Crackers And Grape Juice Podcast

For eight years, Ellie Holcomb recorded and toured full-time with her husband’s band, Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors, before stepping off the road when her first child was born. Her solo debut, As Sure As The Sun (2014), landed her a Top 10 hit at Christian radio with “The Broken Beautiful” and a GMA Dove Award for “New Artist of the Year.” Her critically-acclaimed sophomore LP, Red Sea Road, followed in 2017. In subsequent years, Holcomb has released two children’s books—each with a companion EP of original music written specifically for kids, the second of which earned her a Dove Award for “Children’s Album of the Year” in 2020. She’s consistently writing, touring and performing while raising three kids with Drew in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. (They’ve been dancing in the kitchen to the new songs on C A N Y O N, and she can’t wait to share them with the world.)Ellie has performed with Third Day, MercyMe, Steven Curtis Chapman, Amy Grant, Chris Tomlin, and more. She joins the podcast today to talk

Richard Stearns is a leader who has been tested as a CEO in both secular companies and also as the head of one of the world’s largest Christian ministries. After stints as CEO of Parker Brothers and then Lenox, Stearns accepted the invitation to leave his corporate career to become the president of World Vision US, where he became the longest serving president in their seventy-year history. During his tenure there he implemented corporate best practices, lowering overheads while tripling revenues. His leadership in calling the American church to respond to some of the greatest crises of our time, notably the HIV and AIDS pandemic, and the global refugee crisis, challenged Christians to embrace a bold vision for compassion, mercy, and justice. In Lead Like It Matters to God, Stearns shares the leadership principles he has learned over the course of his remarkable career. As a leader who has navigated both secular and sacred spaces, Stearns claims that the values Christian leaders embrace in their workplaces ar

Tim Gombis joins the pod to talk about his newest book, 'Power in Weakness: Paul’s Transformed Vision for Ministry.' Tim and Teer explore a model for church leadership as old as Paul's letter to the Romans.From the publisher:After Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he turned from coercion and violence to a ministry centered on the hope of Christ’s resurrection. In earthly terms, Paul had traded power for weakness. But—as he explained in his subsequent letters—this “weakness” was actually the key to flourishing community that is able to experience God’s transformation, restoration, and healing. What would it mean for pastors today to take seriously Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 11:1 to “imitate me as I imitate Christ” and lead their congregations in this way? Instead of drawing leadership principles and practices from the worlds of business, education, and politics—which tend to orient churches around institutional power and image maintenance—Timothy Gombis follows Paul in re

“My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.” Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant—completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in. But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women’s maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: “Joy doesn’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering.” This is the story of Angela’s discovery of an authe

Brian Zahnd is the founding pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He's also the author of many wonderful books, including, Water into Wine, Beauty Will Save the World, and most recently, Unvarnished Jesus. Brian was our first guest five years ago so we invited him to join us for our 300th episode. He talks about his incredibly successful Prayer School, his upcoming corollary, How I Read the Bible, and how the Church muddles through the post-Trump years.

Dr, De La Torre joins the podcast to talk about his latest book, 'Decolonizing Christianity: Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers.'In the interview, Dr. Del La Torre talks about his life in America as an immigrant, makes clear that it is not his job to fix that which White Christians have done, and even disagrees with Stanley Hauerwas.For more information on Dr. De La Torre, visit his website at: www.drmigueldelatorre.comor check out his blog at http://ourlucha.wordpress.com/_______________________________Before you listen, do us a solid and help out the podcast. Head over to http://www.crackersandgrapejuice.com. Click on “Support the Show.” Become a patron. For peanuts you can help us out....we appreciate it more than you can imagine. Follow us on the three-majors of social media:https://www.facebook.com/crackersnjuice https://twitter.com/crackersnjuice https://www.instagram.com/crackersandgrapejuice

On why a baptism "In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" is not a valid baptism (and you should be re-baptized), the resurrection of the flesh and what it means for burial practices, and the Gospel that gives you Christ and everything that belongs to him...This special episode is a session from the Crackers & Grape Juice House of Theological Studies featuring Dr. Phillip Cary. in this special episode, we share our second session from our Luther and the Gospel class, led by Dr. Cary.Veteran teacher Phillip Cary, an internationally acclaimed expert on Augustine and Luther, will show how Luther’s theology arose from the Christian tradition, particularly from the spirituality of Augustine. Luther departed from the Augustinian tradition and inaugurated distinctively Protestant theology when he identified the gospel that gives us Christ as its key concept. More than any other theologian, Luther succeeds in carrying out the Protestant intention of putting faith in the gospel of Christ alone. Cary w

Friend of the podcast and all around Gandalf to the gang, the irascible Will Willimon returns to talk about meeting the Risen Jesus, fighting in church, Karl Barth, preaching, and the new edition of his first book, The Gospel for the Person Who has Everything.

Our friend, Jack Levison, is back on the podcast to talk about his recent book, An Unconventional God, which examines the role of the Holy Spirit in the Gospels. Jack Levison holds the W. J. A. Power Chair of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Raised in a tract house in Levittown, New York, Jack left to attend Wheaton College, followed by an MA at Cambridge University. When he returned from England to pursue doctoral studies at Duke University, Jack fell in love with a divinity student, Priscilla Pope, whose office is now just down the hall from him at SMU. With essays in the Huffington Post, parade.com, relevant.com, and beliefnet.com, Jack's writing and speaking appeal to a wide swath of readers. In the course of his career, he has received the Fitzpatrick Prize for theology at Cambridge University, as well as grants from the National Humanities Center, the Lilly Fellows Program, the Louisville Institute, the Alexander von Humboldt

"When I started out in seminary, I thought I was going into a helping profession, a community-organizer, a therapist, an advice-giver. And then Gerhard Forde upended all that, showing me how a pastor is one is compelled to preach the forgiveness of sins."Check out his new book! Seriously, go get it. Ken Sundet Jones, Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, loves teaching undergrads. He was born in Heidelberg, which must be why he likes Luther so much. He was shaped by the Sturgis motorcycle rally in his hometown and by summers at his grandparents’ cattle ranch. His doctoral dissertation covered 16th-century German evangelical funeral preaching. And he knows how to do knitting and Scandinavian flat-plane woodcarving.

“In order to understand why these groups support Trump, it’s important to better understand their vision of the world. Evangelical beliefs are often misrepresented in popular media and in political discussions. These misunderstandings make it difficult to assess and respond to the political situation.”André Gagné is Full Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He was Directeur d'études invité at l'École pratique des hautes études in Paris in 2017.His research focuses on the (Neo)Charismatic Right, Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, religious violence and the interpretation and reception of the Bible. In his scholarship, Dr. Gagné seeks to explain how biblical texts and theological ideas are sometimes used by ultra conservative groups to incite social, political and religious tensions.Dr. Gagné is also a Full Member of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (Concordia), a Research Associate with the Centre de recherche Société,

Many sincere Christians dismiss evangelism due to enduring evangelistic caricatures. This book helps readers move beyond those caricatures to consider thoughtfully and practically how they can engage in evangelism, whether it's through one-on-one conversations, social media, social justice, or the liturgy of worship services.At once biblical, theological, historical, and practical, this book by a seasoned scholar offers an engaging, well-researched, and well-organized presentation and analysis of eight models of evangelism. Covering a breadth of approaches--from personal evangelism to media evangelism and everything in between--Priscilla Pope-Levison encourages readers to take a deeper look at evangelism and discover a model that captures their attention. Each chapter introduces and assesses a model biblically, theologically, historically, and practically, allowing for easy comparison across the board. The book also includes end-of-chapter study questions to further help readers interact with each model.Prisc

"Q: Given demographic shifts, immigration trends, white evangelicals' end-times rhetoric, and Republicans' siege, grievance mentality, was something like Donald Trump inevitable?A: Yes.Q: Is it in the past or is it still the future?A: I don't know."Our guest for episode #292 is former Republican campaign operative and fundraiser, Gretchen Purser.Raised a conservative Baptist in Oklahoma, Gretchen retired in 2009 from a 20 year career in politics, raising over a billion dollars for the Republican Party, candidates, and causes. She worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Christian Coalition during the 1996 Presidential Campaign, the President’s Dinner, George W Bush’s Inaugural. As an RNC consultant and finance director, Gretchen oversaw the McCain Victory finance team as well as the Bush finance team in the 2008 campaign.Donald Trump’s Republican Party is NOT her party nor is it the Pro Life, Character Counts, Christian Values party for which she worked for two decades, and she’s back on t

A generation of young Christians are weary of the political legacy they've inherited and hungry for a better approach. They're tired of seeing their faith tied to political battles they didn't start, and they're frustrated by the failures of leaders they thought they could trust. Kaitlyn Schiess grew up in this landscape, and understands it from the inside. Spiritual formation, and particularly a focus on formative practices, are experiencing a renaissance in Christian thinking―but these ideas are not often applied to the political sphere. In The Liturgy of Politics:Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor , Schiess shows that the church's politics are shaped by its habits and practices even when it's unaware of them. Schiess insists that the way out of our political morass is first to recognize the formative power of the political forces all around us, and then to recover historic Christian practices that shape us according to the truth of the gospel.

"We forget...Before Hitler became our absolute fetish of evil, he was in fact just another politician. Before Hitler was Hitler, he was simply Adolf, the bumbling idiot that the German politicians and aristocracy believed they could manage and control if they allowed him to become Chancellor. Likewise, people generations from now will look back upon us and wonder what moral judgments they would've made had they been in our shoes these past four plus years."For our episode this week- a week that saw seditious rioters, seduced by propaganda and a lie,, storm the Capitol building in Washington DC, we're making available the first session of our online class with Dr. Jeffrey Pugh, Bonhoeffer for Troubled Times. An ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church, Jeffrey was the Maude Sharpe Powell Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University. Among other books, he's the author of Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Troubled Times.

Back on the podcast is my friend and former teacher, Dr. Ruben Rosario Rodriguez, to talk about abortion, diversity, and disability in relation to the Atlantic's December cover story on the Last Children of Downs Syndrome.The Rev. Dr. Rubén Rosario Rodríguez is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. His first book, Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective (2008), won the 2011 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for Theology. He has contributed to two recent collections, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology (2015) and Immigrant Neighbors among Us: Immigration across Theological Traditions (2015), and is editor of the forthcoming T&T Clark Companion to Political Theology (2018). His most recent monographs include Christian Martyrdom and Political Violence: A Comparative Theology with Judaism and Islam (Cambridge University Press, July 2017), and the forthcoming Dogmatics After babel: Beyond the Theologies of Word and Culture (Wes

This is a special episode from the "Secret Podcast" we release every other Tuesday as part of our newsletter, Crackers and Grape+ We're making this "Secret Podcast" available so you know what you're missing by not subscribing, but also because it's awesome. Jacob Smith is a contributor to Mockingbird Ministries and is the rector of Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City.

Our guest is Mandy Smith. Originally from Australia, Mandy Smith is a pastor and author of The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry (IVP). Her next book, Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture (Brazos), is available for pre-order and will release in 2021. Mandy and her husband, a New Testament professor, live with their family in a little house where the teapot is always warm. Mandy is the lead pastor at University Christian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here's her links:Personal website: thewayistheway.orgMissio Alliance:http://www.missioalliance.org/author/mandysmith/Christianity Today:https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/contributors/mandy-smith.htmlBooks:http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=4123https://www.amazon.com/Unfettered-Imagining-Childlike-Baggage-Western/dp/1587435055/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=unfettered+smith&qid=1603995828&sr=8-1

Christian preachers dare to talk about God.- Karl BarthOur friend, mentor, and muse, Will Willimon, is back on the podcast to talk with Dr. Johanna (she's got a crush on him), Teer, and Jason about his new book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God.Mining Karl Barth's maxim from the Gottingen Dogmatics that "Preachers dare," Willimon offers a wily dissent from homiletics understood as a human endeavor. Plus, the book is dedicated to the team at C&GJ!Plus, the attempt at an intro from Dr. J is worth the episode. 

Delvyn Case III is a composer, conductor, scholar, performer, concert producer, and Professor of Music at Wheaton College of Massachusetts. As a professional musician he works as a composer, conductor, and pianist, equally at home in the worlds of classical and popular music. As a church musician he's worked in virtually every context and every genre. He's conducted major works like Handel’s Messiah, led an 80-voice gospel choir, played organ at Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and UCC churches, and played keyboard on praise teams at many Evangelical churches. As a composer, he's written a symphony, an oratorio, an opera about anti-Semitism, and chamber and vocal pieces which have been performed by Grammy-winning artists Richard Stoltzman and the Chestnut Brass Company, among many others. Much of my concert music explores themes from the Christian tradition. He's also written pieces for educational outreach concerts, which have been heard by over 10,000 children across the world. But his most popular piece i