Welcome to the Ocean Water Podcast.
I have my good friend Ed Love on here today.
Actually, it's Dr. Ed Love.
He doesn't really roll like that.
Don't throw that out.
And so Ed has planted a church that has planted churches
and helped architect a relational network
of church planting churches called the Greenhouse Network.
That went really, really well.
And so well that Ed has been asked now
to help other people with starting churches
and starting church planting
and putting together church planting networks.
And Ed is the National Planting Director
for the Wesleyan Church and just a wonderful guy.
I got to know you, Ed, about a year ago.
And you actually had visited Ocean Water.
Yeah.
So I'm grateful for that.
That was wonderful the night you came.
We were meeting in an under-construction coffee place.
It's done now.
So the next time you see it.
Oh, awesome.
I loved it, man.
Loved it.
It was a great time and so good to be with you here today
on this podcast.
Yeah, we're at the beach today.
This is fun.
We got our background.
This is, I just want to say thank you
for taking some time to chat today.
So, Ed, when you're at home these days,
we've spent a lot of time at home.
Some of us venture out and get a meal here and there.
And when you do, where do you like to go
and what do you like to get?
The hometown meal, you know.
Well, I live in a pretty small town, like ultra small.
Like there's only one restaurant in the town.
So I only have one option.
Now I could go into a bigger city, you know,
and get whatever I wanted.
But in our town, in Gaston, Indiana,
the place to go is Mill Street Inn.
And so my go-to there, this might sound a little weird,
but my go-to is a grilled cheese, grilled ham and cheese.
And it's with that real salty kind of country ham, so good.
And tomato soup, that's my go-to.
That's pretty tasty.
I'm very hungry right now, so everything sounds good.
Awesome, so what do you do in these days
and how did you get into it?
Yeah, well, I oversee church planning and multiplication
for the Wesleyan Church.
And the organization that we have that kind of
holds all of our church planning systems
is called the Church Multiplication Collective.
And so I bring direction to that organization,
which helps serve church planters
and multiplying church leaders.
So those would be like churches that are planting churches
and sending people out exactly what you're up to.
And so we try to serve those leaders the best we can
and help them with all kinds of resourcing
and coaching and training and assessing
and a lot of fun stuff.
It really feels like we're on the front lines
of the kingdom work and getting to see new things start.
Super exciting, I love starting new things.
I got that entrepreneurial edge,
which I think is why God ended up using me
in the church planting realm, starting new churches.
But I love seeing it start up.
I love the work that you're doing.
Seeing that start up was just incredible.
And actually when I got to be there in that space
was what, Taco Tuesday you called it, right?
The church gathering.
And we're eating tacos in this,
like the building's being renovated.
I think while we're there,
there's like tools sitting out and drywall mud
and we're in there gathering and worshiping.
And it just was an incredible experience.
Cause that's the way a start up is.
It's kind of, it's raw, it's rough,
and it's not meant to be well polished.
And that's kind of the cool part of it, I think.
So, and to know like God's using it.
I kid you not, I don't remember who it was,
but I was talking to someone out on the street
and they're like, they had just started reading
the book of Acts and they're like,
man, this church just feels like the book of Acts.
And I was like, that is a cool description of a new church.
That's the way it should be, right?
So, pretty sweet.
Oh, thanks Ed.
Yeah, that was a really fun night.
And that was fun for us to meet in that space.
There's a whole backstory there,
but the guy who's like my brother,
he's actually on our advisory team for Ocean Water,
his name's Mark Bell.
And him and my other friend, they built that together
and they allow us to meet there for free.
So it was just nice to be a part of that journey
and allowing things to be messy and dirty.
And that's all part of the startup grind.
And you kind of lean into that.
And it was just nice to, really nice to share
that night with you.
That was a really cool experience.
One of the things that's fun to do, Ed,
we're around, I think we're around the same age.
The current Ed could talk to like, you know,
20 year old Ed, you know,
what are some things he might've said?
Like, oh, goodness.
What are some things you wish you'd known
when you started out?
Maybe some ways you've changed.
What I would have said to myself 20 years ago,
yeah, it's about a straight 20 years
when I started like full-time ministry.
I would have said, Ed, you know nothing.
So don't act like you do.
Which, you know, which seriously,
when I first began ministry
and kind of the lifestyle that I lead,
I probably did come across a little bit prideful
and I wasn't married yet.
And when I kind of, when I was,
I got married pretty young.
So I was like 22 when I got married.
And in the kind of the engagement time period,
Emily, my wife, we started doing like premarital counseling,
right?
And kind of getting ready for marriage,
kind of doing everything right, you know?
And it was there that I realized very quickly
because Emily and I started button heads
and it was like, ooh, there's some stuff going on here.
And what I quickly discovered,
and it was pointed out to me by our lovely counselor,
who I thought was on my side,
but he just looked at me one day, he's this old guy,
he's got plenty of credibility with me
and he's just like, Ed, you're prideful.
And that was it.
I was like, aw, you serious?
And I hadn't seen it until I entered into that relationship,
but then that was also evident in other areas of my life
where I just kind of had that know it all attitude
or just kind of my way is the best way.
And I didn't really respect those who had gone before me.
And so I entered into ministry
with a little bit of that edge
and quickly it was revealed to me
that it's not gonna be good if you keep that
and you gotta let God refine those edges on you
and really just humble you to the point
where you really recognize how finite you are
and recognize that God's using all kinds of other people too
in addition to you that have different ways of thinking,
different cultures, different backgrounds.
And so be mindful of that,
be open to entering into other people's worlds
with humility and learning from them
because you've got a lot to learn.
And so I'd say that has been true all through the years
and I still wanna keep those who I'm working with.
It's difficult now because sometimes I'm in a role now
where people wanna come to me and they're like,
Ed, I wanna know this stuff, like teach me, tell me.
And so I've kind of got that teaching side of me
that is helpful to people I think.
But just being around people,
I think that's what you learn through the years
is just people are most attracted
to people that are humble.
You wanna be around those people
and you just see God kind of move through
that type of leadership, that's what Jesus modeled for us.
And so I'm striving for that still
and always learning and really excited.
I love learning from you, it's fun.
Oh, I love learning from you.
I love learning all the time.
Yeah, it's fun to learn.
I love reading and that's the best thing that happened to me
when I first went to college
was I just really started to like reading.
Really loved reading.
Me too.
Yeah, that was the best thing that happened.
I couldn't look back on a course or whatever
but at some point the switch flipped
and I just loved to read.
I hated reading in high school and my younger years.
But then like something happened.
I was like, I wanna get exposed.
I wanna know how the world works.
Yeah, it's funny too, you kind of alluded to something
about joking about how we're prideful.
It's like the older that I get,
it's like the more embarrassed I am of how I was
when I was younger.
Oh, yeah.
It's embarrassing.
You know, I think, yeah, that's.
I was embarrassed in a lot of ways.
Yeah, and I think it's human nature.
We see it, the older you get,
you kind of get maybe stuck in your ways
or just kind of less open to new things
and I wanna push against that
and so always just, you know,
remaining open to what God is doing
and seeing the new things that he's doing
and the new ways that he's doing it.
That's what's cool right now.
It is cool.
In fact, kind of like trails into our next little fight
is like so much of being, keeping life interesting
is just being curious and things to ask.
There's no way to answer this
except for what's bumping around,
but what are you really curious about these days?
What's really making life interesting?
Well, I'm curious about ocean water.
Actually, I think this would be what I'm curious about.
You would be part of that,
but I'm curious about the new forms of churches
that God is using in the world today
and these new startup ventures.
One example would be like ocean water.
It's a little bit different and, you know,
what is God doing in this time period?
Even what will the church look like post COVID, right?
As we go through this pandemic,
how is that gonna shape the texture of church, you know,
in the future?
And so I think I'm really curious about that.
I'm also curious about, like,
I'm not really just excited about, you know,
new churches doing new church things and new styles
because it's a kind of a fad or a trending thing
or just because they wanna do something new.
I wanna actually know,
or what I guess I would wonder is,
are the new forms actually making a difference in the world?
And maybe not, that might be not the best way to put it.
Not just making a difference, but making a different world.
And is God raising up a new missionary for a new age
that is actually expressing the potential
that Jesus originally wanted in the church
to not just make a difference in the world,
not just to make it like a little bit better or nicer,
but actually are we actually contributing
to making it a new world, the new heaven,
the new creation with Christ as King?
Christ as King, and that's what I'm really curious about.
So I'm hopeful.
Yeah, me too.
I sort of backed into what I'm doing now in a weird way.
I was serving at a Saddleback Church
because a guy that I've known for 30,
that I've served with for 30 years now,
I've served with him since I was 16.
Kurt, he's been with Rick for 25 years
and a real loyal, wonderful, humble man.
And he invited me to be on staff there
and that was a wonderful experience.
And towards the end of my time there,
I became really interested in the ability
to scale the church, the ability to multiply the church.
And I really started looking at cost
and it's not something that people talk about a whole lot,
but I knew from being on staff
that it cost $1.2 million to start a new Saddleback campus.
And actually the real number was $2 million
from the time that they pick a site
and put the staff in and fund it.
That's a beautiful thing.
I don't, I believe, no, I believe every way
that somebody is trying to follow Jesus is wonderful
as far as intentions when we get to having God measure.
That's why he's the judge and we're not
because he always looks at people's motives.
That's a hard thing to get at from the outside.
That's why we're not supposed to get at it.
But my thinking was, well, what if you're,
what if you don't have $1.2 million?
Is there a space to, and then a lot of the suburban
and urban models, they sort of scale down the cost.
They'll start, it's kind of an unsaid,
it's kind of not talked about a lot,
but if you looked at different ways of doing things,
a lot of it has to do with funding.
So there's like the, in that case, cost a million dollars
and then it can come down from there.
And I became very, very interested in what would it look
like if we could scale for free?
Because one of the things I also learned
in doing a little bit of research was usually
you can scale the second one at half the cost
of the first one.
But what if we could figure out a way to have
a really great culture and scale for free?
Now I'm incredibly interested in cultural side of things
and I sort of backed into that as well
because I just really like, I'm a small beach town person.
I like, actually like a small town like the one you live in.
That's really what I enjoy.
I like small towns, I like small beach towns,
I like where everybody knows each other.
I like rural areas.
I've also surfed my entire life
and I really like the culture of surfing.
I really like being in the water
and everything that goes along with that.
And I really saw the culture that I grew up in
as so attractive and so fun to be a part of.
And how come the activities that I enjoy,
like surfing and riding my motorcycle and a bicycle
and those types of things are so fun to be a part of
and that never really translated over into how I thought
the culture of the churches that I had been a part of.
So there were a few things going on with me
that I hope I'm kind of getting to your question
a little bit of how I sort of stumbled into this.
Part of it was my experience being taught at Saddleback.
That was a beautiful thing.
And some of the stuff that was going on in my heart,
culturally, some of the way that I'm wired,
also some of the stuff going on with public health.
And I've only been doing this a year,
but I'm really interested and curious about
how to scale for free, how to keep.
That sounds new, it's really not.
It's like you love to learn and read
or really if you just go back about 200 years,
this is what we have.
We just had a really relational,
really a really good culture in the church spread that way.
So it's only been in the last 100 or 200 years
that that's changed.
Well, and it's the version of church
that you're talking about that we created.
It's a cultural expression of church relatively recent,
that requires a building, requires a staff structure,
requires, I mean, all that's all really new.
And that's where it breaks down the scalability.
But that's something that we created.
So if we created that, we can actually uncreate it
and create a new structure like you're talking about.
And there's some great examples,
even you look back in the Wesleyan revivals,
and not just John Wesley or Francis Asbury
that were kind of like the leaders
of those the revival movements,
but if you actually look at the pioneers that were sent out
and read some of their stories
of the way that these new churches were started,
I mean, you're talking, these were farmers and coal miners.
I mean, it was a different breed of pastor,
and they weren't a professional class,
not well-educated right away.
And they were the ones that were doing
the work of evangelism and discipleship
and starting new churches.
And sometimes at great cost.
Yeah, I agree.
One of the things I've been...
No one was paying them to do it.
What's happened?
Yeah, no one was paying them to do it either.
It was just like, they felt the calling and they went.
I love that.
Yeah, exactly.
And all the ways are great.
One of the things we learned as leaders,
someone doesn't have to be wrong for us to be right.
Right.
And there are people doing beautiful work
in a lot of different, beautiful ways,
but there's also a practical reason
for why I feel so strongly about this.
And it's because when we talk about
helping people get water from the ocean,
when we talk about using a platform
that turns ocean water into drinking water,
when you go to these sites,
there's 108 countries in the world
that have direct water access to the ocean.
And when you go to these sites,
these are places with 100, 200, 300 people.
They're on the, they're in the bottom 20%
of income earnings across the world.
They're mostly poor.
You have to have something that can scale there for free,
or you'll never have anything.
So what was kind of going on in my heart
also matched well the entry points for water.
And so I just, that sort of just started to click
and I'm still learning.
And it's always fun when you talk about
how you got where you are.
And sometimes it's like a zigzag.
Like my friend talks about the beautiful squiggly line,
you know, where it's just got,
and a lot of times it feels like that
as a follower, Jesus as a disciple.
Oh, absolutely.
What's something that you have failed at recently
that you'd like to talk about?
Recently, well, yesterday.
Parenting is always a struggle.
I feel like, you know, we're always failing in that realm.
I think a big kind of block of my life,
I did go through burnout
and that was while I was playing football
and I was playing football,
and that was while I was planting a church
and we did a big building campaign.
We did all the things that it would take, right,
to build up that style of church and took a toll on me.
And I didn't have good boundaries in the first place.
I was pretty much a workaholic for other reasons.
I was trying to prove myself.
And that all just kind of led to this workaholic spirit
that ended up burning me out.
And, you know, I know it ended up taking my wife
in the middle of an argument, a heated argument.
It took her basically just,
she said the words, I want the old Ed back.
Oh yeah.
And I didn't know where I'd gone.
And it was a realization at that point,
like something is completely different here.
Like I am a different person.
And the path to discovering that was probably,
you know, one of my greatest growth places in my life.
Because it was there I found my identity in Christ alone.
I discovered that I didn't need any sort of success
to kind of build up my ego, you know,
in the world's eyes or the church world's eyes.
You know, I didn't need any of that to sustain myself
or even give me that drive, that motivation
to advance the kingdom.
And so I think that was, you know,
where God met me and healed me in the middle of that.
But I'd say like that was in the middle of,
everything was failing.
Like, you know, my life really felt like it was collapsing.
It was the first time I'd really been depressed,
sleep deprived, anxious, nonstop.
And I couldn't explain why until, you know,
it took some actual medical examination
to kind of diagnose myself
and realize something that happened in my brain
that I couldn't have, I could have controlled it,
but I couldn't at that time, I couldn't get out of it.
I was stuck.
And yet thankful, I tried quitting ministry
and everything, I actually put my resume in
to be a gas station manager at a Shell gas station.
I didn't get the job.
And I mean, that's how bad I just wanted out.
I was just like, I just wanted, I want a different life.
And, you know, I'm thankful that I had a good group
of people around me, supported me,
and encouraged me to, you know,
kind of move through the healing process.
And I did, and God met me, healed me, made me new again.
It was like I was reborn all over again.
And so it was just a beautiful thing.
So I don't know, I do think about failure
as I wrote a book called Fear Not,
and one of the chapters is on failure.
And that is probably the best chapter, the most read one,
because everybody experiences it, you know?
Like you don't do everything right
the first time especially.
And yet that, I think that's the very thing that God uses
if we allow him to.
That's the very thing God will use
to shape us into the person
that he really wants us to be.
Because if it didn't happen,
those things wouldn't have been revealed.
We wouldn't have known.
And so it ends up, you know,
sometimes it's that pain of the failure
that leads to our greatest success.
I mean, you think about like, what is it?
Thomas Edison and the light bulb, you know,
it was like 10,000 light bulb experiments
before he got the one that worked.
And you think about, you know,
all the voices in his head that were saying,
I think it's time to give up, you know?
But that's where, you know, you keep pushing through.
And when you do, that's when God shows up.
And then it's like completely world.
So I guess that's my story of failure.
There you go.
Gold, gold, thank you.
So good, deep.
So we'll hang a little bit.
That's great, I love it.
Let's hang a little bit of a riot.
Kind of what's like your understanding
of kind of the water situation in the world?
Yeah, you know, it's pretty shocking.
I mean, when you really think about it
and you know, I don't know what number you're using.
I've heard it's like 844 million people
don't have clean drinking water.
I mean, whatever number you're looking at,
it's like, that's a lot of people, you know?
And it's something I take for granted every day, you know?
I mean, I got to be honest with you,
I mean, I got tons of water.
I got endless amounts of water.
And you know, it's like, that's not everybody's world,
you know, so I think part of,
for those who do have water,
it's like, you know, just getting out
into someone else's world, recognizing like,
that's not normal.
And sometimes it takes going to those places
where you actually see it.
And I've been to those places and you're like,
oh, that's the water you use, you know?
And of course, as a visitor to like another country,
they tell you like, don't drink the water, you know?
And stay away.
And it's like, really, you know?
So it's one of those things I think, you know,
it's like the, I mean, you have to have water to survive.
Like you literally will not survive, you know, without it.
And to think that that is a,
you know, for many, many people,
like that is something that they have to fight for
on a daily basis, you know?
And search and go on long treks
to carry it back to their household.
It's like, you know, that's a world
most of us don't understand.
And so, I mean, it kind of breaks your heart, you know?
Yeah, it does.
And it's a justice issue.
You know, the people who have the worst access
and the worst quality spend the most amount of time
and the most amount of the percentage of their income.
And so there's such an opportunity there
to demonstrate very wonderful way.
And it's truly not a handout.
It's a platform for empowerment
when you provide,
when people don't have the staples down,
water, food, housing,
those can take someone's entire life
just trying to take care of their staples.
And so there's such an opportunity there
when you think about water infrastructure,
you think about housing, you think about food.
Very interesting, you know, Jesus alluded to this.
We talked about giving a cup of water to someone.
When you think about the simple things,
those are problems.
There are a lot of problems in the world,
but at the top of the list would be,
I don't have water, I don't have food,
I have nowhere for my family to live.
Yeah.
And sometimes that's part of the problem
that leads to other problems,
with like unsanitary situations and diseases.
And so it just kind of,
there's a trickle down effect of problems.
And I think that's where,
I love what you're doing with the church.
And I love the fact that it's the church doing it too,
through the ocean water network.
It's like the people of God,
you know, should be doing this.
And also tie that to like,
yeah, you're gonna meet a physical need
and you're gonna start a new ocean drinking filtration system.
But it's also like, yeah, while you do that,
you're gonna be telling people about
the water of life, you know,
the one who made the water and how he provides.
And it's like such a tangible expression of the gospel,
you know, and you're distributing water,
but you're distributing so much more,
the real spiritual water that they need.
And that's why I love what you're doing.
Thank you.
You look around the world,
there's hundreds and thousands of places actually
that have a limited documented water crisis problem.
They have no church and there's a lifetime of,
literally no church,
the forgottens, these groups of 100 to 500 people,
terrible water, no church.
That's where we, I pray all the time, you know,
Lord send the laborers into the harvest.
I spend time right now with four different people,
three of them in their 20s
that are on their way to church planting.
And one thing, one guy's in his early 30s,
one thing that's been made loud and clear is they love Jesus
and people also wanna be a part of solving
actual tangible problems,
like water and housing and food.
And it's so interesting.
There's not a week that goes by
that I don't have to explain to someone
why we're not an NGO,
why we're not just an NGO
and why we're not just a church.
Yeah.
Part of it is I have two hats.
I have a public health background.
I also have a pastoral calling.
That's the only way I can explain it.
And I was on a journey for a few years
and I would talk to people that I really loved
and really admired and it was almost like people wanted
to make me pick.
Like you have to do church,
just do that or just do public health NGO platform.
And I never felt, I always felt like I shouldn't,
if this is the way God made me, why should I have to pick?
So I'm on the journey of figuring that out, dude.
Well, I love it.
I love that.
So if it's not a paradox, sometimes I wonder if,
you know, it's not a God thing.
God is full of paradoxes.
You know, that's probably the right place to be.
Yeah.
This has been delightful.
Thank you for your time.
Is there anything else that,
and I'd like to do this with you again.
This is every time I, once in a while,
it's like you just know the conversation is not finished.
So let's file this away and we'll come back next time
and talk about other stuff, but this is just gonna be great.
Is there anything, any last words from Ed today?
Ed, what do you got?
What do we need to hear from Ed today?
Final words, keep fighting the good fight.
It's worth it.
Don't give up.
Thanks, dude.
Love you, man.
Thank you.
Love what you're doing.
Okay, have a great day, Ed.
Woo!
Yeah, sir.
Okay, thanks so much.
We'll see ya.
All right, thanks so much, dude.