Terrin Phillips

What should the church look like when people stop pretending they have everything together? Steve Marston welcomes Terrin Phillips, lead pastor of The Refuge Church in San Antonio, for a wide-ranging conversation about antisemitism, the church's relationship with the Jewish people, spiritual warfare, authentic Christian community, confession, and what Terrin calls “hospital church.” Terrin discusses his involvement with the David Merage Foundation and its work bringing pastors and leaders together to confront antisemitism in churches and communities. Drawing from his own experiences visiting Israel, Terrin challenges Christians to examine what they believe about Israel and the Jewish people and to recognize the dangers of antisemitism wherever it appears. The conversation then turns to a very different—but equally challenging—question: Are our churches places where broken people can actually be honest about their brokenness? Terrin explains the “hospital church” approach embraced by The Refuge Church. Instead of encouraging Christians and even church leaders to hide their struggles, the goal is to create a community where people can confess sin, confront the mess in their lives, pursue reconciliation, and allow other believers to walk alongside them. That means church can get messy. It means dealing honestly with addiction, pornography, broken relationships, divorce, codependency, personal failure, and other struggles Christians sometimes feel pressured to keep hidden. Terrin argues that genuine worship involves more than singing songs on Sunday. It requires confession, reconciliation, surrender, and a willingness to deal honestly with the things standing between us, other people, and God. It's a challenging conversation about truth, grace, confession, community, Israel, and becoming the kind of disciples—and churches—willing to walk with people through the mess of real life.