Norma, my wife nor I grew up in the church. And so when God called us to plant Transformation Church, we knew that the most important thing about our leadership, most important thing about my leadership was not my preaching gift, not My leadership gift, but my holiness in Christ. And as a result of that, there needs to be time. And so I have built in. And other elder pastors have allowed me an executive leadership team to have six to seven weeks every summer of what I call a sabbatical slash study break.
For the so for the first three weeks, I’m just resting, I’m exercising, I’m reading things I want to read, I’m deeper into the Word. And then the next three weeks, I prepare the preaching calendar for the next year. And so that allows so many good things. One, one is the health of my soul. Yeah.
Two, our calm team, our production team, our staff, they’re not reactive to me changing things. Yes. I believe that the Holy Spirit is an incredible planner. And so I would encourage leaders, if you can, to build that into it. And if you can’t, ask yourself, why can’t you?
Have you bottlenecked everything? Are you in control of everything? I believe that a part of exceptional leadership is things don’t fall apart when you’re not present. But also, I don’t have to be lead pastor of Transformation Church. Be okay.
Like Jesus is my okay. See, you’re stepping on some stuff that is an ouch for most leaders.
A lot of us think we actually cultivate this whole invincible presence kind of thing where we people just depend on us. But you’re a horrible leader if that’s the case, and I shouldn’t say it that way, but that stop to think about it. You’re injecting embalming fluid in your own effectiveness. Oh my goodness. Because you can’t operate like that.
And so you bring this freshness to where you are. And so when you stand back and get perspective, it puts things in its right place. And you taking time off and even building into when you’re back in the saddle, a rhythm that you protect every single day. Your intimacy with God, your time with your wife or your husband. And you’re taking maybe three times a year planning weekend as a couple.
You’re building in breaks that bring freshness. What that does to you is that it causes you to respond to God rather than to react to people. And even, even when there are crises that come up, you’re responding to God. You’re saying, God, what, How, what do I do about this? Rather than a knee jerk reaction to people.
Yes. And that’s how I gauge myself. I know I need rest when I start getting a little cranky. Folks are getting on my nerves, that kind of thing. I said, hold up, hold up, hold up.
You know, I’m. I’m shooting a cannon at a canary here. This ain’t right.
Wow. Yeah, well, so that leads into how you’ve been married for 53 years and having such an incredible pastorate. You teach at seminaries, you’ve traveled the world. You have been a chaplain. So talk to us about your marriage and your ministry and how you cultivate a flourishing marriage in ministry.
Well, I haven’t done it perfectly. You know, I haven’t. And I think it’s. It’s listening and responding and repenting, and it’s. I’m.
I’m married to an incredible woman. You know, I. I tear up sometimes these days. I guess it’s a product of age. When I think about the sacrifices that she’s made, you know, and I think about how she is praying for me constantly.
So, you know, and then. Plus, I was blessed to come from a family that. Of a long line of strong leaders and intact families. And my mother and father modeled that in front of us. And so.
And then early on, I had some great mentors speaking to my life. You know, I came perilously close to burnout back in the mid-90s. Just perilously. I wasn’t quite there, but very, very close. And I took some time off, and some friends of mine got in my grill, and I emerged from that time that I took off with an understanding.
There’s only three things I do in life that nobody else can do for me, which are nobody can walk with God for me but me. I own that. I can’t delegate that. I can’t hire no staff to do that. I own it.
Secondly, nobody can be the husband of Karen Larritz for me but me. And I own that. And I need to nurture that. And nobody can be the father of Brian, Heather Brennan, and Holly for me, but me, I own that. And everything else I do, somebody can and will do for me.
Now, I’m most effective at ministry when I keep it detached from my personhood. That’s true. Amen. If you can’t walk away from it, it’s an idol. Yes.
It’s an idol, yes. If you cannot walk away from it. And so that scare helped me listen to my wife. Now, the other side of that is that my wife feels equally called to ministry. She feels called to.
She shares a vision that I have for my life. And so she. She feels called to help and to empower that and that kind of thing. So that’s helpful. And if you have a spouse that’s fighting what God has Called you to do.
That ain’t good. That ain’t good. That ain’t good at all. It ain’t good. That is a short shelf life.
Trust me. Yes. Wow. That is so helpful and beautiful. One of the practices that I do from time to time at Transformation Church to ground myself, but also to communicate to the congregation is one, I don’t have to be senior pastor to be happy in life, because Jesus is my joy.
Two, my first ministry is to receive the ministry of God’s grace. Second ministry is the love of my wife, as Christ loved the church. Third ministry is to Presley and Jeremiah. And then they’re fourth. Yeah, that’s right.
And they should want that because that’s when I’m flourishing, and thus I can be a adequate resource to them. That’s exactly right. And staying in that fourth position, it’s just like I was telling somebody the other week, I said, now you will raise dysfunctional children if you put them in the second position. Mm. They will be dysfunctional.
They will have dysfunctional marriages. If they are more important than your spouse and you treat them that way, you’re not. You’re not actually helping them at all. Right. You’re handicapping their future and their children.
Yeah. Because you’re modeling the wrong thing. Amen. What I have seen, Doc, and I know you’ve seen this tons, more than I have, is most people in marriage who place their children ahead of their spouse, it’s because they can’t control their spouse, but they can control their children. And that’s idolatry.
And an idol is never satisfied. Or they’re trying. Or they’re trying to make their children the spouse they never had. Yes. And that’s.
And that’s when you get into emotional. Just emotional enmeshment, where you end up parenting your parents. Yep. Which has a whole host of issues. Well, let me.
Let me turn the corner just a little bit to this cultural moment. A German word that I like to say the Zeiss, the spirit of the age. So you’ve been in ministry since 72. You’ve seen a lot within the evangelical world. How did we find ourselves in this weird cultural war we have?
Yeah, I think. I don’t think it’s that difficult to analyze how we got here. I think it’s hard to get out of it. And it’s. You know, I think what happened.
This is Crawford’s assessment, having grown up during this whole time, that when. When evangelicals discovered culture wars social issues, they developed a bit of a culture war theology. And what Ended up happening is they, they developed a list of sins, but that menu of sins that they put there was incomplete. And they became selective in the denunciation of the sins they have. But whenever you become selective in denunciation of sins, it sets you up for power motivations.
Yes. Okay, so you think that winning is the same thing as transformation, but it’s kind of like the dog chasing a car. What is he going to do when he catches urinate on the wheel? Drive it? I mean, what is the dog going to do with it?
And so we began to court access, but in the courting of access, we wandered away from our prophetic calling. Yes. And see, once the church gets overly associated with any particular structure, Democrat, Republican, independent of this kind of thing, then we lose our prophetic integrity. Yes. Because our role, our role is to speak comprehensive truth and the model, to model before a watching world the destination at which the culture needs to arrive.
But, but we got, we got seduced into this whole thing in the late 70s and 80s and this kind of thing. And before you know it, you know, we became a bit of a voting bloc and these issues, these, these, these incomplete sins and issues became the 67th book of the Bible for us. Wow. And so now we have churches that can’t differentiate or refuse to differentiate between political action and this kind of thing. And they end up saying silly impartial things.
They’re not comprehensively prophetic. And as a result we keep getting recruited to rage and anger and passing it off as if it’s righteous indignation. And so we codify all that stuff and we need to stand back. We need to stand back and just, just redefine who we really are. Now I’m not saying that you vote for whoever you want to vote for and whatever that might be, but you got to scrape the barnacles off the gospel.
Scrape the barnacles off the gospel and it’s time for purity right now. And people have left churches over stupid, silly, idiotic, self serving things, gotten angry and stuff because somebody voted for somebody else. And, and, and then we end up calling people who, if you talk about justice, then you go, then you call them a cultural Marxist. I mean this, it gets, it gets silly, you know, or if, if, I mean, yeah, I don’t want to go. No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead, doc.
You have freedom. Go ahead, Doc, go ahead. So, you know, it’s kind of like we are coming across as being intellectually inadequate. Yes. And it becomes a laughing stock.
I mean, you know, the hottest thing now is, oh, Man, I mean, you know, if you talk about the history of race in our country, okay, now you’re being accused of being woke, being woke and this kind of thing. And then they’ve taken words and redefined them. Because originally, by the way, that term woke, the term woke was not a pejorative. No, we used it in the 90s. Yeah, I was going to tell.
I was told somebody the other day. We used to use the 80s, 70s and 80s. We used to use the term what? And it just simply meant what it meant that you were aware of what was going on. Yep.
It was not. There was no Marxist barnacles or attachments or anything. And sadly, Doc, respectfully, there’s so many people who wouldn’t know what Marxist ideology is if it bit them. It is people talking over talking points. That’s exactly.
And this is what I think, and this is what we try to embody here at Transformation Church is we need to reimagine and revisit the person of Jesus. Amen. In his historical reality and context, he came proclaiming the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God begins with blessed are those who are poor in spirit, for theirs is kingdom of heaven. And he goes through these characteristics of a kingdom person.
And then in verse 14 or verse 16 of Matthew 5, he says, Let your light so shine that you’ll glorify your Father in heaven. And so when you only have two political platforms to vote for, you’re going to have believers on different aspects. But what is the church doing? The church cannot be co opted by a donkey or an elephant. The church belongs to the lamb.
And lastly, 99.9% of all people who’ve ever followed Jesus in a 2000 year history and who exists now have no clue what a Republican or Democrat is. So therefore, if you say a person can’t be saved based on who they vote for, that’s a new Galatianism. You are pulling out the circumcision knife. And so I want to see the church not have a partial list of sins, but to embody the great commandment. Yes, to embody the Great
Commission.
Wouldn’t it be great if the church would be known for what happened to the Apostle Paul when he was in the Greco Roman world? And so many people came to faith that the people who made idols were angry because there was no one to buy their idols anymore. Instead we’re the ones who boycott versus people should boycott the church because strip clubs are closing, because things are being things that are in just no
longer exist. But we no longer have a missional mandate like that anymore. Because we’re asking somebody in the White House to do for us what God has called his church to be able, man.
I mean, you keep singing that song, I’ll turn the pages, man. That is exactly where it’s at. And that we just need to be shining on that bright light shining on the hill, you know, and just the other thing, too, is that, you know, I’m. I’m a little bit bored with this angry Christian motif that we’ve gotten into. There’s never a time, never a time where it’s okay for any believer to not demonstrate the fruit of the spirit, ever.
Amen. Ever, ever. It’s never a time. That’s sin. Yes.
And yet we wink and nod at that. And it’s okay for us to be angry and yelling at people and castigating them and saying things that are just awful. And we’re courageous cowards because we hide behind a screen and a keyboard. We won’t pick up the phone. And 90% of the people who post all of this nonsense, they won’t pick up a phone or go visit a person, look at them eyeball to eyeball and say, let’s have an honest the conversation about what do we disagree about?
They’ll hit the rewind button. And so I think there’s this layered, disingenuous posturing that needs to be repented of. Let’s get back with being a church, and let’s get back to holding everybody accountable. Yes, everybody. Yeah, Doc.
As you like to say, as we land a plane, and in this time of outrage, I’m just reminded of the words of God incarnate King Jesus. In Matthew 5, 44 and 45. He says this. Bless those who persecute you and love your enemies.
Well, Dr. Loritts, thank you so much for being with us. You are a gift to the body of Christ and to the transformative church podcast community. Thank you guys so much. Like, subscribe
and share. And remember this.
When the church is transformed, the world will be transformed. Catch y’all next time.
