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Pastoring in NYC
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Pastoring in New York presents unique challenges due to transience, ambition, and the city’s pressure.
These factors can make it difficult for people to engage with the church and prioritize long-term spiritual growth.
Jon Tyson
I want to do this because there are real challenges in pastoring in New York that require a constant reorientation of vision. Let me tell you the five challenges of pastoring people not like you in New York, okay? Number one, transience. Most people are not here with a long-term vision of being here, so their dreams aren’t rooted in the future of this city. They’re rooted in relationships, or they’re rooted in jobs, or they’re rooted in other places. And so a lot of times you get people whose heads aren’t quite in the church game here. Second thing is ambition. Very few people come to New York generically with a desire to seek the kingdom of God. They come here because something in their heart drives them here. So you have a confrontation with ambition. The third thing is it’s a lot harder than you think when you get here. And so a lot of times pastoring ends up feeling like running an ER room. And when you’re in a crisis, nobody’s thinking long-term health. They’re thinking, how do I get out of this? And so a lot of times people’s, the pressure of the city reveals the idols of their hearts or the fragility of their faith or issues they haven’t worked through. And so that can be challenging. Also,-
Pastoring Challenges in NYC
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Pastoring in NYC presents unique challenges due to the city’s transient nature, with many people not rooted long-term.
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This is compounded by the ambition that drives individuals to NYC, often prioritizing personal goals over a primary focus on faith.
These factors, combined with the city’s pressures, strong opinions, and diverse preferences regarding church, can create a congregation of driven, reactive, opinionated consumers if not carefully addressed.
Jon Tyson
And so a lot of times you get people whose heads aren’t quite in the church game here. Second thing is ambition. Very few people come to New York generically with a desire to seek the kingdom of God. They come here because something in their heart drives them here. So you have a confrontation with ambition. The third thing is it’s a lot harder than you think when you get here. And so a lot of times pastoring ends up feeling like running an ER room. And when you’re in a crisis, nobody’s thinking long-term health. They’re thinking, how do I get out of this? And so a lot of times people’s, the pressure of the city reveals the idols of their hearts or the fragility of their faith or issues they haven’t worked through. And so that can be challenging. Also, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, a lot of people got a lot of preferences about how church should be. So a lot of times you spend time navigating. It’s not that preferences are bad. There’s nothing wrong with having preferences. You just can’t build your church on trying to keep everybody’s preferences happy. And then lastly, not sure you’re aware of this, New Yorkers are an opinionated people. Don’t believe me? Just look at the comment section on anything, okay? And just opinions. The result of this is that if you’re not careful, what the church in New York can end up with is driven, reactive, opinionated consumers. And I want to tell you, I’m not saying this with any, genuinely, any sort of condescension.-
New Yorker Disciples
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New Yorkers can be challenging to pastor due to transience, ambition, and strong opinions.
However, when their ambition and passion align with the Kingdom, they become the most passionate, visionary, and sacrificial disciples.
Jon Tyson
New Yorkers also make the best disciples of Jesus of anywhere I’ve ever been in my life, if that gets aligned. And so if you can get people past that, if you can get them thinking differently and aligning their ambition and their passion and their preferences for kingdom preferences, if they Start to have the mind of Jesus, you get the most passionate, visionary, sacrificial disciples that you can get anywhere. And so I love doing this. This is a big year for me because this is my 20th year of being in New York.-
New Yorkers as Disciples
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New Yorkers can be challenging to pastor due to transience, ambition, the pressures of city life, strong preferences, and opinionated natures.
However, when their ambition and passion align with the Kingdom, they become the most passionate, visionary, and sacrificial disciples.
Jon Tyson
New Yorkers also make the best disciples of Jesus of anywhere I’ve ever been in my life, if that gets aligned. And so if you can get people past that, if you can get them thinking differently and aligning their ambition and their passion and their preferences for kingdom preferences,-
Shared Vision in a Distracted World
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It is extremely challenging to unify a group of people’s attention, desires, and actions in our current world of constant distractions.
Getting everyone to focus on the same future vision, especially in large groups, is exceptionally difficult.
Jon Tyson
And I want to show you why this is important. If we go to the next slide here, it’s very, very hard with this much going on in the city and this much going on in your life to get everybody to pay attention to the same things. You’re in a war for attention. And it’s very, very hard to get all of those people looking at all of those different things to have a shared vision about the future we want to see God do in our church and in our city. And it’s very, very hard to get thousands of people’s desires and align those desires for the same thing. And then it’s even harder to get them to act the same way with a shared framework and same practices.Aligning collective desire and attention is fundamentally difficult in a world of infinite distractions. The future may be shaped less by what we consciously decide to pursue and more by what successfully prompts us — which means the design of prompts, notifications, and interfaces becomes the architecture of shared attention. For any vision to take hold, it must be compelling enough to cut through the noise. desire hunger pkm-
True Poverty of Spirit
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The Greek word for “poor” used in this passage doesn’t refer to economic poverty, but rather poverty of spirit.
It describes those who recognize their spiritual need and are thus open to the Messiah’s grace.
Jon Tyson
That’s a separate Greek word. This is the idea of being poor in spirit. It means to cringe, to shrink back, or to cower. In essence, Jesus was saying, I’m coming for those who know that their spiritual poverty makes them a candidate for the grace of the Messiah. These people were self-righteous and we’re like, we’re good and we certainly don’t need you telling-
Self-Righteousness and Rejection of Jesus
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The self-righteous did not see Jesus’ message as good news, but as an insult because they didn’t see themselves as needing His grace.
They wanted judgment for their enemies, not a Messiah for the whole world.
Jon Tyson
Now the problem they had is there’s no judgment for their enemies in Jesus’ message if he’s the Messiah. Jesus does something fascinating in this verse. If you hear the original context of Isaiah, Jesus is taking two passages, one from Isaiah 58, one from Isaiah 61 verses 1 and 2, putting them together. And Jesus doesn’t read the entire section. Jesus chops off half a verse in the Isaiah 61 reading. Here’s how it ends. To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God. And Jesus shows up. He says, I’m going to do the favor bit, but I’m not going to do the vengeance bit. And they’re like, oh, heck no. We want you to drive our enemies out. We certainly don’t want this teaching that says we should love our enemies and do good to them. And so they are not interested in a Messiah who is the Messiah of the whole world. They just want a personal Messiah to fix their problems and their people and their time. And the implication is this, beware of having a God who’s only dealing with the problems that are everybody else and not seeing yourself as the problem that God came to deal with. And then they reject him. Jesus says, a prophet has honor everywhere except in his hometown. Honor is a fascinating-
Pearls Before Swine
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Jesus’s saying about not giving pearls to swine isn’t about hating pigs.
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It’s a metaphor: pigs don’t recognize a pearl’s value, just as some people don’t recognize the cost of spiritual gifts or anointing.
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Recognizing the value and source of these gifts (honor) is crucial for receiving them.
People may want the benefits of the Messiah but reject the Messiah himself.
Jon Tyson
But if someone treats you with contempt, you’ll be like, bro, you don’t know what it costs me to get this. That’s why Jesus said, don’t give your pearls to swine. He’s not anti-swine. He’s just like, listen, if you put a pearl necklace in front of a pig, the pig has one response. Can I eat it? And you’re like, no, he goes, I don’t care. Let me try. The pig’s just like, he’s not like, wow, that’s a beautiful, where’d you get that? Did you go up to Tiffany’s to get that? Bro, that little turquoise box. I feel that box. No, he’s just like, let me eat the box too. He has no concept of what’s put before him. And so Jesus is saying anointing and honour require you recognise that it’s here and what it costs and where it comes from. And they say, you’re not going to get this in our hometown. And they reject Him because of it. They want the fruit of the Messiah, but they don’t want this person who is the Messiah. They love the teaching that He has, but they don’t like the teacher Himself. And they love the miracles he can do, they just do not like that it comes from him.Humans crave knowledge and beauty but often don’t appreciate the hands that provide it. The “pearls before swine” metaphor applies to our relationship with information: we consume anything that gives us pause without caring whether it’s human-made or algorithmic. We recognize no cost, no craft, no source — just the immediate experience. This is the posture of pigs with desire: unable to distinguish between what’s precious and what’s merely consumable. pkm taste desire-
Modern Society’s Failed Experiment
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Removing God from society was supposed to bring freedom, peace, and thriving.
Instead, it has resulted in the most anxious, enslaved generation in history, making us cosmic orphans.
Jon Tyson
And let me ask you a question, are we free and peaceful and thriving? No, we’re the most enslaved anxious generation in recorded history. We’re not thriving, not free. We’re experiencing the tragedy of becoming cosmic orphans. Now, Time Magazine did a cover in 1966 asking this question, is God dead? And this was on the cover of Time Magazine because it kind of felt like He was. Was such a decline post-World War II. You know what comes after 1966? The hippies. And these kids were like, listen man, screw capitalism and whatever this other stuff is. We don’t need God. We don’t need any of this. And I think in some sense people are asking this question right now. 11% of Gen Z get Bible engaged or Bible literate. Most unbelieving statistical generation in American history. More and more people deconstructing. We’ve got God on the cliff of the culture we’ve built. We’re trying to push him off with everything we can. Church is just going to fade out. It’s tragic. I don’t know what you think the next 20 years in New York are going to look like for you, but a lot of people are like, Tyson, man, you need to dig in and ask for help because all you’re going To do is pastor a shrinking, declining generation.Girardian philosophy suggests that every generation needs a scapegoat — someone or something to blame for what’s broken. Gen Z’s deconstruction of religion may be less about intellectual conviction and more about mimetic aversion: adopting a posture because it’s culturally legible, not because they’ve engaged deeply with what they’re rejecting. The ease of having a public presence rewards signaled virtue over examined belief. The irony is that the Christian story centers on the scapegoat mechanism itself — a God who became flesh and was innocently slain. If they examined the narrative more closely, they might find that what Christianity presents is more relational and human, despite its institutional baggage, than the performance culture they’ve built as an alternative. ecology-of-technology bestill faith1min Snip
Jon Tyson
And this was on the cover of Time Magazine because it kind of felt like He was. Was such a decline post-World War II. You know what comes after 1966? The hippies. And these kids were like, listen man, screw capitalism and whatever this other stuff is. We don’t need God. We don’t need any of this. And I think in some sense people are asking this question right now. 11% of Gen Z get Bible engaged or Bible literate. Most unbelieving statistical generation in American history. More and more people deconstructing. We’ve got God on the cliff of the culture we’ve built. We’re trying to push him off with everything we can. Church is just going to fade out. It’s tragic. I don’t know what you think the next 20 years in New York are going to look like for you, but a lot of people are like, Tyson, man, you need to dig in and ask for help because all you’re going To do is pastor a shrinking, declining generation.-
Responding to Brokenness
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Don’t blame God for your brokenness.
Ask Him to heal your brokenness and step into the middle of it.
Jon Tyson
Implication, don’t blame God for your brokenness. Ask Him to heal your brokenness and step into the middle of it. Don’t accuse God for what’s gone wrong. Invite Him into the situation to do something about it. This is such a test of wanting God. Do you want Him when it doesn’t go how you want?-
Reckless Devotion
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Break the most precious commodity of your life in reckless devotion at Jesus’ feet.
If you’re not criticized for how you follow Jesus, you haven’t broken the bottle yet.
Jon Tyson
At his feet. Listen, if you’re not getting criticized for how you’re following jesus you haven’t broken the bottle yet if people aren’t telling you that’s a bit much it’s not jesus you’re following I don’t want a Nazareth heart. I don’t want Nazareth to make its way into my spirit.-
Burnout Prevention
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Don’t hold back in fear of burning out.
Rely on the Holy Spirit, not ambition, to avoid burnout and achieve breakthroughs.
Jon Tyson
And some of you are holding back in self-preservation in fear that if you give it all, you’re not going to be able to sustain it. You can’t sustain it in the flesh. But if you try and hold it in the flesh, you’ll never get to a breakthrough in the Spirit. And you’ve got to just give yourself, listen, I’m not talking about volunteering in programs here. I’m not doing a recruitment, come and volunteer or anything. I’m just talking about giving your heart to serve Jesus. Listen, I have been burning since I was 17 years old. And all people say-
Spiritual Breakthrough
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Don’t hold back in fear of not being able to sustain your faith.
You can’t sustain true faith in the flesh; let go to experience a spiritual breakthrough.
Jon Tyson
And some of you are holding back in self-preservation in fear that if you give it all, you’re not going to be able to sustain it. You can’t sustain it in the flesh. But if you try and hold it in the flesh, you’ll never get to a breakthrough in the Spirit.
