Greg Troxell on A Fresh Look at the Gospels via Harmony.Bible | Episode 015

In today’s podcast episode of future.bible, Rob and Greg form harmony.bible will share their platform and that is to share the make the Bible more understandable for every Christian regardless of their spiritual maturity. They will share that it is effective to start reading the Bible from the Gospel. It will be emphasized that utilizing technology is a lot of help in making the Bible more understandable and interesting.
Did you know you can catch-up on past episodes of the the Future.Bible Podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, TuneIn and wherever else you go to download great podcast content.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Greg: greg@harmony.bible
Rob: rob@harmony.bible
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Kenny Jahng: Hey friends, this is Kenny Jahng with the future.bible podcast. Thank you for joining us once again as we make a journey across the interwebs, meeting innovators and peers with people who are really interested in furthering scripture engagement hold together, innovation techniques, technology, and other means to really further the game. Today, we’ve got a really interesting interview here with two gentlemen here. I’m excited to sit down and actually learn more about their venture and share some of the stuff that they’ve been doing along the lines of scripture engagement for churches and communities. The resources these guys have a phenomenal. And so let’s get right down to it. Welcome to the show gentlemen, Greg and Rob.
Greg: Thank you, Kenny. Good to be with you today.
Rob: Great to be here.
Kenny Jahng: So, you guys are with a venture called harmony.bible and actually, I just want to call out the fact this is one of our favorites that use using a new gtld.bible. So kudos to you. You’re one of our favorites. So harmony.bible. Once you, before we get to the actual venture and what you are doing in terms of resources, tell us a little bit about your backgrounds and who you are. So maybe Rob, you can start, just let us know, just a little background of what your experience is and how you got to harmony.
Rob: Well, I got the harmony by seeing some materials that Greg had put together in some of his work on spiritual gifts and how to enable those within the life of the church because it was a glass ceiling usually takes place with asking the question. Then people have been through like four or five, six, seven different questionnaires on spiritual gifts and how do you make that work? And that’s a very difficult place for people. So I was looking for materials and helps and I saw some of this stuff and I emailed him out. And then we got started that way. I actually got started with something that got absorbed by American Bible Society many years ago called Houses of Worship out of Pittsburgh and they were doing some work on how to engage small churches. And so they asked me to do some, like every two weeks little blurb on my experiences with church and I’ve been involved with small parishes for a long time of my ministry. I’ve been doing that for 30 years or so. And now I’m doing interim ministries trying to help churches get from one pastor, the end of one pastorate to next with a sense of expectation. And so that’s been putting a lot of my own spiritual gifts and talents than, and things, skills and love of experience into that. And one of the things that I’ve seen the need for courses the development of leadership for small groups. And so as Greg and I were talking about things in the beginning, this lead very naturally in our discussion about that and so I was really excited about moving into helping other people just listen in on some of the experiences that we’ve got and how that can be helpful to them as they develop their groups.
Kenny Jahng: So good. What about you, Greg? How did you come to this idea of venture and tell us the genesis of it?
Greg: Well, if I turn back the clock a long way, I was in marketing and I left marketing out of the Silicon Valley technology world back in the 80s. So, I mean, this is early stuff, right? We were still in building computers, laptops.
Kenny Jahng: Pre iPhone, right. Who remembers those days?
Greg: That’s right. It was something else. And I left that to go into ministry. When I stepped into the ministry, I found my love. I just really enjoyed particularly I focused with youth students. And with that you get involved with young adults and adults of all ages that are also working with the students. And so as I jumped into that, I was actually doing a little bit of transitional work for a church that had really have a lot of churn and from there I stepped into a ministry with young life. As I was in young life, we’re trying to communicate the gospel to people who aren’t engaged in churches, right? And who aren’t even there, who are disinterested, whatever their story might be, right? But we’re in their world and we’re trying to communicate the gospel out and in young lives way we communicate the gospel through stories and trying to get right again focused in the gospel and then, you know, communicate the rest of the Gospel story of Old and New Testament and relevant to today. So that brought me into the harmony of the gospels years ago and trying to help disciple students into that. That helped me meet years later, some folks from Sunlife. Sunlife as a ministry many may be familiar with. And so we kind of crossed paths back and forth over the years. I kept doing what I was doing, a boat and migrated from youth ministry over into adult ministry discipleship ministry within churches, small group ministry, launching many, and then working ecumenically really across different denominational lines. In all of that, I’d never produced anything and I kept buying materials.
Greg: And so I thought “Gemini after lunch or reached about 1000 members, you know, that’s a lot of small group material, a lot of expense and I thought this is silly. We need to just get people focused in, on the gospels and allow people the opportunity to explore that and develop that.” I wanted to create a platform that allowed for collaboration of pastors, small group leaders, discipling individuals, youth pastors, missionaries to co-create something together and have it in an open source creative commons kind of platform that we could all work together and do. And so that’s the genesis of it, which really then launched in 2014 when I found myself at the end of another ministry term. And I said, that’s it. I’m going to focus myself on this and some other business ventures that I’m engaged in. And so that brings us up to today.
Kenny Jahng: Wow. Yes. I can’t imagine. I wonder what the number is on how much churches spend commercially buying small group curriculum, over and over again, year after year after year, right?
Rob: Year after year after year, and finding it on the shelf when you go into those churches and they’ve been purchasing had been sitting there not being used anymore.
Greg: Yes, I mean that’s just the church library. Then you have members who are buying the book for seven to 12 bucks every 7 to 12 weeks. Right? And it’s just a lot of expense. And I just thought this really isn’t necessary. We’re trying to get people into the word and study and if we can hone it in, the other part of what we want is to mature believers, right? We want believers becoming disciplers, not just, you know, not that disciple is discipled right there become disciplers in one way or another with whatever expression of ministry and gifts that they have. So they’re equipped to do that. And that’s where we’re going.
Kenny Jahng: Okay. So there’s so much good this year. Okay. So let’s start, I almost had, there’s so many different paths I can go down. Let’s start with just the harmony of the gospels. It’s not everyone listening in today might understand that term. I remember in seminary, harmony of the gospels, Blue Letter Bible. All those references were, you know, so once you start to give us a cookie, in a fortune cookie type of answer, what is the harmony of the, of gospels that you’re talking about?
Greg: All four gospels lined up essentially side by side, trying to find the white space and the commonality of them as the story progresses from the beginning of Christ life and the beginning of John, we would put at the beginning there towards his ascension and a resurrection experiences.
Kenny Jahng: Why is that type of lens so important for discipleship making, a disciple making or studying the Bible especially for new believers?
Greg: Rob, you want to take turn for that?
Rob: You know, what happens is often people will say, “well, I read that and that part of the Bible, but I don’t get that in this part of the Bible. Do we have, we have the same Bible”, you know, and what we find here is that we looked through various parts of the story of Jesus and, and how the Holy Spirit worked in the Gospelers to be able to present the things that they were being led to present to us as those, those are represented, the opportunity to talk about the details, the differences between those which sometimes show up, allows us to be able to have the conversation with people that might not otherwise be happen and then pull those together in out of a sermon kind of format into discussion format provides a great amount of interest in people’s, at their own interest in the story itself. Why is that they’re, that way, which of course is the curiosity that we’re looking for and really help people and helping the small group leaders to understand how to make use of those and facilitate the discussion. I’s really can be a very bountiful, profound kind of way of discussing the issues that Jesus represents to the Gospel.
Kenny Jahng: I remember having a small group where we use the Community Bible Experience, that version of the Bible, and we had two people that never read the Bible ever before and it was just curious. It’s a little humorous where we read the First Gospel and then the next meeting is the Second Gospel and they’re like, “didn’t we read this already? Is this the same person or is this the same? And the third one, and then by the fourth one, like Christians are crazy what’s going on?” And line up. And I think it’s lost on us sometimes, especially people who have been in the church for so long that someone who’s learning growing at the very beginning, especially or many Christians who haven’t had that much discipleship in our churches today. We need some sort of guidance or track, like the harmony that you are presenting.
Greg: Kenny for years, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who said, oh, I started reading the Bible right? And I started where? Genesis, in the beginning. And if they make it through Genesis, then quickly lose track and they get so confused. Other people join up a church and the Bible study that’s going on is in the midst of, you know, Judges or in Ruth or whatever it might be. And they’re trying to understand Old Testament law in modern day, right? This is the other reason why I always say to people, just start in the gospels and my encouragement to you and I’m going to make it free and encouragement to you is do it in the harmony of the gospels because you’ll get the breadth of understanding and communication desire, right? The Gospeler’s desire and why they were communicating what they were communicating to their audiences, but you’re going to get the whole story of the Gospel through the Lens of the four Gospelers, Matthew, mark, Luke and John, and then you can look backwards towards the Old Testament and the Old Testament laws and the Old Testament customs will start to make sense and as well in the Epistles and everything that’s there, whether it’s Paul or whether it’s James, right, are going to start making sense to you, Timothy right? Are going to start making sense to you and then you’ll start seeing the diversity and why we can respect the diversity.
Kenny Jahng: That’s great. Now let’s talk literally about your offering. Can you share with us the format or you know, you’ve got a couple of different ways to engage, but it looks that. it looks like it’s very organized. Can you share with our listeners here today, what, what to expect when they engage with harmony.bible?
Greg: Yes. So what I want people to do is I want them to register. I want that whether that be the discipler, the one leading the small group or the pastor leading that up Sunday morning discussion group or whatever. However, whatever format it is that you’re going to tackle the harmony of the gospels, even as an individual or a missioner who is out there. I’d like you to register. That’s easy. It’s free. You just registered. And then in the midst of that, you’re telling me how many copies I will provide you a PDF version that I have allowance for through my agreements that I’ve already made with HarperOne, HarperOne Collins to provide a PDF version of this. But what I found quickly was that the book itself it, while it’s wonderful, is really difficult because of the book, meaning this is Thomson Gundry’s, which is the classic one here. There’s a number of different versions out there. The book is hard because it’s bound and you’re trying to add things into it, maps and other other resources and all that kind of stuff. So the next part that you have registered or not is you have the whole chronology of the harmony of the gospels on our website and with that, then every page as it’s formatted today, every page we’ve put in, it’s a WordPress back end and every page has a plug-in that allows you to print this page as a PDF so you really don’t even have to do it that way. You can do it through the website and just print a certain passage segment that you’re looking for. And we want you to begin right from the very beginning of the gospels and just go to phase one, section one and begin. And what we do is, through the weekly study, we have a recommended outline of how many sections you should be reading, studying that week because some weeks are really intense, some weeks are short and I’m based out of small group experience. We know about the dialogue time that it’s going to take to process the content that’s in there and we want it to be a meaningful experience for the small group leader and their and their members.
Kenny Jahng: It takes about, I think there’s five or six phases right? In the first phase I think takes about 14 or 15 weeks.
Greg: That’s right. Yes. So, the whole thing altogether, we broke phase 5 into four parts. Part of that is strategic in the element that there is a progression as we see through the harmony of the gospels. The other part is technologically. I’ll just confess there was the other part of that which was WordPress couldn’t handle the volume of scripture that’s in phase five. We broke the WordPress system as we were designing the HTML. And that was that. It kind of culminated in the two things coming together and really working well, the whole system,
Kenny Jahng: It’s all laid out nicely, visually, columns, notes. I mean, it literally is a easy to read index that anybody, any church leader can go in and within the first session of going to this site and you can actually start to print something out and get going right?
Greg: The other thing, Kenny is any registered person, right, as a WordPress platform, any registered person can then make comments. And what we want to do is we want to see our next growth stage here is that we really want to see comments and people becoming commentators. Yes, you can take five years and produce a new printed version of the harmony of the gospels and we could do that, but I think it’s much more important to have a living, active commentary going on by people who are studying and engaged today.
Kenny Jahng: Absolutely. Great. And tell us a little bit about Harmony radio. What’s going on there?
Greg: Right now we’re on a little bit of a respite read. We’re taking a break due to some of my other business engagements and that put us on a little hold. We’ve got the last segment of a phase five D to go through and then we’ll continue on Harmony Bible Radio was designed to train the trainers, not designed to focus in on the study itself. I wanted kind of what was that old Haddon Robinson Radio Bible class, right? That’s really what I wanted was an experience of three to five people online chatting through each segment. And I’m carrying on as it’s turned out, Rob has been the faithful partner through this portion and I think one of the next stage is we’re going to go through is this kind of quick 15 minute podcast and we’ll develop those as in the next stage of things.
Kenny Jahng: Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So, you know, you’ve got a bunch of different resources. You’re actually inviting other ministry leaders to participate. Can you share, I guess, what is the ideal type of person in terms of ministry. Is it just the pastors or the small group leader and elder who is, who is that person that you, who’s the sweet spot of the person that you want to draw in terms of participation?
Rob: Sweet spot probably is that the small group leader who’s been recognized and involved in the life of a community, whatever that community might be. But we tended to tackle each of these discussions of ours. We have taken the very, a person who is just brand new to the whole concept of wanting to do, lead a bible study altogether and so that can be a little bit limiting in a sense of how we jumped right in, but it allows us also to kind of get warmed up to the situation and the issue as well. But by the time we’re 15 minutes in, we’re talking about fairly deep issues and matters that can be raised within the group, we’ll take some time, as the questions formulate in our minds as we go through our discussion about, what would be helpful for the small group leader at this moment in the discussion about this particular thing, the more background from our experience.
Rob: And so we’re adding in the kinds of things that would be leadership development stuff as we’re talking, but then we’re talking about the scripture itself, of course, that’s kind of the heart of the whole thing. So it’s possible for a person who has no small group whatsoever to just listen in and get a feel for what’s happening. Pastors could be involved with this because from my perspective and much of Greg’s perspective as well, we’re going to be putting material in there that they can be used for next Sunday sermon, you know, as well. It just takes a little while to wade through that, you know, to be able to get into it. But I would see where the interaction could happen with a person who really wants to get a small group going within a community and then they can access both Greg and I or whoever else we’re in a fellowship here with, to associate with, to be able to help that group grow and have a plan of action and help that pastor who might also want to be. I don’t see the sweet spot like you mentioned, I want to see the sweet spot is being a person who is doing this kind of work with a small group fully in conjunction with their pastor in it could be a pastor himself was doing this at work, but we don’t want to see this as being as small groups that are being a engendered off of and a fellowship and accountability kind of situation as well. So that’s the sweet spot for me .
Kenny Jahng: Now for the actual person who’s potentially, you know, ready to engage in look at this as a source of curriculum to, to lead their study. Can you set up some exhortations because, I feel like we’ve been almost, commercially molded in the North American church to understand what small group or Bible study who really should be or is, right? It’s become almost like a Bible mcnuggets, right? Like, fill in the blank. There’s one right answer. Everyone goes around. Everyone stays silent until the person who write Chinese. We’ve almost been trained to reduce down to that. Can you contrast that with, right? There’s all the small group materials that small group leadership resources, all this stuff that has flourished commercially over the last several decades. What makes it valuable from that perspective? The leader who really wants to see life serving growth in their community? Can you share some expectations and what the differences?
Greg: I think the day of a fill in the blank Bible study, small group leader materials is really numbered, right? We were not living in an era where we have uneducated, uninformed people. I’ll say, I would almost imagine universally around the globe, right? That the case. And people are even, even people who are uneducated about the Gospel, right? Who have never had any interaction with it, they have a first interaction with it. So, what we want is for the emotive and the intellectual to come together right? Through that. So the questions that we’ve created in each segment in each week study are designed to elicit out and bind together bring a group together and help them express themselves in the real skill for the small group leader is to learn how to curb things when it’s out of alignment with scripture. Right? Also out of alignment with your denominational or your congregational perspective on things. Because there’s going to be diversity in that even from what we published, which is again, one of those reasons why we want.
Greg: We didn’t want to create a set of defined commentary. We wanted to invite broader commentary because Kenny, you have insights that I don’t have, right? And so we want those to come together. But the same thing as when you’re leading a small group, how many times, if you had an Aha! moment from one of the members in your group, right? And you just go, wow, I hadn’t thought of that because they have different life experience and so that journey together is part of it, right? Jesus didn’t start with a script. He was the script, right? But he didn’t have a script that went along with them and said, hey, this is what we’re going to do. So following the life of Christ and that becomes our script as we’re trying to emerge and develop and emerge ourselves as spiritual disciplers.
Kenny Jahng: Wow. Well, I think this is enough for anybody who’s listening to what their appetite enough to head over to harmony.bible and really check out the resources. It is very encouraging, especially the way I just think the structure and the way you guys laid it out is just inviting. You’re removing a lot of the friction for someone who’s trying to lead a group or try to find resources that introduces people to the gospels.
Greg: One other part here, and you can, but we’re, we’re gonna go through some other development as the next phase goes through. Hey, we need to finish up in our current 60 minute fix phase five D. In addition to that, one of our other ministry partners, is a gentleman from campus crusade crew, right, and Simon is out in Switzerland. Simon came and said, “Greg, we need to have this thing in German”, but there is no German. And while we created a plug-in or put in the plugin for language translation, it’s really not sufficient, right? It’s not the gospel. So it’s a Google translation of the Gospel, right? So what we’d really like to see is get away from copyrights. We have Wycliffe people, other missionary translators, join in. What Simon has been able to do is he’s actually taken the back end remapped it all so that now we’re now we’re prepared to go language by language with a CSV file of any language and upload it into that format and then translate the whole Gospel, have the whole Gospel, a harmony of the Gospel re-path with white space and everything back into whatever language.
Greg: So our next stage is to go there. I think another thing that we’re going to aim for in the next two years is I’d like to launch a whole new radio station, a podcast station 24/7 multi-language. I think it’s really important to have people who are doing 15 minute hour long segments, Bible study segments carrying on and I think it’s a new era with technologies that are out there to create that sort of thing. I think we’re going to redevelop the website itself as we move over to that new language based platform. And I’m looking for partners, people who are techies who love to dig in and do something collaboratively and see where we go with this.
Kenny Jahng: And again, I just want to point out to people listening in today, they already have some really cool resources they have developed. It’s not just future forward. I love the map and the timeline. I mean just the stuff that you have on the site is something that I think every church leader at least needs to be aware of. So they have these tools at the fingertips at some point in this next ministry season. So I would invite everybody to check out the website.
Kenny Jahng: As we close this out, one of the questions that I have for you guys is, we typically ask some of our guests here, if we gave you a magic wands and budget technology, all those pieces of friction are removed in terms of scripture engagement, what would it be just one dream that you would have that you’d be able to accomplish with that magic wand? What’s one thing in terms of scripture engagement that you would just love to see solved or accomplished in terms of resources and tools out there?
Greg: Huh? Hey, Rob, you first.
Kenny Jahng: It’s like ordering at the restaurant when you’re not ready and you just defer to your guests. Right?
Rob: Well, okay. So the best scenario is that a person converts to Christ and immediately becomes a mature Christian. Right? We wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of this stuff, right? Yes. But, you know, what I want, I think if you could manage to get the office of teacher and a gift of teacher, which we were not trying to remove that from, with this particular format, you have that in conjunction with your small groups and there’s the living interaction between teaching and discussion and growth and evangelism that goes all in one hand. That’s the picture. I don’t know how you would ever know.
Kenny Jahng: Silos and those walls between all of those facilities. Right?
Rob: Right, exactly.
Kenny Jahng: Free flowing. That’s a great one. Greg, what about you?
Greg: Well, I’d like to see greater ecumenical communication, right? And collaboration. And it’s not just ecumenical, I mean, you can put two churches have the same denomination in the same town and we need to see more collaborations.
Kenny Jahng: How true is that?
Greg: Free spirited, offer, freely you’ve received, freely give. That’s at the heart of what Harmony Bible is.
Kenny Jahng: Great, great sentiments, great ideas. If someone was listening in to our conversation and they want to get in touch with you directly, what is the best way that they could do that for each of you?
Greg: Each of us have an email using the .bible domain. It’s greg@harmony.bible, or rob@harmony.bible.
Kenny Jahng: Right. Perfect. Well, I appreciate you guys stopping in and sharing with us a little bit about your venture. I know that you guys are in roll up the sleeves mode and really just trying to churn out these resources for the church. Thank you so much. The project that you’ve accomplished so far is a gift to the Kingdom. We’re really looking forward to seeing all the developments as they go along and if it’d be okay, we’d love to revisit with you periodically to see what other types of resources that you guys unveil periodically.
Greg: I like that, Kenny. Thank you.
Kenny Jahng: Thank you so much for listening in and if you are part of our audience, we’d love for you to help us share this resource with other church leaders. The best way to do that is leave a review on iTunes and share this episode on your social media accounts and email your pastor or a friend. Let’s spread the word about harmony.bible and the work that these guys are doing to push our congregations and our whole church forward and we really appreciate you listening in today. We’d love for your feedback, comments on this particular episode as well as ideas and introductions to guests for future ones.
Kenny Jahng: I’m Kenny Jahng for future.bible. Next week we’re going to have DJ Chuang. Join us back in the co-host seat, but, ’til then we really hope that you have an engaging time with the scriptures and remember that starts with you. Thanks for joining us and we’ll catch you next week on future.bible.
HIGHLIGHTS:
07:15 Yes, I mean that’s just the church library. Then you have members who are buying the book for seven to 12 bucks every 7 to 12 weeks. Right? And it’s just a lot of expense. And I just thought this really isn’t necessary. We’re trying to get people into the word and study and if we can hone it in, the other part of what we want is to mature believers, right? We want believers becoming disciplers, not just, you know, not that disciple is discipled right there become disciplers in one way or another with whatever expression of ministry and gifts that they have. So they’re equipped to do that. And that’s where we’re going.
08:27 All four gospels lined up essentially side by side, trying to find the white space and the commonality of them as the story progresses from the beginning of Christ life and the beginning of John, we would put at the beginning there towards his ascension and a resurrection experiences.
09:06 what happens is often people will say, “well, I read that and that part of the Bible, but I don’t get that in this part of the Bible. Do we have, we have the same Bible”, you know, and what we find here is that we looked through various parts of the story of Jesus and, and how the Holy Spirit worked in the Gospelers to be able to present the things that they were being led to present to us as those, those are represented, the opportunity to talk about the details, the differences between those which sometimes show up, allows us to be able to have the conversation with people that might not otherwise be happen and then pull those together in out of a sermon kind of format into discussion format provides a great amount of interest in people’s, at their own interest in the story itself. Why is that they’re, that way, which of course is the curiosity that we’re looking for and really help people and helping the small group leaders to understand how to make use of those and facilitate the discussion. I’s really can be a very bountiful, profound kind of way of discussing the issues that Jesus represents to the Gospel.
11:18 how many people I’ve met who said, oh, I started reading the Bible right? And I started where? Genesis, in the beginning. And if they make it through Genesis, then quickly lose track and they get so confused. Other people join up a church and the Bible study that’s going on is in the midst of, you know, Judges or in Ruth or whatever it might be. And they’re trying to understand Old Testament law in modern day, right? This is the other reason why I always say to people, just start in the gospels and my encouragement to you and I’m going to make it free and encouragement to you is do it in the harmony of the gospels because you’ll get the breadth of understanding and communication desire, right? The Gospeler’s desire and why they were communicating what they were communicating to their audiences, but you’re going to get the whole story of the Gospel through the Lens of the four Gospelers, Matthew, mark, Luke and John, and then you can look backwards towards the Old Testament and the Old Testament laws and the Old Testament customs will start to make sense and as well in the Epistles and everything that’s there, whether it’s Paul or whether it’s James, right, are going to start making sense to you, Timothy right? Are going to start making sense to you and then you’ll start seeing the diversity and why we can respect the diversity.
15:38 we broke phase 5 into four parts. Part of that is strategic in the element that there is a progression as we see through the harmony of the gospels. The other part is technologically. I’ll just confess there was the other part of that which was WordPress couldn’t handle the volume of scripture that’s in phase five. We broke the WordPress system as we were designing the HTML. And that was that. It kind of culminated in the two things coming together and really working well, the whole system,
18:48 Sweet spot probably is that the small group leader who’s been recognized and involved in the life of a community, whatever that community might be. But we tended to tackle each of these discussions of ours. We have taken the very, a person who is just brand new to the whole concept of wanting to do, lead a bible study altogether and so that can be a little bit limiting in a sense of how we jumped right in, but it allows us also to kind of get warmed up to the situation and the issue as well. But by the time we’re 15 minutes in, we’re talking about fairly deep issues and matters that can be raised within the group, we’ll take some time, as the questions formulate in our minds as we go through our discussion about, what would be helpful for the small group leader at this moment in the discussion about this particular thing, the more background from our experience.
And so we’re adding in the kinds of things that would be leadership development stuff as we’re talking, but then we’re talking about the scripture itself, of course, that’s kind of the heart of the whole thing. So it’s possible for a person who has no small group whatsoever to just listen in and get a feel for what’s happening. Pastors could be involved with this because from my perspective and much of Greg’s perspective as well, we’re going to be putting material in there that they can be used for next Sunday sermon, you know, as well. It just takes a little while to wade through that, you know, to be able to get into it. But I would see where the interaction could happen with a person who really wants to get a small group going within a community and then they can access both Greg and I or whoever else we’re in a fellowship here with, to associate with, to be able to help that group grow and have a plan of action and help that pastor who might also want to be. I don’t see the sweet spot like you mentioned, I want to see the sweet spot is being a person who is doing this kind of work with a small group fully in conjunction with their pastor in it could be a pastor himself was doing this at work, but we don’t want to see this as being as small groups that are being a engendered off of and a fellowship and accountability kind of situation as well.
24:01 We didn’t want to create a set of defined commentary. We wanted to invite broader commentary because Kenny, you have insights that I don’t have, right? And so we want those to come together. But the same thing as when you’re leading a small group, how many times, if you had an Aha! moment from one of the members in your group, right? And you just go, wow, I hadn’t thought of that because they have different life experience and so that journey together is part of it, right? Jesus didn’t start with a script. He was the script, right? But he didn’t have a script that went along with them and said, hey, this is what we’re going to do. So following the life of Christ and that becomes our script as we’re trying to emerge and develop and emerge ourselves as spiritual disciplers.

Recent Comments