Advertise on podcast: Summit Podcasts: BACK40, Sermon Audio, and Leadership Night

This week Pastor Mel began a new series, The Cost of Discipleship, with Luke 14:25-33. A large crowd was following Jesus, and He turned around and told them what following Him would really cost: a love for Him so supreme that every other love looks like hate by comparison, a cross of their own, and everything they own. Pastor Mel explains what Jesus meant by hate, and how the church has sometimes sold Jesus like a product on sale. He shares the story of his own calling at youth camp, walks through the things we're sure God would never ask us to give up, and closes with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jim Elliot on the life we find when we give up our own.

In this episode we start with privacy: whether valuing privacy from the government is righteous when God sees everything, how we might live if our spiritual front door were always open, why "God knows my heart" should never be a defense for bad behavior, and how to hold firm moral lines without sliding into the legalism of the Pharisees. Next we talk about honesty: whether being honest means saying everything to everyone, why love is the filter for truth, why loving is not the same as being nice, and why gossip is a truth told without its context. We finish on spiritual malignancy and mental illness. We discuss how much of human evil has been medicalized, why the spiritual and the mental are both real, how our beliefs shape our minds, where medication helps and where it has been over prescribed, and why pastors should not hand every struggle off to clinicians.

This week Pastor Mel preached Romans 16:1-27, the final week of our series in the book of Romans. It's easy to skim the last chapter as a list of greetings, but every name Paul mentions shows the unified church he spent the whole letter describing: Jews and Gentiles, women and men, servants and city officials, serving side by side. Pastor Mel walks through Phoebe, the deacon and patron who carried the letter to Rome, Priscilla and Aquila, Andronicus and Junia, and Rufus, the son of the man who carried Jesus' cross. He shares why Summit affirms women in ministry while loving churches that see it differently, how our primary identity as sons and daughters of God brings down the walls between us, why we should talk to people instead of about them, and the promise that the God of peace will crush Satan under our feet.

Pastor Mel draws on 28 years of ministry in a talk to pastors at an ARC gathering at Victory Church in Cranberry, Pennsylvania. Most pastors don't leave over a headline scandal. They leave because of what Mel calls the slow drip of ministry: the hurts, disappointments and unmet expectations that add up over the years. What sustains leaders, he says, is their rhythms, and every rhythm is driven by an affection. So the real question is what you love. Mel walks through the right affections in order: Jesus, your spouse, your kids and God's people. "The health of your ministry cannot exceed the health of your marriage." Then he names the wrong ones that quietly take their place: success, applause, control and comfort, which he calls "the greatest enemy of the church." He closes by reading 2 Corinthians 4 and praying for the pastors in the room.

This week Pastor Mel preached Romans 15:14-33, our next-to-last week in the book of Romans. Paul has spent fourteen chapters calling a divided church to unity, and now he tells them plainly that they already know what to do. They just need to be reminded. Then he opens his heart about his calling: he brings the good news so that he might present the Gentiles as an acceptable offering to God. Pastor Mel walks through Paul's mission from Jerusalem all the way to Illyricum, his refusal to coast while there were still people to reach, and his bold expectation that the church in Rome would help fund his trip to Spain. He connects it to the Great Commission, to the offering Paul gathered for the poor believers in Jerusalem, and to the churches of Macedonia, who were very poor and yet rich in generosity. He closes with Paul's request for prayer and his blessing over the church.

In this episode we start with news of a plague in Russia and what Summit would do if it had to walk through something like COVID again. We talk about why the church would keep its doors open, how to weigh facts and data after 2020, and what it means to lead when every decision applies to everyone. Next we talk about the repentance of God in Genesis 6, where the Lord was sorry he had made man. We discuss the Hebrew word behind it, the sovereignty of God, and how God can grieve while his plan never changes. From there we turn to people who say there cannot be a hell. We talk about the belief that people are basically good, reducing God to love while forgetting his holiness, and what the limits of our caring reveal about us. We finish on resilience in ministry and marriage. We discuss why resilience is a daily choice and a muscle, how our daily rhythms follow our affections for Christ, and why you prepare for the storm before it hits.

This week Pastor Mel preached Romans 14:1-15:13, where Paul addresses a very specific dispute in the Roman church. Jewish believers returning to Rome after their expulsion found that the Gentile believers had dropped many of their customs, and the church divided over food and holy days. Paul's answer is unity: "Accept other believers who are weak in the faith and don't argue with them about what they think is right or wrong." Mel explains that weak here means immature, not inferior, and that the mature are the ones called to give grace. Paul then sets a higher standard for Christian freedom. The question is not only whether something is allowed, but whether it will cause another believer to stumble. A mature believer lays down what they have the right to do for the good of others, because "Right relationship is greater than being right." Paul closes by calling the church to accept each other just as Christ accepted us, and Mel connects it to Jesus' prayer in John 17 that His people would be one, so the world would know God's love.

This week Pastor Mel preached Romans 13:8-14, where Paul turns from governing authority to the people inside the church. His call to a divided church is love — not a starry-eyed feeling but a sacrificial practice. It's the only debt worth carrying. Paul sums up the commandments against adultery, murder, stealing, and coveting in one line from Leviticus 19:18, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and Mel shows why love is the antidote: it is hard to sin against someone you truly love. He is clear that this is "not this call to like each other. It's a call to love each other," even when we disagree fiercely. Then Paul adds urgency — time is running out. We must throw off dark deeds like dirty clothes, including quarreling, jealousy, and gossip, and clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, making no provision for the flesh.

In this episode we start with hell: whether part of its suffering will be the final realization of how much God loved us, why hell is better understood as the natural end we were all headed toward than as a punishment God adds, and why a good God is the one who stepped in to save us from it. Next we talk about power. If God grants us authority over other people, what is the most God honoring way to use it? We look at Jesus' words in Matthew 20, why the higher you go the more you have to serve, and the difference between leaders people fear and leaders people love. From there we ask how to correct sin without driving someone into secrecy, starting from Solzhenitsyn's picture of prisoners in the Gulag who learned to hide everything to survive. We finish on cheap grace, mercy that looks the other way without calling for repentance, and on the difference between shame and conviction.

Pastor Mel preached Romans 13:1-7, the passage on how a Christian relates to governing authority. He makes the case that believers are called to submit to the authorities God places over them — even the ones they did not vote for. Submission to authority is godly, wise, and fair. But he is equally clear that the state's authority is not absolute: there is a place for civil disobedience when a government commands what God forbids or forbids what God commands. Our conscience both compels obedience and sets its limit. Underneath it all is one steadying conviction — God is in charge of who is in charge — so our worship, and our peace, belong to Him alone, and not to any party or leader.

This study moves into Genesis 6:1-10 and the events leading up to the Flood. As humanity multiplies, so does its corruption — the sons of God (Seth's godly line) take wives from the daughters of man (the apostate line of Cain), and godliness mixes with godlessness. We examine why the Lord declares that His Spirit will not strive with man forever, limiting human life to 120 years as both a judgment and a merciful reprieve. We learn about the Nephilim — the "mighty men of renown" who reveal what unchecked power does to the human heart. As wickedness grows until every thought of man is "only evil continually," Scripture says God was grieved in His heart and resolved to blot out what He had made. Yet Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord — righteous by grace, walking with God in the midst of a fully corrupt generation.

Pastor Mel preached Romans 12:9-21, the final movement of Romans chapter 12. After eleven chapters of doctrine, Paul turns to the practical shape of life in a divided church. His prescription for unity is genuine love — costly, sacrificial, and possible only by the power of the Holy Spirit. Mel walks the passage command by command: really love rather than pretend, and hate what is wrong; take delight in honoring one another; never be lazy but serve the Lord enthusiastically, confronting what he calls the church's "spiritual obesity" of endless consuming without spiritual exercise. We rejoice in hope, we're patient in trouble, and we keep praying. Christians should be ready to help and eager for hospitality, blessing those who persecute us. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. We live in harmony, never taking revenge but leaving room for God's justice. We conquer evil with good.

Pastor Mel draws six leadership lessons from Jack Welch, the legendary CEO who grew General Electric many times over. Control your destiny, or someone else will. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be. Be candid, honest "to the last ten percent," because clarity is a kindness. Don't manage, lead (and know the difference). Change before you have to, the cautionary tales of Kodak, Blackberry, and Blockbuster. And if you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete. Q&A follows.

In this episode we start with artificial intelligence: how these systems are climbing from narrow tools toward something far more general. We talk about the "alignment problem", then we pivot to a hopeful call for writing true, useful material a means of influencing the future of thought. Next we talk about sin as something contagious: Paul's picture of a little yeast working through the whole batch of dough, how sin now spreads by ideas and crowds more than by geography, and the difference between a faith that is simply immature and one that was never really our own. We finish on marriage and the dangers of being unequally yoked. We discuss why it matters for a believer to marry a believer, why the warning is so hard to hear once two hearts are already joined, and why marriage was never meant to complete us, but to make us holy.

Pastor Eran Holt preached Romans 12:3-8, picking up one week after Pastor Mel's message on being transformed by the renewing of your mind. Eran's driving question was practical: if God has really transformed a person, what would you actually see? Paul answers by naming four ordinary places a changed life shows up — how you see yourself, how you see others, how you see your gift, and how you finally live. Eran spent the most time on the first: "sober judgment," which he defined as seeing yourself accurately, measured by the faith God gave you rather than the person next to you. Insecurity is not the opposite of pride but the same root wearing a different face, "both are obsessed with the need to impress other people," and "both are obsessed with me." From there he walked the body of Christ where "each member belongs to all the others," the gift that is grace "entrusted to me for somebody else," and the warning that the enemy lies about your gift because he cannot take it away.