For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
An Uncommon Success
This week's For People is based off of Bishop Wright's opening worship sermon given on November 7, 2025 at the 119th Annual Council of the Diocese of Atlanta.
What if success isn’t about wins on paper but trust put into practice? Luke 10 teaches us how Jesus sends people out light on gear but heavy on purpose and asks us to measure progress by reliance, integrity, and the peace we carry into real places. The kingdom isn’t far off; it’s near and asking for a public life that heals, feeds, and invites—even when doors close and welcome is thin.
In this episode Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about an uncommon success. They unpack peace as shalom instead of silence: not keeping the powerful comfortable, but seeking wholeness, equity, and purpose that challenges harmful norms. That peace moves toward cities where people should flourish, not just scrape by. From there, they discuss scale. Jesus grows the team from twelve to seventy, and we take the cue: faith and data can be partners. They talk targeting new congregations in the poorest areas, gathering facts on health and education gaps, and budgeting for ministry that brings hope to “fingernail dirty” places. All of it leads back to one audit question: do we trust Jesus more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today? Listen in for the full conversation.
So ministry day to day is full of hows, but the dynamite, the nitroglycerin, right, is the why. And he says, tell them, do all this, uh, you know, encounter all these hardships, inconveniences, because people need to hear that the kingdom is near. In fact, the kingdom is here. So I want to remind our folks that what are we fighting for anyway? We're fighting for Jesus' vision of the world. We're participating in Jesus' vision of the world. That's what we're fighting for.
Melissa:Welcome to Four People with Bishop Rob Wright. I'm Melissa Rau, your host, and this is a conversation inspired by For Faith, a weekly devotion sent out every Friday. You can find a link to this week's For Faith and a link to subscribe in the episode's description. Our devotion this week is an excerpt from Bishop's annual council sermon inspired by Luke chapter 10, verses 1 through 9. Bishop?
Bishop Wright:So when the church gets together, there's always big questions in the room. Questions like, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus right now? Questions like, what does the gospel offer that secular humanism doesn't? And my favorite question, Bishop, exactly what are we fighting for anyway? Those are hard but fair questions. And each question to my mind is longing to understand what success looks like for followers of Jesus. Jesus never promises conventional notions of success, that's first. He doesn't promise wealth, doesn't promise promotions or prominence. What he promises is a life of meaning. What he promises is that you, that if you have a harvest heart and harvest hands, there's plenty of work to do. What he promises is to place you in the largest idea of family that you can imagine. What he promises is that we can rely on him as we join him in his adventure. What he offers is a journey toward a new depth of integrity. Success for us in every season and in all situations is staying connected to Jesus' purpose, to his why. So the definition of success for those sent by Jesus is measured in reliance, reliance on his words and reliance on his ways.
Melissa:Bishop, thank you. And so this is one of my favorite gospel passages where Jesus sends 70-ish followers to travel with nothing but the barest of provisions. And you called this expert uh excerpt an uncommon success. And to me, that was like a leap. And so it's like I focus on one thing, I know. And so I really would love for you to share how you got there and why this passage matters for your people, the Diocese of Atlanta, the largest gathering that you have every year. So tell me.
Bishop Wright:Well, yeah, we'll be gathered about 600 of us uh for worship and to do some uh some good work of the church to pass a budget that funds our ministry in Middle North Georgia. Um, we'll be there to encourage one another, to take heart, to uh, you know, to name some mile markers on the journey of serving Jesus right now in the world. So it's uh it's our Super Bowl, so to speak. And um, you know, as far as I can tell, there's nothing better uh at this time for the church, Christ Church all over the world, is to be refreshed by Jesus' clear purpose. Purpose is what helps us uh to not get broken in the midst of breaking news, right? Purpose is not temporal, purpose is eternal, purpose holds us no matter who's in the White House. Uh, temporal uh, you know, ideas of you know accomplishment won't really hold us, won't really satisfy us the way staying connected to Jesus' purpose does. And so I wanted to just remind, you know, uh the followers, us followers, those who are trying to stumble forward to follow Jesus, you know, what's the center of us? And the center of us is not gimmicks, it's not uh, you know, jingos, it's not slogans. The center of us is to join Jesus in his very clear purposes as laid out in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now, in Luke, the 10th chapter, one and nine, uh, the ninth chapter, Jesus describes all these hills and valleys, this sort of tumultuous sort of uh, you know, these events. He laments his own homelessness. He talks about the disciples' reluctance uh to feed the five thousand. Um, he laments the fact that the disciples uh want to build things, you know, construction rather than sort of what he calls valley vocation, right? Um, you know, and on and on and on. But what's interesting about the 10th chapter is that to all of the vicissitudes of life, Jesus reasserts the purpose, right? And he tells us how we should go two by two, he tells us how we should pack, pack light. Uh, he tells us to go and be moral examples, to go and be adaptive change uh agents, uh, to go and be community healers. He tells us all the hows, right? And so ministry uh day to day is full of hows. But the dynamite, the nitroglycerin, right, is the why. And he says, tell them, uh do all this, uh, you know, encounter all these hardships, inconveniences, because people need to hear that the kingdom is near. In fact, the kingdom is here. So I want to remind our folks that what are we fighting for anyway? Well, we're fighting for Jesus' vision of the world. We're participating in Jesus' vision of the world, we're joining Jesus on his adventure. Uh, that's what we're fighting for.
Melissa:What is peace anyway? And because it's not so much about the what, but I feel like Jesus was very specific about the how.
Bishop Wright:Well, Jesus says, uh, you know, when you when you go to places, you know, uh say peace. Uh, but if there's no peace there, you know, keep moving, right? So I mean, he he makes sure that what we have is uh is our words and a vision that mobilize us over communities. Um now remember, we're trying to take a movement and put it into a denomination, right? So Jesus had a little fledgling movement, and you know, most churches have denominations or uh congregations, et cetera. And so uh there has to be some accounting for um, you know, sort of the itinerant peace of Jesus' work in our work. But nevertheless, we are to be able to sort of say something about the peace that we find in Jesus. And the peace that we find in Jesus is not kumbaya, the peace that we find in Jesus is, you know, shalom, well-being, clarity of purpose, right? So the fact that I know that I know that I know that I am uh, you know, living out what fidelity invites me to live out is how I get peace, right? Because he doesn't promise a rose garden, right? The truth of the matter is that history is littered with examples of men and women who wanted to lead nonviolent movements who were killed, right? And so we should, we should be clear that Jesus is peace, right? That Jesus wanting people to have equity and health and nutrition and opportunity and um safety uh threatens the prevailing status quo notion of what peace is, right? So peace uh in popular imagination is uh leave the rich people and the abusive people and the people of power alone and let them do whatever they want to do with you know whomever they want to do it with and say nothing about it, right? That's not Jesus' idea of peace. Jesus's peace is about engagement of status quo. It's interesting to remember in this stuff in this wonderful story that Jesus sends people to the city, right? He sends people to where the where the you know where the people are. And uh, and we know that the cities are supposed to uh you know provide for the folks. You shouldn't just survive, you should flourish. Um Aristotle talked about the polis, you know, this is this is where we get the word political. And Jesus's politics are really, you know, as I've said before, uh not progressive or conservative, not left or right, not red or blue, right? Jesus' politics are vertical and horizontal, uh vertical in devotion to God and horizontal into love of neighbor. And so if that is your peace, right, to live out that and to help co-create that with God, when you take that places where there is not that kind of peace, uh, we shouldn't be surprised when that is not welcome. But what he doesn't say to the disciples is give up, right? He says, you know, it's about scale. Let's keep the conversation going, let's go as broadly as we can, and let's go as deeply as we can. And I would say that in Jesus saying that uh you may go some places where the peace doesn't return to you, Jesus realizes that our job is not to fix anybody. Our job is to proclaim a possibility, to invite people to uh enjoy this possibility, learn of it, uh bring it into their own ways and their own world. Um, but it's not to badge or obligate or condemn or shame anybody, it is to make an offering and to keep moving. And uh so he appoints and he sends 70. Uh, interestingly enough, um he had 12 in the chapter before. Now he has 70. Uh, you know, that represents a 483.33% increase, right? In in disciples. He's taking the movement to scale.
Melissa:That's right. I love that you did the math on that, Bishop.
Bishop Wright:Well, I'm only look, you know, um, we should remember that uh as part of life with with God is not just sort of eloquence or or or catchy words or fine-sounding words. I mean, it's faithful, data-driven work. Right? I mean, faith and data are partners in ministry. And uh, and so some people uh want a faith life that doesn't have any data. No, uh, Jesus invites us into a measurable reconfiguration of life.
Melissa:Okay, so then what are we counting?
Bishop Wright:Oh, we're counting lots of things. I think what we're counting that can be counted is how many experiments are we running uh to engage people, uh, you know, that fidelity prompts and data prompts. In the Diocese of Atlanta right now, um, our deacons, our wonderful deacons, are gonna bring a resolution, a proposal to uh to the full body uh saying that we should raise some money and figure out how to get some congregations started in the poorest of our uh areas of our diocese. That's data driven, right? That's not just say, hey, we ought to start some stuff. That's saying, hey, we ought to be targeted. And so we need some factoids. We need to know who are, you know, what are the poorest counties among us? Uh, what are the needs in that place? Um, you know, what's it gonna cost to get that ministry off the ground? I mean, all of that is, you know, not terribly sexy to some people, but that's the work. That's the work is to find out how we bring, so to speak, the best, right, uh, to what I call the fingernail dirty places or the worst. And so I think that uh, you know, that is part of the work. Um, William Barber, Bishop William Barber, who's uh famous for starting Moral Mondays out of North Carolina that has really become a national movement, you know, he he's he observed that people have stopped talking about the poor. And so, how do we talk about the poor without data? We need to talk about it. We need to talk about health outcomes, we need to talk about educational outcomes, we need to talk about uh vulnerability with our seniors. Um, you know, recently now in the national conversation, we're talking about SNAP benefits. We're talking about supplemental, supplemental nutrition, uh, you know, uh being uh withheld uh by some uh as a political ploy. Um we need the data, we need to know how many families that's going to adversely affect so that you know other entities um, you know, can find a way to respond and meet needs. Yeah.
Melissa:Yeah. So Bishop, to kind of pull this all together, how might you uh juxtapose Jesus' uncommon success with what you think uh society today defines as success? How is the church to be different?
Bishop Wright:Well, yeah, so that's interesting, isn't it? Because uh, you know, so the last point of the sermon really is to answer those questions, right? So the questions that I've heard over now 14th year 14 years of being bishop and uh 28 years of being a clergy person, and my own personal questions about what does success look like as a follower of Jesus? And, you know, yes, it looks like um throwing good seed, you know, the parable of the sower. Uh, and yes, it looks like going to the most vulnerable and the least and measuring that. Yes, it looks like feeding and clothing and visiting the sick and visiting the incarcerated. How many times do we do that? Do we do that at all? Uh are we leaving numbers of people without a visit and without um, you know, consolation and encouragement? So that's one measurement. But if you go upstream of all that, it is the measurement is reliance on Jesus, right? Are we using Jesus' words and ways uh to drive us into places and to work that is you know measurable on a spreadsheet? Uh and so there's only one spreadsheet for the soul, and that is, are we relying on Jesus? And so, you know, the question that I ask in the sermon is uh, do you trust Jesus today more than you did yesterday? And will you trust him more tomorrow than you do today? So that's the measurement for us. And when you do that, when you work through that, when you interrogate that, when you do an integrity audit about all that, then there's lots of wonderful measurements that show up downstream of that. I believe, still believe, after all these years, that faithful people trusting in God can produce the most audacious results. And sometimes, you know, it's an agrarian kind of economy. Sometimes it takes things a slow amount of time to sort of pop up and to bloom and to bud. Uh, but nevertheless, you know, what this is about is not losing our souls. Our souls rest in reliance on God. And so what we don't want to do is lose our souls or be beaten down and be crestfallen, as the world would want us to have. Jesus does all this, he appoints to 70 in response to the bad news of the previous chapter. So, you know, here we have, you know, that's that's phenomenal to me as we think about how tumultuous the world is right now. So, you know, take heart, as we say. So we take heart, right? And if we do, if if if it's true for us that uh our heart is flagging in faith or zeal or clarity, then you're not left to your own devices. We have each other, and we have our resource in the gospel. Um, you know, we have a resource in pastoral counseling and care. I mean, we're not hopeless, right? There's no need to despair, which is the absence of hope. There's good reason to hope. God, you know, as I like to say, there is nothing too hard for God.
Melissa:Amen. Well, Bishop, I'm gonna take heart and the peace of the Lord be always with you.
Bishop Wright:And also with y'all.
Melissa:Thank you, listeners, for listening to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright or by visiting www.forpeople.digital. Please subscribe, leave a review, and we'll be back with you next week.