Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation

060 Why Discipleship is an Adventure in Transformation (with Jessie Cruickshank)

• Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw • Season 4 • Episode 60

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Jesus told his followers, “Go and make disciples of every nation,” but a lot of us stop before we start—because we feel like we don’t have what it takes. But Jesus didn’t ask spiritual superstars to make disciples. He invited ordinary people into the adventure of following him.

Our guest, Jessie Cruickshank, holds an M.Ed. from Harvard in mind, brain, and education. She is an ordained minister and a nationally recognized expert in disciple-making and the neuroscience of transformation. And she has recently written Ordinary Discipleship: How God Wires Us for the Adventure of Transformation.

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Geoff Holsclaw:

Jesus told his followers go and make disciples for every nation. But a lot of us stop before we even get started, Maybe because we feel like we don't have what it takes. But the truth is Jesus didn't ask spiritual superstars to make disciples. He invited ordinary, everyday people into the adventure of following Him. So what we're talking about today is the adventure of everyday and ordinary discipleship.

Geoff Holsclaw:

This is the Embodied Faith Podcast, hosted by myself and Cyd Holsclaw, helping you get unstuck through a neuroscience-informed spiritual formation And, as always, we're brought to you by Grassroots Christianity which seeks to grow faith for everyday people. You're joined by Jesse Crueschanks Crueschanks, Crueschanks, I know, she told me it's Crueschanks. She holds an M Ed from Harvard in Brain, Mind and Education. She is an ordained pastor and a nationally recognized expert in disciple making and the neuroscience of transformation, And she recently just wrote ordinary discipleship How God Wires Us for the Adventure of Transformation. Sorry, I already botched your name, Jesse, but we're so glad that you're here with us today. Just to jump right into the deep end, You could kind of talk about your initial ministry, some of the things you're doing, but how did that? your ministry lead you into looking into neuroscience and getting a degree in all this stuff?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yeah, so I got the graduate degree when I was 30, and I had already been in full-time ministry 10 years and running a successful nonprofit with a couple of brothers in the Lord, but so in the wilderness when you're. So it was a guide, right? It was an immersion discipleship program where we would take young adults and adults out for up to 40 days and 40 nights and they would have backpacking, technical snow mountaineering with like ice axes and ropes and stuff and technical rock climbing. So originally, because we were so young, we wanted to do it well and we wanted to facilitate a divine human encounter, but not death, right. So you?

Cyd Holsclaw:

know That's good.

Geoff Holsclaw:

We're glad you were a fan of that.

Jessie Cruickshank:

But on this side, and so we in doing a program. Well, when you train people in the different skills that they need, there's going to be a lag between when you train the skill and when they use the skill. So we had snow school, but then it would be like 15 days before they would be ascending the full peak and need to self-arrest with an ice axe if they fell. So I wanted to be able to teach somebody something once and have them remember it with a high degree of accuracy, because their life and everybody else's life depended on it. So I already had an undergrad in education and my dad has a PhD in adult learning and stuff And so just started reading and applying neuroscience to what we were doing, looking at it, trying to teach it you know how do we do this? well, and teach that to the staff And along the way, my dad and I ended up kind of discovering and seeing this pattern in all of these best practices.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So I mean we looked at like about eventually ended up reading about 3,000 different journal articles and books and things from chaos theory to, you know, psychology, neuroscience, all this stuff, and in the process of applying that and kind of sorting it through we ended up discovering this model of transformation And then I took that to Harvard and thought that they would fix it or tell me what you know part of research I had missed. But I ended up lecturing there a few times And it's published academically in a peer review journal, the Journal of experiential education, and but so so I'm wanting to teach things. Well, right, and that very quickly and early on ended up like kind of transforming to not just skills that would save your life, but like discipleship conversations.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Yeah, love that. How do?

Jessie Cruickshank:

you have a conversation, one conversation with a person in 20 minutes or an hour, and it have, and it changed their life. Because it's not, it's not just living and breathing that's at stake now, it's eternity. And I wanted to do that well, so became very interested in the science of transformation, how God created us, and so where there was gaps in the research, i would look in scripture and just kind of dialogue with God. Okay, god, what do you? what do you do here? What are you thinking? How did you make us, why did you make us that way? Because that seems like a dumb idea.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So you know just these conversations and dialogues with the Holy Spirit and looking at the science and wanting to be effective in eternity, Because that's the thing that matters the most.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Yeah, Cyd, she you know she's a spiritual director and also a coach, but she took all these courses on the neuroscience of change, like how does change happen and how was it the best ways to make it stick, how do we make change sticky, and all these things. So that's great. So your book is like a distillation of like all these best practices and you kind of you introduce this idea of an adventure. That discipleship should be an adventure. It's not some I don't know terrible task or painful process Or school, it's not school.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah so tell us about that, like how is it that you wanted to make sure? or how is it that you're thinking of discipleship as an adventure of transformation?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Well, one thing that the Lord showed me early on was the difference. Okay, so in the Christian world we have head knowledge and heart knowledge, and we talk about that and you're like, oh, let me teach my head and then my head will teach my heart, or it's in my head but it hasn't dropped down to my heart, and we have this kind of language, but we prioritize the head, which is kind of a problem.

Jessie Cruickshank:

It's not just kind of a problem, it's actually a really big problem, but if you look at long-term memory, to be a total nerd for a second. If we look at long-term memory, there are actually two different types of long-term memory. That corresponds to head and heart knowledge. Now, the head knowledge, long-term memory, is called semantic memory And this is your memory of data, facts and things that would like when you money on Jeopardy or in the bar at the trivia time And if you remember it. There we have a very substantial amount of research on how easy it is to forget And you forget very, very easily when it's in this memory system. So in this data fact memory system, like it's mostly gone by tomorrow and by mostly I mean like 95% gone by tomorrow, and like Flash to all of you preachers.

Geoff Holsclaw:

People have forgotten your sermon.

Jessie Cruickshank:

No sense, And by the end of the week it's totally gone.

Geoff Holsclaw:

I forget the sermon that I preached by Monday. I don't even know what I said.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Right.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So what a great use of time for everybody. It's amazing. Or we have our other type of long-term memory, which is called episodic memory, and it has two parts procedural memory, which is muscle memory, so how do we do things? Okay, it's the embodied memory. Episodic is an embodied memory. And so procedure how we do stuff, muscle memory how you brush your teeth, the autopilot driving your car and autobiographical memory.

Jessie Cruickshank:

An autobiographical memory is a fully embodied memory system stored in your organs. Like we know this right, our brain, our body, keeps the score. Well, your story is completely stored across your body because your brain is extremely invested in keeping it Right. So we forgot our autobiographical memory, the way we forget our data fact memory, like that, like we lose it a little bit and we think that we're getting old and we're terrified and we have dementia. But here's the other amazing thing, more than just even how dedicated your body is in keeping the memory system, is that autobiographical memory is the only memory system that can project into the future. So the way that you remember the past is the way that you think about the future. Semantic memory data facts cannot project into the future, which means you cannot biologically answer the question. How do I apply this to my life? Let me prove it. George Washington, first president of the United States, apply that to your life.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Right.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So if we learn God is good, as a data fact and not in our autobiographical memory, if we learn that God loves us and that we are fearfully wonderfully made, as a data fact and not in our autobiographical memory, we literally cannot apply to our life. God didn't make us to do it that way.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Right right.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So autobiographical memory, our story is the best way. It's actually how God created us to learn And it's automatic, like you automatically start applying stuff to your life, like you don't even have to work at that. Okay, so what better way to like explore trust and patience and faith and whether or not I like you and whether or not I have issues than on an expedition or an adventure? Right so the adventure part of living it's called by anthropologists called liminality, which is like this tension space where your identity is being created, like facilitating and having those experiences is actually God's design for how we're recreated and how he transforms us. So I just think, rather than having a lot of school time and sermon time that will never change us or has extremely small effect, why don't we just go on an adventure together and we're automatically transformed in very deep and radical ways?

Geoff Holsclaw:

So I love that.

Cyd Holsclaw:

There are so many things that you just said that I just really appreciate And I'm like writing down notes of like, ooh, i wanna learn more about that, i wanna look at that.

Cyd Holsclaw:

But one thing that really stands out to me is you're talking about the adventure of discipleship and going on an adventure, and I heard that, even when you were talking about your process of learning, about how transformation happens in the brain, that you said where there were gaps in the research, you would stop, look at scripture and then have a conversation with God about why did you bake us that way and what is this about? Which, to me, says you're already on an adventure with the Holy Spirit, adventuring together to even create the story that you're writing together and presenting this to the world. Can you say more about how did you personally come to a place of trusting the Holy Spirit to that degree that you would say, okay, there's gaps in the research, holy Spirit, you tell me like, fill it in for me. How did you get to a place like that And how do we develop trust in the Holy Spirit like that?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Well, that's a great question. How did I get there? I am charismatic Pentecostal, but I wasn't always. I was raised in a Baptist church And my mom was charismatic. How do I? my mom was a witch before she was a Christian, and so she was already aware of the spiritual. We grew up with things happening in our home and in our life, and so whether or not the spiritual and like this unseen kind of realm existed wasn't a question. The question was just like, what do you do? And because of those negative, like movie worthy experiences I had when I was a kid, my brother, my sister and I all gave our lives to the Lord. When we're like three and five, cause my mom told us that Jesus could protect us, we didn't have to fight like the weird, like you guys, the doors open and closed by themselves.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Things picked up and moved. And so when you're like you know you're not, you know you're not debating whether or not that's possible via physics, you're just like that's scary, what's going to protect me, jesus? Okay, boom, jesus is going to protect me. And when I was in college then I had the baptism. The Holy Spirit was part of a charismatic church and that happened.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So having this relationship with Holy Spirit at that level when my 20s was kind of new and fresh. And so you're like, okay, well, let me just, if Holy Spirit's real, then I'm just going to ask random questions And you know, just kind of that testing aspect. I think I learned to trust Holy Spirit because Holy Spirit demonstrated time and time again that it was smarter than me and it had answers that were better than mine. So I'm kind of a slow learner and I wouldn't say that I have great faith. I think I ask God to prove himself a lot. Sometimes he has partnered with that and sometimes he hasn't, but when he does he gives me pretty amazing answers and insights and things like that. So I don't know, testing practice failure, holy Spirit being quiet and me being really upset about that. That increases trust and dependency.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Yeah, so even as you talk about that, you know you're talking about this journey that we all go on in this adventure, right, the wilderness experiences of being sort of pushed to your limits and sort of to the very edge. I hear some of that echoing in your adventure with the Holy Spirit. How can all of us trust the Holy Spirit, right, if we haven't had this individual experience, like you've had with baptism of the Holy Spirit and your personal journey of testing, like why is it that we can even trust the Holy Spirit at all on this adventure that we have in discipleship?

Jessie Cruickshank:

That's a great question. When I went to go write the book and like, take these things that I had learned them in teaching thousands of people in their development as disciple makers in the wilderness ministry, i looked around at what it existed as far as discipleship training And I noticed that and this was much more true 10 years ago. So this isn't as true now but 10 years ago. Like most of the discipleship materials were written by cessationists. They were written by people who didn't believe the Holy Spirit was active, didn't believe the Holy Spirit was talking to us, that we could hear, that we could discern, and so you know, a lot of discipleship materials were around Scripture and discerning Scripture And the Holy Spirit wasn't even present in that conversation.

Jessie Cruickshank:

The Holy Spirit wasn't present as what is actually supposed to lead us into all truth. So Scripture says that Jesus is the truth and the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth. It actually never says this in the Bible, that the Bible was the truth, because and I'm not saying that I don't think it is like I do but the Bible itself never claims that And that's because it wasn't canonized for like hundreds of years, right? So it's not going to say oh no, this is all you need, because that wasn't true when they were writing it, because they were writing it right, because I mean so it's kind of like a history timeline thing And but it does say you can trust Jesus and you can trust the Holy Spirit to be what leads us into truth and what helps us. And if it was good enough for 300 years that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were enough.

Jessie Cruickshank:

while we're learning, we're reading the letters and letting the Holy Spirit, like, teach us and show us how to live. then then why is that not true today, now that we have scripture in this, now it's written down, so I always ask Jesus to tell me what the scripture means. Yeah, it's for it, for me. I love reading the Bible with Jesus and saying what's that about? What's that sentence about?

Cyd Holsclaw:

I don't understand. That's super weird.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Wow, jesus, that sounds really harsh. You know like I'd rather have an embodied in an incarnational experience with scripture.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Yeah, so not that every adventure or every outdoor kind of exploration is the same, but there is, especially in the kind of the world of literature, as well as our experiences, there are like patterns, and so you kind of base your book on these kind of this pattern or the sequence of events. So can you go through just like and relate them to discipleship, to the adventure of discipleship? How does there's like the seven steps that kind of happen that you kind of like lead us through And kind of just list those and kind of just kind of situate them within this kind of adventure understanding?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Sure Sure, i like logical linear head guy.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Okay, I want the seven steps. Enough of this like. I'm like I have about 12 more questions Enough of this, like how do you know when the spirit is talking with you? I want the order, the sequence.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Okay, so because they're integrated.

Geoff Holsclaw:

These, these, both these things work together as well. I sit and I work great together, So we kind of bring a little. So, anyways, if you could do the seven steps, that would be. That would help me people like me a lot.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Sure, sure, cause. God is both the God of breath and the God of order.

Geoff Holsclaw:

That's right.

Jessie Cruickshank:

That's right Which is ordinality right It's not control.

Cyd Holsclaw:

It's like A, B, C.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yeah, so there's this amazing framework that was that this guy in the 1950s articulated called the hero's journey, and Joseph Campbell looked. It was a storyteller and and he loved archetypes and mythology and stuff like that, and so he looked at a lot of different myths that ground different cultures and like, like are the, the, the stories that that culture tells itself and tells its children in order to know who it is. He found this pattern in there that he named the hero's journey, and it is essentially these steps where there's an ordinary person. They're not a hero, they're an ordinary person in ordinary world. And you know, you spend the first time, part of the story, looking at the ordinary world and then something happens they get the call to adventure, the call to lead this ordinary world and to to go somewhere different, to do something different, to be somebody different. So, step one, ordinary person, step two, a culture, adventure.

Jessie Cruickshank:

And in the, in Joseph Campbell's stuff, the hero rejects the call and says no, not me. And so it takes, you know, compelling circumstances for them to finally do it. And if we look at the hero's story and every story in the Bible, they all reject the call, except Jesus, which is kind of fascinating to me. So yeah, ordinary person answers the call and then teams with others And now you have people, like in every hero's story. It's not a solo. It's not a solo story. You've got friends, you've got, you know, the comic relief, you've got the mentor and the sage and the wizard, you know, and all of that are gammed off right. Everyone has a gamb off or a buddy Or Yoda.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Or Yoda.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yeah, exactly So they. and so then, when they team with others, now they get to learn new things, and they learn new things together. And as they're learning new things, they start to experience these struggles and these trials, either, you know, with whether it's a test or whether it's with one another, or whether it's internal, like like these things start to come up and they experience that struggle. And as they do that, they get the opportunity to make a choice. And in the middle of that pit in the darkness there's something deep has to change. and they get to choose that. And when they do, they experience revelation. And now revelation is what changes them and they're no longer the same.

Jessie Cruickshank:

That's where an ordinary person becomes a hero. And in discipleship, that's usually a place of repentance, which is a miracle based on the way the brain works right. Repentance is amazing and what it takes there. And then, when they do that, then they get to come back to the rest of their world, and there's rewards, there's gifts. Things are different on the other side of that revelation. And then they go back home. They're different, their world is not. And so it sets us up for the sequel, as they discern the seasons and like, ok, what's the next chapter? What's the next adventure? So that is the order that the journey happens in.

Geoff Holsclaw:

And in discipleship. the sequel is just called the Book of Acts, which comes after Luke. right, you have the hero's journey with the formation of the disciples And you mentioned this a little bit in the book. but, just like the calling of Peter, he has a small miraculous encounter with the catch of fish And then he's like oh, i'm a sinner, Jesus, you need to get away from me. That's kind of like the rejecting of that call. But then of course, jesus does call him to be not just a fisher of fish but a fisher of people. And the adventure starts you get the whole 12, the band of 12. And then Jesus sends him out on little missions to find out just all the ways that they fail.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Those are those little interludes of little challenges And he just keeps upping the ante.

Geoff Holsclaw:

So, as you read even the Gospels, you can kind of see this happening, as Jesus is, he's on his own adventure, in one sense, to conquer sin and death, but then he's also initiating the disciples into this adventure and he's the mentor for them.

Cyd Holsclaw:

So OK, so even with all the steps, though, thank you for doing the order. Are you satisfied?

Geoff Holsclaw:

Partially OK For now.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Well so thank you for doing this. I saw it in the Hamilton song in there somewhere. Yeah, yeah.

Cyd Holsclaw:

So all of that, though, implies to me too right that there is relationship involved in all of this. You said at the beginning that it's the story a culture tells its children so that they will know who they are All right then.

Cyd Holsclaw:

So can you say more about how these stories help us? We also go ahead and use attachment language. I mean, we've used attachment language on this podcast several times. We love talking about attachment. So how does the relationship form through this process? How do we become more securely attached in the process of this adventure?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yeah, I think it's when we think about discipleship as not information in your semantic memory, but your journey of your autobiography, which is your identity right. When we think about it as an identity journey, now suddenly so many other things make sense and so much other scripture makes sense, when it was just school and memorizing and like oh, i have to have the right, like accurate theology and complete understanding of scripture, which no one has, by the way.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Like you guys, we're just kids. We see in the mirror, actually Like, let's just not take ourselves too seriously there. So when we lean into the reality, that is about our identity in Christ and who God says we are and And who he's created us to be, which then opens up like what has he created us to do and purpose and stuff. So identity, belonging and purpose, those things are the actual Substance of discipleship and disciple making. So disciple makers helping somebody else in that journey, right, so disciple makers been changed by Jesus. They're just journeying alongside somebody to be changed by Jesus too.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Okay, so change is scary and we don't do change well unless we trust and We don't know what we're changing into without Relationship in people. That's relationship with God, that's right relationship with one another. Like you literally can't be a disciple if you're just by yourself studying. You can't be a disciple by somebody you haven't met, you don't be. You can't be a disciple by somebody who's dead. Like you can't be discipled by someone You're not in relationship with. Because Discipleship is about change. And if we can't ask the follow-up question, if we can't go wait, why? what does that mean? What did you say there? Whether you're the disciple, the disciple maker, like unpacking something, then it's not discipleship, because it's not identity formation.

Geoff Holsclaw:

So Wait, so you can't be disliked.

Cyd Holsclaw:

You can't be discipled by podcasts.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Oh.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Anyway, keep going. I'm sorry, just keep going. And you can't be a disciple by a book on discipleship, yeah.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yeah right online sermons word, unless they're Dialogical and there's conversation, and then it's it's to me, it's whether or not it's an autobiographical memory or not. Yeah, um, that's, that's the difference. So Let's say, i learned as a data point that God is good, but I don't actually trust that, and that's me right. I, i learned this a ton of point. God was good, but I just I had so many reasons and so much history and experience with God that Led me to go like I don't think so. I mean maybe other people, but not to me.

Jessie Cruickshank:

My journey Following God has been about becoming more securely attached to him, like because my, my default is Disorganized because of my, my childhood, my origin story, the secure attachment. I've earned secure attachment at this point, and that means I've had to unpack both my avoidant coping mechanisms and my anxious Mechanisms, and that is why I've been therapy for 20 years and it's fine, it's great, everybody should do it, but I've had people who had a secure relationship with God and I They had to show me how to do that. I couldn't have got there by myself. I needed to have somebody else model it so I could mirror it, and It took another person, took relationship, to show me how to have relationship with God and so, as a disciple maker, that's what I think that we do.

Jessie Cruickshank:

We have relationship with God and we help another person have deeper relationship with God. And you know what, like that's one, all of our brain systems and body systems and the way that God created us line up with that journey. Well, like the sitting in a room and studying and in memorizing, like we're just not created that way. Who decided that was the way it was supposed to go and that was a good idea? Like it's not working. It doesn't work, it's just hard and we fail. Let's I just rather do it God's way.

Cyd Holsclaw:

I don't know.

Jessie Cruickshank:

That's why I come back to you.

Cyd Holsclaw:

So Jeff and I are both fighting over who gets to ask you the next question. We're doing our like, like pointing on the table thing, and I'm like me, me, me, me. So I'm gonna ask my question. He can ask his question. You can choose which one you want to know, choose your own adventure.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Right, it's all about adventure. So my question is you know you just said you needed someone who was securely attached to model for you What it looked like to be securely attached, so that then you could mirror that. Can you talk more about that process and why that's so important to do in an embodied way in order to change?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yeah, you know I, i Define the scope of disciple making to just teaching what heavens taught you. No more, no less. Right, when we try to teach things that we haven't actually learned in our autobiographical memory, that's where we get into like weirdness and and stuff.

Jessie Cruickshank:

But if heaven has taught me something that's changed me and I have the power of prophecy in that testimony, that's what scripture tells me and so I can sit here and tell you about that. In my whole body remembers that and my whole body is emanating that deep connection and revelation with God and Your body is created to mirror that and receive that at a non-conscious, fully embodied level. And then it like teaches the rest of you and you get changed from the inside out, like how I just I mean, i'm geeking out how amazing God made us.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Yes, absolutely so When we just share revelation not information, but revelation that heaven has taught us, that comes with our story or testimony or autobiographical memory, and it carries the power of heaven in it, and Then anybody can just share whatever it is that heavens taught them like. So then the 12 year old can disciple a 10 year old, because they can share what God has showed them no more, no less right. And so a baby Christian can disciple a newer Christian, and an old Christian should be able to disciple almost all of us, because they've experienced so many things, but they should also be able to learn the things that they haven't experienced from someone else who's younger. Yeah, the group project. At the end of the day, it's always a group project.

Cyd Holsclaw:

So then I want to say I'm picking up your joy.

Geoff Holsclaw:

So, as part of this group process, if Discipleship is not just a transfer of cognitive information Although it's not less than that, or it doesn't exclude that, that's just not.

Jessie Cruickshank:

That comes second.

Geoff Holsclaw:

That's like second or third so if it's not that primarily that, then there needs to be some sort of process of like a What we would call attuning to people. So if it's not just, hey, i have a bunch of information that I'm just gonna dole out to you week by week, and then you're gonna, as a sponge, you know, you know drink it in and then that'll change you. If that's not the discipleship process, then we have to some. Somehow attune to both the people in front of us and the Holy Spirit is, i think, what we were talking about before. We pressed record. So if you could just talk about that a little bit, like, if we're on this adventure, then how does attunement function within that adventure?

Jessie Cruickshank:

Well, automatically, mostly. So that's why the adventure is the best space, okay. So, for example, if I'm in a classroom and my professor or whatever is just standing at the front and they're just talking at me And even if, like, i like them and they like me and maybe we have some fun and everything, if it's confined to that, then I'm barely attuned for that amount of time. If we even get there Or we can hang out together, we can do life with one another. We can go through the same experience. We can experience the same, like scary points and frustration points and the food group, the food spills, and now we're both going. Now we're both hungry for the night and frustrated, right.

Jessie Cruickshank:

When we journey together and we're sharing that story together, we're automatically attuning to one another And we don't even have to work at it, like, we just have to work when it breaks, right. So when we break attunement, then we have to reattach and repair, but otherwise the like, the journey just takes us there And that's why it's still like the best, most effective place for all of this to happen. So that's why we live life together and do life together.

Cyd Holsclaw:

So I'm just gonna say like I hope that those of you that are listening and watching are just catching a little bit of like this infectious joy and this delight in the adventure that Jesse has And I know I am for sure gonna read your book Like I'm excited about the journey and excited about the adventure And you just you're contagious. Your enthusiasm is very contagious, so I'm excited Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Well, i know you're doing a bunch of different things and you just released ordinary discipleship, so everyone, please check it out. That'll be in the show notes, but where else can people find you or what are some of the other things that you are up to out in that adventuresome world?

Jessie Cruickshank:

So at this point in my life I have two part-time jobs. One is with V3, which is church planting organization. So collating that and love those people, love that place Oh my gosh, they're delightful. The other one is that I have my own ministry called HOOOLOGY W-H-O-O-L-O-G-Y. So the who, who are you discipling, who's discipling you? And in that space I have essentially like five things going on you ready.

Jessie Cruickshank:

So one is ordinary discipleship. Another one is ordinary community, because once you start like having multiple people disciple, then you have a disciple making community And that creates some more questions Like how is a community? do we handle sin? How is a community, do we repair and have secure attachment, and things like that. So the deeper, more complex conversation there.

Jessie Cruickshank:

I've also got a thing on ordinary leadership, how to be a spiritual leader from any seat at the table, and that book is in process, but there are some trainings available for that. So the contents there it's just about polishing and stuff like that. And then there's something like to me, leadership isn't the goal of being in a community with one another, it's actually spiritual maturity. So I've got a cluster of tools and trainings around. What does it mean to be spiritually mature or have the fruits of spirit, of the spirit at any stage of development. So as a developmental psychologist, like how we understand our world changes over time, but we should still have a version of Christ likeness in each one of those stages. And then overall, i'm trying to just help the body of Christ recapture narrative, disciple making, and how do we use narrative?

Jessie Cruickshank:

the way the rest of the world does through church-flating movements and disciple making movements, Like it worked for thousands and thousands of years with billions of people. So you know, maybe we can learn something. So ordinary narrative is the last part of that whole aspect of the biology.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Nice I love that Well thank you so much.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Well, for everyone else listening, of course, you can watch this broadcast on YouTube. on my YouTube channel, jeffrey Holtsclaw, You can find the Embodied Faith podcast on all your podcast players, as well as Spotify and everything that Cyd and I are doing You can find on embodiedfaithlife. But, jesse, thank you for all those things And maybe when you get those other books or projects moving forward, we can have you on again. That would be super fun.

Jessie Cruickshank:

Well, you can sign up for the community cohorts already. That's not going to be a book, because you can't train people to work together, unless you're actually working together. So I have those cohorts going already.

Geoff Holsclaw:

Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate all the time that you put into this book And thanks for jumping on today.

Cyd Holsclaw:

Yeah.