The Exchange with Ed Stetzer copertina

The Exchange with Ed Stetzer

The Exchange with Ed Stetzer

Di: Ed Stetzer
Ascolta gratuitamente

Each week, Ed Stetzer sits down with pastors, scholars, and leaders to make sense of the technology and culture reshaping the church.2026 Ed Stetzer Catechesi ed evangelismo Cristianesimo Spiritualità
Episodi
  • Lisa Harper: An Unkind Theologian Is a Bad One

    Lisa Harper: An Unkind Theologian Is a Bad One
    Sep 22 2026

    Lisa Harper says church leaders, herself included, have watered down theology, and that doctrine that leaves character unchanged falls short.

    The conversation

    How should pastors teach theology to their people?
    For years Harper gave her neighborhood Bible study a story, a short exegesis, and a takeaway, following homiletic rules she learned in her thirties. She now says it was her desire to be understood that was watering down her doctrine. Her test case is the hypostatic union. Stetzer frames the vocabulary question in plain terms: people who learn to order at Starbucks can learn theological language at church.

    Does correct doctrine excuse bad character?
    Stetzer names a pattern he sees: leaders who check every doctrinal box, treat people poorly, and get a pass. Harper rejects the assumption that their theology is good. She claims gaining information is important, since it informs our understanding of Jesus, but she believes that theology solely bound to academics is lifeless.

    How much of your own story belongs in a sermon?
    Harper’s test on whether a story is appropriate to share is if Jesus remains the hero. She names two failures she has corrected in herself: telling stories that belong to someone else, and humor at her own expense that made her the emphasis. She argues that stories of darkness can also become self-aggrandizing when listeners rally around the speaker's pain. On the opposite end is editing so much that teaching becomes performance.

    From the conversation

    "Show me somebody who has strong theology but doesn't have humility, and I would say that the information hasn't softened the heart yet." — Lisa Harper

    "I think the onus is on us, and I don't think we've done a good job." — Lisa Harper

    "I don't want to edit so much when I'm teaching that it becomes performative instead of testimonial." — Lisa Harper

    "If you can learn to order coffee at Starbucks, you can learn some theological language at church." — Ed Stetzer

    About Lisa Harper

    Lisa Harper is a Bible teacher, speaker, and author of more than a dozen books and Bible studies, including A Jesus-Shaped Life: How Diving Deeper into Theology Can Transform Us and Our World with the Radical Kindness of God. She hosts the Back Porch Theology podcast and founded The Kerygma Summit, an annual gathering of theologians and Bible teachers. She holds a Master of Theological Studies from Covenant Seminary.

    Website: https://www.lisaharper.org
    Podcast: https://www.lisaharper.org/backporchtheology
    Instagram: https://instagram.com/lisadharper
    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialLisaDHarper
    Book: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Shaped-Life-Theology-Transform-Kindness/dp/0800744764

    The Exchange is presented by Gloo, a technology company for the faith and flourishing ecosystem.


    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    31 min
  • Rich Villodas: Your Certainty May Be Anxiety

    Rich Villodas: Your Certainty May Be Anxiety
    Sep 15 2026
    Villodas arrived with a definition of anxiety that implicates confident leaders as much as worried ones. Stetzer spends most of the hour testing whether a congregation can hold that much internal difference and still teach anything difficult.Why do confident pastors still lead anxiously?Villodas separates anxiety from worry. Worry is a feeling a pastor can honestly deny. Anxiety, as he uses the term, is the automatic response to a real or perceived threat, and it shows up as manipulation, coercion, anger, or avoidance. That definition does real work in the conversation, because it moves the diagnosis away from the visibly stressed pastor and toward the one who cannot leave room for dissent. His own test is whether he can tell a staff member to push back and mean it. When he cannot stand disagreement, he reads that as anxiety rather than conviction.Stetzer sharpens this into something a listener will recognize, noting that pastors can grow worse at formation than the people they lead because they treat sermon preparation as their spiritual life. Drawing on the pastors moving through his cohort, Villodas says the average pastor has no plan for personal formation and is living off someone else's spirituality: podcasts, books, other people's sermons. Can a politically mixed church still teach hard convictions?Villodas describes his congregation as split roughly in thirds between Trump voters, Harris voters, and people who abstained. Stetzer asks the difficult question: does a spread like that indicate a pastor avoiding the sharp edges of Scripture? Villodas responds by saying that a single message cannot form anyone, so a church that wants to hold a hard conviction has to build multiple spaces for conversation, listening, prayer, and self-examination around it. Alignment is a low bar for a pastor to clear. Discipleship is the actual assignment.He frames the pastoral task as creating an environment where difference does not automatically produce disconnection, which he ties to differentiation: staying close to God, to yourself, and to others under high anxiety. He also insists on understanding how people arrived at their conclusions, since depersonalizing someone strips the story that produced the conviction.Where does pastoral burnout actually begin?Burnout, in Villodas’s account, is the attempt to give what you do not have, which is why he starts with relationships rather than Sabbath. Villodas argues that emotional pain persists when there is no relational home to hold it, and he applies this directly to pastors carrying criticism, hard emails, and board conflict without anywhere to put them. Is the narrow path about salvation or discipleship?Villodas grants that Matthew 7 is usually read salvifically, as a statement about how few are saved, and argues instead that Jesus is describing discipleship. He works from three categories he takes from Dale Bruner: successism, moralism, and individualism. Against successism he sets the Beatitudes as a reframing of what counts as blessing. Against individualism he sets love of neighbor as the proof of love for God. He also inverts the usual sequence between prayer and mission, treating mission as a root of formation rather than a result of it, and points to his church's health center, pantry, and youth organizing work as the setting where that formation happens. From the conversationEd Stetzer: "I'm of the view that pastors sometimes are worse than regular people when it comes to their spiritual formation 'cause they just sort of rely on their preparation as their formation."Rich Villodas: "But anxiety is not simply about worry. Anxiety is what is the automatic response to distress or disagreement."Rich Villodas: "I think the average pastor's living off the spirituality of someone else. Podcasts, other sermons. There's not a cultivation of being with God and speaking out of that place."Rich Villodas: "It's a narrow path that leads to the kind of spacious life that we long for."About Rich VillodasRich Villodas is the Brooklyn-born lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, a large multiracial church in Queens with more than 75 countries represented. He is the author of The Deeply Formed Life (2020), Good and Beautiful and Kind (2022), and The Narrow Path (2024).Website: https://www.richvillodas.com/Books and links: https://linktr.ee/richvillodasInstagram: @richvillodasX: @richvillodasChurch: https://elmhurst.newlife.nyc/ The Exchange is presented by Gloo, a technology company for the faith and flourishing ecosystem. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    29 min
  • David Kinnaman: Fluency Is Not Authority

    David Kinnaman: Fluency Is Not Authority
    Sep 8 2026

    Barna's research puts practicing Christians ahead of the general population in regular AI use, and ahead of the pastors who lead them. David Kinnaman argues the church's answer is not better tips, but a theology of technology, and a clear line between fluency and authority.

    Are Christians really using AI more than everyone else?

    Kinnaman opens with a caveat: research is good at telling us what is happening, less good at why. What it shows, he says, is a reversal. Practicing Christians, usually late adopters, are at the leading edge of this one. He cites Barna findings that 44 percent report using AI often or very often, against 31 percent of the US adult average and 29 percent of non-practicing Christians. Ed's framing: leaders still file AI under future issues, while the data puts it in their congregations' ordinary week.

    Why are pastors more cautious than their congregations?

    Ed pushes hardest here, asking whether the gap is healthy or a leadership problem. Kinnaman does not concede that caution is wrong, but he does argue pastors are behind. His explanation is sociological rather than theological: practicing Christians are more likely to be parents, volunteers, and members of community groups, so they meet more of the daily friction these tools remove. Pastors use AI too, he says, for ideation and sermon material, with cautions attached. The more consequential finding is what congregants want from their leaders. Not tips and tricks, but a philosophy, a kind of theology of technology. Kinnaman calls that a gap the church can fill, and does not say who fills it otherwise.

    Should Christians use AI for prayer or spiritual growth?

    Ed brings the question down to a case. During a recent hospitalization, ChatGPT told him it was praying for him before surgery. He posted about it and heard from the Washington Post. He asks where spiritual engagement with AI should be encouraged and where it should worry us, and Kinnaman declines to draw a bright line. His position is that the question has to be re-asked continuously, because what holds today may not hold in a few months. What he rules out is abstention. He tells a story about sitting out Facebook, and says AI is not that.

    What does the church have that AI does not?

    The argument lands on a distinction Kinnaman credits to another leader, whose name the transcript garbles. Language models are fluent, and fluency reads like knowledge because it moves in patterns we recognize. Authorship, not fluency, produces authority: you have standing on a subject because you did the work. The theological turn follows fast. The algorithms are never silent, which trains people to treat God as instantly summonable, a lamp to rub. Kinnaman's counterclaim is that the church holds what no model holds, the human word of forgiveness, spoken by a person, grounded in the cross. Asked what we have underestimated, he names what technology has always offered: comfort and control.

    From the conversation

    "So first of all I just think we have to have an adaptive, leaning in posture. This is not a revolution you can sit out." — David Kinnaman

    "Authorship gives you authority. When you write something from scratch, you have an authority on that subject if you do your work and do your homework." — David Kinnaman

    "We have to recognize I think this is going to be over the next five years, quite a bulldozer of all the things that we held dear" — David Kinnaman

    About David Kinnaman

    David Kinnaman is CEO of Barna Group. Since 1995 he has directed interviews with more than two million individuals and overseen thousands of research studies. He is the author of unChristian, You Lost Me, Good Faith, and Faith For Exiles.

    The Exchange is presented by Gloo, a technology company for the faith and flourishing ecosystem.


    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    17 min
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Ancora nessuna recensione