Bethel Exclusive Preview | Eric Johnson | Leaders Conference 2023

Hey, thank you. Please be seated. Good evening! It's good to see you all. Good evening! It's good to see you all. How many have flown in from a different time zone? Okay, all right. Well, it's good to be back. I've been here for a few days; was here for Sunday morning with the people here and had a wonderful time. Just been connecting with old friends and family. It's an honor to be here tonight. We left three years ago to plant this amazing, beautiful community called Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. You know, you've made it in life when you can go by one word. It worked for Picasso, it worked for Michelangelo. Studio. Why is that a big deal? Because we don't have to say anything else; that's what we are. I think sometimes we describe ourselves too much; why don't we leave some mystery? We have some fun with our name. We planted an amazing church; we celebrate our two-year anniversary coming up in January. A wonderful group of people. If you are ever in the Carolinas or near Greenville, please come visit us. We're having a great time. It's been fun seeing what God's doing. Before tonight, we were talking to the online audience watching this conference, and I said three years ago this month we had no idea this city existed. So it's funny to be in that city now, in a full home for us. We love it; we're deeply rooted there. Our hearts are there. For those of you who have been encouraging us all this time, I know many of you have never seen my face before, but I know lots of you are familiar faces. We've run together for many years. Just want to say thanks for your support, for all the DMs, emails, texts, and hugs. We're doing very well. Candace says hello; she had to stay back and hold the fort down. We have a lot going on, and it's a little more costly to leave when you're a much smaller team. But it felt good to be out here to do this and Sunday. It's an honor to be here. There are a couple things I wanted to make you aware of. I believe the team in the back has a couple slides. We have a couple podcasts that we put out from Studio. A lot of people ask if we have any podcasts. This is one of our podcasts: all of our Sunday talks that we do every Sunday, called 'Studio Greenvil', available on all the platforms you can imagine. We love talking about faith, culture, creativity, and community. The next one, which we released a few months ago, is called 'The Space Between Words'. This is where we take different topics—faith, culture, human topics—and we take time to dialogue and dissect. The name came from studying a passage in the Bible where Elijah is suicidal, depressed, and scared of Jezebel. Most of us are familiar with that story. He goes to the cave, and I love how God doesn't talk to him for 40 days. He just lets Elijah sit in his stuff for 40 days. Some of you are in that space right now, and God doesn't want to talk to you; he just wants you to become really familiar with you. I think that's why God's silent a lot. But there's this moment where he says, 'Elijah, step out of the cave.' Elijah steps out, and the earth shook, fire came, wind blew—just chaos. But all those instances were familiar to him; he had experienced the fire that came from God, the earthquake, the wind. But the Bible said after each thing, 'But God was not there.' Then some translations say there was a gentle whisper. Some scholars say that's a slight mistranslation, and it actually was no sound—described as 'the space between words.' It was there that Elijah became familiar with the part of God he had never experienced before. So that podcast really takes time to get into topics and ideas and unpack them. I wanted to make you aware of that. A lot of you asked if we have podcasts, and those two are available. Anyway, it's good to be here. How many have never heard me preach at all? Oh, good! I'm so glad I got some new people in here so I can just regurgitate a bunch of old content. Just kidding.

Did you know the Earth spins at about a thousand miles per hour? But we can't tell. And they say the Earth revolves around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. In shadow, did you ever think about how a shadow is formed? Sunshine and a shadow. But the physics of a shadow... My wife and I and one of our daughters were vacationing in Florida, and I noticed my shadow on the beach. I got caught up in this reality and began looking into it. A shadow actually took up to 100,000 years to create. They say in the sun, there's so much activity going on in the core; matter is colliding, particles are colliding. Our minds can't even fully comprehend the sheer amount of energy. We don't even have numbers to describe it, partly because you can't go study it up close—you wouldn't make it. The people who spend their lives on this say there's so much activity, it's hard to describe the intensity. But as stuff is colliding in the center of the sun, it takes about 10,000 to maybe 100,000 years for that matter, what's called energy light pockets and photons, to get to the surface of the sun. Once it reaches the surface, it emits, and those photons travel 93 million miles in about 8 seconds. If that photon evades all asteroids, comets, space dust, and somehow penetrates through all that, then it has to make it through the atmosphere of Earth. If it does that, then it travels through our atmosphere and hits your back, and a shadow is formed. It's fascinating how something so simple is really so complex. They say the universe is so big it would take 220 trillion years to get from one end to the other. That's the known universe. And from what we understand, it's traveling at the speed of light, growing at the speed of light. We have to ask: what's outside the universe? What's going on? Where's the un... what's holding the universe? Is there a multiverse? Is heaven on the outside? Does a black hole take you into heaven? They say the universe isn't just static floating in some abyss of void; it's actually moving. Everything in the universe is moving. It's really complex. And God decided this would be a good idea to create this. Then you have to ask: what's the shape of the universe? Some of you probably never think about this, but I think about it often. Is it a big ball? A sphere? An oval? Flat? What shape is it? Is it in a multiverse or just a universe? There's a reason it's called a 'universe'—it implies there are other verses. It's fascinating that God can move in and out of this. It takes an energy packet to move 93 million miles in 8 seconds, but when God shows up, it's instant. And then he decides to create humans. According to scripture, we are his best creation. I think one of God's masterpieces is our brain. The whole human body is fascinating, but I believe if God had a Louvre in heaven and hung his masterpieces on a pedestal, the human brain would be on that pedestal. The human brain can comprehend insane amounts of data, yet it takes no more energy than a small light bulb. Supercomputers on earth match the speed of a human brain, but the power to run them is the amount of power small cities need. God creates this gray matter that looks weird but uses barely any energy and functions the way it does. He creates a frame, skeleton, skin, and puts a soul, spirit, and mind. We talked about this a couple days ago. Then he places you in a garden and says, 'Now you choose.' There are so many complexities to being human. It's a mosaic of experiences—indescribable joy and indescribable pain. There are over 7,000 languages on Earth, which means there are 7,000 solar systems of words just trying to communicate the human experience. It's really complex. As humans, there are parts that want to belong and parts that want to be free. Parts that want to be private and parts that want to be known. It's cool to think that we can look out at a sunrise and be moved to tears. We can look into the eyes of another human being and think, 'I'm going to give my life for you.' When a child is born, something happens inside of us that is indescribable. So we have a boring word: 'paternal instincts kick in.' 'Maternal instincts kick in.' Equally boring. We just don't have the language to describe what it means to be human. When my two daughters were born, everything changed. There are no words for it. God thought that was a good idea. He thought it was a good idea that when we smell a flower, we would think all is well in the world. He thought it was a good idea to give us the ability to feel deeply and all the emotions. If any of us were God, we would probably skip those emotions. But for some odd reason, God said, 'I want to create a being that has the ability to feel everything.' Make note: any belief system that doesn't respect the human experience or the human soul's ability to experience all emotions—be aware. We are designed to experience all emotions known to man. There are ones we love and ones we'd rather never experience. But we get through life navigating this, and we come out the other end realizing we're better because of it. Yet we avoid it at all costs. I challenge us as leaders: there are frameworks, mindsets, and internal doctrines that cause us to miss out on necessary humanity. One challenge is that if we don't expand our understanding of humanity and the human soul, we will rob people of the ability to know what it means to be fully human. We will lead people into a space where, in my opinion, most people are deconstructing because we've not done a great job allowing them to have a whole human experience. That tells me we don't know how to have a whole human experience ourselves.

God created an intelligent species. I know some people might not think you're intelligent, but we are. No other species beats us. Think about every creature God ever created who's still standing: humans. And we're not even at the top of the food chain. There are creatures that could easily kill us—one swipe, one plague, we're gone. But through all of human history, mankind has found a way to survive and thrive. That tells us we're an intelligent species. They say we take in roughly 30 to 34 gigabytes of data every day. That's the equivalent of watching every episode of Stranger Things every day, or 15,000 hours of Fortnite, or scrolling for 94 hours on TikTok. That much information. If you read The Hobbit, roughly 100,000 words, your brain processes that much information in one day. The capacity we have as humans is impressive. In Ecclesiastes 3:11, one of my top verses—Studio has a verse from Ecclesiastes that shaped our culture. I don't know how many churches can say Ecclesiastes is part of your culture, but ours is. I'm proud of that. We took a book in the Bible that we avoid and said, 'No, we're taking a verse out of there.' It reads: 'He has placed eternity in us.' That's hard to fathom. Eternity is inside of us. We are multi-dimensional beings, connected to our past, this moment, and something that hasn't happened yet—the future. We're also connected to the intangible, transcendent space. God has placed within us this ability. We're driven by a transcendent narrative and by the stories we create through our human experience. We are tasked with sorting and organizing all our experiences. We have encounters, travel, all these moments. We navigate what to keep, forget, or distort. We create our own stories. You can all sit there and create stories in your mind right now. You'll delete some things I say and remember others. You have this insane ability to create narratives. The challenge is that if you don't compare your story to other stories, you'll run into issues. Fast forward to today: you can shape your universe how you want. Follow who you want, block who you want, unfriend anyone. Now we have a bigger problem: AI pays attention to what you watch and click, then feeds you more of it. This is the first time in human history that we become a product to a system. But the cool part is that we have the ability to create our own stories. I've noticed I usually create a story where I'm the hero or the victim. The one we never want to talk about is the villain. We don't want to write a story where we're the villain. We want to be the hero or the victim. That's the only way to have power. I challenge us as leaders: what stories are you creating? What narratives about humanity? We live in a complex time, thrust into realities we didn't think would happen. We need to be aware of the stories we create inside us. If we can triangulate them with stories of people who had similar experiences, it opens up possibilities. But you have to be humble enough to step into that space. A friend shared that humility is an appropriate relationship with your opinion. That's the challenge. Today, the goal is to draw hard lines, create rigid structures. When stressed or fearful, we boil complexity down to two options: right or wrong. We boil everything down to good or evil. The last six to eight years have seen incredible momentum toward drawing harder lines. We say this explains everything in the universe, yet we don't understand how a photon works or quantum physics. Particles intersect and shape each other. I think there's a visual reaction to what's happening across the earth because we're no longer limited to our geographical location. I grew up in a small town of 3,000 people, pre-internet. My world consisted of those 3,000 people. Now we're exposed to what's happening around the world 24/7. Our soul doesn't know how to comprehend this. So we boil everything down to good and bad, right and wrong. But I propose it's more complex. We need to remain curious, willing to go into spaces with no clarity. Everyone wants to roll in and be the hero, but sometimes we need to roll in and learn, listen. It's fascinating that we like to tell people right from wrong but often don't do the due diligence to understand how they got there. We need to wrestle with ideas. Is our perception of faith in Jesus a destination or a pilgrimage? We want to make it a destination, get everyone to a point and say, 'This is it.' But the human soul is so complex. We tell someone, 'That's wrong, you shouldn't do that.' We're giving them information but no revelation. Are you with me tonight?

We need to expand our intelligence, our ability to understand the world. We need to have a humble, appropriate relationship with our opinions. Humans are shaped by information and experiences. Have you ever wondered where heaven is? Ask most people, and they point upward. What if you're in Australia? You'd be pointing in the wrong direction. Where's hell? Everyone points down. Once you go through earth, where does it go? We all have what I call a spatial threshold. I grew up in a small town. The longest you'd drive to see someone was five minutes. If it was 10 minutes, you'd say, 'I don't have time for that.' The grocery store was six minutes. I moved to Mexico for ministry, and the drive from Tijuana to San Diego was an hour and a half with no traffic. So from five minutes being too long, an hour and a half became a good day. My threshold expanded. A couple years ago, six minutes was saved for another time. Our access to experiences and information shapes our perspective. We have a threshold where we're allowed to think. I've been here for four days, and I keep showing up to every coffee or meeting super early because I forgot how small Reading is. The city of Red Bluff is about 30 minutes from here. When I lived here, I never drove there. I thought, 'That's too far.' I moved to Greenville, and now a 30-minute drive is nothing. So our experiences and the world we live in shape our spatial threshold and perspective. We are shaped by things not in the Bible—things we don't want to admit because we want to protect our image. In a religious community, the goal is to appear moral and pure. You don't want to be perceived as someone who was a villain. But your soul is telling you you're not that. So there's dissonance. We have humans and leaders running around putting on a show, but deep inside we know something's off. We need to honor the complexity of being human in a broken world, shaped by chaos, confusion, and pain. Any belief system that dismisses that—make note.

So what can we do? Let me get back to the heaven conversation. For centuries, heaven was out there in the stars. Until Galileo and Copernicus came along and disrupted the entire worldview. They proposed theories, and with a 20-power telescope, Galileo studied the stars. He wrote a book and said the Earth is not the center of the universe; the sun is the center of our solar system. That was a complete violation of the worldview. Galileo was put under house arrest; his writings were forbidden. In Italy, there's a museum with his middle finger. His last words were, 'The Earth still moves.' Up until that discovery, heaven was in the stars because Jesus ascended into the clouds. So every cartoon about heaven has clouds. When Galileo and Copernicus came along, it abolished the view of a physical location for heaven. By the 17th century, consensus over the location of heaven was gone. The new astronomy fractured the idea of an empyrean heaven. By the 18th century, the Catholic dictionary could dismiss speculations about the physical location of heaven. Heaven became the atmosphere, then space. N.T. Wright says we should consider a view closer to original Christianity: salvation not as an escape to heaven but a renewal and recreation of this one. Why share this? Our perspective was certain, but as more information comes, it gets more complex. I believe Christian nostalgia is guiding most Christian leaders. We adhere to an idea of what already happened, but it doesn't fit the world anymore. You can only access a different level of thinking when you admit there's a problem and you don't know the solution. When stressed and fearful, we boil everything down to right and wrong. It's not simple; it's complex. My concern is that when leaders aren't growing in understanding, your people are coming with complex issues, and we give one-dimensional answers. We say, 'That's just wrong,' and wonder why people aren't flocking. We're thinking one-dimensionally. Light-hearted message, I apologize for the intensity. I got one shot; it's been three years.

I want to switch gears. The future needs leaders willing to interact, engage, and think multi-dimensionally. Leaders that step into a new space and are curious about the world. John 19:23 says when the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares. The undergarment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. Jesus wore a garment with no seams. Seamless garments are referenced in the Old Testament. The person who wore the seamless garment was a priest. The goal was to remain clean, not touch anything unclean. Up until Jesus, if you wore a seamless garment, you stayed clean and protected yourself. When Jesus puts on a seamless garment, he rewrites the script. He says, 'Up until now, you stayed away from culture, the mess of humanity.' At the end of his life, they gamble for his clothes. This man violated the entire idea of a seamless garment. He touched sickness, went into culture. He was seamless in culture, interacting with the poorest and richest. He was in the dirt drawing to distract the Pharisees from stoning the adulterous woman. They wanted to stone her, and they asked Jesus. Jesus refused to answer and started drawing. He distracted them. They persisted, and he said, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,' then went back to drawing. The oldest left first because they realized how messed up they were. The youngest thought he had it all figured out until his mom yelled from the crowd. Jesus walked on water, fed 5000, taught in the temple. He interacted with all of humanity, not just those he liked. We create stories and only want to be with people like us. We think the kingdom is expanding, but we're just in our own little pond. The mission of Jesus comes alive when you put yourself in spaces you're not prepared for. We've spent so much time on Acts 2, forgetting Acts 17, 18, 19, 20, which had nothing to do with fire falling. We better include the whole thing. How can we engage humanity when we only talk about one aspect of the Holy Spirit? Charismatics and Pentecostals understand the Holy Spirit around the word 'suddenly.' If it's not sudden, it's not the Holy Spirit. Our entire theology is built on spontaneity. But God has been planning this for centuries. He picks the right moment. There are other parts of the Holy Spirit that require different parts of you. Scripture says Jesus is the power and wisdom of God. Different communities emphasize one over the other. We lay out Acts 2 and stop. But what about wisdom? Intelligence to thoughtfully engage with humanity? Jesus did that well as a 12-year-old, and then in his 30s he blew everyone away. Paul walks through cities, notices idols, and uses an altar to an unknown god to answer existential questions. In the 14th century, during a plague, Christians ran into the plague. You had a higher chance of survival if you knew a Christian. Jesus puts on the seamless garment and gets right in the middle. The future needs leaders who think seamlessly, grow in areas to interact with different aspects of humanity. Some people live in one dimension, but the world is complex.

Philip Rieff, a sociologist, described three worlds: first, second, and third. First world is a pagan view, governed by something transcendent. An Oracle gets information from a transcendent being and brings it back. Second world is the Christian worldview: God governs and sets the tone. The common denominator is something transcendent. Third world is secular: nothing transcendent governs. You determine your own reality. We are hundreds of years into that. People are redefining everything. An artist took a urinal, put it on a table, and called it a fountain. It became controversial. Fast forward 100 years: society is redefined by human self. Most of us know how to live in the Christian view, so we talk to people about what God said. But our world is increasingly secular. We need new language. We have gotten lazy, copying and pasting what worked. When you change language, people think you're attacking their beliefs. Linguistic relativity: the words you know shape your paradigm. People in the Arctic have 30 words for snow. I have one. Tribes in the Amazon have 30 words for green. When you step into a more nuanced world, you get more language. Some of you might not like this, but I leave tomorrow. Jesus's language was revolutionary in his time but not today. We copy and paste. Why don't we try 'Command N'? Take the beauty of Jesus and find new language that addresses what the soul longs for. God is inviting us to come up with new language. Are you still with me? A few more things. Remain curious. It scares me when someone stops being curious. It means they've arrived. Steve Backlund said an old statistic: 84% of people stopped growing in their 30s. Remain curious. Now is the time to run into culture, not separate from it. Find new dimensions of conversation. Politics is the new religion. Your existence is defined by which side you're on. If people ask, say 'neither.' We have to trust who lives in us. I've been interacting with more people deconstructing than ever. Their soul is longing for answers. If we draw them back to what we know in the past, it won't help them move forward. Can we move from a destination mindset to a pilgrimage? Allow people to journey, understanding why they're alive, who Jesus is, and be okay with open-ended questions. We rush people to a decision; it works for the mind but not the soul. I'd love to see leaders expand and be willing to go into dark, hard conversations. Engage a level of thinking promised by Jesus: the mind of Christ. He proved you can be seamless and interact with all aspects of society.

Father, I thank you for this space, this room. Thank you for the leaders in this room and what you're doing on earth. I pray that wherever we are as individuals, as leaders, as humans who have said yes to you, tonight we would move further into this reality. The lines we've drawn between us and culture, us and humanity, we begin to erase them. Move into spaces of humanity we've been terrified of. Recognize that you're looking for people who will engage, interact, and think multi-dimensionally. Find new language in a time that needs it. Reduce our copy and pasting and move into 'Command N' as leaders. I pray for those terrified by what I shared. Be willing to be curious again. Say, 'I want to learn more about this world.' Instead of retracting and vacating, we go in. Help us understand the human soul better. It deserves a conversation at the table. Jesus, our design is to experience the mosaic of experiences. I pray for those already in those spaces; elevate them in understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. Open doors for them like Paul walking through the city, studying how it thinks, functions, and exists. I pray for pastors in this room having conversations about deconstruction and questioning reality. Make us good at walking with them, journeying with them. Let our own insecurities not drive the pace of these conversations. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. The existential longings, we know in this room, but we live in a world where you don't exist in their frameworks. Next season, we would see people with no framework of the transcendent experience something transcendent. Give us courage to explore again, take new risks, press 'Command N'. I bless this room and each person in it. Thank you for what you're doing in our hearts. Amen.