Your Covenant Pathway to a Preferred Future with Terry Hoggard (Ep 363)

Stop drifting and discover your covenant pathway to a preferred future. Veteran missionary Terry Hoggard reveals a transformative three-movement practice: foundation, strategic insight, and covenant with God. This isn't goal-setting—it's positioning yourself in the center of what God is doing. This calibration time gives God opportunity to download fresh vision for your next season.

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See the full episode transcript below.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Your Covenant Pathway to a Preferred Future with Terry Hoggard

Brian: Welcome to the podcast today, friends. I have a great family member and friend and a co-laborer. We work together on some projects, some kingdom projects. Terry Hoggard is with us, and we are discussing something today. We're at the outset of the new year. I think these dynamics could be applied anytime. I don't think we have to do a reboot just in January, right, Terry?

Terry: It's a great moment to capture in my heart, so I love it. I'm cleaning up everything I know to do with the old year going out, and I want to be there hands wide open saying, "Here I am, Lord. I've got some things to talk to You about, and I'm sure You have some things to say to me."

Brian: Amen. Yes, absolutely. And sometimes people will listen to an episode like six months later. I put out something recently encouraging people to think about 90-day years—the winter season, the spring season, summer, fall. You can continually start afresh, start anew. But definitely at the beginning of our year is a great time. People are of this mindset, aren't they, in January? It's just a natural tendency, it seems.

Meet Terry Hoggard

Terry Hoggard has served for 30 years as a missionary leader across Europe with the Assemblies of God. He's provided pastoral leadership in Rome, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Malmö, Sweden. He has also equipped international teams and built cross-cultural networks around the world, including Asia, throughout his ministry. And Terry and his wife Ruthanne, my cousin on my dad's side, continue to invest in leaders globally. Thank you for being here. And what else could you say about the Lord's workings in your life currently?

Terry: Well, at this moment I'm still highly engaged with the network of churches, so I still have intimate connection to the four churches that you mentioned. But in early 2004, I think, we built out what we called FEIC—Fellowship of European International Churches. It's an incredible network still going strong.

And then in 2011 we met for a summit. Every year we'd gather, and in 2011 we were praying on our way to say goodbye. A friend of mine, his name is Al Perna, was praying, and he just felt like the Lord was saying, "Now's the time to extend the tent. We've been here together for almost a decade, but there's all these other churches and the movement of the nations and the diaspora." Three times God spoke to us. We have to do something.

Well, at this moment, our leader of the Assemblies of God World Missions was brand new. His name was Greg Mundus. I said, "Greg, you know we have FEIC. How would you feel about us bringing all the regions—Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, Northern Asia—and begin to create a network that would allow each one of these regions to be intimately connected internally, but by expansion they have the whole world?" And Greg said, "That's a good idea."

Brian: So that came out of prayer both in your own life and in partnership with others. Pattern recognition—what the Lord is continuously saying and doing. How important is it for all of us to be people of prayer, to be connected with others in prayer, to live our best calling before God?

Terry: Absolutely. In fact, all those things—it's all about the capacity of the community. These guys were lined up behind me or around me, and I didn't even know that this was something that anyone was percolating. I think God spoke sovereignly in that moment. And from that initiative, God birthed something that was just so amazing.

Brian: Percolating. I like that. Percolating in the Holy Spirit. I had a friend who said, "Kingdom currency runs on kingdom connections." That's vital, isn't it, for all of us to have quality, authenticity, kingdom connectivity so that the Holy Spirit can run on that?

Terry: Absolutely.

Three Words: Clarity, Closure, Catalytic

Brian: This is a time, Terry. I was actually thinking this morning about three words that begin with C: clarity, closure, and catalytic. What could you say about just the need to get clarity from the Lord, to maybe bring closure looking back to some things that need to close, and turn to the future and be catalytic with new things that need to open up? What do you think about that? Clarity, closure, catalytic.

Terry: Well, I guess I would say this. I think in every situation, but specifically in these kinds of things that are strategic and they're emerging, I think it's the posture of your heart. If you have something you want to take to the Father and you want to talk about it, it's a wonderful thing. But if you just go saying, "Lord, I'm not sure what it is. Let clarity come. Let there be catalytic realities that would confirm that this is what You want me to do." I know there's a lot of things we can do—we can read books and we can hear other things—but I think the seed is born out of the heart. And the posture and the positioning of the heart would be absolutely critical.

Brian: Yeah. And the partnership with the Creator in the prayer and the positioning ourselves to receive new initiatives and to really begin to pray them into being, right?

Terry: Yeah.

The Three Movements Toward Your Preferred Future

Brian: Now, you recently shared something with me, at my request, something that you and your wife Ruthanne go through every holiday season approaching the new year. You pursue—you're really going after a pathway that leads to a preferred future. I appreciate you being willing to share this personal practice that you do with your wife, but I think it can apply to all of us. What is that approach? What are those three movements? I'd just love to hear about that again.

Terry: Here's what it really is. My first expression is that I want to openly open my heart and openly confess. I'm here at the end of 2025, and I have some notes here that I carried out of this same moment a year ago. And, Lord, I know there are things here that I was so eager to engage, and somehow along the way, as much as God did glorious things, I think I left this one not unattended, but I didn't bring it into fulfillment.

So I began something knowing that. And then I began to realize this time—there's always a way it works. The first thing that struck my heart was foundation. And what I knew was I needed a foundation that was solid and sure. Because to live out the mandate of God is something that really needs to be built around the most powerful platform that anyone could stand on. I don't want to have one foot up on a ledge. I don't want to be right to the center or right to the left. I want to be right in the center of what God is doing. So that was really important to me.

The second thing that I found would be important to me is not just foundation, but that I wanted to have the opportunity to have strategic insight. Because I know there are things here that I need to see to get beyond where I am. And I want that to be a reality.

And then the other thing was that I wanted to come to this place where I would sort of make it a covenant with God—that these things that I've written and spoken with my wife about, and one of my daughters came with us (she loves to do this thing as well), I want it to be not just a matter of words and not even commitment as much as—I do love commitment—but I said, "Lord, before I leave this time of prayer, we spent the whole hour, two hours actually, doing our work and writing and praying at the end. But I want this to be a locked-in covenant so that I am being provoked every single day when I just stop and pray." I've been doing it now. I'm doing a lot of Bible reading and looking into the whole foundation thing because I think that's important. I think if we don't get a foundation right, we can somehow be swept away unintentionally, but it can be very traumatic.

Brian: So the basics, the basic foundational elements—the Word of God, prayer, consecration. And so you prioritize that and build off of that. And you're tapping the power of covenant. Correct me if I'm wrong, Terry—I'm learning, trying to learn all the time—but I'm not sure that many...