Convening with Believers!

This is Michael Carbone with the Truth Network. We're partnering with Bible League International on Open the Floodgates, Bibles for Africa.

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That's 800-937-9673. Thank you for caring. This is Darren Coon with the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we search the ancient paths to find ways that God brings light into a dark world and helps set men free from the struggles that we all face on a day-to-day basis. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

Real life, real people, real experience. His name is Matt Curran. Matt, welcome to the program, my friend. Thanks, Dave. I'm glad to be here.

It's so good to have you. Tell us about what led you as a believer to go back to Bible college, get your degree, and start all this stuff, man. Yeah, so I just recently finished my master's degree from Liberty University. I love Liberty, and I got my master's degree in Christian life coaching. So I have a background of working with people in the aviation community.

We really learn how to make decisions and learn how to train. Well, as I was going out and speaking about human error and decision-making, a lot of people would come up to me and they would say, hey, Matt, your message doesn't just resonate about flying helicopters. Your message resonates about being a Christian or being a parent or our marriage. And so the more I spoke and the more I talked about it, I was just called to go back to Liberty and further my degree and my master's degree in Christian life coaching. And that's what the website goes along with.

Wow, that's awesome. And so you started this. So what is Convene? Tell us a little bit about that. I want our listeners, I love the innovation of this. Here at Truth Talk Weekend, what we try to do is we talk to believers who are missionaries and entrepreneurs and just how God's birthed their vision in them to change the world. Well, how did this come about?

And what is it? What do you do at Convene Communities? So, Stu, how do we learn? How do we learn in life? How do we learn in church? How do we learn when we're parenting? We learn through our experience, and as we gain more experience, we get better at making decisions. We get better at parenting or better at being a Christian. I just got done at Wednesday in the Word with you this morning. We're in the Word of Christ and learning about it.

So that's how we learn. So what Convene Communities is, is it's a website that allows people to come together no matter what your passion is. So there's communities based on parenting.

There's communities based on, you know, that have to do with marriage, sports, being a first responder. But one of the, you know, while we're here talking, is one of my favorite, and the community I'm most excited about is Convene Christians. I think that, you know, Convene Christians across the world, and I was just sitting in as you did another interview, you know, it's time to, that we bring Christians back together. At church, you have brothers and sisters in Christ. If you're truly your family, we really are a body of Christ. You have brothers and sisters being beat up, beleaguered, attacked, embattled, persecuted, tortured, in some cases killed, and yet we have no idea that our body is suffering like that. And they're not saying, hey, send me money.

They're saying, hey, necessarily, but they're saying, hey, pray for me. Send me a note. Come visit me in prison, you know, that sort of thing. But we don't even know they're there because we, our community, we're kind of fractured there. We're good at communing in other ways, right? You know, ball games and all that, but what about the faith?

Let me give you an example. You and I have something in common. You know, this is one of our reasons that we're friends and that's our daughters. You know, our daughters have been dancing together for 10 years and now they, you know, we can talk about they're just left for college.

You know, both of us have now freshmen in college. And so we have that in common. So we, you know, we talk about that sort of thing, but we're also Christians. And, you know, in the world today, I think that, you know, it's not so easy to be a Christian.

You know, we're talking about the persecuted church all over the world. You know, we have it easy in the United States, but, but we also get, you know, questioned and we don't feel like we can go out and talk about it. So convening Christians is, it allows us to bring together Christians in a place where we are like-minded, where we are Christians and we are believers and, you know, we can share our story. We can share our experiences, you know, for the good of each other and, you know, through groups, through experiences, you know, an example, uh, this morning we do Wednesday in the word, but I'm also a pilot. So I travel quite a bit, so I can't always be at Wednesday in the word. So what if I can take Wednesday in the word, the video that you did on Facebook live at my Facebook page. So what if we can take that plus the handout that you give us and what if we put that within convening communities?

And now when I'm on the road traveling with my job flying, I'm still able to be a part of Wednesday in the world. Churches can go on there. Bible studies, small groups or people that have something in common, in a common hobby, they can connect there. And obviously the goal is to encourage and enrich and bring people closer to God.

How's your time in the word? It's just a whole, but you're, you're trying to get, you're trying to leverage the social media context, I guess, into a deeper spiritual journey for folks. And that's a neat, that's very plottable.

I really like what you're doing with that. Yeah. And so we, we all have a life experience, right? We all have stories in life.

And so what convene allows you to do within whatever community is, it allows you to, to share that story, or it allows you maybe to put a question out there. For example, maybe a parenting question, you know, one of the things as parents that we have to deal with nowadays is social media, you know, and our kids, we didn't deal with that when we were young. So as parents, I like to say it's a catch 22.

And this is part of, you know, my life coaching that I've talked to other parents about. So it's a catch 22. Some people might say, well, I'm not going to let my child have a phone.

Well, that's a, that's a double-edged sword, right? If you don't let your child have a phone, they get picked on. And so we don't really understand that because we're trying to protect our child.

But on the flip side of that, they're dealing with the repercussions of not having a phone and not being on social media. But so how do you handle that? And so with convene, there's an experience that we wrote and we talked about that and other parents have gone on and given their opinion of, well, I would handle it this way. Um, and so there's, you can put experiences out and groups out that really have to do with anything. And I guarantee if you're going through it, guess what?

Somebody else is going through it and you're able to talk and share and all the implications in a warning signs. Don't go see this movie. There are some atrocious Netflix movie out right now. You know, this, this horrible it's pornography.

There's gang rape. There's this, there's this Netflix series called 13 reasons or something where it actually culminates with the kid committing suicide and kids are watching it. Good Christian kids.

That's right. Mom and dad, your kid, if they're a teenager, they're probably watching that right now or so they've probably seen it. They're friends. They've already talked about it and watched it before you even realized it existed. Well, what are we doing to watch that? What are parents doing to communicate to you?

Make sure that's why we have Christian radio to create a community, to have these programs on our network, like focus on the family, like these great shows that bring that to light. But you're at, you're trying to add another layer that maybe meets people in the world of Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and all of this. So that there's a, there's a deeper connection, right? Well, yeah, I like to say that it allows us to continue the conversation. So, you know, you, as an example, this morning with the video from, you know, Wednesday in the word, now we can take Wednesday in the word and now we can continue the conversation. You know, we're not really asking anybody to do anything different with incoming.

Do what you already do, but bring it into Convene. And let's, let's continue the conversation in a meaningful way so we can learn how, you know, each other, you know, would handle things. Because the way you might do it, Stu, is not the way I might do it. Doesn't mean that your way is the best way.

Doesn't mean that my way is the best way. We can learn from each other. And that is the goal of Convene and Convene Christians and, you know, the different communities.

Well, what is the website? What's the way folks can get involved? I know there's people that want to connect and they want to support you.

They love, you know, there's this, who doesn't love the idea of this, you know, to better their walk with God, devotions, all those things. What's the, you're going to put the Truth Network on there too, aren't you? Absolutely. The Truth Network is going to be on there. We're going to get Wednesday in the word on there. So when, you know, you're in different parts of the world, you can, you know, watch, you know, Stu's videos and you can go in and interact with the questions. There's a great Bible teaching down to the Truth app. What's the best website for Convene? So, convenecommunities.com. Okay.

It's very simple. convenecommunities.com. And you'll be able to see the communities there. The communities, it's a free website, so you can go in and anyone can create an experience, and we encourage people to create experiences. Anyone can create groups. So it's just a wonderful platform to bring people together in whatever community that they like. We're always adding communities. We'll continue to add communities, groups, all of that different stuff. Love what you're doing.

Matt Curran flies helicopters, has a heart for God, went and got his master's degree in biblical counseling ministry, and now you want to serve the Lord and you want to start a community that's redemptive. I love it. I mean, I don't see how anyone cannot support it. Everyone's got ideas. Let's encourage this kind of thing. What's your idea? How's God using you?

Who knows what, you know, who knows what you could do with the great potential God's put in you? So get around people to encourage that, right? Absolutely. But be part of a Christian community. Let's bring Christians together all over the place. God bless you, my friend. Thanks for coming. Thank you. This is the Truth Network.