Noah Filipiak's Blog, page 19
November 2, 2018
Porn Stats Within the Church
64% of self-identified Christian men and 15% of self-identified Christian women view pornography at least once a month (compared to 65% of non-Christian men and 30% of non-Christian women). (Barna, 2014)
1 in 5 youth pastors and 1 in 7 senior pastors use porn on a regular basis and are currently struggling. That’s more than 50,000 U.S. church leaders. (Barna, 2016)
Only 7% of pastors report their church has a ministry program for those struggling with porn. (Barna, 2016)
I serve as a Church Consultant on Pornography & Sexual Purity for Covenant Eyes. Contact me if you’re interested in making a game plan together for your church. I also have a free 60-second survey you can send to your congregation to gauge porn usage within your church body.
I’d love to hear from you on what’s already working and help fill in the gaps. Let’s get those first two stats to drop and that last one to rise!
(If you yourself are struggling with pornography, please join one of my 7-week online small groups.)
Visit www.coveyes.com/beyond if you want 60 days of Covenant Eyes Accountability Software for free.
-Noah Filipiak
15 years of pastoral experience
Author of Beyond the Battle: A Man’s Guide to his Identity in Christ in an Oversexualized World
(You can download a comprehensive Porn Stats packet (2018 edition) via Covenant Eyes here)
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Episode 9: Why Most Accountability Doesn’t Work + The Importance of Both Wings of God’s Airplane (Judgment & Mercy)
Listen below at podcasts.com or listen/subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
A great question from the mailbag brings up why a lot of accountability is ineffective. Noah gives his thoughts on what you must have for accountability to work. There’s a new segment on breaking down a piece of Scripture as a guide for how to spend your daily time with the Lord. This episode’s scripture passage is Psalm 131:1-2. The topic of the day is on the importance of emphasizing both God’s wrath/judgment and his grace/mercy in order to be freed from sexual temptation. These are two wings on an airplane and one without the other won’t cut it.
Send your questions/comments in to the mailbag at podcast@beyondthebattle.net or @battle_podcast on Twitter.
Visit www.coveyes.com/beyond to get your first 60 days of Covenant Eyes Accountability Software (and optional filtering) free.
Click here if you want a free copy of the Covenant Eyes Accountability Partner checklist.
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The post Episode 9: Why Most Accountability Doesn’t Work + The Importance of Both Wings of God’s Airplane (Judgment & Mercy) appeared first on At A Crossroads | Noah Filipiak.
October 31, 2018
Beyond the Battle Audiobook now on Audible & iTunes
If you are an Audible user, Beyond the Battle‘s audiobook is now available! (And did you know if you aren’t an Audible user, they’ll give you Beyond the Battle free as your first book)
Beyond the Battle the audiobook is also now available on iTunes ($14.95) and at the southfrancispress.com bookstore ($13.95).
Enjoy!
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October 16, 2018
FINAL EPISODE: Noah’s new job, pornography, Does God hate people?
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October 15, 2018
Reflections on my New Position with Covenant Eyes & Crossroads Church
I accepted a full-time job with Covenant Eyes as a Church Consultant. My primary role will be working with churches who are interested in addressing and removing pornography from their churches. If you are a church leader and are interested in this, contact me as this is the exclusive focus of my new job.
I am staying at Crossroads Church as a member and will be in the preaching rotation, but will no longer be on staff and will no longer be on the decision-making elder team. I’ll have a title of Pastor Emeritus, which sounds like something from Star Wars. This title honors my founding of the church and the role I’ve played in the congregation’s life, but is a volunteer role that does not carry decision-making authority with it.
Our church members received letters from me last week, but I thought a blog post filling others in would be good as well. This is also good for me as I process things through writing them out, and I’ll probably share some soul-level things here that fit my personal blog format better than they would a letter to my church members.
I’m the founding pastor of Crossroads Church and I’ve been in a senior pastor or co-senior pastor role there for 13 years. I switched our leadership structure around 7 years ago to a plurality of elders model. In a nutshell, this means we got rid of the “senior pastor” role, and if you’re on the Elder Team, you’re also a pastor. Elders pastor. There were 4 elders on our team when I was on it, each of us sharing the senior authority of the church. With me stepping down, there are now 3 elders sharing that role. My pastor staff role will not need to be replaced.
This change came multi-faceted for me. If you are interested in personality inventories like I am, you’ll be able to track with me here. I think people are all wired differently. Some are introverts, some are extroverts. Some are risk-takers, some like to play it safe. This is the stuff that just comes naturally to us. We don’t choose it. Over the years, every since I was a kid really, I’ve always been good at “taking new ground.” I’m good at starting things. I’m good at taking risks and successfully pulling off the risk. What I’m not good at is farming.
Once you take new ground, you need to farm it.
What I realized looking back at the last 13 years is that starting a church (taking new ground) and pastoring a church (farming) are two very different jobs. And I believe that for the most part, they require two different types of people. When you have a new-ground-taker who is farming, the farm suffers. And when you have a farmer trying to take new ground, you won’t be taking much.
It’s only recently that I realized that it wasn’t sinful to be wired the way I am.
On the Meyers-Briggs, I am an ENFP.
On the DISC, I am a D (Dominant).
On the Enneagram, I am an 8.
On the Strengths Finder, my top 5 strengths are: 1 Futuristic, 2 Command, 3 Activator, 4 Relator, 5 Strategic.
If you are familiar with personality inventories, you might be laughing right now. My strengths, and their accompanying weaknesses, are so heavy on one side of the spectrum. Most days, I wish I wasn’t wired this way at all as it leads to a lot of conflict and stress.
A few things that go along with my wiring is I become addicted to starting new things (and then having to lead the things I start) and I easily become a workaholic. I was in a 9-retreat Transforming Community led by Ruth Haley Barton from 2015-2017 that changed my life. One thing I realized was that it is okay to be wired the way I am, that God wired me this way, He loves me, and I don’t need to beat myself up about it. I also realized the dangerous pace I was living my life at. Underneath this dangerous pace was the feeling that God needed me and that I needed to save the world. I would see problems in the world, start a non-profit, lead the non-profit, then do it all over again when I saw the next problem in the world. Spinning so many plates simultaneously that eventually the engine started to smoke, the screws starting to come loose, and it was only a matter of time before everything fell apart. I couldn’t ever just start one project and lead it. I had to start 6. It’s like I’ve been consistently trying to live 3-4 lives in the space of 1, which is the only life I have. Because “something’s got to give” is true, the past few years have been a painful process of closing down non-profits, leaving teams I was leading, and saying no to new initiatives. All for the sake of trying to reclaim my life. Each time feeling like I had deeply disappointed people.
Throughout these years of hard-driving, I read books about rest and I preached about rest. I’d slow down on the surface, with the inner engine always churning. I’d preach sermons about how we need God, God doesn’t need us, and I’d tell myself this repeatedly, while still living the opposite. The only thing that stopped my runaway train was failure.
I was trying to solve poverty.
I was trying to cure racism.
I was trying to be a go-to voice within Christian culture.
I was trying to get a book published, and would do whatever needed to prove myself to a publisher.
What surfaced from this journey was my heart’s deepest desire, which was to enjoy God and rest in him. I hadn’t enjoyed God for years because I was so busy working for him. I hadn’t been myself for years because the weight of the world was always on my shoulders.
This of course manifests itself in nasty ways. If not layered with the fruits of the Spirit, my personality wiring is a blueprint for conflict. Much of this I brought about myself because I kept pushing the engine faster when what the farm needed wasn’t more land.
I became like Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. When going into battle, the Enterprise would begin with 100% power in its shields. The enemy’s laser blasts would literally just bounce off this robust protection. This is the leader at full strength. Conflict comes, people attack you, and you are able to keep moving forward in love. The attacks don’t get close to your soul and you can keep moving deeper into the battle. But when you stay in the battle for a long period of time, your shield’s percentages start getting lower and lower. This is where the drama in the Star Trek shows and movies would come in. Technicians would report to the Captain that the shield power was down to 50%, then down to 25%, and to 10%. Of course at this point, there are flashing red lights everywhere as the ship is yelling out that it needs to retreat or it will be destroyed. Ruth’s new book Invitation to Retreat hits on this concept well.
Our lives aren’t any different than the Enterprise. God created us with limits that we must honor. We aren’t supernatural; we are humans. And if we don’t honor our limits, we will pay the price. God created rhythms of work and rest that the Bible clearly lays out, that most of us today completely ignore for the sake of getting more and more tasks done.
The 10% shields eventually become 0% shields and the hull of the ship takes direct hits. This is the point where you aren’t the fresh, strong, mature leader you felt you were when you started the battle, or the church, or the non-profit. An enemy laser blast that would have bounced off early in your journey now leaves a permanent hole. In my podcast interview with Kent Carlson, he discussed some of his personal regrets from the process of transitioning the seeker-driven megachurch he founded into a church of spiritual formation. He says that when someone throws a grenade at you, a good pastor will lay down on the grenade. His regrets were all the times someone would throw a grenade at him and he would quick grab it and throw it back at them.
Man, I can relate.
I’m not blaming anyone for ways I responded. I am held accountable before God for every grenade I threw and for every reaction I had after my hull took a hit. I am also held accountable for stubbornly staying in the battle without biblical rest and retreat for as long as I did.
I haven’t talked to much about my job transition and I’m 1500 words in…I told you this would become some soul-level stuff! Thank you for staying with me this far, for those of you who have.
I write some of this as an apology to anyone I damaged in my path for accomplishing tasks. I think I write some of it as an explanation as well.
During my time in my Transforming Community, I realized it was nearing time for me to step down as pastor at Crossroads. Both for my health, as well as the health of our congregation. It was obvious that more farming was needed and less taking new ground, particularly after we purchased our first building. That a hammer is a great tool, but is unneeded to drive screws or seal pipes. And that I had to stop trying to live multiple lives of pastor, author, and seminary student simultaneously.
This has been a pretty transparent post thus far. What I hope to communicate is that it become obvious that it was the best thing for all parties involved, including the Kingdom of God at large, that I step out of the role I was in at Crossroads. To be frank, the small groups I lead through beyondthebattle.net have been some of the most fruitful things I’ve ever done in ministry. This isn’t to diminish anything I’ve done as a pastor, but in a year with a lot of challenges, it’s been such a breath of fresh air to see deep, and rapid fruit in men’s lives in these groups. Marriages restored, singles living at peace, bondage to pornography broken, and the joy of men’s salvations restored. The opportunity to do more of this became an open door. When I was presented with this job from Covenant Eyes, it was one of the first times in my life when I felt like I was letting God open doors and lead me, rather than me running ahead of God and telling him to hurry up to help me out.
My new job will allow me to focus on my Beyond the Battle author work, and it will allow me to start new things. Every church that I help to create an anti-porn plan with is me getting a chance to “start something new,” and it’s something needed, and I’ll get to do it over and over again! And those gifted at farming within each of those churches will get to do the farming that will come next.
God doesn’t need our successes in order to be God.
I’ve really been humbled by all of this. I tried to solve poverty and failed. I tried to cure racism and failed. I tried to get a book publisher and failed! Praise God for his faithfulness. That He doesn’t need our successes in order to be God. I’ve always been in such a hurry to be a warrior for God, yet God just wanted me to be his son and rest in his arms (Romans 8:15-17). I’ve been like David when he put on all of Saul’s armor. It didn’t fit and I kept bumbling in it, because I felt like I needed it to protect myself. To protect myself from failure. To protect myself from what other people think of me. To look like a powerful warrior. To protect myself from letting God down. It’s no wonder I could never enjoy God or rest in him. God has wanted me to take the armor off for a long time, but I’ve been too prideful. I was to be the exception. It’s only been through failure that God has shown me I don’t need the armor at all, I only need him. I praise God for that miracle.
I’m talking about a lot of deeper soul-surrenders here than my role at Crossroads. I do not think Crossroads is a failure, for the record. It is not. It is a beautiful, biblical community that I am very glad to get to continue to be a part of. More on that later.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is the difference between being a pastor at the church you started versus being a pastor at an established church. I believe there’s an innate pressure that the whole thing rests on your shoulders when you start a church from scratch, particularly with limited resources, that you simply don’t have when you get hired in at an established church. I was never able to shake this. My clinical depression and anxiety began when I started a church. I don’t think I’m alone on this as a church planter. I think if a study of pioneer church planters was done, this would be the norm. Some haven’t been diagnosed, but would exhibit the symptoms.
What has been so awesome about this whole journey is the support, counsel, and encouragement of Crossroads’ Elder Team: Pastors Curt Wright, Justin Miller, and Will Berti. These men of God have loved me in such real ways and encouraged me in every way possible, while at the same time speaking truth to me when and how I needed to hear it.
What I love most about this next chapter of my journey is that I don’t have to leave Crossroads Church. Crossroads is my community and is where my closest friends are. As a pastor, you lose a lot of friends. People leave your church for all kinds of reasons, and more often than not, it hurt. I don’t hold that against those people, it just hurt to lose people who were once your friends. I think that’s a natural feeling. Like if it didn’t hurt, you never really cared about that person to start with. I think a lot of that has to do with starting a church, but to a degree probably carries over to all pastors. And I just don’t want to lose any more friends from being a pastor. So we’re staying. I’m looking forward to getting to enjoy my church, without the pressure of decision-making and the repercussions of when people don’t like the decisions you make. People ask me if I’ll be able to just attend and not try to get involved to fix things. I try not to laugh out loud at this (valid) question! That’s like asking the Star Trek Enterprise who is puttering along with one smoking engine and a hull that looks like Swiss cheese if it will be able to restrain itself from jumping back into battle. Yes. Yes, it will.
I feel like I’ll be able to enjoy my church for the first time in a long time. I don’t care about winning these battles anymore. I just want to sit in my Father’s arms. I want to enjoy God and enjoy my church.
I am so looking forward to getting to model what it looks like to submit to your church elders, as the Bible commands us to do. It is such a hard job. It’s a job that you’ll never do perfectly and never be able to please everyone in. When someone from another church comes to me for advice when they are upset with their pastor or disagree with a decision, my response is almost always, “It is a hard job.” I pray for our church elders and the heavy burden they carry to lead our church, you should pray for yours too. It’s a hard job. Praise God for the farming, shepherd hearts he has instilled in them.
Well, that wraps things up. Thank you for the space to write this. This didn’t end up having much to do with my new job at Covenant Eyes or my role at Crossroads as the title said it would!
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The post Reflections on my New Position with Covenant Eyes & Crossroads Church appeared first on At A Crossroads | Noah Filipiak.
October 2, 2018
How Life Becomes More Fulfilling Without Watching Porn
Check out my latest article on the Covenant Eyes blog: How Life Becomes More Fulfilling Without Watching Porn
The post How Life Becomes More Fulfilling Without Watching Porn appeared first on At A Crossroads | Noah Filipiak.
Episode 8: What does the Bible mean by “One Flesh” as God’s design for sex?
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What does the Bible mean by “One Flesh” as God’s design for sex?
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September 20, 2018
Invitation to Retreat by Ruth Haley Barton
I love hearing Ruth Haley Barton’s voice when I read her books. I have been on nine retreats led by Ruth over approximately a two year period. When I go to read her books, I can’t help but hear the inflections in her voice and her deep care for ministry leaders (for me!) as she teaches during retreat and as she types the words of the book.
It’s been too long since I finished my Transforming Community retreats and it’s been too long since I read one of Ruth’s books. My stated goal (rule of life) at the end of my retreat cohort was to continue in certain rhythms that would allow me to live an unhurried life where I was able to enjoy God. I have not kept my rhythms, my life continues to feel over-busy, over-stressed, and over-hurried, and as a result, I’m not enjoying God in those deep moments like I did on my TC retreats. Those deep moments that I still long for, but feel impossible to attain in my regular life and ministry.
Then I picked up Ruth’s newest book, Invitation to Retreat. What I love most about Ruth’s writing and teaching is it reminds me I’m not crazy to desire rest. She of course uses more eloquent words than this, but you get my idea. In the world of life and ministry, you are made to feel out-of-place, lazy, and slacking off if you aren’t cramming your life full of tasks, accomplishments, and striving. Nor does it helped that I am hard-wired for this sort of achievement-based life.
I tell people about my 9 retreats and about Ruth’s ministry and I often can read their minds: oh yeah, one of those crazy people who is always going off on retreat. See ya, I’ve got things to get done. It’s easy to start to think they are right. Whereas when I began reading Invitation to Retreat, Ruth’s voice immediately brought me back to the true reality that we are meant to rest in the Lord. Not a lazy “rest” of watching TV all day, but a deep soul rest where we enjoy God, knowing we are loved and experiencing that love, and laying down all our attempts to earn our belovedness. Attempts of striving, being busy, and having more. To get away from it all in order to be with him, just as I am. Invitation to Retreat brought me back to the reality that we are human beings created with limitations and that we must honor those limitations, lest suffer the consequences of overwork which I am all too familiar with. Ruth’s voice in the book reminded me it’s the culture out there that has got it upside-down, and the true, healthy, reality is that of a God of Sabbath rest and an incarnate Savior who would pray the Jewish prayer hours and go up alone onto mountainsides to rest.
What I love about the whole concept of retreat is the way Ruth puts it as an invitation from God. She uses illustrations I can relate to all too well, like getting cut from a sports team, being in middle school and longing for the popular crowd to accept me, or for the girl I had a crush on to reciprocate. These are feelings where I wasn’t invited in, and it stings. Yet here God is, the Creator of the universe and the Lover of our souls, inviting me to stop everything else and spent time with him, and I reject him so often! But the invitation is still there, and that invitation truly is exciting!
There were so many great reminders peppered throughout Invitation to Retreat. There are real battle wounds from doing ministry. We hurt people and get hurt by people. We must remove ourselves from the battle for a time in order to retreat and rest, and in this quiet away from the storm, realign what needs to be realigned. There is no way these realignments can take place when we’re in the midst of the battle.
The biggest thing that keeps me from retreat is me thinking of how much I’m needed by God (so how could I ever take a break?), which is so ironic because it is in retreat when I realize God doesn’t need me at all, but I desperately need him.
Invitation to Retreat reminded me I have a choice. I don’t have to walk through life exhausted.
Trying to earn approval from people is exhausting and unattainable. In retreat, I find I already have this approval from God and am able to give up the chase of trying to earn it from others. My unquenchable thirst is fully satisfied on retreat.
On a personal note, I love Ruth’s vulnerability in this book. She is the master of rest in many of our minds, yet pulls back the curtain on how she is just as desperate for these truths as we are. As someone who struggles to admit I have limits, it’s refreshing to hear from Ruth that she also struggles with this, and to know that God will be with me when I go to him, just as he has been with Ruth. And that I’m not alone in having to disappoint people when I arrange my life to be one of limits, as facing this disappointment is such a tremendous challenge.
At the end of the day, something’s got to give. It’s only when we become so desperate, so beat up by the hecticness of it all, so empty from always looking to people to fill us up, so raw, literally at the end of our rope, when we say yes to God’s invitation. If you don’t know where to find that invitation or you need to be reminded of it, read Invitation to Retreat.
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September 18, 2018
Episode 7: Singleness & How to Spend Daily Rhythm Time with Jesus
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