#7: Josh James: Struggling with the Sending Church

In today's episode, Nick Warnes has a dialogue with Josh James. Josh James (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a commissioned church starter in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and pastor of The Restoration Project in Salisbury, Maryland. He and his wife, Kate, have been married for 12 years. They have two sons, Abram (6) and Jude (4). Josh also has a highly curated Netflix queue and has recently become an enthusiast of buying sports cards on eBay. (Yes, that is real.) . To find out more about Josh James you can visit www.restoresby.org, Facebook (www.facebook.com/restoresby). Here are some quotes from today's interview:

• “I never thought that I had what it takes to be a pastor.”
• “Bad news — there are really no jobs for you. You might want to think about becoming something else…”
• “One of my biggest fears is starting a church that feels like a split — and despite our best efforts, it’s always felt one-sided. It was never reciprocated from our sending church.”
• “It’s hard to tell this story in a way that is honoring to the existing community…”
• “I started to get burned out being bi-vocational and…living this pastoral call…”
• “I think through our weird relationships, we’ve been able to carve out a niche for ourself that doesn’t look like other local ministries.”
• “We’ve been leaning into the weirdness of who we are in our context, because there are very few places that have allowed folks to be who they are and pursue Jesus in that way.”
• “We don’t feel the pressure to cater to our community in stereo typical ways…”
• “I have not idea what it is like to walk in a lot of people’s shoes. Yet here I am ministering in a context where oppression is front-page news all the time. We have the opportunity to minister in light of it.”

Please review this episode, subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend! Make sure to visit our website, cyclicalchurches.com. There's a lot more going on at Cyclical, including our new book! Virtually every church around the world has been impacted by COVID-19 and we are all now in various stages of it. It can be hard to trace the threads of how to understand the church and your role in it and what kind of theological priorities we should be paying attention to right now. We gathered a group of ecclesial innovators from across our international network to write a book for you called Faithful Innovation (or something like that). It's 12 chapters to help you reflect on this unique moment, make sense of what it means to be church after COVID-19. Available on July 28.