The Bible has often been misused to wound and exclude, with distorted interpretations justifying harm. Drawing on his own experiences of being rejected by faith communities, Pastor Zach Lambert wrote "Better ways to read the Bible: Transforming a weapon of harm into a tool of healing" to share how to reframe Scripture as a source of restoration and hope and how to read the Bible through a lens of healing, inclusion, and love.
Guest: Pastor Zach Lambert
- Zach Lambert is the lead pastor at Restore, a United Methodist Church.
- Learn more about Pastor Zach Lambert at his website.
- Explore and/or purchase "Better ways to read the Bible: Transforming a weapon of harm into a tool of healing."
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This episode posted on Nov. 7, 2025.
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Transcript
Make this Advent season a time of peace and reflection. With “Advent: A calendar of devotions 2025,” each day's reading draws you closer to Christ's light, offering hope and joy for your journey. Available now at cokesbury.com. Your source for meaningful advent resources.
Prologue
Hi, my name is Crystal Caviness and I'm your host for "Get Your Spirit in Shape." Welcome to episode 199. We are one episode away from celebrating our 200th episode. I want to invite you to join us on November 21st when we air our milestone episode featuring three guests that get your spirit in shape. Listeners already know Dr. Ashley Bogan, Reverend Matt Rawle, and the Reverend Dr. Ron Bell. Make plans now to join us for an engaging conversation from these three United Methodist leaders discussing what the denomination has experienced over the time spanning the past 100 podcast episodes. And then they make a prediction about what the church may look like when we celebrate our 300th episode! It’s an exciting conversation. Now let's get started with today's episode.
The Bible has often been misused to wound and exclude with distorted interpretations, justifying harm, drawing on his own experiences of being rejected by faith communities. Pastor Zach Lambert wrote “Better ways to read the Bible: Transforming a weapon of harm into a tool of healing” to share how to reframe scripture as a source of restoration and hope, and how to read the Bible through a lens of healing, inclusion and love.
Crystal Caviness, host: Zach, welcome to “Get Your Spirit in Shape.”
Zach Lambert, guest: Thanks, Crystal. I'm so excited to be on with you.
Crystal: Well, I'm excited too. And just before we started recording, we just had a really fun conversation that I can't wait. We should just start. We hit record so the audience can be a part of it too. Absolutely. Yeah. So before we get started, we're going to talk about a book that you have out that's new, but before we do that, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself?
Zach: Yes. I'm a pastor of a church called Restore, right in the middle of urban Austin, Texas. This is my hometown. So I was born and raised here. I was gone for undergrad and graduate school seminary, and then we moved back in 2015 and officially launched Restore in 2016. We were originally part of a denomination called the Evangelical Free Church of America and a number of other partners. But kind of really quickly after we launched the way that we were practicing inclusion, especially for the LGBTQ plus community, but also some justice work, racial justice and things like that, we kind of increasingly got on the outs with some of our partners and we're officially kicked out of our denomination back in 2018, I believe. And yeah, what I was just telling you before we hit record is that as of two months ago, we are officially a United Methodist Church. It's been an amazing process. Bishop Harvey down here in the Rio Texas Conference has been an amazing friend and mentor through this whole process. It's about a year long and I'm a licensed local pastor. Our church is officially United Methodist Church and we are in the process of merging with 152-year-old Methodist congregation just about eight minutes from where we meet right now. And its been beautiful. Its been, it's felt like home. The United Methodist Church has really felt like home.
Crystal: Oh, I love that. And I didn't know that. That's not why I invited you to be a part of the podcast, so that's just a bonus. So welcome to The United Methodist Church. Thank you. Yeah, it's really
Zach: Thank you. Yeah, it’s really exciting. We're so excited. And for the listeners, she really is telling the truth. Right before she hit record, Crystal said, I know you're not United Methodist, and that's totally okay. And then I had to be able to be like, well actually news. And then, yeah, so it's a divine appointment.
Crystal: It sure is. The reason I invited you here was to talk about your book, which came out in August. The title is Better Ways to Read the Bible. I'm going to continue just being as transparent as possible. A friend referred the book to me, I read the title and thought it was a guide on how to do Bible study. I'm not going to lie. Absolutely. And then the subhead says, transforming a weapon of harm into a tool of healing. And wow, that got my attention. So yeah, so I want to talk about the book. I want to talk about why the book, there's some definitions in the book I want to talk about. So maybe we start with why did you write the book?
Zach: Great question. It really comes out of our community here at Restore in Austin. We are a church that is really kind of unapologetically for and building a community alongside folks who have had difficult church experiences. And for so many of our people, they've been really deeply wounded by faith communities. And the primary weapon used to do that. Wounding has been the Bible and I would say bad interpretations of the Bible. And I think what we've come to realize and embrace is that the problem is not the scriptures themselves. The problem is the way most of us have been taught to read them and the way that they have been wielded against many of us and people that we love. And so for a lot of folks, they walked away from the church or scripture altogether because of that weaponization and the damage that came from it.
And so after years really of my entire growing, I grew up Southern Baptist and really saw the Bible used to subjugate women and justify racism and bash LGBTQ plus people and cover up abuse, I mean massive abuse scandal in the Southern Baptist Church. And it was covered up for a really long time under the guise of, well, there's good things happening and we don't want to mess that up. And God's at work and this real ends justify the means thing. I remember there was specifically this verse from a Pauline letter that was quoted all the time about where he says, it doesn't matter why they're preaching the gospel, it just matters that they're preaching the gospel and used to justify the fact that abusive pastors were good at evangelism or something like that. And so for so many of us that was just so toxic.
And so when we started restore, we had to be really careful and intentional about how we engage with scripture. Everything from how I preach to how we did small group Bible studies, all that kind of stuff. And so we really attempted to read really widely and diversely and attempt to engage with scripture in much healthier ways and kind of take everything that we've learned and put it together for these better ways to read the Bible. And so we have been practicing and refining this at our church for a decade, and I've preached on it a number of times. I've taught a seminary class or two on it. And just every time I talk about these kind of lenses of biblical interpretation, people have been like, we want more. Would you write more of it down? And so again, yeah, it's not that I've cracked some code. It's not that I am some incredible scholar. It's really that this combination of I've had amazing teachers both that I know and I don't know that I've just read over the years, and that we have this amazing community that we've actually put this stuff into practice over the last 10 years. The book kind of emerged from that.
Crystal: And one of the things I love about the book, and I told you before we got started, there's no way we're going to get to all my questions, so just go get the book everybody, the short answer here. But you really do go, you take some of those verses that are kind of famous for hurting, for harming people, and you just dissect them. You talk about the context, and one of the things you talk about that I really love is the difference between true versus literal. Can we talk about that for just a minute?
Zach: Absolutely, absolutely. So my thesis in that chapter, that section specifically, is that storytelling is not an inferior way of communicating truth. And what I mean by that is the truth is more than just kind of a recitation of facts. And we know this intrinsically because we are storytelling creatures as humans. In fact, Jesus primarily taught through storytelling through parables which were not historically accurate. They were made up stories to illustrate larger points. And so I think that we kind of sometimes get really caught up in attempting to defend something about the Bible that the Bible's not even or the biblical authors are not even trying to do. So I spent a lot of time in Genesis one through three and the creation narrative, and I certainly grew up in a space where that was taught to me as a scientific recounting of the origin of the Earth, a lot of Ken Ham and those kind of folks that were involved in shaping a lot of the teachers that I had.
And so it was very specifically like the Earth is 6,000 years old. Adam and Eve were the kind of parents of all other humans. And honestly, what I say in the book is I'm not refuting any of that. I'm not attempting to say you can't believe the Bible or the Earth is 6,000 years old. My point is actually, regardless of whether the earth is 6,000 years old or 60 billion years old, that's actually not what Genesis one through three is trying to tell us. Genesis one through three is attempting to tell a story about a God Yahweh that was very different from the kind of gods of the surrounding peoples. And the best way that we see that is actually through this whole idea of Imago Day, the image of God, and that humans, according to Genesis one through three are created in God's image and likeness.
Whereas in most other Pagan religious cultures, humans were created to be the slaves of the gods because the Gods were tired and lazy and wanted to just enjoy their leisure, and they wanted humans to assume their drudgery. And so that's why they did it. And so again, the whole point of Genesis one through three is not to be literal, this wooden literalism. The point is that it's telling a larger story, a larger truth. And I think this is important to understand that not only do the biblical authors do this, not only does Jesus do this, but we still do this. And I tell this cute little story about stories I tell my kids, and I have these two young boys and we talk a lot about our values as a family and kindness and inclusion. And if I wanted to teach them about why bullying is wrong, I'm not going to pull up a pew research study and read them a bunch of statistics. I tell them stories about bullying and why it matters and why it's so harmful, and that's really what sticks with them. And so all that to say truth is not confined to just recitations of facts. And we see that throughout the biblical narrative.
Crystal: And one of the things you also said about this true versus literal is that some of these stories were true at the time, but they're not true in our 21st century world. And I never really thought about that. Which kind of brings me to my next point is that you did a lot of research, you've done a lot of research across years to really uncover this and get to the essence of the verses. But a lot of us, we are reading it without that one kind of a skillset because it requires the ability to research and study and time. So how do we discover these things? I guess the short answer is we get your book and you lead us through it, but even in your book, you don't cover the entire Bible.
Zach: Oh, of course.
Crystal: So how do we choose a better way to read the Bible?
Zach: Yes. I will say tongue in cheek, that is why I wrote the book honestly. I mean, as I said, it emerged from our community, but I also saw kind of a gap in I didn't feel like there was a great kind of single resource to give people for a framework for healthier biblical engagement. There are a lot of great books that I quote throughout that engage problem passages or talk about historical context or explain what liberation theology is or different things like that. But I did not feel like there was just one resource that could hand and say, this touches on a lot of these different things to help give a better framework. So yes, I will say that is the hope of the book. I do not hope that the book or have any illusions that the book is going to solve all of those problems for people.
But it is hopefully a really great starting point and goes deep enough that people can learn. And then that's why I quote people a lot in the book and not just kind of summarize ideas is because my hope is that say you're wanting to go deeper in context, and so you're in the chapter on context, you get to hear me or see me quote a number of different great books and scholars that hopefully you can be like, wow, this is a great way to go a little bit deeper as far as just kind of picking the Bible back up again. That's a question I get a lot like, Hey, I read the book and I want to read the Bible again, but do I just flop it open to Genesis and start reading and go from there? And there's a great study bible called the Cultural Background Study Bible that I recommend to people a lot that has, and nothing's perfect, but it has some amazing contextual notes all throughout every part of scripture.
It's still something that I use in sermon prep almost every week, a great starting point. And yeah, I think you also try to find some of these. One of the other reasons I quote a bunch of people is so that you can engage with trusted voices. People that I think are doing a great job thinking about these things, not that they all agree with each other all the time, but that they do a really great job of trying to follow Jesus and trying to engage with scripture in healthier ways. And so if you're coming across a passage that's confusing, a lot of times you can literally just Google somebody's name, a trusted voice and the passage or the idea, and you can start to engage it in maybe some new ways, ways that you haven't heard it before. So those are a couple of little tips or tricks that I think would be helpful.
Crystal: Thank you for that. And you mentioned, Jesus. One of the things that you say pretty quickly in the book is about you talk about following the revolutionary Jesus. Can you define the revolutionary Jesus for us?
Zach: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a lot connected to the faith that I was handed as a kid, which was I would say Jesus is more like a mascot for my childhood faith. We didn't do a lot of study about the life or teachings of Jesus. We spent a ton of time in some of the more condemning parts of the Old Testament. And then a lot of time in Revelation, I went to a pretty hellfire and brimstone kind of a church. And so Jesus was really more just like a name that was placed on top of all these other ideologies and not someone that we really went deep with. And I tell this story in the book of being 18 years old and reading through the gospels really for the first time, just kind of as a narrative arc, just reading them like a book and having this realization that I knew very little about the life and teachings of Jesus.
I knew the beginning of the story and the end Christmas and Easter and maybe a walking on water feeding the 5,000 or something like that. But literally crystal, I have no memory of my childhood churches or pastors engaging in the Sermon on the Mount at all. I remember reading it for the first time being like, I've never heard this before. Never. And so there's so much there that I think this kind of radical revolutionary Jesus was somebody I never met until I was 18 years old, and I was so disillusioned with Christianity by that time based on a bunch of different church hurts and childhood experiences, I was pretty ready to give up and meeting encountering that radical revolutionary Jesus just through the gospel accounts, really changed everything because I began to think if following Jesus this Jesus is what it means to be a Christian, then I'd like to be a Christian. But I just never had that kind of depicted to me before.
Let's take a break from our conversation with Zach to talk about an offering. Have you ever given during worship and wondered, does this really make a difference? The answer, especially in the United Methodist Church is a resounding yes. That offering you gave last Sunday, it might help fund a rural food pantry in Arkansas or send a student to seminary in Zimbabwe or help a community center in New York provide afterschool programs for kids. It's all part of portion giving how churches of all sizes unite their gifts for a greater purpose. When we give faithfully, whether that's weekly, monthly, or whenever we're able, God uses it to multiply ministry around the world. While the majority of your offering stays right in your local church, supporting ministry in your own community, a portion goes beyond your walls helping to strengthen ministries across the connection that you might not even know exist.
Truthfully, you may never see where your gift goes, but somewhere fills the impact. This is what it means to be united in impact. Want to learn more? Visit resource umc.org/united in impact to explore the United Methodist connection and discover the strength we share when we work together. Now let's get back to our conversation with Zach.
Crystal: You talk about in the book really the hurts that you did have, and then in your bio, just on your website, you just, I'm just going to read it. My name is Zach. I'm passionate about holistic justice, radical inclusion and the way of Jesus. I grew up in a right wing evangelicalism, but after getting kicked out of a youth group, two private Christian schools and a conservative denomination, I spent the last decade helping pioneer faith spaces centered on mutuality and flourishing for all. Zach, after all that hurt, why in the world? How in the world did you come back?
Zach: Yeah. So I would say maybe half of it is what I just said about reading and encountering the radical revolutionary Jesus in the gospel accounts. The other half was I began to encounter people who really followed the radical revolutionary, Jesus, who led with love, who pursued justice. And I began to have an imagination for what that could actually look like because I think so many times we end up lacking imagination for what it could look like to really be followers of Christ in a world that is pretty broken in a lot of ways and needs a lot of help. And again, because I'd been through so much and because I had really come to a place where I was pretty done with Christianity, that dual encounter of Jesus in the Gospels and Jesus, in the lives of people that I deeply cared about that really began to turn things around for me and give me an imagination for what it could look like to follow Jesus in ways that I've found to be much more value aligned and much more hope and grace filled as well.
Crystal: When you talked about that, it just gave me chills because that really, I mean, we are supposed to be showing the love of Jesus, and that is what brought you back, encountering people who were doing that. I've heard people in recent years say that they're not comfortable calling themselves Christians anymore, that they're much more comfortable calling themselves followers of Jesus. And I think it's probably for exactly the reason you've said. Absolutely. So in the book, you also talk about this notion of, and you just used the word of curiosity versus certainty, and I don't know if you're a Ted Lasso fan.
Zach: Oh, absolutely.
Crystal: Well, then you know what I'm talking about, that he has this great scene where he talks about all his life, people were sure they knew who he was and they just weren't curious enough to ask the questions. So talk about how that plays into how we read the Bible.
Zach: Yeah, I love that scene where he's like playing darts in the pub and that has that great monologue, and I think it does, it really resonates with a lot of my experiences too, connected to faith and Christianity more broadly. I certainly grew up in faith spaces where faith was equated with doctrinal certainty. What it meant to have a great faith in the churches of my childhood was that you were absolutely sure about absolutely everything. What I've come to realize though is that I think faith and certainty are actually at odds with each other because if you are absolutely certain about absolutely everything, you don't really need faith. Faith is trust in the things that we cannot see, and it is not like this level of absolute certainty. And we see that from the biblical authors and the biblical characters, heroes and heroines of our faith who wrestled and struggled.
In fact, I think that we can make the case that Jesus had moments, especially in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he was really like, if you remember his prayer in the garden, he says, I don't want to do this. Take this cup for me. If there is any other way. I don't want to go to the cross. He's having a moment of struggle, of doubt, of I don't think this is what I want to do. And then he bookends it with this beautiful, not my will, but your will be done. And I think I began to see that as really a beautiful posture of faith, which is to say, I don't know if this is the right way. Some of this feels really hard, some of it feels out of control, but not my will, but your will be done. I'm going to keep following even when I'm not sure.
And again, same thing. The disciples, the people who spent the most time directly in Jesus' orbit every day for three years with him, they still struggled with doubt and uncertainty and all of those kinds of things, pre resurrection and post-resurrection. And so I think that leaning into that, really exploring that, one of the things that we show this opening video every Sunday at Restore, and one of the lines on it is to say that no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here. No matter your doubts or your questions, they are welcome here. And I think that we have to be that. I think if we want to be a church moving forward, that rises to the moment, this cultural moment that we're in. We need to do a whole lot of shaming, doubters and a whole lot more of walking with people through a process of engaging their faith, disentangling it from the unhelpful things, re-engaging some of the healthy things. And I think that's actually a huge part of what it means to be a pastor, a leader, even just a Christian, is trying to walk through that with other people and make space for it in our own lives.
Crystal: Yeah, I really appreciated that whole, I think the more we study the Bible or this has been true for me, the more I study the Bible, the less certain I become.
Zach: Yeah. I worry about anybody who reads the Bible front to back and closes it at the end of Revelation and says, I don't have any questions.
Crystal: Yeah, that's worrisome for sure. It's like, did you read it? Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the Post Evangelical Collective. I'm really intrigued by that. What is it?
Zach: Yeah. So back after we got kicked out of that denomination in 2018, what we ended up realizing, especially into 2019 and 2020 is that we were not alone in this. There were a number of churches that started out in more fundamentalist versions of the faith and had gone through the processes that we just described, leaning into questions, working through doubts, and they'd ended up in places that were maybe outside of where their fundamentalist organization allowed them to be. And so they were pushed out or kicked out or whatever, or they just left of their own accord, and they all kind of felt a little isolated, felt like they didn't have a place to belong. And so we began to gather people together. We did our first gathering back in 2021 at a church in South Bend, Indiana, which is not easy to get to. You got to fly into Chicago and then drive where you got to hop a really small plane from Chicago to South Bend.
And so we thought maybe 20, 25 pastors would show up, and 120 people came to this church in South Bend, and the Washington Post sent a reporter. And I mean, it was like wild. And what we just realized was there were a lot more of us than we understood, and the idea of post evangelicals specifically is that for a lot of us, we were post evangelicals, we had left evangelicalism, but also there were a number of mainline clergy and mainline churches who are connected to it, United Methodist, P-C-U-S-A, Episcopals, UCC, folks like that who even if they specifically like that church wasn't post evangelical or the pastor wasn't post evangelical, they were getting an influx of evangelicals to their church and they wanted to be better equipped on how to help those people and support those people. About 40 million people have left the church in the last 25 years, and most of them have come out of evangelical or fundamentalist type denominations, especially over the last 10 years.
And so is this massive movement of evangelicals looking for a place to be. And so coalescing the churches that wanted to be a part of doing that work was kind of the whole point of that. And then also trying to share resources, stave off loneliness, all that kind of stuff. So I believe there are a hundred and sixty, a hundred seventy five churches or something that are a part of it right now. Again, some of them are non-denominational, some of them are United Methodist, some of them are connected to other main lines, but we all kind of have this shared ethos in these shared values of the trying to be churches that are centered on the person working teachings of Jesus, that practice inclusion and justice, that practice a posture of grace. And one of the other values is a lot of what I do in my book, which is deep and wide formation, which is really just learning from a wide variety of people past, present, and outside of our kind of current tribes, so to speak. And so, yeah, it's been a beautiful thing. It's been a gift. I was a co-founder of it and I'm still on the board. And anytime that we can find clergy and Christian leaders who care about similar things and who want to, how should I say it? I want to offer an alternative version of Christianity than what a lot of us end up seeing on the news and things like that. I want to be a part of helping make that happen.
Crystal: I was on the website, there's different cities represented, and even Copenhagen, Denmark has, I guess a chapter or a branch or whatever group now, is it something that leaders or members can be a part of it too? How does that work?
Zach: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So usually the specific church slash pastoral leadership kind of signs up usually with whatever decision makers are at the top of the community. But the actual events that we do, whether they are the annual gathering, it's in Boston this year in April, or we have a bunch of regional gatherings that's really open for everyone, even non PEC churches, people that are just kind of curious about all of this. And so yes, it is something that we want to cast as wide of an net as possible.
Crystal: Well, I'll be sure I share the link. on the episode page. And we are getting ready to finish up, which I knew the time would go so quickly and I would still have many, many questions, but I definitely want to ask you if there's anything you wanted to talk about that we didn't get a chance to discuss today.
Zach: Yeah. One quick thing is a question I get so much about the Bible specifically, but about the Christian life more broadly is how do I know if I'm doing a good job, how do I know if I'm interpreting this passage correctly slash how do I know if I'm living out the way of Jesus effectively? And so one of the healthier lenses that I talk about in the book is this lens of fruitfulness, and it comes from this idea that Jesus said, you'll know my followers by their fruit. And then Paul enumerates what the fruit is, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And he calls that the fruit of the spirit of God, the fruit of Christ's spirit within us. And so I think whether you are doing Bible interpretation or you're just trying to follow Jesus in your everyday life, if you're wondering, how am I doing?
I think a really great barometer is to say, are you seeing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera produced in you and in the people around you and through your work? If you are, then I think the spirit of God is there and at work. And if you're not specifically with a Bible interpretation, if you're like, gosh, this traditional interpretation I've been given, it's producing a lot more hate than love. It's producing a lot more war than peace, a lot more cruelty than kindness. I think that's a really good indication to reassess, re-engage in maybe a healthier way. So if your listeners are looking for just a quick filter through which to try to make some of those decisions, I think that fruit of the spirit, that fruitfulness lens is helpful.
Crystal: Thank you for sharing that. And you talking about that particular portion of the book reminded me of a question, another question I wanted to ask you, how did we get it so wrong as a culture? Is that another podcast episode?
Zach: Yeah, that's probably a few podcast episodes. I will say, I can answer part of it briefly though. I think there are a number of people teaching really bad Bible interpretations or holding onto really bad Bible interpretations for completely non nefarious reasons. Or another way to say that is they think that they're doing the best that they can. They're trying to call agree with Jesus faithfully, and they just don't know any better, or they have not run into a time when it just stopped working for them. But then there are a bunch of us who have realized that it's not healthy. We've run into something that it doesn't work anymore and we couldn't do it. But I think that one of the reasons that it continues to plague us, or as you said, one of the reasons we got it so wrong is because some of these harmful lenses are incredibly effective, so to speak, at controlling people at coalescing power, at building wealth.
I talk about this whole apocalypse lens, which is interpreting scripture through this kind of left behind theology, this theology of God is coming, returning in the person of Christ to basically kill all of his enemies and torture people for eternity in hell and all of these things. And I will say, if that's your picture of God, that's a really terrifying God. And if you can make people believe that that is who God is, that God is this violent retributive monster, and you can be then that God's mouthpiece of saying, if you want to avoid that terrible stuff, just do what I tell you to do. Gosh, there are very few more effective control tactics than that. And so I do think there are a number of people in very powerful political and theological positions that know that and use it really effectively. And I think that's why it won't die. I think it's because it works so well for these really ungodly purposes.
Crystal:. Well, I wish I had, maybe I had asked the question earlier. I really liked having this end on this fruitfulness, look at your fruitfulness in your life. That was a much more positive place. But I feel like my next question is going to take us back there.
Zach: Absolutely.
Crystal: That's the question we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape” and that's how do you keep your own spirit in shape?
Zach: Yes, I love that question. I've been thinking about it and I could take it a bunch of different ways that I think are very spiritual, early morning prayer, intentional time in scripture, those kinds of things. And they're all true. But I would say Crystal, the thing that really is keeping my spirit in shape right now is when I get really intentional time with my family, with my wife and kids, we have been able to, my boys are seven and 11 now, and so much more independent, but still in that phase where they love to hang out with me and our family. And so we travel together a lot later this month right after Thanksgiving, we're going to Dallas. I'm speaking at a church called Lover's Lane United Methodist up there the Sunday after Thanksgiving about the book and all that kind of stuff. But we're just going to go take a whole weekend and we're going to go to Six Flags together and we're going to road trip up there together.
And this morning I was in the living room playing a game that they invented called Sock Ball, where it's like baseball with socks and you crawl on your knees around the carpet, and we did all that before school. It was just amazing. So those are the things that I think whenever I'm starting to feel like, gosh, I'm really struggling, if I will just be like, I'm going to put down whatever I'm working on. I'm going to take a breath and I'm going to go get some really intentional time with Amy and the boys. That's really what keeps my spirit in shape.
Crystal: I love that. Thank you. And thank you for being a guest on “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” Thank you for writing the book and for all of your ministry, and welcome to The United Methodist Church.
Zach: Thank you, Crystal. It's an honor to be on. It's an honor to be United Methodist, and I'm so grateful to be connected.
Epilogue
That was Pastor Zach Lambert, author of “Better Ways to Read The Bible: Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing.” To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you'll find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners, gysis@umcom.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, we invite you to leave a review on the platform where you get your podcast. Thank you for being a “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listener. I'm Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we're together.
