Being Real When Life Isn’t Great: The Genesis Project & Carrie Stuart Parks
Jesus Calling: Stories of Faith
Jesus Calling
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2019
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Some of God’s greatest miracles come when He brings good out of dark places. In Ogden, Utah, pastor Matt Roberts felt he didn’t feel comfortable inviting his friends and neighbors to church as it didn’t feel like a place where people could be vulnerable, so he decided to create an open community he thought they—and he—would feel like they belonged. When his former youth pastor, Rob Cowles, came for a visit, Rob knew The Genesis Project was something special and decided to plant his own location in Fort Collins, Colorado—in, of all places, a former strip club. Carrie Stuart Parks was a young woman with a flair for art when her father, the head of the School of Law Enforcement in northern Idaho, decided to invite Carrie to use her talents on crime scenes. Carrie became enamored with the work, helping victims close the chapter on some of the darkest moments of their lives. She even began a second career as a thriller novelist—not knowing her mentor was a wildly successful author himself—and work to help reach not knowing her mentor was a wildly successful author himself—now reaches the world through stories and emotions we all can relate to.
Links, Products and Resources Mentioned:
Jesus Calling Large Text Cloth Botanical Cover
God Can Redeem Your Struggles: Joel & Luke Smallbone and Sandi Patty
Lolo Jones Olympic athlete
The Genesis Project, Ogden, UT
The Genesis Project, Fort Collins, CO
The God of New Beginnings: How the Power of Relationship Brings Hope and Redeems Lives book
Gary Haugen International Justice Mission, founder
FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia
Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces book
Frank Peretti author
HarperCollins Christian Publishing
Interview Quotes:
"It was really hard to invite [my friends and community] to church with me. It was such a cultural gap . . . " - Matt Roberts
“That time in Portland was very monumental for us, really learning what it meant to be an embedded church in the middle of a culture that desperately needed a Savior.” - Matt Roberts
“What does it mean to live bravely in the way of Jesus?” - Rob Cowles, on Gary Haugen
“There was an authenticity about their worship [at The Genesis Project], because they really knew what it was to be brought back from darkness, brought back from death into new life.” - Rob Cowles
“Community doesn't happen by accident. We have to actually cultivate and create a space where people can come in and be real, be open, and be honest.” - Matt Roberts
“What happens is if you create a culture where it's not safe to talk about your brokenness, to talk about your failure, to talk about your pain, that then you naturally create a culture where you have to be fake.” - Rob Cowles
“I pray that I will be salt and light to them as I speak to them. I wear a cross, I let them know, just by having that cross on the outside, where I'm coming from. I don't say anything to them. I just let the presence of that and my words be, hopefully, helpful.” - Carrie Stuart Parks
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's people we get the privilege to minister to and to walk with and live life with every day |
| 0:07.3 | who have been through things in life I never had to go through and |
| 0:11.6 | instead of seeing those things as a weakness you begin to understand that they have a |
| 0:15.6 | strength in their life that has never been asked of me and what we find is is when people actually engage in the story of somebody |
| 0:26.0 | that God is actively redeeming it changes everything. |
| 0:32.2 | Welcome to the Jesus Calling podcast. |
| 0:35.0 | Today we see how God is at work in some of the darkest places in our world and that even |
| 0:39.9 | in the most tragic situations he can redeem those moments for good. |
| 0:44.0 | Pastors Rob Cowles and Matt Roberts and forensic artist and author Carrie Stewart Parks. |
| 0:50.0 | First up, Matt Roberts and Rob Cals are founding members of the Genesis Project, a network |
| 0:56.2 | of believers who are working to reach people who don't normally do church. |
| 1:00.7 | Along the way, they've seen the beauty of forming authentic relationships with others, especially people who are different from us, |
| 1:07.0 | and the power of telling your true story, flaws and all to someone else, and still being loved. My name is Rob Coles. I am the |
| 1:16.0 | founding and lead pastor of Genesis Project in Fort Collins. My name is |
| 1:22.1 | Mount Roberts, my wife Candice and I have been married for 20 years and we |
| 1:27.6 | planted in lead a church called the Genesis Project in Ogden, Utah, and have been doing that for the last 10 years of our life. |
| 1:40.0 | When I was a young teenager, my family, my dad was transferred for work. I lived in the southeast for my entire life and so a pretty big culture shock for us going from a small very tight-knit Pentecostal church |
| 1:58.2 | environment in Atlanta, Georgia and showing up to the west and so as a young teenager as my family began |
| 2:07.0 | looking for a church I'll never forget showing up to to youth group on a |
| 2:11.8 | Wednesday night |
| 2:12.8 | and meeting Rob there. |
| 2:15.4 | And so our stories first really intersected |
... |
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