Case Thorp

This is our third and final installment of the three-part vlog series entitled Navigating Turbulence (Part 1 and Part 2 here). We are considering our own well-being in this week’s vlog. Case Thorp and Donelle Wright, a seasoned leadership coach, will discuss What is God asking of us at this time? along with How do you access joy in difficult seasons? This conversation can help all of us personally, but also provide deeper understanding as we strive to lead well during turbulence.

Today, communications (personally and corporately) is the focus of our second installment of The Collaborative’s three-part vlog series entitled Navigating Turbulence. “The constant gaze of a Zoom meeting can be draining in ways an in-person meeting isn’t,” says Jeremy Bailenson in his latest article for the Wall Street Journal entitled Why Zoom Meetings Can Exhaust Us. Case Thorp and Donelle Wright, a seasoned leadership coach, will discuss this issue and others that we all need to be cognizant of during COVID-19. Click on the button below to gain more insight on communications.

Today The Collaborative is kicking off a three-part vlog series entitled Navigating Turbulence. We are striving to provide practical encouragement as we are all learning new ways of life amid Covid-19. These are short discussions between Case Thorp and Donelle Wright, a seasoned leadership coach. The first installment is Navigating Turbulence: Dealing with the Unknown. Normally, we post on the second and fourth Wednesday’s of the month. However, to be more responsive to the immediate crisis, we will be publishing a vlog for the next three consecutive weeks.

How long has it been since you’ve heard a sermon from your pastor on Noah, the ark, and the flood? It seems the only place I hear about Noah’s journey is when my children bring home from Sunday School crafts depicting the ark full of animals, two by two.

As the Supreme Court reconvenes this week, it will take up several key court cases that deal with gender. While many of these questions have been with us for quite some time, technological advances and our cultural progression has brought these issues to the forefront for all of society to consider.

Please take the time to listen to this podcast with Case Thorp and Brandon Queen, the host of The E.A.R. podcast, on Common Grace. Among other things they discuss common grace as a tool for common ground. Below are a variety of link options for your listening pleasure.

To combat the cultural disobedience and dualism that plagues the American church, common grace provides six practical benefits for individual discipleship, and for the local church with her role in the public square (the first three come from the Christian Reformed Church’s 1924 Synod statement and subsequent revisions.)

The riches of our tradition and the renewing work of the whole gospel offers hope. Not a shallow, fleeting feeling of optimism, but rather the hope of Christ that brings to bear the power of the Almighty so that we might be a redeemed people who have been charged with bringing about redemption in this fallen place and in our fallen state. It is this life sustaining, transformational hope where we must find our rest. It is our only true path out of the valley. The Reformation tenet of common grace contributes to a needed correction towards obedience.

There are, no doubt, numerous deficiencies in the church, her leaders, and this author as a result of cultural disobedience. One of the devastating effects of disobedience results in functioning dualism that is crippling the church’s understanding of herself, and her role in society—not to mention confusing and frustrating the public square. We will see how the doctrine of common grace is uniquely able to sweeten the bitterness of such dualism.

Our hope rests in the purposes for which we were created—to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. And such hope is realized when church leaders, with humble hearts fresh with words of repentance, embrace God’s work of common grace as the common ground of the public space.