Forefront Podcast

Disruption | Seeking Understanding When Everything Has Fallen Apart

Rev. Venida shares a message on the story of Job as we continue the Disruption sermon series. Everything Job holds dear — his property, his family, his wealth, his physical health — has been taken from him. Reduced to suffering and misery, Job laments his circumstances and tries to make sense of what has happened to him. How do we also seek to make meaning of our pain?

Disruption | Christian Zionism & Palestine

Kai (they/them) speaks about Israel-Palestine, an issue that feels overwhelming to lots of folks: What is the Christian stake in all of this? They will walk us through a historical and theological context that outlines Christian responsibility in the current oppression of and genocide against Palestinians.

Forefront Conversations with Mari Joerstad

These days when people think about their relationships with land, it's often under the context of landownership: buying it, selling it, farming it, exploiting it. According to Dr. Mari Joerstad, the Israelites of the Old Testament would be horrified by our attitudes towards and interactions with the Earth. For Old Testament societies, owning and selling private land was just not a concept or practice like it is today. Dr. Joerstad talks to us about what the language in the Hebrew Bible says to us about the relationship that Israel had to the land and, in turn, to God and how that extended to the concept of being accountable to the land. We also get into a discussion about how contemporary concepts of landownership are so tied into identity of societies that it leads to armed conflict.  Joining this conversation is Amanda Clevinger, the leader of Forefront's Faith & Climate Change small group.

ABOUT MARI
Dr. Joerstad is a biblical scholar, whose research focuses on ecology, land, migration and belonging in the Hebrew Bible. She received her BA from the University of Toronto, a Master of Religion from the Toronto School of Theology (Wycliffe College), and a PhD from Duke University, where she studied with Ellen Davis. A revised version of her dissertation, entitled The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. She has also published articles in journals like The Journal of Biblical Literature, Horizons in Biblical Theology, and The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. More recently, she has been a Research Associate at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where she has provided support for the grant Facing the Anthropocene, lead by Norman Wirzba and Jedediah Purdy, and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Disruption | When The Unimaginable Has Happened

What happens when the unimaginable has happened? Where is God? What happens when our plans, our world falls apart? Join us as we learn from the experience of the Disciples when their lives were disrupted.

Disruption | Discovering a New Path

In Pastor Mak's final sermon as a member of the Forefront staff, she shares her testimony of her 5 years at Forefront and how this church has impacted her life in tremendous ways. She contemplates the meaning of having a "calling", interrogates the concept of having to "do it all", and shares her hopes for the future.

Disruption | When Humans Disrupt God’s Plans for Justice

What happens when humans disrupt God’s plan for justice? What should be our collective response when we do? Rev. Venida continues our Disruption Sermon Series sharing the good news that God can give us the strength to recreate God’s plans in our own lives with new vision and intention that propel us forward to bring change and liberation to those suffering.

Disruption | Disruptions in Family Expectations

Rev. Josh tries to make sense of our disappointments in how our expectations of our parents or our hopes for our children sometimes get disrupted. He shared vulnerably about the parallels between his own story and that of Moses and his Mother Jochebed. And concludes the message with some practical advice on how to navigate the challenges within family dynamics.

Forefront Conversations with Makenzie Gomez

The COVID lockdown of 2020 changed the paradigm for all of us. The pandemic set many of us on a journey of discovery new routines, anxieties, and fears that we had never experienced before. For Forefront co-pastor, Makenzie Gomez, it was also the start of a journey living with disabilities and chronic illness. Makenzie's journey didn't just see her realizing that there were new physical limitations in her daily routine, but also realizing there was internalized ableism in the world, the Church, and even within herself that had to be interrogated. In this first "Forefront Conversations" of 2024, Pastor Makenzie Gomez expands upon the sermon she gave in November 2023 to dive deeper into internalized ableism, how her experiences have shaped her relationship with faith and prayer, and why it's not cool to tell people living with disabilities that they're "an inspiration."

Listen to Makenzie's sermon, "We Will Not Be Silent: Ableism."

ABOUT MAKENZIE GOMEZ
Pastor Makenzie (Mak) Gomez is one of the Co-Pastors at Forefront whose focus is Operations. Her spiritual upbringing includes a mix of Presbytarian (PCUSA), Non-Denominational Evangelical, and Inter-Denominational Christianity. She received her BFA in Musical Theatre from Boston Conservatory and is a proud member of Actors Equity Association. Outside of Forefront, she is a professional performing artist and teacher.

Mak is Mexican-American and identifies as queer/lesbian. Forefront helped her discover that embracing the intersection of sexuality and spirituality can truly be a holy and healing experience, and she hopes to continue to foster a similar environment of wonder for others.

At Forefront, Mak produces Sunday services, oversees our Sunday Volunteer Teams, and manages the Church Calendar. She preaches semi-regularly, provides pastoral care and opportunities for growth (particularly when it comes to volunteer and leadership development), and aims to bring as much creativity as possible to all she does. Mak works closely with our deacons of Events & Data.

Disruption | Disruption of the Mind: Anger

Please forgive the low quality of our stream. Unfortunately, we had streaming issues and had to stream from a phone instead.

 

What is your relationship to anger in this season? In what ways are you or aren’t you prone to suppression? Where have you seen rage practiced well? Does Scripture or Jesus provide healthy demonstrations of anger? Rev. Josh explores all of this and more as a disrupts our mind's relationship to anger!

Disruption | Disrupted by Uncertainty

Rev. Venida continues the Disruption Sermon Series highlighting the story of Peter and the disciples as they navigate the stormy seas. She looks at how God can keep us afloat, and work for us and through us in the midst of life’s uncertainties.