Summit Podcasts: BACK40, Sermon Audio, and Leadership Night

Summit Church
  • 5.0 (14)
  • Christianity
  • Updated Semiweekly

The official podcast network of Summit Church. Here you will find The Back40 Leadership Podcast, Sermon Audio, Leadership Night, and much more.

  1. 2d ago

    Leadership Night - The Importance of Mentoring

    This week on Leadership Night, Pastor Mel teaches on the importance of mentoring — why most leaders underestimate it, and what it costs us to try to go it alone. He opens with a reminder that the Global Leadership Summit is coming to Summit Church on August 6th and 7th, then makes the case with the data: employees who receive mentoring are promoted about five times more often, roughly three-quarters of executives credit mentoring as key to their careers, and mentoring quietly drives retention along with real cultural and financial benefits for an organization. From there Mel gets practical about how to actually find a mentor. First, go find one — aspire rather than settle, be a "big game hunter," and don't limit yourself to a single person; pursue different mentors for the different areas you want to grow. Second, look for what a prospective mentor is genuinely passionate about. Third, be willing to ask — ask many people, and don't ask the first time you meet them (he tells of pursuing Dan Reiland, considered one of the first executive pastors in the country, and fighting to get a single hour on his calendar). Fourth, evaluate the relationship honestly. He names his own mentors along the way, including Pastor John Nuzzo of Victory Family Church. Then he turns the whole thing around: you weren't made only to find a mentor — you were made to become one. His warning lands hard for anyone winning right now but pouring into no one: that kind of success has a short shelf life, because nothing is being replicated. The challenge is to measure your leadership not by what you're building, but by who you're raising up.

    Leadership Night - The Importance of Mentoring

  2. 2d ago

    BACK40 E125 - Wrongful Certainty, What to Confess, Trusting Grizzly Bears

    Mel, Joel, and Michael wrestle with a question that sounds simple and turns out to be anything but: we tell leaders to be convictional, but is conviction really the same thing as certainty? What happens when a leader's certainty quietly outruns the evidence — and how would you ever catch that in yourself, from the inside? The conversation moves from character and maturity to why leaders hide. They talk about pride and the refusal to change your mind, how audiences accept sounding certain as being certain, and the insecurity that makes us want to look sure even when we're not (with a nod to Moses leaving the veil on so no one would see the glory had faded). Along the way they land on a grizzly-bear picture of trust and character: you can only trust a person as far as their proven character warrants, and you shouldn't be shocked when someone acts out of the character they've already shown. From there they discuss vulnerability, accountability, and confession. Not as punishment, but as a pathway back to health. They contrast honest transparency with the performative "pay attention to me" kind, make the case for living above reproach, and reframe accountability as something that's genuinely for your good. Mel closes with the story of a well-known pastor who secretly hid a drink until the Holy Spirit confronted him with why he felt he had to hide it — and who, by confessing and receiving grace, found years of renewed fruitfulness. The takeaway: confession is a doorway forward, not a death sentence.

    BACK40 E125 - Wrongful Certainty, What to Confess, Trusting Grizzly Bears

  3. 6d ago

    Prepare the Way - Week 2 Discussion

    Mel, Joel, and Michael unpack Week 2 of the Prepare the Way series - Pastor Mel's message on blessing and obedience. They start by challenging how we use the word "blessing." In the Western world we've tied it to what we own - the car, the bank account - but tracing it back to the Hebrew (barak, which also means to kneel) and the Greek (makarios), the trio lands on a different definition: blessing is God's presence, being with him, not what he can give us. Next they talk about discerning good things that draw us toward God from ones that pull us away, the rich young ruler whose "blessings" hardened his heart, and Jesus' words in Luke 11: blessed are those who hear the word of God and put it into practice. Blessing, it turns out, is bound up in obedience. The back half turns to 1 Samuel 15 and King Saul - sparing what God told him to destroy and dressing it up as worship. Mel names the ways we disguise disobedience in spiritual language ("you don't have a prayer chain, you have a gossip chain"; "I'll pray about it"), why there's no such thing as partial obedience, how the things we neglect today get handed down to the people who come after us, and the difference between humility and insecurity that sat at the root of Saul's downfall. A candid, wide-ranging companion to the Prepare the Way message - with a few classic BACK40 detours along the way. If it helps you, share it with someone.

    Prepare the Way - Week 2 Discussion

  4. Jul 7

    Prepare the Way - Week 1 Discussion

    Mel, Joel, and Michael sit down to unpack Week 1 of the Prepare the Way series — the message that set the theme for the entire year. Their conversation centers on a searching question: what does it actually mean to prepare the way of the Lord, not as a one-time event but as a daily practice? They talk candidly about spiritual seasons, the let-down of living only for the next big moment, and the unglamorous work of building the “infrastructure” of a growing life — drawing on real pastoral experience: churches outpaced by their own growth, Joel’s transition into ministry, and the everyday discipline of ordering your life so you’re ready when God moves.

    Prepare the Way - Week 1 Discussion

  5. Jul 3

    Prepare the Way: The Sermon Discussions

    Throughout the month of July, Summit is rebroadcasting Prepare the Way — the series that set the theme for 2026. This year the rebroadcast comes with something new: for each week of the series, Pastor Mel, Pastor Joel, and Michael Baun sat down for an hour-long unedited conversation starting right where the sermon ends. These discussions have never been seen before and will premiere during the rebroadcast. Tune in at normal service times — Saturday at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 9 and 11 a.m. — on Facebook, YouTube, or live.summitpa.church. Note that At the Movies, Summit's in-person July series, will not be streamed due to copyright restrictions.

    Prepare the Way: The Sermon Discussions

  6. Jun 27

    Romans - Week 18: Romans 11:1-36

    This week Pastor Mel preaches Romans 11, the climax of Paul's three-chapter argument about Israel — and he opens with the question driving all of it: has God rejected his own people? Paul's answer is immediate: of course not. God has not rejected the people he chose from the beginning. Mel uses the chapter to address a real fault line. He explains and pushes back on replacement theology — the view that the Church has replaced Israel in covenant — arguing instead that the Gentile Church was grafted in, while God still holds a special covenant with Israel. He teaches the faithful remnant, prevenient grace, and the hardening of hearts, then slows down on the heart of the passage: Paul's olive-tree picture, where a wild Gentile branch is grafted into Israel's cultivated root and — because the root is good — begins to bear good fruit. He ties it to Jesus in John 15: apart from me you can do nothing. Along the way Mel answers whether a believer can lose their salvation (you can't lose it accidentally, but you can forfeit it), surveys the three views of what "all Israel will be saved" means, and lands on the truth that holds it all together: God's gifts and his call can never be withdrawn. The invitation never expires. 1. Where do you feel like you're the "only one" still following Jesus — and how does the truth of the remnant (1 Kings 19) change the way you carry it? 2. The Church didn't replace Israel — it was grafted in. Pride sneaks into faith as a quiet sense of having earned our place. Where do you catch yourself acting like the root rather than a branch? 3. "If the root is good, the fruit is good." What does staying connected to the root look like in your actual week — and where have you been trying to produce fruit on your own strength? 4. Mel says you can't lose your salvation accidentally, but you can forfeit it through persistent, unrepentant disobedience. Is there an area where you "know what God wants" but have quietly decided God will adjust to you? 5. "God's gifts and his call can never be withdrawn." Who in your life has said "no" to God? How does knowing the invitation is still open change how you pray for and pursue them?

    Romans - Week 18: Romans 11:1-36

  7. Jun 27

    BACK40 E124 - Politics and Secret Sins

    This week on the BACK40, Michael Baun sits down with Pastors Mel Masengale and Joel Maus for another round of "Asking for a Friend" — and they take on some of the hardest, most personal questions people are quietly carrying. Is same-sex attraction a sin? Can someone who is gay serve as a volunteer or worship leader? How does a person caught in addiction actually find freedom? And what should politics look like in the life of a follower of Jesus? They draw a careful line between attraction and identity, and between sin and the justification of sin, returning again and again to one truth: shame drives us away from God, but conviction draws us back to Him. They talk honestly about why confession breaks the power of secret sin, why you must flee a sin's associations and not merely the substance, and how to choose wisely the people you confess to. And when the conversation turns to politics, abortion, and marriage, they land somewhere bracing — that the answer is never to be louder, but to treat the person across from you as someone loved by God, an image-bearer to be won to Christ, long before they are ever a vote.

    BACK40 E124 - Politics and Secret Sins

  8. Jun 21

    Leadership Night - Lessons from General Washington

    This week on Leadership Night, Pastor Mel explores the leadership of General George Washington during the hardest year of the American Revolution — 1776. Recorded as the country approaches its 250th birthday and drawing on David McCullough's book "1776," the conversation looks past the marble statues to a leader staring down impossible odds: a ragtag army of farmers, shoemakers, and schoolteachers, short on supplies, money, and time, facing one of the most powerful militaries on earth. It's a study in leading through defeat. Britain dismissed the colonies as untrained "rabble" and no real threat — and for much of that first year, the scoreboard agreed with them. Washington drove the British out of Boston, then watched it unravel: defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn, the loss of New York City, and a long, painful retreat through New Jersey. What set him apart was sober realism — "while everyone else slept, he could not, because he knew the danger" — and the resolve, on Christmas Eve with his army nearly spent, to propose something daring and cross the Delaware. The hosts call the nation's survival not luck but Providence. From there the conversation widens into leadership principles you can use anywhere: why attention to detail matters and how success quietly disconnects leaders from the small things; why casting a clear vision and earning buy-in is everything (as John Maxwell puts it, "if no one is following you, you're just going for a walk"); the danger of "pot-committed" all-in moments versus losing your nerve mid-decision; and the conviction that the system is never the answer — the people are. Bad people wreck even the best structure; the right people make almost any structure work.

    Leadership Night - Lessons from General Washington
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The official podcast network of Summit Church. Here you will find The Back40 Leadership Podcast, Sermon Audio, Leadership Night, and much more.

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