Beeson Podcast, Episode #646 Reverend Tara Beth Leach March 21, 2023 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. And today on the show we have a guest with us who has come all the way from Chicago. She has just preached a wonderful sermon in Hodges Chapel. And spoken to a couple of groups of students here on campus. We are glad to have her with us. Before we introduce her, let me say just a word about a couple of events to which you and your friends are warmly invited. First, our Conger Lectures on Preaching will take place March 21-23. That’s a Tuesday through a Thursday. Dr. Scott Gibson of Truett Seminary will be our speaker. He will speak at 11:00 on each of those days, and at 12:15 over lunch on Wednesday, March 22nd. And second, our final Thriving Pastor’s Threads event will take place on Monday, March 27th. Matt Mason, Senior Pastor of the Church at Brook Hills will give a talk at that event entitled, “Use Your Words: Teaching & Counseling For the Care of Souls.” All these events are free. Find out more and register at www.BeesonDivinity.com/events. All right, Kristen. Who do we have with us on the show today? >>Kristen Padilla: Thanks, Doug. We have a friend of mine who I met in person for the first time yesterday, but we met several years ago online and her name is Tara Beth Leach. Reverend Tara Beth Leach is the new Senior Pastor of Good Shepherd Church in Neighborville, Illinois. Right outside of Chicago. She is married to Jeff and they have two boys. She is the author of several books. Her most recent book is called Radiant Church: Restoring the Credibility of our Witness. She has a book for empowering women in ministry. She’s working, I don’t know if you know this, Doug, but she’s working on a preaching commentary with Lynn Cohick on Ephesians. And so she’s very busy. Has a wonderful ministry. And we’re glad you’re with us Tara Beth. Welcome. >>Tara Beth: Thanks for having me. What a thrill to be with the students today at Beeson Seminary. >>Kristen Padilla: We’ve loved having you here. And I know I just gave a bio, but we always like to ask our guests to introduce themselves more fully. So, tell us more about you and where you’re from. >>Tara Beth: Yeah. So, I am a Chicagoan through and through. I’ve lived in Los Angeles some, I’ve lived in upstate New York some, but Chicago is my blood. I am a local church pastor. My passion is building up the local church through teaching and preaching and shepherding and seeing the church look beyond the four walls. Seeing the church realize that our call is not to be insular only, but that yes we are a gathered people and that we are also a sent one. Next to pastoring, as you mentioned, I do some writing and speaking. But for me it’s about the local church first. I always say I’m a pastor who happens to do some writing. And I’m a mom. That’s a big part of my life. I have two boys. The absolute loves of my life. Noah is 11 years old and Caleb is 13 years old. Just this last weekend I was preaching and I was telling a little bit about my family. And my boys were watching online. And I later Facetimed my son in-between one of the four services and he said, “Mom, why didn’t you tell them that I’m a swimmer? You should have told them that I’m a swimmer.” So, from now on, whenever I introduce my boys, you should know – that my 11 year old Noah is a swimmer. And a great one. >>Doug Sweeney: Way to go, Noah. All right, mom. Tell us about your call to ministry. When did you figure out the Lord was leading you into pastoral ministry? And what has your ministry journey looked like so far? >>Tara Beth: So, my call to pastoral ministry began really as a call to ministry. I never could have imagined myself as a pastor when I was called, because I had never seen a woman do that. I just wanted to tell the world about Jesus. I grew up in a family of more cultural Christians. We went to church on Christmas and Easter. I’ve heard pastors call that Chreasters. But we were culturally Christian, but we had no language for what it meant to follow Jesus or walk with Jesus. Until I was a teenager, I started to come into contact with other students that loved Jesus and talked about Jesus in ways that was so peculiar to me, that I eventually did start walking with Jesus. And when I was 16 years old I had this very dramatic call into ministry where it was just this one minute it wasn’t even on my radar and a minute later all of a sudden it was boom, I just had this call. And for me the call was all about telling the world about Jesus. Jesus had so dramatically changed my life. I mean, after becoming a Christian one morning I saw the world in black and white and the next morning the world was in color. One morning I never heard the birds sing, and the next morning the birds were singing. I mean, that was the type of conversion experience that I had. >>Doug Sweeney: What happened there, by the way? Were you by yourself and just all of a sudden? Or what was it that occasioned this change? >>Tara Beth: I was. Yeah, so, the Youth For Christ leader that had been coming alongside of me told me to start reading my bible. And I thought maybe if I start reading scriptures I will learn about this Jesus that all of these students in my high school are bearing witness to. And so I started to read the bible. I would come home from school every day, after swim practice, and then doing my homework and eating dinner I would run up to my room and I would start to read the bible. I started reading Genesis and Exodus, which as a teenager was incredibly exciting. Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy ... that got a little confusing and dry at times. But then eventually I got to the gospels. I read Matthew, Mark, and then I read Luke. And Luke was such a profound book for me. It was when everything started to align and make sense. And when I got to the story of the cross I was alone in my room and I was overcome. And I got down on my knees next to my bed, just weeping, weeping and I thought, okay, I think I’m supposed to say something to Jesus for my gratitude. And the only words that could come out of my mouth were, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.” And tears were just rolling down my face and it was that moment that I looked back to ... when that was happening I don’t know if I would have said, “I am converted.” But I look back at that as the pivotal moment where everything aligned and made sense and truly I did wake up the next morning and ... I mean, I was one of those kids that I was really telling everyone. I was telling my family. I was telling my friends. I would invite as many kids as I could ... every Monday we had Campus Life Outreach. I would walk through the hallways and just be passing out fliers. And then I would follow-up with kids and I would go and pick them up at their home. I had this little Toyota Rav-4 that I was driving. I would illegally pack 11, 13 kids in it. They’d get in the hatchback and ... because I wanted them to come and hear about Jesus. And so all of my call to ministry was directly related to that experience of encountering such a loving and gracious God. And I could not imagine my life without that anymore. And I couldn’t imagine or bear the idea of anyone living their lives without that. And so I just felt compelled. >>Doug Sweeney: And so when you went to Olivet Nazarene- >>Tara Beth: That’s right. >>Doug Sweeney: ... right from college, were you thinking already maybe this will just naturally lead for me to a full time ministry role? Or it was too early for that for you? >>Tara Beth: It was too early. So, I definitely did not think pastor. I wanted to be in the highways and the byways. (laughs) I wanted to get a bus and just travel and ... I started hearing about Billy Graham. And I thought, I’m going to do that. Because he has the greatest opportunity to tell as many people about Jesus as he can. And then I heard about John Wesley and these early awakening revivals that were happening where they were setting up tents and riding on horses. That to me is where I wanted to be. I wanted to be on the frontlines of seeing conversions happen. Pastoring, to me, just seemed so insular. When I looked at churches ... and you’ve got to understand that I became a Christian through the ministry of Youth For Christ. And in many ways that became my church, as a teenager. Yes, I know it’s a para church. Yes, I know it’s not a church. But for me at that time, because that was my life. I was at Monday Night Campus Life Outreach. Thursday Night Student Leaders, doing all the extra stuff. Doing all the trips. And that was my life. I looked at churches and I thought, well, they’re not seeing conversions. People aren’t being led to Jesus in the same ways, and so I don’t want to do that. And so for me when I went to Olivet Nazarene University I majored in Youth Ministry. Because then I thought well I’ll be on the front lines of telling the world about Jesus that had changed my life. And of course I think God has matured me some through the years, and I understand the purpose of the church. Obviously, I love the church. But it wasn’t until being out of college for a couple of years that I had a change of heart. And a lot of that had everything to do with the gifts that mentors were pointing out in me. And me wanting to use and steward those gifts. And so a lot of people were coming alongside me, “You really have a gift to preach and teach, Tara Beth.” I really wanted spaces to do that. I just had this burning desire to preach. I would preach in front of my mirror. There was one time my girlfriends and I were driving down the road ... I grew up in the country with cornfields. And we were listening to the song, “My Redeemer Lives,” by Nicole C. Mullin. And we were worshipping and I pulled over the car and we turned off the music and we were worshipping and I grabbed my bible. And I started to preach to the cornfields. Because it was just ... I just had to. I was just going to explode. And so I wanted to preach. So, I became a youth pastor. And while I was youth pastoring I started to develop such a love for the local church that has never gone away. >>Kristen Padilla: I wonder if you could talk about navigating ministry as a woman? And how that led to your book Embolden. That book was how I came to know who you were and started following your ministry. But it’s called Embolden: A Vision for Empowering Women in Ministry. So, I guess first just about your own journey as a woman in ministry, and then what led you to write this book to want to embolden other women for ministry? >>Tara Beth: Yeah, so I really struggled with having any category or framework or imagination for women in ministry. I just knew, again, I just knew what I felt led to do. But early on I started to realize, it really started to impact me and my imagination – especially once I got out of college and I got into the church world and I started to realize that there were more barriers. And I started to realize that people didn’t think I should be preaching. And i started to realize that I was looked at differently. I started to realize that I was treated less than my brothers who were in ministry. I started to realize that my brothers were getting opportunities that I wasn’t. On and on and on. And I was looking around me and I would see all of these women that absolutely had gifts but they weren’t getting roles in churches. And around 2008, a denominational leader posted a post on Facebook about Black women in ministry and why. And he gave all of these reasons that the reason there aren’t women in ministry is because they’re at home, they have duties at home, even though he said, “I’m affirming of women in ministry, but there’s just complications that keep them.” And he put it back on the women, as though it’s their problem. It was in that moment that I just realized, oh, they don’t ... they’re not getting it. They don’t get that actually they are part of a system that is perpetuating the sidelining and marginalization of women. And when I say sidelining and marginalization of women, I don’t mean it in the same ways that we sometimes hear when it comes to social structures, per se. But more that in the idea that [Caroline Custus James 00:14:13] talks about that when women are held back in the church, the church limps along. Women have been held back. And I believe that when women and men are serving alongside of one another, using their gifts, that we see greater flourishing within the church and within the Kingdom. And so it was around 2008 that it was again I just started to be able to see what are these things that are causing this imbalance that we have? And again it was never about equality for me. It wasn’t about pushing this idea of a feminist framework, for example. For me the framework I’ve always worked off of is a biblical one. For me, women in ministry is biblical and it’s old school. And so I’m not working off of a worldly framework. And so when I began to talk about this and write about this it was because I cared about the mission of the church. I wanted to see the church flourish and women not being held back, that half of the church was being held back. And so that’s why I started to write. I started blogging about it first. I’d never set out to write a book. I started blogging about it first. And it was getting just all this traction. It was resonating with people. And then I was sitting with a publisher from Intervarsity Press and he said, “If you were to write a book today, what would you write?” And I outlined all of Embolden in like 20 minutes on the spot. And he said, “Let’s do it.” And i said, “Oh, we’re going to write a book? Okay.” And Reading at Church was a little bit similar in some ways. Though it wasn’t about gender, it was still about the local church. Embolden was written because I wanted to see the church be the church that Jesus believes we can be. Reading at Church was about me wanting to see the church be the church that Jesus believes we can be. And so Radiant was born out of just this place of feeling troubled for the state of the church in America. In particular the evangelical church in America. And I was starting to notice symptoms of the church that were not very becoming of our witness. And that was actually creating a decaying witness that was kind of repelling to the world. And that’s not our call. As the people of God and Christ our call is to be an attractive witness. Our call is to be the city on a hill that cannot be hidden. And what I was noticing is that the church was becoming a city on a hill that wasn’t hidden, but also wasn’t always beautiful. It was hypocritical. It was misogynistic. We were seeing racist ways, we were seeing ... I mean, we were seeing many church leaders begin to hitch their wagons to political parties that were not in line with the kingdom. And then the people that were leading were beginning to believe things that the kingdom of God can only be inaugurated if a certain political party is in place. That the kingdom of God is going to be inaugurated through a political president alone. I was troubled, because I thought we’re not rooted in the right story here, folks. We have veered off from the vision that we see in scripture. And so Radiant Church was written for those who are participating in those ways and the curtains are being pulled back and we’re saying, what’s happening? What are these symptoms? And I’m saying, these symptoms have deep roots and a long history. Let’s talk about these. But then I also wrote this book for the people in my generation, Millennials, who started walking away from the church and doing this thing called deconstruction. And they’re going down a path of deconstructing and deconstructing. Radiant Church, what I tried to do was point those people to the radiant vision of the church that Jesus talks about. And one of the things I often talked about is, hey, Jesus still believes in us. When Jesus taught the sermon on the mount, and when Jesus prayed for us in the garden, he didn’t teach these things and pray for these things, and then say, “In 2016, though, might as well just walk away because it’s all going to hell in a hand basket.” Jesus still believes in that vision for us. And still believes in this master plan in which we are invited to join. And so my hope was restoring to some of that, that hope for those who have lost hope. >>Doug Sweeney: A lot of our listeners are church people, seminary people who love good preaching. And you’re a good preacher with a lot of experience preaching. Tell us a little bit about your approach to preaching, your priorities as a preacher, how you prepare to preach? What are you like as a preacher? >>Tara Beth: Yeah. Well, I love the bible a lot. I really, really love scripture. I am a bible theology nerd. I love thinking about hermeneutics and context. But when preaching for me it’s beginning with just the word as itself. And reading it and saturating over it. And allowing it to take root in my heart. Journaling about it. Praying over it. And then it’s really important for me after that to consult many scholars. And so my general rule of thumb is to consult five or more scholars through commentaries for every sermon that I preach. And so commentaries are my greatest possession. (laughs) It’s like I could get rid of anything but don’t touch my commentaries. Those will be with me for the rest of my life. My husband, I’m just moving church offices because I’m about to lead a new church, and my husband was cursing as he was carrying like 26 boxes of books. As a preacher, I stand on the shoulders of scholars that have gone before me and scholars that are doing the work [inaudible 00:20:51]. And so leaning into them to understand contextual clues and keys, to unlocking it in such a way that before the congregation that it starts to, they start to see it in color. And they start to see it dynamically. And they start to see it not flat. But as this dynamic passage. It’s just so much fun for me. And so what I often do is I consult scholars through commentaries and do a lot of journaling. Then I start to look, okay, what’s an alignment here? What is through my reading of the scripture? What is the Spirit saying? What are these scholars’ conclusions? What’s the main thesis of this that is digestible for the people that are going to be listening? And so I’ll usually try to write down a main thesis sentence at the top of a Word document. And then I start looking through all of my notes and I’m like, okay, what’s it saying here? And so usually what I’ll do is I’ll try to build it out. So, at the top of the sermon, I usually try to open it up in such a way that gets people to lean in. I try to open it in such a way where there’s a question that demands an answer that only the text can answer. And so whether that’s an opening illustration or an opening story that kind of creates that hook. And some of this a little bit of [inaudible 00:22:19] cratic style as well. And so then we’ll go into the scripture and allow the scripture to start to kind of paint some life to that. And the scripture will start to answer the question as to the one that we’re trying to answer. And then we apply it. So, what does this look like for you? What does this look like for us? And so leaning into scholars, it’s not uncommon for me to quote scholars. But also Scott McKnight once told me, he said, “Tara Beth, you’ve got hide ... it’s so important that you hide your scholarship in the pulpit.” You want to be undergirded by scholarship but you don’t want to be flaunting it. The work of the preacher is to help proclaim the scripture in such a way that it cuts to the heart of the people, and that they are inspired to live differently. That they are edified, that they are built up. And so that process usually for me takes a few days. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, it sounds fantastic. But a lot of students listening, a lost of busy pastors think, “Well, how does she get all of that done in a week leading up to Sunday?” What is your routine like? How do you fit all of that in? >>Tara Beth: So, usually I look at the text sometimes as early as Sunday night or Monday morning. And I read it. And I’ll start kind of journaling or circling some things. And that can be done in 20 minutes. I mean, just sit down for 20 minutes. Because I think sometimes we hear stuff like this and we think, “That must be gobs of time.” But I’m a batch worker. And so ... meaning I really care about when I’m working on something to find that focused state. And if we can get into a hyper focused state, things actually don’t take as much time as we think it does. And so even that journaling and reflecting and consulting scholars, that’s a couple of hours right here. So, for me, that happens Monday or Tuesday. Preferably Monday. And then Wednesday is I might take another hour or two of like, okay, what is the thesis here? And then putting it together is another couple of hours. So, I think sometimes we just think it’s going to take gobs and gobs of time. I understand having a full schedule very much. And so blocking that prep time in is really important for me so I have it just blocked as a standing appointment. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, we want to encourage our listeners to go to our YouTube Channel and find your sermon. It will be easy to find. It will be in our Spring 2023 playlist. So, we encourage you to go listen to the sermon that she preached in chapel a few hours ago called The Kingdom of God is Like. We always like to end these shows by asking our guests what the Lord has been teaching you these days? What has the Lord been doing in your life that would serve as a word of encouragement or edification as we close out the show? >>Tara Beth: What I am learning is that the Spirit is so wildly surprising. And the Spirit is often up to holy mischief that we can’t even see or imagine. And one of the things that the Spirit keeps reminding me in that is to look up and to be still. I’ve gone through, I’m going through a season of major transition that was so wildly unexpected and good that I said would never ever happen. I’m getting ready to pastor a new church. I told the church “no,” that I would not go. And God kept doing these things that it was just like, “Okay, what are you doing?” And it was as though God would say, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Look up and be surprised. >>Doug Sweeney: May that be true for all of us. You have been listening to the Reverend Tara Beth Leach. She is the new Senior Pastor of Good Shepherd Church in Neighborville, Illinois. We are grateful to you for this big gift of time you’ve given Beeson this week. Thank you very much. >>Tara Beth: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a joy to sit with you both. >>Doug Sweeney: Thank you, listeners, for tuning in. We love you. We’re praying for you. We say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.