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Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Weekly sermons from our Central Lutheran Church preaching team plus quick reflections from Pastor Ryan Braley.
Real talk, ancient wisdom, and honest questions — all designed to help you learn, grow, and find encouragement when you need it most.
At Central, our mission is simple: FOLLOW Jesus together, be a community where you BELONG, and LOVE our neighbors across the street and around the world.
Think deeper. Live freer. Share an episode with a friend and visit us in person anytime — you’re always welcome here in Elk River, MN.
Episodes
299 episodes
#138 - Go First {Reflections}
Most of us don’t need more information, we need a simple move that breaks the gridlock of hesitation. Today we’re leaning on a two-word rule for life that hits with surprising force: go first. Inspired by Gabrielle Reece (and the training-for-l...
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To The Lord with Sonja Knutson
“To the Lord” sounds like a toast, but it can also be a way of living. We take the final stretch of Colossians and bring it down to street level: how Jesus reshapes what we do with our relationships, our work, our words, and our time when nobod...
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#137 - There Is Nothing New Under the Sun {Reflections}
A stand-up comedian delivers the punchline of the year: modern pastors trying to solve modern problems with an ancient book, like a husband leaving for an AI TikTok dancer while the pastor scrambles for a Bible verse. We start there because the...
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Out with the Old, In with the New with Pastor Ryan Braley
You can’t staple Jesus onto an already busy life and call it transformation. Colossians 3 forces a sharper question: if you’ve been raised with Christ, what has to die so the real you can finally live? We walk through Paul’s pattern step by ste...
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#136 - Faithful with Little {Reflections}
The fastest character test isn’t a big spotlight moment, it’s what we do with the small responsibilities nobody notices. We wrestle with a sharp line from Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: if you can be trusted with very little, you can be trusted w...
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Rules, Rules, Rules with Pastor Ryan Braley
If you’ve ever felt squeezed between “fit in with the culture” and “prove you’re serious with more rules,” Colossians 2 hits uncomfortably close to home. We walk through why the earliest Christians in a Greco-Roman town felt pressure to add Jes...
#135 - Where Are You? {Reflections}
God’s first move after failure isn’t a lecture. It’s a question: “Where are you?” Ryan takes us into Genesis 3, back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve reach for the forbidden fruit, feel their eyes open, and suddenly want to cover up. T...
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Beliefs Buffet with Pastor Ben Carruthers
Faith rarely gets attacked head-on. More often, it gets diluted. We keep Jesus on the plate, but we start piling on extras that feel practical, modern, and safe: success, comfort, status, control, and the need to be affirmed. That’s the “belief...
#134 - Why Your Plan Isn’t Giving You Peace {Reflections}
Your brain loves a plan, but that doesn’t mean your plan is love. We tell a story from a pilgrimage in Israel where our guide refused to share the itinerary, and it instantly revealed how quickly the ego reaches for control when certainty disap...
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#133 - What If Nostalgia Is a Map? {Reflections}
Nostalgia can sneak up on you and suddenly you’re missing a version of life you can’t actually return to. After a weekend back in Colorado with old friends, I find myself asking why the “olden days” can feel so magnetic in midlife, and why tryi...
The God Who Sees with Rob Morris from LOVE146
Some messages don’t just inform you, they pull your head up and make you look at people differently. We sit down with Rob Morris, founder and CEO emeritus of Love146, to talk about ending child trafficking and exploitation and why this work sta...
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#132 - Two Questions That Change Everything {Reflections}
Two questions can stop you in your tracks, the way a guard’s shout can freeze a stranger at the wrong gate: Who are you? And what are you doing here? Ryan opens with an old story about Rabbi Akiva taking a wrong turn and ending up face-to-face ...
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Underneath It All with Pastor Ryan Braley
Underneath everything we argue about, fear, chase, and try to control sits a claim that is either liberating or offensive: Jesus Christ is the center of it all. We walk through Colossians 1 and an early Christian hymn that calls Jesus the image...
How to (Clumsily) Practice Resurrection with Pastor Ryan Braley
Easter isn’t asking you to admire a nice message about springtime. We’re talking about a claim that is either breathtakingly true or totally disruptive: Jesus is raised bodily, seen and touched, and that resurrection is the first sign that God ...
How Is This Night Different? with Sonja Knutson
A strange greeting like “Happy Maundy Thursday” can sound like code, and we get it because church language can feel like trying to explain a sport nobody’s ever watched. So we slow down and tell the story in plain words: the night Jesus gathers...
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#131 - The Most Uncomfortable Day in Christianity {Reflections}
We’re wired to love winners, which makes Holy Week oddly uncomfortable. Easter Sunday is bright and obvious, but Good Friday is slow, humiliating, and hard to look at. That’s exactly why we need it. I talk about why I used to avoid crucifixes, ...
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The Crucifixion with Pastor Ryan Braley
Rome didn’t just rule with soldiers, it ruled with stories. One of its loudest stories was the Roman triumph: a victory parade that crowned the emperor, filled the streets with incense, and trained everyone to believe that real power looks like...
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#130 - What If Salvation Starts With Diagnosis {Reflections}
“What must I do to be saved?” sounds like it should have one clean answer. We can quote Paul in Romans without blinking: confess Jesus as Lord and believe in the resurrection. But when people bring that same question to Jesus in the Gospels, he...
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The Consoling with Pastor Ben Carruthers
Five people stand near Jesus as he suffers on the cross, and that detail changes how I read John 19. While so many disappear into fear, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Mary the wife of Clopas, and John stay close enough to be counted. That’s not ...
#129 - Scapegoat Season {Reflections}
A crowd can make good people do ugly things, and sometimes the scariest part is how normal it feels while it’s happening. We start with a haunting detail from Mark’s Gospel: while Jesus is being crucified, random passersby still stop to hurl in...
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The Mocking with Sonja Knutson
Mockery feels small until it hits the core of who you are. On a snowy morning, we keep walking the Lenten journey to the cross and sit with one of the hardest scenes to read: Jesus being laughed at, dressed up, spat on, and publicly shamed. Son...
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#128 - Your Boos Mean Nothing {Reflections}
The crowd can be loud, confident, and completely wrong. We’re in the Lenten stretch, and I want to talk about a trap that shows up everywhere from pop culture to politics to Holy Week: the madness of crowds and the craving to be approved by the...
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The Cyrenian with Pastor Ryan Braley
A stranger is yanked from a crowd and everything changes. We follow Simon of Cyrene, an African pilgrim likely in Jerusalem for Passover, as he’s forced to shoulder Jesus’ cross—a single-verse moment that quietly reshapes church history and dis...
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#127 - Head on a Swivel: Staying Awake in a Distracted World {Reflections}
What if the difference between a grounded life and a regretful one is as simple—and as hard—as paying attention? We connect three vivid scenes: a bodyguard’s rule for staying safe, a culture bent over its phones, and a midnight vigil in the Gar...
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