Who’s Actually in Charge Around Here?

Who’s Actually in Charge Around Here?

Hi there! I hope you’re having a great day. This newsletter will be the short version of what I go into much greater depth in the video version. I noticed that there are two kinds of learners on this mailing list: some who just want to read it and others who enjoy the video version. So here we go. In forty+ years of ministry I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong inside churches, organizations, and movements. Leadership failures, church splits, burnout, abuse of authority, financial scandals — most of it up close. And underneath almost all of it is the same root problem. Not bad theology. Not weak leadership. Not a lack of resources or strategy. The number one source of dysfunction in Christianity in my humble opinion is simply the subordination of Jesus. Not his absence. His subordination. He’s still in the building. His name is still on the sign. People are still singing songs about him and praying in his name and carrying Bibles with his words printed in red. But somewhere along the way, Jesus stopped being the actual authority. He became the mascot. He became an advisor we consult when we need wisdom, a therapist we visit when we’re struggling, an emergency contact we call when things fall apart. We rarely treat him as Lord — the one with the final say over everything. Influence and authority are not the same thing Influence is the ability to affect someone’s thinking and maybe their behavior. Authority is the right to make decisions and expect obedience. You can have one without the other. Jesus has enormous influence in Christianity. In practical terms, he often has minimal authority. People talk about him constantly. They study his teachings. They worship him on Sunday. But they don’t necessarily do what he says. He said it himself: “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say?” A secular historian named Michael Hart wrote a book ranking the hundred most influential people in history. He places Jesus third — behind Mohammed and Isaac Newton — despite Christianity being the world’s largest religion. His reasoning: Jesus’ ethical teachings are among the most remarkable and original ever presented. Then he says — Christians don’t feel the need to obey Christ in order to identify as Christian. A secular historian just described the central problem of Christianity in one paragraph. We can never truly align with Jesus until we individually, and corporately, accept his authority over everything. The seminary problem As someone who worked in seminaries for twenty years, including as a seminary president, I think I’m entitled to an opinion on this one. If I wanted to reinstall the authority of Jesus in Christianity worldwide, I’d start with the seminary — the place training the next generation of pastors and thinkers. You’d assume the primary curriculum in a seminary would be Jesus. You’d spend three years unpacking his words, his practices, his way of training people, his handling of conflict and power and poverty, how he dealt with the rich and the poor, how he made disciples. But if you enroll in seminary expecting that, you’ll be disappointed. In actual seminary, you’ll study a million other things. A dedicated course on Jesus is typically an elective — if offered at all. You get one course called The Gospels, but you’ll spend half the semester on technical arguments about authorship. etc. Jesus is not even the chief theologian of his own movement. Paul is. You’ll spend two years studying every word Paul wrote. Just as John the Baptist was the forerunner of Jesus, Jesus might as well be the forerunner of Paul if you judge by who gets the spotlight in the institutions built in his name. Let that sink in. The authority he simply commanded I want to talk about the kind of authority we’re actually reinstalling by intentionally placing Jesus not just as the most influential Person in our life, but actually as the central authority in our life. What bothered the temple authorities most about Jesus was the authority he simply commanded. He held thousands of people on a hillside with no amplification — just his voice, while he sat on a stone. In every recorded conversation he speaks as the Master, never searching for words, never uncertain about what he wants to say. The Pharisees kept throwing the same question at him: “Who gave you this authority?” John answers it in the first line of his Gospel. He has it by creation. The Father confirmed it through miracles done by his voice alone — commanding demons, sickness, storms, and death. He now sits at the right hand of God, Lord of Heaven and Earth. That is the authority we are reinstalling. Not a new ministry strategy. Not a doctrinal revision. This. Jesus is higher than all the apostles. Higher than any ancient or modern prophet. Higher than Mary and the Pope. Higher than your pastor. Higher than the most brilliant theologians who have ever lived. He is higher than anyone else within the pages of the Bible. He is not a teacher — he is THE Teacher, THE Prophet, THE Messenger of God to us. See Jesus. Then reJesus everything else. Reinstalling the authority of Jesus starts with one decision: choose to treat Jesus as if he is actually in charge. Not an advisor. Not an emergency contact. The one with the final say. That single decision changes what you read in Scripture, how you handle disagreements, and how you conduct yourself every moment of every day. If you’ve got time to listen to this on video, I think you’ll get a lot more out of the podcast version this time. Every Blessing! Chuck ReJesus Everything is available now on Amazon [https://a.co/d/01wVCsST]. It’s a letter to the generation inheriting the Christian movement — about how to put Jesus back at the center of a faith that has quietly promoted other things in addition to him. Grab a copy, and if you want to work through it with a group, there’s a free discussion guide coming soon. PS: Please leave a review, even a short one. It’s a powerful way to expand the reach of the book on Amazon, the world’s largest book marketplace. Thanks!!! Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

An Idea for Turning a Powerful Scripture into an Internet Video

Hi there! I hope you’re having a super good day. Are you good at imagining things? Can you, for example, get an idea about the furnishing of a room so that it comes alive and becomes a place with a purpose? Can you see it before actually dragging furniture into the space? I think we all have this ability, but some people use it more and so it becomes stronger with them. Anyway, we’re always trying to encourage people to release their creativity because creativity is worship. God is our Creator, and He invites us to create things with Him. In this video, I want to invite you into the process that is involved in making a video out of a scripture passage. Today I was reading Psalms 148, and it just read like a script. I could see it in my mind. Read it with me in this video, and I think you’ll see it also. Over the next few months, we want to convert this scripture into a powerful video that lays down the foundation of teaching behind the Old and New Testaments. I hope to have the liberty in the next year to build out some videos that can hopefully gain traction with young audiences online and teach them the big strokes of God’s message in a way that feels the most natural to them. So, without further ado, let’s open up the Bible to Psalms 148 and start envisioning what a video of those few verses might look like. Thanks for standing with us as we raise up a generation of content creators who put God’s words into artistic form so they can impact this digital generation. Every Blessing! Chuck and Sherry Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Make Up Your Mind

Hi friend! Sherry and I are back in Thailand, so I’m back in the studio, able to produce again. Thanks for your patience. Let’s dive in. There’s a scene at the very end of the Bible that has always amazed me. It’s my new favorite Bible verse, and you’ll find it in the last chapter of Revelation — God’s final word to the world. You’d expect something tender. Something like, “Please, my children, come back to me. I love you too much to let you go.” That’s not what happens. A glorious angel steps forward to deliver the closing message: “He who is unjust, let him be unjust still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him be righteous still. He who is holy, let him be holy still.” No pleading. No last-minute persuasion campaign. Just… “Hey Humans, Make up your mind.” I’ve come to believe that whole speech is basically a command to decide who you’re going to be and get on with it. Vote already. If you want to be crooked, then lie, cheat, and abuse like a gangster. If you want to be lustful, then go roll in the filth. But if you’re going to follow Jesus — wake up, and do it with everything you’ve got. What strikes me about that passage is that it doesn’t seem to matter to God whether every single person chooses him. He gave us free will. What matters is that everybody votes. He wants us to pick a team. I’m picking Team Jesus. The either-or This is where I think a lot of churched people skip past too quickly. We think we settled it all when we prayed the sinner’s prayer one day so we wouldn’t have to go to hell. All of us need to intentionally make up our minds about Jesus. Either he is the Creator come in the flesh to save us, or he is not. Either he is the only door to God, or he is not. If he’s none of those things, then he’s just a man — a good teacher, maybe — but not someone you build a life around. But if he is that Savior, then he must also be Lord. If this is true, then we have to live like he’s actually the boss. The early church didn’t have a twelve-point statement of faith. They had one doctrine: Jesus is Lord. That was enough. Everything else fit inside that one conviction. Compare that to what a lot of us grew up with — stacks of doctrinal positions and denominational distinctives layered on top of each other. Somewhere underneath all of it, the actual Lordship of Jesus has often gotten buried instead of being the one thing holding everything else together. Lordship or nothing The core of the Gospel message is that Jesus offers to be our Lord. The choice to accept this offer belongs entirely to us from that point on. But he won’t lower his position to make it easier on us. It’s Lordship or nothing. That sounds like a hard sell, doesn’t it? Who actually wants a lifetime under the authority of a Supreme Lord? Our experience with power, in this life, is that power tends to end up unpleasant, even abusive. We chafe at the thought of someone else having the final say over us, and that’s a completely normal reaction. But Jesus isn’t like any human leader you’ve ever lived under. The people who actually live under his Lordship discover something that surprises them every time: his yoke is easy, and his burden is light. His authority strengthens and lifts you rather than crushing you. It releases your creativity. It ignites vision instead of shutting you down. This is not religion. Religion takes what you have and always demands more. What Jesus offers is the exact opposite — he’s offering to become your shield, your provider, your healer, your leader, forever. That’s an unbelievable offer, once you sit with it. My own conviction If Jesus is anything less than what he claims to be in the Gospels, I don’t want to follow him. I don’t need another moral teacher. I need a Savior. There’s no middle road. He’s either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. I spent my early years in the spiritual wilderness working through exactly what I believed about Jesus, and why. I looked at the alternatives. I sat with the doubts. And then I made up my mind. I believe him because of the life he actually lived — he refused to compromise to be popular, wealthy, or to avoid pain. I believe him because five hundred witnesses were willing to face persecution and death to testify that they had personally seen him alive again. But more than any of that, I believe Jesus because I’ve experienced him for myself for fifty years now. He healed my depression as a teenager. He’s answered specific prayers more times than I could count. That’s not theory. That’s my own history with him. Represent Jesus, not Christianity Sherry and I have spent over forty years living in Southeast Asia. We have not spent forty years representing Christianity. We represent Jesus — not our denomination, not a nonprofit. Just him. This Jesus thing has never been doctrine for us. It’s experience. So don’t follow a religion about Jesus, or a creed, or a particular church’s brand of him. Follow him. Know him. Whatever else you do this week — make up your mind about Jesus. Vote. If this question is stirring something in you, this is exactly where the book picks up. ReJesus Everything is built around one conviction: Jesus is the standard, and the Christianities we’ve inherited are just our attempts to represent him — some better than others. This piece you just read is the opening move of a much longer conversation in the book: making up your mind about who Jesus actually is, before we ever get to what’s broken in how the church has tried to follow him, and what it looks like to rebuild from here. It’s not a book about tearing anything down. It’s a letter to the next generation of leaders, written from fifty years of ministry across dozens of cultures, about how to put Jesus back at the center of a faith that’s drifted. If you’ve ever sensed that gap — between the Jesus you grew up believing in and the Jesus actually described in the Gospels — this book was written for you. ReJesus Everything [https://a.co/d/01wVCsST] is available now on Amazon. Grab a copy, and if you want to work through it with friends, there’s a free discussion guide on the website too. [https://a.co/d/01wVCsST] Click here to order. Please leave us a review on Amazon. It’s more powerful than you could know in causing the algorithm to show the book to other people. Thanks! Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

What's at stake in global Christianity?

Hi! I hope you’re having a wonderful day. I wanted to share with you this interview which was released this week on the Medialight Substack page. It’s a conversation I had with Ross about where the next generation finds themselves in relationship with the church and the Bible and Christianity globally. One of the concepts we talk about is the need to re-establish the central authority of Jesus and not treat Him just as one voice among many. The Medialight team came up with this diagram, which I share with you now. Because I know Ross so well, I really think the conversation between us is special, and I hope you will check it out. The book is available now on Amazon. Every Blessing!Chuck Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

It's Here!

Hey! I have exciting news, the book is finally live! ReJesus Everything is available on Amazon worldwide! We have a Kindle version already up, and we will produce an audiobook within a month or so. This has been a passion project for many years. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been writing this book all my life because I have been thinking the thoughts that I was finally able to release along the journey of ministry that Sherry and I have been in these 45 years. There were so many battles involved in bringing this book to its launch day. There were struggles with artists, struggles with the layout designer, and struggles with Amazon over technical parts of the physical construction of the book. Anyway, we expected some resistance anytime we create a new thing, but this one truly took so much grit to bring across the finish line, so please celebrate with us! The past two years have largely revolved around this project, and now it’s completed. In this video, I talk about what’s inside the book so I won’t go into details on that here. What I am hoping is that this book will become fuel for discussion in local churches and ministries. We are producing a companion leader’s guide for free that can be downloaded from the book’s website. In this guide, we lay out six to eight sessions that a church can have to create a safe discussion where church leaders and young people can process the dissonance many young people feel between the Jesus of the Bible and the organized version of Christianity around them. Like the book, the majority of this discussion centers around rebuilding our current version of Christianity with Jesus, His words, and the example of His life at the center. A whole generation of Christian young people are avoiding any idea of serving in church ministry, even though they love Jesus. They just look at current forms of church and say, “That’s not for me.” We’re missing so much buy-in from this generation, and those of us who are mature in the Lord have to put some energy into making certain the baton relay continues. Over the last two thousand years, if even one generation had failed to pass the baton to the next generation, the Christian movement would have stopped. I don’t want to see things break down in our generation. Sherry and I are spending much energy trying to help this generation pick up the ministry and create their own new version of things so that the powerful Gospel of Jesus continues forward. We believe this book can be an important resource for the global church, and I want to thank you for supporting us up to this point. Thank you for opening my emails and for participating in this podcast. You have allowed me to work out my thoughts and bring them to a place where they could be published. Sherry and I are so grateful for this. Can We Ask Two Things Please? 1. Give the book a try. Here’s the Link to Purchase on Amazon [https://a.co/d/00QUR4VV] 2. Write a 3 sentence review and give the appropriate numbers of stars in your rating. If we could get 50 people to buy the book and give it a review, it will trigger an algorithm on Amazon where the book gets promoted to new viewers. This is the great chance for a breakout, but it needs to happen in the first two weeks, so please buy the book today and give us a review. We will be so grateful to you for that. Thanks again! Chuck and Sherry Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]