Gravity Podcast

Light as Air: Practicing Authenticity, Depth, and Purpose in a World of Empty Promises. offers readers freedom from unmet desires, a way to disrupt broken systems, and an invitation into a life of depth and creative action. How? By exploring the story of Jesus and the way his kingdom engages our dissatisfaction and invites us into the life we were made for. Jesus' kingdom is a political reality that overthrows broken systems, cultivates meaningful connection, and empowers us for creative action. Light as Air shows us how to live into and out of Jesus' kingdom in a way that gives hope to a dissatisfied world.

Jonny Morrison is a church planter, pastor, and writer known for his integration of creativity, spirituality, and culture. Jonny and his wife, Tory, live in Salt Lake City, where he co-pastors Missio Dei SLC church. Jonny graduated from Western Seminary with an MA in biblical and theological studies and received his doctorate of contextual theology from Northern Seminary. You can find more of Jonny's work at jonnyis.com.

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• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
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• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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Seems like everyone's talking about Amazon's new docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, so we wanted to host a discussion about it, and the issues it brings up. We invited Rebekah Mui and Dr. Laura Robinson to join us for this very wide-ranging, longer-than-usual discussion. Have fun!

Rebekah Mui is a PhD Student in political, social, ethical and cultural thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech and researches postcolonial political theology, Christian anarcho-pacifism and Anabaptism. She is the editor of the Kingdom Outpost (http://kingdomoutpost.org) and publishes personal essays on http://medium.com/@rebekahmui and can be found on Twitter at @rebekahmui.

Dr. Laura Robinson (PhD, Duke) is the co-host the New Testament Review Podcast. You can follow her writings on her excellent Substack newsletter.

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• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer's book A Church Called Tov, readers wrote in with stories of abuse and practical questions, such as:

1. How can I transform the culture in my church or organization to make it tov?
2. I believe my workplace has unhealthy values. How do I initiate change?
3. How do I unleash a culture of goodness in my ministry?
4. I’m not in a position of church leadership. What are some red flags that indicate a toxic culture, and what can I do if I see them?

These questions are answered in their new book Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture.

We talked with Scot and Laura about how churches can implement practices, establish priorities, and cultivate the Kingdom Gospel-centered qualities that resist abuse and cultivate goodness cultures.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/gravity-leadership-podcast/donations
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Learning to hear God's voice can be a difficult and confusing experience for many. But if we can start with getting real about what's happening in our hearts, we can begin to untangle the mess of our thoughts and feelings and create a stillness that makes it easier to hear what God is saying to us and sense what God is doing in us.

Megan Nilsen wrote Untangled Faith: How Honest Conversations with God Lead to Deeper Connections, Clarity, and Peace and created the "Beautiful Exchange Journaling" method to give people a safe, intentional space to sort out our thoughts through honest conversations with God. Megan is a speaker, author, life coach, and founder of the Beautiful Exchange Community. She offers Christ-centered coaching for those seeking kingdom alignment and strategy during a transitional season in faith, relationships, or vocational calling. She loves discovering what God put in the hearts of women that will help them walk in greater confidence, fulfillment, and purpose.

Show notes / links:

• Megan's website and podcast
• Discerning God's voice bookmark (free download)
• Megan's social media: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn
• Megan's books

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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A few days ago Gravity Podcast co-host Matt Tebbe wrote an article about 2 kinds of anger: the legitimate anger of the oppressed that tells the truth about injustice, and the illegitimate anger of the powerful who seek to maintain their own privilege at the expense of others.

If we can’t discern the difference, we lump all expressions of anger together, and anger itself seems to be our main problem (we often call it “polarization”). We develop an allergy to anger that serves to hide injustice.

We wanted to talk in more depth about this issue, so we invited Jonny Rashid to join us to talk about anger, power, and the unavoidable political facets of the gospel.

Jonny Rashid is pastor of West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, an Mennonite Church USA congregation in Philadelphia. He blogs at jonnyrashid.com. His book, Jesus Takes a Side, was published by Herald Press in 2022.

Show notes:

• Jonny's Substack
• Matt's Substack
• Ben's Substack

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/gravity-leadership-podcast/donations
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For over fifteen years, writer Jeff Crosby has been searching for a language of the soul--a way to articulate our deepest longings. Through his book The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts, he gifts us with those so-often-untranslatable desires of our hearts, guiding us to finally find the words and luminous insights for our own longings for home, for friendship, for forgiveness, and for transformation--and how God meets us in the midst of these longings.

Jeff Crosby is an organizational leader in the world of words, ideas, and book publishing. Currently president and CEO of a trade association of publishers, he has served in various executive roles, including as vice president at Ingram Book Company, and at IVP, a publisher in the Chicago area. He combines a background in journalism, leadership studies, and business with a love of language and insight from several fields in exploring faith and spirituality in light of applied practice. He and his wife of more than forty years, Cindy, have two grown children and six grandchildren.

Show notes

• Sign up for Ben's new Substack newsletter.
• Sign up for Matt's Substack newsletter, too.
• A Bright Sadness: Making Space for Grief and Joy (Aug 31 - Sep 2)

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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A few weeks ago we talked about 7 common parenting pitfalls and we wanted to follow it up with a list of parenting "pro-tips" (even though none of us are "professional" parents lol), and make a list of 8 (one more than our list of pitfalls):

1. Reparent yourself first.
2. Cultivate natural consequences.
3. Normalize being wrong and apologizing.
4. Delight in the diversity of your kids.
5. Define your family values.
6. Focus on heart transformation, not behavior modification.
7. Spend more time with your kids.
8. Get other adults involved in your kids' lives.

Show notes:

• Parenting For Heart Transformation Diagram

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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Christian spiritual formation resources and teachings have primarily come from Western spiritual traditions, which implicitly communicates that the white experience of God is the norm.

In Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation, Cindy Lee proposes that, in our increasingly diverse contexts, we need new, non-Western cultural ways of being formed--turning from linear to cyclical, from cerebral to experiential, and from individual to collective.

Cindy S. Lee is a spiritual director and aspiring mystic and proudly Taiwanese-American. She leads retreats in the areas of Christian mysticism and BIPOC centered spirituality. She completed a PhD in Practical Theology in the area of Spiritual Formation from Claremont School of Theology. She teaches as an adjunct professor in the areas of Christian Spirituality and Spiritual Direction. In her free time, she enjoys street art, coffee, and exploring the city.

You can connect with Cindy on Instagram.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/gravity-leadership-podcast/donations
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After listening carefully to stories from people who suffered misogynistic, racist, or homophobic abuse at the hands of the church, Charles Kiser and Dr. Elaine Heath bring those stories into conversation with the death and resurrection of Jesus, and find in the gospel a God who shares the experience of the traumatized.

The result is their book Trauma-Informed Evangelism: Cultivating Communities of Wounded Healers, where they propose a new kind of evangelism—one based not on fear and coercion but on witnessing the unconditional love of God.

Charles Kiser is a pastor and theologian with Storyline Christian Community in Dallas, Texas, a network of missional communities he helped to form. He is passionate about creative expressions of Christian community, contemplative spirituality, and healing spiritual trauma. Kiser has a DMin in Contextual Theology from Northern Seminary and serves as a faculty member of Neighborhood Seminary.

Elaine Heath is the author of eleven books and numerous articles, the most recent books being Loving the Hell Out of Ourselves (and Others) (Birch & Alder, 2021), coauthored with her sister, Jeanine Heath-McGlinn. She formerly served as Dean of the Divinity School at Duke University, where she was also professor of missional and pastoral theology, and the McCreless Professor of Evangelism at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Heath cofounded two nonprofits: Missional Wisdom Foundation, and Neighborhood Seminary, a contextualized model of missional theological education for laity. Heath is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and served in pastoral ministry prior to her academic ministry. She currently lives with her husband at Spring Forest, an intentional Christian community and farm in rural North Carolina where she serves as abbess. You can connect with Elaine's work at elaineaheath.org.

Show notes

• The retreat we talk about in the intro: A Bright Sadness - making space for grief and joy Aug 31-Sep 2.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/gravity-leadership-podcast/donations
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A few weeks ago we released an episode ("5 Signs of a Toxic Leadership Culture") that garnered more response from listeners than we've ever received! So we wanted to record a follow-up episode reflecting on those responses and offering signs of a healthy, non-toxic leadership culture.

Here are the 5 signs, along with their toxic analogues:

1. From power flowing up & in to power flowing down & out.
2. From reality distortion to "reality is complicated."
3. From loyalty culture to love culture.
4. From "unable to have a Kairos" to celebrating and honoring learning.
5. From conflict being mishandled to conflict being addressed in a trauma informed way.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/gravity-leadership-podcast/donations
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