[Music] Hey folks, it's Chris with the Human Project Podcast. I know it's been a while since you've heard from me, and all my goodness so much has changed. I have lots and lots of stories about how God has been working, but this episode, I get to spend time with a really, really good friend of mine named Mark. No, not that Mark. Mark Jones, who has been my pastor, my friend, my leader for over the last decade. And he asks a lot of good questions about what is Human Project, what is the Equipping Ministries International? So I thought it'd be really helpful to hear kind of what is the heart, what is the rhythm, what is the excitement and drive behind the Human Project and Equipping Ministries International. So would love for you to take a look. Let us know what you think. Email me at
[email protected]. I'd love to hear your thoughts and what's resonating with you. Thanks and take a listen. [Music] In the living room, his name is Chris Conlon Chris. I'll have you in a moment. Kind of introduce yourself. Tell us about your family, the ministry that you lead. But Chris is the new executive director of EMI, Equipping Ministries International. And you're also a lead, something called the Human Project. Maybe we'll give you an opportunity to expand on that here in a moment. But Chris has also been a long time member of Living Church, sharing life with a couple of our house churches over the years, and continues to serve in a variety of ways, currently share life with one of our house churches in North Kentucky. But more than anything, I was thinking about this today, Chris is my friend. And I am so thankful to have Chris in the living room today. There's a lot of different titles and different positions that Chris has and has had over the years. But I'm thinking about you and thinking about our journey together for years now. Really, I think about a friendship that's really grown over the years, which is super amazing. And Chris always has a way to just make me laugh and to just enjoy life. Like seriously, like we've done some trips together. Man, and I just think about those like, man, we just, I've never not had a good time with you. - Shucks. - And so anyway, so welcome, welcome to the living room. Good to have you finally after years of, you know, begging you to come. And be on the podcast. So tell us about you, man. Tell us about you, your family. Tell us more about EMI, the human project. We'll start with that. - Yeah, yeah. I echo the sentiment. It's always fun. But there are very few people that bring the very best out of myself. Like you do, like Victoria does, Joseph's up there, Kyle's up there. Yeah, it's, it's a pleasure to be here, privilege to be here. Yeah, I got plugged in with Living Church about 13 years ago. Wow. All the way back in 2013. It's coming to have a really dark time in my life. And Brennan Clench invited me to come. - Shout out to Brennan. - Yeah. - We should do the applause for that. - Let's do it. See his name again. Brennan Clench. There we go. Yeah. And the rest is history. Later that year, I met Victoria, my wife, actually at our house church. There you go. House church is a dating service. That one was, man. I think Kyle met his wife there. - Okay. - Joe Prilly met his wife there. - All right. - Victoria there. - Dude, we call them living communities. - Yeah, it's true. - Back then, when we said ours was the loving community. Dude, that's pretty amazing. You have three couples. Like, married couples not coming out of that. That's okay. All right. - Yeah, and I think like I have no idea how many of the apprilles have now. But I think they have like at least like 13 or 14 kids at this point. - It's a few, but yeah, I'm probably getting up there. - Yeah. So Victoria and I met there. I'm married to Victoria. We've married for 10 years now. We have two daughters, Sophia, who is four and Grace, who is two. Yeah. They're awesome. They're wonderful. We live in, we live in Northern Kentucky. At one point, I lived in Milford. She lived in Colerayne. We met in Northern Kentucky. And now we all live in Northern Kentucky. Kind of the gravity of our house church and our friends brought us there. - That's cool. That's awesome. So yeah. Well, tell us about the human project. Tell us about EMI and what all that is and does. - Yeah. So just over the last six months, I've stepped into the role of leadership of equipping ministries international. And it's a ministry that's been in existence for over 50 years. We've taught over 700,000 people. - Wow. - Seriously. - Yeah. - Across 120 countries. - What? - Yep. - Because it's great. Everything that we do is practical, biblical, and repeatable. Could you repeat that again? - Hold on. I don't know if those three things found repeatable. - I just should repeatable. I just had to lean into that. Practical, biblical, and repeatable. So good. I remembered it. - Wow. Practical, biblical, repeatable. - Yeah. There you go. - Yeah. Okay. Anyway. So what we really focus on, it started way back at a church here in Cincinnati. And it actually started as a healing and prayer ministry that there were many people coming that were having physical ailments and more like mental ailments. And they got together, they prayed, and they prayed for healing, and they would happen. But they found that a lot of the same people were coming back for the similar challenges. So they said, okay, there's got to be something here that we're missing in terms of what does it look like to follow Jesus? Like, why are these things happening? And so over the years, EMI, Equipping Ministries International, EMI, has started things like skills, practices, habits, rhythms around what does discipleship look like, what does following Jesus look like? And so over the last several years, we've worked on how do we kind of help build that into the church's DNA? Because a lot of churches are really, really good at the theology side of things, but they're not great at the practical relational side of things. And a lot of what my exposure to house church was, was it was really good from the relationship side of things and the theology side of things. But when I went to my first EMI class back in 2020, I realized like this, this is the language, this is the practices and habits that help really enable our house church to be successful. And so we have a brand called the Human Project that's been our podcast and a couple of our classes, but it operates under Equipping Ministries International as the brand. So you guys, man, I did not know the vast influence or impact when it comes to the amount of people. That's incredible. So give an example of something like, I'm just imagining someone and listen to this, whether they're leading a house church or maybe they have some friends that are in more of a legacy traditional church, but maybe EMI could be super helpful. What are some of the things that EMI does to help these churches live out the practical application of following Jesus? Yeah. So we offer, oh, you're good. Sorry. Clear it. We're gonna get all choked up about this. We offer practical skill-based classes. So around what does discipleship look like in practice? And what that means, what that looks like is how do you deal with things relationally? Like how do you effectively listen to somebody? How do you connect more at the heart level? And all of us think we're great listeners, but there's so many things that get in the way and things that we do that actually drive disconnection instead of enabling us to see the real part of what makes up another human being. There's things that we tend to do that stay surface level. So what we do is we help how do you get deeper with these things? So there's listening, there's conflict, there's what are thought patterns that we come up with. You've been through our journey. Yeah, excellent. Where it's revealing like where have you seen God show up in your life? What does that reveal about you? How does that help you see what are God's desires for you? What's getting in the way of that? Yeah, I think it's and I would encourage anyone, this is any of this, you know, having Chris and their team out for whether you're leading a small Bible study or you're leading a church of two to three hundred or more whatever, whatever size of people that you are leading or discipling, what they can provide is phenomenal. It's excellent. I can and I speak from experience of being part of one of their classes and kind of went in just like, I just seem to go, you know, like I kind of want to see what they're all about. And I love transformed and seriously, it was, I learned a lot of different things. Like some of the things that you saw, like the listening, they at least in the class that I went to over the weekend was like, there was a lot of the different pieces of the different classes involved in that. And it was really, really helpful. And so it makes me think it'd be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to get angry. I feel like, you know, if you struggle with listening or you think you're good listener, you're probably not. You know what I mean? I mean, I would have thought that I was, but I think learning some of the things even that weekend were really helpful. And I think what's convicting for me is I think about it now was like, I think I was a, well, I know as a better listener of people other than with my own family, you know what I mean? And so I think like, I think that some of that, I can't
away from that was like, wow, like I need to be a better listener with the people that are in my own home. You know, and I think that was really, really good in challenging. And so I would, how can people get connected to you to EMI, little promo here, but I think it's really important. And I think people need to try to find it like a website, whatever where they can get connected to your resources and get connected to you if they want to reach out to you. Yeah. So it's equippingministries.org. And on there we have, we have public classes that we run in Cincinnati every couple of, a couple of months. We also have an online self-paced course you can go through. Okay. Highly recommend that for small groups going through that together because it gives you a common language, a common vernacular. That's called our deeper series. So we go on to equippingministries.org and you see four small groups. I definitely check out the deeper piece. It's free. It's absolutely donation based. So no risk. Like try it. Yeah. So you can reach out to me, Chris at equippingministries.org because we do travel. So for those who are listening around the US, we're going to Kenya this year. So awesome. We were in Kenya last year and man, God showed up and did awesome things with the pastors there. So yeah, I'd love to get connected and help out. Yeah, I think that's a so equippingministries.org. Head to the website, reach out to Chris, take that free class. And I was going to say to like, it's a love offering based ministry, right? Like you're not charging anything when you come out. Right courses we do charge, but we also provide if folks cannot afford that, we have a very generous donation based from our partners that help really subsidize a lot of the cost of courses. So yeah, if that's don't let that be a barrier. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm trying to get to. Like don't. And if you think this could be helpful for you, for your small group, for your house church, for your church, and you guys do like, or maybe I'm, I don't know, like stuff for like marriage conferences stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we have a marriage course that's talking about how do you practice this as a couple as husband and wife? How do you be able to walk that out with each other? Yeah. Because like you said, that's, that's the hardest one because it is really, yeah, so true. Burden of familiarity that you think somebody is automatically going to assume what you're talking about. Yeah. And studies have actually shown that that's the opposite. The more familiar you are with somebody, the more you assume incorrectly, which is mind boggling. Yeah. That is mind boggling. I bring that up because I think again, like you were thinking about my, how can we build into the lives of those that are married and are even in our community? Like I think this could be an awesome opportunity for, you know, a group to have you guys out and do like a marriage retreat for a local neighborhood or community or whatever it might be, you know what I mean? And so anyway, yeah, equipping ministries.org, hit up Chris, talk to him. Yeah. Or you can search for, we also have a podcast. Okay. Project podcast, you can search for that on Spotify, the human project podcast. Okay. Talks about a lot of these topics. But if you really want to experience it, you want to see what we're about, definitely check it out from a class perspective or that deeper course. Okay. Anything else about the ministry you want to share? Oh, yeah. Go, go for it. I can talk about it for a while. Well, let's dive into that for a little bit. I mean, we can go a little bit more in that and then we'll talk house church. Okay. Yeah. Because I think, and I bring that up again, Chris, because I think the people that are listening, like they might not have like one, they may not have the time and they may not have the resources to just devote some of this stuff, right? They're time to helping in these specific areas. So that's why I think it's really important that you're here because I think you guys provide something, your resource for the church. Yeah. And I, and I, and knowing that and having experienced it, I think it's really important. We spend some time on this a little bit because I could think of people, you know, where there might, wherever there might be Louisiana, Missouri, you know, Pennsylvania, I mean, like, man, let's get these people out here because I think this could be really helpful for our own group as well as maybe for our community, me and thinking about like, dude, we could put on like a marriage retreat or something in our house for people on our street, you know, whatever. Like anyway, so go ahead, talk a little bit more. What, what do you want to share about the ministry? Yeah. I think one of the things and there's a lot of parallels with where we've seen living church show up. And it's, how do you build these rhythms and these habits? I think there is a lot of stuff that we just take for granted with how we do life together. And we assume that there's going to be this depth and this vulnerability and this closeness. And really what ends up happening is because, well, because of sin, like we are turning away from each other constantly. And so it requires this intentionality to get close to each other, to build towards each other. And how you do that in terms of habits, in terms of practices, that's, that's really what we walk through. So like, for example, like how do you start to connect to somebody? Most of us, when we listen to somebody or somebody shares a story, we're like, oh, yeah, me too, or we ask questions, or we say, oh, well, here's what you should do. And we've heard story after story after story of just this even, even Sunday, somebody that went to a funeral. And the person that was really well steeped in this was. The person recalled that he had a very specific moment with him where he just felt like the presence of Jesus because he felt like he was being listened to. He said, I can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life that I've truly felt like I've been listened to. And so those practices have revolutionized our marriage. We've started to practice them with our kids. Absolutely perfectly all the time. But it really does start to build this rhythm where it's becoming more and more normal and more and more something that we lean into and becomes a natural part of what we do. And that's what we see with habits. That's practices. That's why house church exists. That's why these habits exist is so that you can start to experience more of the Holy Spirit by doing that and inviting them in. Yeah. Yeah. I think again, what I'm hearing you say is like, there's the, there's the principles I want to be a better listener. But then what are the practices that translate to that actually becoming a reality? And that's where EMI steps in. Yeah. It's all like driving. So if you ask, I think there was a survey done a while ago that asked people, are you an above average driver? And I think something like 85 or 90% of people said yes. So I was homeschooled. So I'm no math whiz. But I'm assuming if 90% of people say they are above average, that's not statistically possible. Right. So that's something like most of us think we're really good at connecting with people. But there's these things, there's these habits that we don't even think about that drive this disconnection that we naturally do and it stops us from being able to speak into each other's lives to actually know what's going on. All of us have so much hurt. Yeah. So many things that are going on in our lives, so many distractions, difficulties and for I don't want an inconvenience, somebody I don't want to let somebody in. I don't want somebody to really see my true self. Yeah. I don't care that. So this habit of listening, this habit of connection really helps be able to do that. Well, and as you're talking to, I'm thinking for someone that's listening to this and maybe they will, you know, what's a class like? Like having gone through it, it's very interactive. I'll just speak to that from a personal experience. Like it's very interactive. You're doing different group activities with people you're not sitting for three hours straight. You know, I mean, and I love that. I mean, that can be intimidating because some of us like myself would much prefer to just sit and stare for three hours because I, you know, it feels uncomfortable. Sometimes I have to interact with other people. But that, but what you're teaching, you're also having people do while they're there. And I think that's really, really important. And I think it's important for people that are listening to this episode, understand that that if you were to have Chris and their team come out, like, yeah, they're going to give you the principles, but they're actually going to teach your people how to do the practices as well. And they get some reps most likely doing those practices. And I think that's really important. So it's, it's hands on, I guess, as maybe what I'm trying to say. And so I, again, I just really want to encourage people that are listening. Because again, as I hear you saying, man, what a great, just a listening piece. What a great tool for learning how to love your neighbor well. Yes. You know, to so like, man, how do I go into, you know, in my neighborhood and just like, what, just listen, just, and how do I do that? How do I do that? Yeah. So that way I can maybe and eventually share the gospel with that person and invite them into my life and them invite me into their life. And that begins. So there's so many applications of all the, of the different courses or classes that you guys teach. Yeah. Yeah. And it reminds me of a quote from a woman called Susan Scott, she wrote a book called "Fear's Conversations." And in that, she's not coming from a biblical basis, but I think it still rings just as true. She says, "While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the outcome of somebody's life or marriage or career or whatever, any single conversation can." And I think we underestimate, most of us, the studies have been done. We have an average of 70 conversations a day. Wow. And if you think about, how do I help make those just a little bit better? How do I start to invite people to connect at a deeper level? It opens up a world of possibilities. Most of us have this desire to be known and to be loved. Like that was God created within us. So how do we experience more of that? And like you said in our classes, what we do is we help people be able to practice it. Because just like you go to a gym and you start using the machines the wrong way, you're going to think that that's the way to do it. So we actually help guide you and coach you through people that are sitting with you, our facilitators, help you be able to practice that and walk that out. Yeah, again, I just think they're so. so many applications in the context of whether, and I'm thinking obviously through the lens of house church, but I think of as far as just as a disciple of Jesus with living the mission of Jesus, man, from an evangelistic, if you will, looking at it through that lens, like man, just think about the opportunities just from listening to people, but listening well. And, but how to love people well in your house. Just imagine if just half of the people in your house church really had some of these practical tools so that they're listening well. 'Cause in our family, like our whole family needs this because we interrupt all the time. And maybe you come up, maybe you're part of a family like that if you're listening, but we just constantly are talking all the time at the same time. And that's just kind of our culture, but yet that sometimes isn't always a healthy culture. Right, and we're talking over each other and listening or not listening like we should. So anyway, I can't speak loudly enough about what you guys are doing. And I think it's a tool. I feel like you're kind of this best, the secret. That's out there that people just need to know more about like a secret for the church. Like man, I think these two guys are, if you could just listen to what they have to share and put into practice what they're doing, I think it could be really transformational. Like you gave that story of that guy. Like and just what has done in his marriage, what's done with his family. And then that's just gonna ripple out into other relationships beyond that. So yeah, anything else? - Oh yeah, so much more. But I think that's a good encapsulation for now. - Yeah, yeah, good. - If you are curious, yeah, check out the human project podcast. We talk, they're very topical. So if you'll take a look through those and see what resonates with you. Like I said, if this sounds like something you're interested, I'd love to connect. Like I love talking about this stuff. I love figuring out how do we start to help people connect better. 'Cause I've been in the spot of attending a church being completely isolated, being able to walk in the door and walk out the door without somebody making any kind of conversation, any kind of connection. And I think for some of us, it's just awkward. We just don't know how to do that when we see people walking in and welcoming them or even in a neighborhood setting or in a family setting or on the holidays or whatever it is, how do you start to just get one step closer? And that's obedience. - Yes. - Modeling what Jesus did with every single person he came in contact with. Kyle Eidelman writes a great book, "One at a time." And I think it's really emblematic of what we are trying to do. It's the person in front of you, the person you were talking to is the most important thing. - Yeah. - You can possibly have at any time. And how do you connect them? How do you treat them? Like they are God's creation. And I think most of us tend to get caught up in the busyness of life and we don't make margin for those kinds of things. And so I love talking about this. - Yeah. - And thanks for inviting us. - Yeah, absolutely. I think again, a couple other additional thoughts and then we can maybe pull on a different thread here. - Yeah. - It just reminds me of like what you're teaching prints, what you're teaching is like how to really live in car national ministry. Like just, you know what I mean? Just like living, like when you're talking about being in the presence like the person that's across from you is the most important person in the room kind of a thing. Like living out that presence of Christ in front of someone where he's just always present, you know, and you're there and you're tangible and you're listening. And I think all those different things are just, man, you're involved in the lives of other people. And everybody is for the most part. But a lot of times we don't know how do I, how do I love them well? And by listening well, how do I love them well by having tools for navigating conflict which you guys have classes on and all these different other things. And I think finding your purpose, right? Like what does that mean for me as a follower of Jesus? And you guys have classes on that and weekends on that and all those different things. And so anyway, you know, I didn't really intend for us to like dive deep into this. But I think it's really important. And the more we got into it, the more I think this is really valuable, especially for the people that are listening to this podcast. And I love that you guys are moving some of that stuff online for people. I think there's some great value there. And to us, another thought I was thinking was, Chris isn't just saying like it's not like he went to school and only studied books on this and now it's teaching. Chris has lived this, right? So just for, so you know from, I've known him for what, 13 years now and knowing that like he just said, this is something that he has experienced himself in this journey. And so, and seeing the fruit of it, you know, and the impact of it, which is, which is really great. - Full disclosure. - Yeah. And I did have a little discussion last night where it was not so healthy. And she said to me, wait a second, don't we teach this stuff? So we're still learning, we're still trying to figure all of this out just as much as anybody is. Yeah, we have, we have the tools we have the practices to go back to. And that's, that's been so helpful for us. So when we do encounter those situations where it's like, you feel a sense of hopelessness or you feel a sense of confusion or anxiety, you have something to go back to. - Yeah. - That is how do we walk out, what is on the Bible? - Yeah. So thanks, bro. - Yeah, thank you for sharing all that. And again, please reach out to equippingministries.org, hit up Chris and if you wanna learn more, take that online, you know, course or class that they have. But thank you for sharing that. I think it's a great resource for any size church, any form of church. So whatever you are at and listening to this man, I would highly encourage you, at least check out the website. You know, go there and check that out and look at that. (upbeat music) - Thanks for tuning in today. We're a crowd-funded nonprofit. Our free resources exist because of your generous support. To learn more about us or check out our classes that we talk about here, visit us at www.humanproject.us. Thanks for joining us on our mission to bring a million lives closer to the fullness of God's design. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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