No Believer is an Island: The Affects of Corporate Failures in Christians’ Lives
April 23, 2024
Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Guest: Mark Bernard
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome again to another Stand of the Gap today. I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, the director of church culture at the American Pastors Network. One of the topics that we discuss often on Stand of the Gap is revival. You probably have heard the phrase over and over here, return to God more than a dozen times. Over the past few years we’ve had programs on that. A lot of our programming deals with the challenges we see across the nation and the globe, and obviously there’s much bad news, but we pray and we hope for God to send revival and change in the world’s direction. Nevertheless, for revival to happen, we believe that God must first and foremost do a work among his people. History tells us that revival nationally will be a byproduct or an overflow from the revival that needs to take place in the household of faith, not just revival individually in people’s lives, but we believe revival needs to have corporate impact.
Jamie Mitchell: One of the issues that is not discussed among believers today is the corporate nature of Christianity and how essential it is for us to understand our faith and has always been connected to and affected by other people. Yes, we’re responsible for our personal walk with God, yet once we come to Christ, we are forever, spiritually and practically intertwined with a body of believers. It’s that corporate dimension of our faith that is far reaching in its implications. Truly what comes to our relationship with the Lord. No man is an island. Well, that saying comes from a 17th century sermon from Englishman, John Doe. He was emphasizing the fact that no one is self-sufficient. Everyone relies on somebody and we do not live isolated lives. It was true in the Old Testament regarding God’s relationship with Israel. Even though God personally called Abraham, he entered into a covenant with him that covenant would be fulfilled through his family and a nation.
Jamie Mitchell: And when Christ established a new covenant, he offered it to those who personally accept it by faith and then immediately placed us into the family of God. The household of faith Christianity is to be lived out corporately. So if revival is to happen, there will be a corporate dynamic to that revival. Our guest today has just published a new book. I’m holding it in my hands speaking directly to this issue. The book is titled The Corporate Church. It’s author Mark Bernard and he’s a return guest here on Stand In The Gap. Marcus present is Blessing Point Ministries, which is committed to help churches identify why they’re struggling and encourage them to invite the Lord to in renewal and revival in the midst of their fellowship. He understands the vital need for corporate revival. Mark, welcome to Stand In the Gap. I’m so looking forward to this hour with you today.
Mark Bernard: Thank you, Jamie. It’s great to be with you again and I hope we can communicate clearly what God is trying to say through this idea of corporate church and what he has in mind for his body.
Jamie Mitchell: Well Mark, as we start today, why don’t you launch out and just tell me a little bit about this book, the Corporate Church, and what was the driving force behind you writing it?
Mark Bernard: Yeah, let’s start with the second half of your question. It’s a book I really didn’t want to write, Jamie, not because of anything negative, it’s just that the world doesn’t need another dry biblical study about ecclesiology. And in my mind as I anticipated writing the book, I thought that’s what it would be. But as I got into the book, the research through the scriptures of how God relates to his people collectively from Israel all the way into the New Testament to the Book of Revelation, you see a consistent pattern of how he relates to his people in groups, whether that group is a church, a regional ministry or denomination. He’s very faithful in dealing consistently with his people as a people. So the driving force was kind of a compulsion to write the book. I could not escape, and the book itself is really tracing how God related to Israel and the Old Testament. It seems kind of boring when you start that idea, but when you see the implications for daily life and the church today, it is astounding the relevance and almost scary the potential when you realize how God relates to his people. Collectively
Jamie Mitchell: Mark this idea of the corporate dynamic of our relationship with God. As I talked about in my opening, it is important however from your perspective, I know from my perspective and others this is a lacking piece. There seems to be a hole in the Christian walk. Speak to that issue. Why is it important for believers to understand this and is there this missing piece in Christianity today?
Mark Bernard: Well, I’ll say it’s definitely missing in Western Christianity, north American Christianity, and some of that is for historical reasons. When you go back to the pre-colonial period of time and you look at the messages pastors were preaching that are still in publications you can find they very much had a collective understanding. In other words, when something negative happened to them in their environment, they often made a connection between that negative experience and the condition of the church. They said, Hey, there’s an earthquake. Hey, there’s a natural disaster. Hey, there’s an economic failure. God is speaking to us as a people through these things to draw us to seek his face afresh. So that all happened pre-colonial Pier. But after the Revolutionary War it was a complete shift because a lot of the basis for the Revolutionary War was an individual pursuit of personal freedoms and we lost the collective perspective at that time and it’s just continued throughout North American Christianity ever since probably getting stronger.
Mark Bernard: This individual perspective and aspect we bring to our faith. When you listen to worship songs for example, how many of them have to do with I worship you or You love me? There’s not a lot so much emphasis on we Worship You. The individual has replaced the collective in America. I don’t think we really even have a collective conception. We don’t have a collective consciousness as a church. Yet the Lord’s Prayer says, our Father who art in heaven forgive us, our trespasses deliver us from evil. There’s a collective aspect at the heart of the prayer we’re supposed to pray on a daily basis, and yet that has been lost and we’ve become like the OD De Sea in church. In some ways it did not know its true condition. It was blind to its true condition because they failed to see their condition as a body
Jamie Mitchell: Mark. When you hear about how we promote America, it’s always in this idea of rugged individualism and that has seeped into the church. Friends, listen, we are not an island. That’s the message of today. We’re talking about the idea of being in relationship with God in community. The body of Christ will significantly aid our walk or hinder it. Now when we come back, we’re going to dig into Mark’s book, the Corporate Church and what needs to Occur corporately for revival to happen. It’s a corporate thing today on Stand in the Gap Today. Well welcome back to Stand in the Gap. Our topic today, no believer is an island, the effects of corporate failures in the Christian life. Our guest is author Mark Bernard and we’re talking about his book, the Corporate Church. Mark, you and I desperately want to see revival happen. We’ve had conversations about this, you believe and some things need to occur corporately throughout Christianity before genuine and long lasting renewal shows up. Speak to this issue. What is the connection between revival and the corporate church?
Mark Bernard: Yeah, the corporate church, if you think of a bullseye in those several rings that are on that bullseye, the outer ring could be a denomination, an inner ring could be a regional ministry or a district within that denomination, the center ring could be a ministry or a church in particular. So under what conditions does God revive anything? Is there a part that we play or is it all the work that God does? Certainly God is the one who in his sovereignty chooses to send revival when he wants to and when it serves his purposes. But there are also certain mechanisms on our part that we’re all familiar with, such as humbling ourselves, praying, seeking God’s face, turning from our wicked ways, and then he hears from heaven and restores the land. But that promise that we’re all familiar with in two Chronicles seven 14 is a corporate promise.
Mark Bernard: It was made to the king of Israel. He was representative head of that body when that promise was made. So when he says, when God says if my people who are called by my name, he’s not talking about Joe, Sam and Sue. If they repent, Hey, I’m going to revive my people. No, as if my people as a body examine themselves, see what they need to turn away from, then I can send revival. So if you take that and apply it, let’s just say to the local church, if a church has unconfessed sin in its history or unhealed wounds in its body from the past, can we really expect God to revive a church in that condition? In our personal lives when we have sin and unconfessed sin in our hearts, our relationship with the Lord gets out of skew. And when that happens in a church, the whole body’s relationship with God gets out of skew and it doesn’t matter really what discipleship program, what evangelistic program, what music program, what assimilation program they try to use, they’re going to be running into these kind of invisible roadblocks.
Mark Bernard: So we have to get our house in order to prepare for revival. And getting our house in order means taking a serious look at things we usually don’t want to look at in our history so that we can confess them and bringing ’em before the Lord and he can cleanse the heart of our church. And now we’re in a position, a much healthier position to be his representatives in the midst of revival. So that inner work has to take place on our side and unfortunately there’s just not a lot of consciousness of the church’s bodily condition today in western culture. And until that takes place, we’re just going to limp toward getting our lampstand removed at some point.
Jamie Mitchell: Well Mark, it’s almost because I do a lot of work with churches and my role with a PN is to evaluate what’s happening in churches. I always like to read mission statements of churches, and again, you look at a mission statement or a purpose statement or a vision statement of a church and it’s so focused on an individual, on a person, on leading a lost person to Christ, and we’re all for that. But Jesus said in Matthew 16 that what he wants to see is he wants to see the church built. I will build my church. And so the missional aspect of Christianity, at least a priority of it should be to grow a holy, healthy, humble household of faith, not just individuals. Now I want to get back to your book. You lay out some powerful illustrations through the scriptures and one of ’em that I was completely intrigued with was the life of King Josiah. How he opened the door of revival to Israel is something I think we need to understand. What can we learn from Josiah and how he ushered in this corporate revival?
Mark Bernard: Yeah, that is a great question and it gripped me too when I read it in the scriptures. Josiah was very young when he became king, and another thing that was happening at the same time was that they had lost the scriptures. No one had seen a copy of God’s word for at least 18 years or more. It was lost somewhere in the temple. He’d never read it. Somehow he had a heart for God even without reading the scriptures. But when the scriptures were found again and he heard them read, and I imagine when he got the Deuteronomy 28, when it talks about the curses and blessings on God’s people when they either walk in faithfulness or deviate from that, that he tore his clothes and went to prayer and immediately saw the implications for the nation of Israel. So there’s a couple of things I think we can take from that.
Mark Bernard: Number one, there has to be a fresh encounter with the authoritative sharp as a two-edged sword, word of God, and we’re just not seeing a lot of anointed UNC actionized preaching that alerts us to our condition as a body, as a church. And that’s I think the first step. Just as Josiah discovered the scriptures, we need to understand the scriptures of how God relates to us collectively. Second thing is he immediately realized the implications for this. And when you consider the condition of Israel at the time rampant idolatry, male cult prostitutes on the temple grounds an image of Asra in the temple just amazingly decayed conditioned to Israel’s the heart of worship in Israel. And there are things like that happening in the church today when you read about the latest pastoral moral failure or some treasure of SCOs with the money or a church split that devastates a congregation or a church in rebellion.
Mark Bernard: These are so common today that we’ve gotten used to them just like Israel got used to idolatry and we need to address these things because nobody’s tearing their clothes. Josiah got it, but we look at it, we stare at it and we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to confess corporate sin. We don’t know how to put it behind us. God is eagerly waiting for us to confess it so he can forgive us and cleanse the temple again. And that’s where Josiah started. He cleansed the temple and then he went out to cleanse the rest of the nation. And I think that’s where it starts. It’s got to start with God’s leaders and God’s church examining their history to see where they want to skew getting their hearts right and bringing that message out to their people.
Jamie Mitchell: It’s so interesting, mark, because right this morning I started writing a memo to our friend George Barna, who’s on our program all the time and does major research and I was making an appeal to him that he should fix and focus his attention on the Bible teaching Bible preaching content-driven nature of what’s happening in the church is part of the reason we’re not seeing revival and people responding to God is people are not getting God’s word. And you look at Josiah, and it was him hearing the word that broke him and brought him to a place to say, we are in trouble now with this. We must look at our individual hearts and ask God to revive us personally. Yet there must be some rediscovering of God’s special, unique concerns to revive his people. Plu speaking. Is that what you have found, mark, both in your research and especially as you have worked with churches, we have about two minutes or so until our break. What are you seeing in regards to working with churches and their real responsiveness or maybe even the absence of understanding this truth about the corporate nature of revival?
Mark Bernard: That’s very fascinating. And our work with churches, we work with church. We work to heal ministries with painful histories. So you go into some of these congregations, some of them that are currently in upheaval, which is very challenging to work through and history, to see the blessings that the Lord has given them, the challenges they face through the years and the crisis points. And you’ll usually discover that the crises repeat themselves through the church’s history. Now, a church can hear from the Lord through that pain and discern what he’s saying to them through that difficulty, or they can just brush it aside and say, well, that’s the devil, or that was a trial. Yet the repetitive nature of similar kinds of conflicts reveals that the underlying dynamics have not been healed that facilitate those kinds of problems. It also reveals that the Lord is keeping the issue alive, trying to get them to pay attention to what’s really happening and what he really has against them as a body.
Mark Bernard: Now, when a church grasps his message to them, they can go down one of really two roads. They can humble themselves, embrace it and repent. And we’ve seen that happen in many churches and we’ve seen the spirit of the churches change immediately and their ministry changes immediately. The fruitfulness of their ministry changes. We just had a church in Pennsylvania celebrate the progress they’ve made and they went through healing 10 years ago, and that is the positive outcome we aspire to see. However, there are other churches that either don’t repent or repent and then go back to their old ways. And we see those churches close within a matter of years. So it’s almost as if the Lord is very patient when we don’t know what our issues are, but when we become aware of them, he takes a different disposition toward them.
Jamie Mitchell: Friends, we need the word of God to impact our lives. That’s clear. But we need that clear emphasis that we’re the people of God, the family of God, the household of faith, the body of Christ. They’re all in the plural. We need to get our corporate identity back on track. When we come back, we’re going to talk about sin. Marcus just alluded to it, sin is the great hindrance of revival. We’re talking about corporate revival. Well, thanks for returning and rejoining our conversation today with Mark Bernard. And sometimes we ignore this topic of the corporate aspect of our Christian faith. Mark has not, he has just written a book called The Corporate Church, and we’ve been talking about revival and the need to get our house in order, and if we don’t, revival most likely will be delayed. And that’s what we’re seeing today and most of my study of revival dealing with sin is always an important issue as is. In your bookmark, your book devotes a chapter called Corporate Sin. What did you find out and what do we need to know about the hindrances and the critical issue of dealing with sin if we desire to see revival take place?
Mark Bernard: Yeah, I think sin is what gets us in need of revival and corporate sin in particular is something that goes overlooked because it’s very different animal than individual sin. We’re all familiar with individual sin. We face it daily. We, I know personally I probably worn out first John one nine which says, if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sin. But corporate sin is a different animal, and I’m going to go through just some of the unique aspects of it. Corporate sin impacts God’s people as a group. Personal sin affects only individuals. Corporate sin ensues when a congregation or part of the congregation acts sinfully. It can arise when a leader acts sinfully corporate sin. In corporate sin. God holds the group accountable. And if it’s not rectified, God disciplines the whole group. He says in Revelation three, those who I love, I rebuke and discipline.
Mark Bernard: He said that to a church. So the Lord disciplines us individually when we have unconfessed sin in our lives ongoing. And he disciplines churches when they have sin in their experience and their history and their journey, and it’s unconfessed. He says, I discipline those I love, and he certainly loves the church. And the point of talking about corporate sin is not to derive the church or to drag it down, it’s just so that she can deal with those issues to be the spotless bride that Jesus deserves and that he’s called to be. But when you look through the scriptures, I found basically 11 sins that are illustrated through the scriptures that, and there’s probably more, but these 11 kind of show obvious examples when the congregation of Israel or a congregation in a New Testament went off script to such a degree that the Lord had to cause them pain to get their attention to deal with the issues that they needed to face.
Mark Bernard: Things like when a leader publicly misrepresents God before the congregation, things like when a public rebellion takes place, things like unconfessed sin in the camp, classic illustration of Aiken and how what he did impacted the whole nation. How one person sin unaddressed can impact the mission of a whole body of people. And yet churches today are filled with akins and leaders often don’t have the either wherewithal or the courage to deal with people who are causing the body pain, maybe through family connections, they’re afraid of that or they’re afraid of losing more people. But these are the unhealed wounds and sins in multiple, multiple churches that are hindering God from flowing through that ministry. And as a result, you have tons of churches that’s going through the motions of doing church without really seeing the fruitfulness they were intended to have.
Jamie Mitchell: Mark, I’ve got two questions. One is in specific with your book, and I want to get to that in a second. I want to unpack a portion of your book on corporate accountability, but as I was sitting here in my mind thinking about different times that I’ve been in conversations with churches and talking about church’s history and you find out or you discover in your work with them that there is a pattern of sin corporately that extends back and it may not even have been committed by the people who were attending that church today, but there’s a hesitancy to go back and acknowledge that past. Do you see that in your work with churches? I mean, if a church today, somebody’s listening today, they’re a part of a church and they know in the past the church and some of its leaders and some of its people have failed and they’re still stuck today. Why is there a hesitancy to admit what took place in the past?
Mark Bernard: I think that is a multifaceted answer. Some of it is because those people lived through those crises and they recognized subjectively or objectively the role they played in those painful events, and they don’t want to revisit them. Another is this kind of general, hey, Paul says to forget what’s behind and move forward, which is not applying to what we’re dealing with when Jesus called the churches in revelation to repent of things in their history they needed to face. But there is a certain degree of pain in revisiting these issues for people. They don’t want to talk about them and yet they need to talk about them. And after they talk about them, they say, we should have talked about this stuff years ago. And they don’t. But when they do, it gives God the opportunity to heal, to heal their church and to see a localized revival take place in that congregation.
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah. Now, mark, you wrote something in your book that really caught my eye and was called the hallmarks of corporate accountability. We talk about accountability a lot in our personal lives, but what did you mean by that and how do we apply it today? Just unpack that issue of corporate accountability.
Mark Bernard: Well, the corporate accountability is something you see in God’s relationship with Israel. He laid out the blessings and the curses that they would experience nationally. These were not individual blessings and curses. This was God’s national policy toward his people. And when you read through that and you read through the rest of Israel’s history, you begin to realize that this is part of his accountability. If they didn’t measure up, here’s what God was going to do. One of the things is that we realized, he watched over and responds to their corporate behavior. He doesn’t ignore it. He doesn’t do what we do where we say, well, that’s in the past. We don’t want to worry about it anymore. Also, their corporate history formed the basis of God’s assessment. God could have used his omniscience to for tell what they were going to do and corrected them ahead of time, but he doesn’t.
Mark Bernard: He lets history play out. He lets people make their choices, but their history forms the basis of his assessment of their spiritual condition. He also sees Israel as a group that traverses time. This goes back to your previous question about people in the past don’t want to face issues from the past. The Lord sees his people as a body that traverses time. In other words, when you read the scriptures, you see, I and my fathers have sin. God holds the sons accountable for the sins of their predecessors. He also gives ’em the opportunity to make those previous historical sins right before him and get out from under the burden of that judgment. God also sends national chastisement for individual acts of sin in the group. There are some things that people do that hinder the blessing of God on the group, and we see that throughout the Old Testament.
Mark Bernard: And then it will of course that God will not compromise His holiness to accommodate his people’s sin. We live in a day when the pendulum has swung so far to the side of grace that we have a hard time imagining that God would hold his people accountable for anything. And yet Jesus was full of grace and truth. And we need to mix those two together to get a fair and balanced assessment of our condition as a people. And then painfully obvious is that God’s discipline, he loves us enough to discipline us when we go off script. It takes many painful forms. When you read the list of curses in Deuteronomy 28, it’s three times as long as the blessings. He’s really making an important connection between when negative painful things are happening in your culture. I using them to draw your attention to underlying issues that you have with me that you need to fix. And then the purpose of corporate pain, which is the seventh principle, is it is always restorative when you’re talking about sin, it can come across as strong statements, but it has always got a redemptive purpose. And the Lord wants us to have a clean heart as a people. He wants to have a bride without spot or blemish or any such thing, but have not even got a consciousness in most days of our lives, of our condition. Collectively,
Jamie Mitchell: Mark, we have a hard time. I think as believers, because we live in grace, we quote things like There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But there is throughout the scriptures very clear that especially with God’s people, when God’s people mess up, when we sin, when we fail, when we disobey, there is consequence. There is at times this discipline of the Lord. And I think sometimes we have a hard time making that connection, connecting that what just happened here? Could it be because of our behavior or our disobedience, our lacking? I had dinner with my neighbors last night and we were talking about how America is treating Israel and the great concern that I had that God would as he promised, if we curse Israel, he will curse us. And they were kind of shocked and said, oh, we never thought about that.
Jamie Mitchell: I said, man, that is a big part of the scriptures that we have to understand. Friends, I want to encourage you to get a copy of Mark’s book, the Corporate Church. You can find it on Amazon or go to Mark’s website, blessing point.org. Now, when we come back, how do we get our house in order? Join us as we finish up this discussion of the corporate church on Stand in the Gap today. Well welcome back to our last segment as we finish up our conversation today with Mark Bernard, the author of the Corporate Church. I would encourage you to get it on Amazon or going to Mark’s website, blessing point.org. Blessing Point is a ministry that works with churches and helps them get unstuck. In some respects, they fall in a ditch and they’re struggling and they’re not being fruitful, and there’s some things that need to occur.
Jamie Mitchell: And part of that is reflected in this book because we must be concerned about our corporate identity. We are not an island unto ourselves. We’re members of the body of Christ, and that corporate connection will strengthen our walk and make us fruitful as God’s people. But it also to ignore it can adversely affect us. Mark, throughout your book, you asked this question, it’s a kind of a repeating question, what does this mean for our house? I figure you asked that question for people to reflect on taking these principles, applying it to their church, their ministry, their life in general. Mark, what is your opinion? Is the condition of the church, can it be rescued if they do apply these things? Can we see an actual turnaround in churches today? Well, I guess Mark is not with us or we’ve lost him along the way, but we’ve been talking about the corporate back nature. Oh yeah, there you are. Praise God. I
Mark Bernard: Apologize.
Jamie Mitchell: No, no problem. No problem. That’s the danger of technology, my brother. Mark, we’ve been talking, I just mentioned that a recurring theme in your book is this phrase, what does it mean for our house? And I gathered that that has to do with the application of these principles to a church, to a ministry, to your personal life. What’s your opinion in about two minutes? What is your opinion of the condition of today’s church and can it be rescued?
Mark Bernard: Yeah, it’s hard to be unequivocal and because each church’s history is different, each denomination’s history is different. There will be variations between the church on the east coast versus the church on the west coast. But if I were to generalize eyes, I would say the church is in a very comfortable state because it’s not responding to the pain that is just running rampant through our nation. The pain things like the divisive political culture, we just went through a couple of years of covid, constant racial bickering. The inflation rate, that’s out of what we’re not used to. I would say these are painful prods to get God’s people to seek his face. And unfortunately, we have not responded to any of them. And unfortunately when we don’t respond, they get more painful as time goes on. So we have a very high tolerance for pain in the church right now because we’re not responding to these signals the Lord uses to get his people to seek his face for revival.
Mark Bernard: And so how these principles apply to our house, that is a pertinent question in each section of the book. And I think that we do need to do some personal assessment. I think a lot of it starts with the leadership of a church or a region or a denomination. Unless they understand that God has an opinion about the state of their ministry, they’re not going to be concerned with these issues. And so if you are a member of a congregation and you hear about this book and you read the book and you’re compelled and you’re convicted by it, you need to pass it on to your leadership because those are the folks who kind of set the pace for these kind of things. Josiah was a leader, Zeki chia as a leader. And we see revival happening in those contexts. We have to involve both the constituency and the leadership in the process, but you definitely need the leadership.
Jamie Mitchell: Mark. One of the issues that we’re dealing with in our Liberty Sunday initiative this year is the issue of lawlessness in our country. I think the church has been silent on discussing the lawlessness, the serious nature of people violating the law, having no consequence out of control judicial system. But the church and pastors are unwilling to talk about that, yet probably within the context of their church, their people are feeling it. And so we ignore these things that are happening out in the world and it affects our churches. And look, the world needs revival, but the church will never be able to offer anything spiritually to the rest of the world if we don’t start dealing with some of these issues in the house. Which brings me my last question today, and that is this. We have an audience of pastors, believers, people who are committed to their church, they wake up as they’re listening and they’re saying, oh my goodness, my church is spiritually stuck. We have a lot of people who are very individualistic, but we don’t have a corporate identity. We don’t have a community, a unity, a oneness. What am I supposed to do as a believer? But Mark, I want you to especially talk to the pastor for a moment. What can a pastor do today if he’s recognizing man, we are lacking in regards to the corporate identity and nature of our church?
Mark Bernard: Well, I think a pastor in a church like that will be experiencing ministry frustration. They will not be seeing the fruit they hoped for. If they have issues in their history they need to deal with, it will likely be causing them personal pain. May them be causing their family’s pain as a result of being a leader in a church that’s lost its identity and doesn’t really know where it’s going, doesn’t even know why they’re just living out their days in a role, not really seeing everything they thought they would see when they first went into ministry. And I would say to the pastors in those churches, look, it may not be your lack of leadership. It may not be your fault that the church is in this condition. There may have been things that have happened long before you got there that have put the church in a disciplinary track because their house is not in order because they haven’t paid attention to their corporate health. And whatever you do is going to result in frustration and probably you’ll experience some of the same problems your predecessors experienced. And I just want to let you know it may not be your fault and you can pursue these things and get free from ’em and see God do believe it or not, and as hard as it may be to imagine to see God do a new thing in your congregation,
Jamie Mitchell: It’s always easy and better. Is it not Mark to do it with some help? And that’s why Blessing Point is there that you can come alongside the weary, tired, broken pastor and to assist him to try to walk a church through. Give again. Mark, what is your website and how can a pastor or a church get in touch with you? We got about a minute.
Mark Bernard: Sure. Website is blessing point.org. I think we just refreshed our website. I think one of the greatest benefits to our new website is that there’s a free kit on there a pastor can get if they just ask for it. The kit includes an assessment they can use for their church. It includes five very brief video messages that explain how Jesus heals and forgives and revives churches corporately. And so those are great helps to a church and it’s blessing point.org. Our list of resources is vast. We’ve developed over the past 20 years. You can peruse those as well.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, thank you Mark Bernard, you are a blessing. And thank you for our listeners again, your faithfulness to stand in the gap in the American Pastors Network. Our prayer at the end of each program is that God will give you the courage to live and lead for Christ. We’ve been talking about a subject, the corporate church. Ma’am, we need courage in our churches today. God bless you. We’ll be back in 23 hours right here from stand of the.
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