00:01:18.960A sense of national greatness has been replaced with self-loathing and hatred of our forefathers.0.55
00:01:25.360Instead of funding great exploits like the space race and Apollo missions, we now fund civil rights welfare programs.
00:01:32.480Largely, this is because we lack the kind of bold, masculine leadership that inspires society's builders, entrepreneurs, statesmen, and artists to unleash their most creative potential.
00:01:44.680Instead of pouring our best strength into our best and most productive people,1.00
00:01:48.280we allow the fussers and malcontents to dominate the discourse and steer organizations.1.00
00:01:54.520What can get a society like ours unstuck?
00:01:57.500To answer this question, Friedman draws an interesting parallel between our era of bureaucratic stagnation
00:02:03.680and the age of exploration, which sparked the Renaissance,
00:02:06.660and one of the most monumental explosions of human invention,
00:02:11.060commerce, art, political theory, and theology.
00:02:14.860It wasn't that people suddenly got more data or increased in learning.
00:02:19.140Instead, it was because certain men arose,
00:02:22.240brave men willing to face the unknown, uncharted oceans,
00:02:25.760bands of bloodthirsty savages, and scores of unknown dangers.1.00
00:02:30.060Chief among them were the Portuguese,1.00
00:02:32.060a small country at the outer edge of Europe with little prominence,
00:03:13.180The qualities of adventurous leadership that enabled Europe to escape its doldrums are exactly the leadership qualities necessary for breaking the imaginative gridlock of our civilization today.
00:03:24.920The catalyst for those other imaginative breakthroughs was the nerve of the great navigators who led the way.
00:03:32.080Europe's imaginative capacity was unleashed not by a discovery of learning,
00:03:36.200but by the discovery of the new world, end quote.
00:03:39.980In other words, it was the nerve of certain leaders who embraced bold risk,
00:03:44.020set out into the unknown, and inspired generations of artisans, craftsmen, poets, and politicians to get to work.
00:03:52.440These same explorers would inspire future generations of explorers, entrepreneurs, and adventure seekers
00:03:58.480to establish Protestant outposts of Christian civilization in America.
00:04:03.100In this episode of the King's Hall podcast,
00:04:05.560we'll continue talking about great tribal leaders
00:04:08.200and why they're so essential for building Christian boroughs.
00:04:11.680We'll discuss men like Prince Henry the Navigator,
00:04:14.480who had the power to transform his generations because of his boldness,
00:04:18.640clarity of vision, and audacity to see the mission accomplished.
00:04:22.660We'll also be discussing the principles and characteristics of leadership
00:04:26.120that we've tried to cultivate here in Ogden.
00:04:28.480What we need is not merely men who have key insights or analysis, but men who have the
00:04:34.420nerve to set out on grand adventures, men who inspire others to pursue greatness and
00:08:56.360One of the things I think that's interesting as we're talking about leadership, I was fascinated reading Friedman's book, which a lot of people have talked about, Failure of Nerve.
00:09:05.880But one of the things I really like about this
00:09:07.740is the concept of the age of exploration.
00:09:11.700Not learning, but the age of exploration
00:15:44.240Enter Armored Haven, a Christian company that provides full-scale cybersecurity for any scale business.
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00:30:26.820Which are leaders who perpetuate the machine.
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00:31:10.400Well, and that's one of the hard things I think is because I looked at the same system through seminary and I was a part of it for a while.
00:32:39.360So I think that's factored into what we're trying to do now is we're saying like, well, we're certainly not going to train leaders by sending them to your run-of-the-mill seminary.
00:33:55.000Like say, say for fathers, in some sense, everyone has spheres where they're going to
00:33:59.960have to exercise some level of leadership.
00:34:02.720But as Paul says in Romans 12, and this is verses six through eight, that having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.
00:34:11.860Then he goes on to say the one who leads with zeal.
00:34:40.700The other thing that's interesting here in Paul's language, the Greek, leadership is kind of a soft word, I think, that's more palatable today.
00:35:24.360And that you can't just make anybody a leader. Leadership is not just the result of a certain curricular process, that you can just put anybody into this process and it produces a leader. And that's one of the problems of large-scale credentialing systems is that they can tend to just take anybody whose money is green. So in seminary, I know there are like pastoral references and you have to get certain things in most seminaries to get in, but they're not very rigorous or vigorous.
00:35:51.680No, and you can generally fake them pretty easily.
00:35:53.860You can pretty much find someone because people are not very good at saying no in our day and age.
00:35:59.020Well, think about the seminary itself.
00:36:00.980It's incentivized to take your money and bring you in.
00:39:28.660Where you would say, well, lead, but kind of apologize for anything that you do that's authoritative and responsibility-taking along the way.
00:39:37.500And I think it's just helpful to know, like, no, if you have the gift and other people confirm the gift in you, be zealous about that.
00:39:56.280He said, for this reason, I left you in Crete, that you would set in order, that's key, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city.
00:40:09.680And the thing that you need is fathers who rule well, who have been acknowledged at the church ecclesiastical level, that you have these gifts.
00:40:15.800You're really good at putting things in order.
00:40:18.220And so now I want you to do that in this context by appointing other leaders.
00:40:23.180So in a way, I kind of see that as what we're doing.
00:40:25.660anywhere there's chaos you find those men one of the ways we do it here is we'll find a younger
00:40:33.440guy not necessarily age-wise but maybe somebody who hasn't experienced leadership in the church
00:40:38.600we put him through the guild process so he's not a deacon or an elder at this point but you give
00:40:44.080him a small area and you say okay i want you to be in charge of tuesday night psalm sing
00:40:49.120and you can just watch brian like every single time it becomes abundantly clear who's gifted
00:40:55.600to order things well like you come in the next morning all the trash is taken out the tables
00:41:00.920are spick and span the doors are locked there's not homeless people living in the basement because
00:41:06.000the doors were left open it's happened um and you'll just watch and then and then the people
00:41:11.140around them will be like hey we decided to put this person in charge of another thing and and
00:41:15.880when they're good at leading people will say oh praise god oh what a relief been out of order
00:41:43.720Now you're able to actually rule men ruling well.
00:41:46.640And then you have eventually civilization.
00:41:49.740Yeah, setting things in order looks like, like we talked about last time, Exodus 18, setting leaders. So one of the primal tasks of leaders is actually to establish, raise up, train other leaders. That's how things are set in order.
00:42:05.060you're actually setting the hierarchy in order and you're identifying the gifts.
00:42:09.200You're basically, you're noticing something God did. And then like, like Adam, Adam noticed that
00:42:14.500a certain rock in the ground was very dense. And so he picked it up and he realized that if he
00:42:18.360heated it up and I'm just like Adam as humanity and he melted it down and he could make something
00:42:23.600that could till the earth very effectively. There was something God did. He put that rock there.
00:42:28.560And then there was something man did in obedience to God's commands and in accordance with God's
00:42:33.100creation of his nature as an order setter, an order bringer, dominion taker. Yeah. This is what
00:42:39.640a good leader does. He notices who should rule. He establishes what they should rule in. He tests
00:42:45.740them. He trains them. He kicks some out. He elevates some. To some, all will be taken and
00:42:51.280given to others who are bearing its good fruit. It's an unequal and non-communistic process.
00:44:14.580we kind of changed his seat to make it more specific
00:44:17.440where he was in charge of building maintenance.
00:44:20.720Yeah. Well, you have to understand, Kevin was a super, super gifted general contractor and a great man, a great pastor as well. Great at counseling. But I kind of had this thought. I was like, wait a minute. Why do we have other people doing building maintenance?
00:44:36.440this scene kevin is because he would come to me this is another way you identify a leader in a
00:44:42.020core area he would come to me and he'd say hey i see these problems with building maintenance
00:44:46.160i think here's a game plan to get three of them done in the next three months
00:44:49.920now and you'll have this light bulb moment where you go okay seize the problem has a working
00:44:55.900solution competent to carry it out experience holy cow we should put that guy in charge of that0.97
00:45:02.200calculating. And then I was thinking about this recently with, we've had a number of projects in
00:45:07.140the church, but even recently with a office remodel, the teacher said, Hey, we would like
00:45:12.960to turn this space. We need another office. We would like to turn it into a usable office space.
00:45:17.780And so we gave Kevin the green light. He had a proposal already, already came up with the
00:45:21.940proposal on his own in like a day. He said, here's how much it will cost. We gave the green light.
00:45:27.700And within two days, there are guys upstairs now almost done in like two days, almost done with the office.
00:45:36.080And Kevin's like, that is a guy who created order out of chaos.
00:45:48.360And a ruler in this sense also has to look at often a ruler sees a hundred problems.
00:45:54.660He knows about all of them to varying degrees.
00:45:56.580and he also has to be capable of 50 people coming in and say there's this problem there's this
00:46:01.700problem there's this problem there's this problem and saying i know that's a problem but it's number
00:46:06.44040 on the list we're not going to do anything about it right now it or hey great you noticed
00:46:12.880that problem here's some ways you could be the solution but right now our leadership team doesn't
00:46:17.100have bandwidth to go and solve that exact problem because we're doing this important work over here0.98
00:46:22.780So you see how rule requires zeal and confidence along with gentleness and humility to be able to interface with people well in a way that they don't feel like, well, you're just a huge jerk who's telling everybody all the time what to do.0.99
00:46:36.120But at the same time, he's not vulnerable to empathy and emotional manipulation where anytime he tries to lead, like you'll experience this leaders, anytime you try to lead in a strong way to solve a real problem, especially a problem of people in an organization, the first thing that will happen is that they will all call you an arrogant jerk.0.97
00:46:53.580oh yeah well and a big part of it too is let's say the more difficult thing like i described the0.94
00:47:00.300kevin griffin like that one is easy in one sense yeah because everybody's excited but what happens
00:47:07.460when you go to the guy and you say hey i think you're in the wrong seat yeah we need to change
00:47:11.440this but what if they've built their identity around what they thought they were good at but
00:47:15.100they're not and so what you end up doing in that situation is what's required of the leader i should
00:47:21.400say is you have to be really direct. Yeah. You have to shoot them straight. You are not passive
00:47:27.240aggressive. You're properly assertive. And you say, Hey, we've looked at this. We've tried a
00:47:32.140few different things. I don't think this is your gifting. And so we need to make a change. And
00:47:37.360there can be all sorts of, this is where the, uh, Friedman is where the concept of weaponized
00:47:42.100empathy that Joe Rigney is talking about. That's where it came from. Um, and he said,
00:47:46.600there's just organizations where let's say your church is changing and you go to the Sunday school
00:47:51.760leader and it's a woman and you say, Hey, we're not doing female rule anymore. Uh, we are, uh,
00:47:58.640you know, maybe even getting rid of Sunday school. There's a good chance that that person is going to
00:48:04.460fuss, complain, talk about how you're destroying her life. Uh, going to go talk to other people.
00:48:10.900Oh, the pastors, they don't appreciate my gifts and it's horrible. Yeah. You guys kind of had
00:48:15.700this years ago with women's ministry. Yeah. When we removed all of the women from doing basically
00:48:22.720quasi elder stuff. Yeah. Um, instead, instead women's ministry is going to be directly tight1.00
00:48:27.180as two older women teaching the younger women to be workers at home, love husband and children,1.00
00:48:31.020no more like Bible studies and this kind of thing. The men will be provide doing that. The elders,1.00
00:48:36.140um, it was the, it's in the top three most, um, aggressive opposition that I faced as a leader.0.98
00:48:45.340with, were from those women. Um, and you know, anytime that you as a leader are confronting
00:48:50.840women, you'll find that you're at a disadvantage because the optics are always bad. When, when
00:48:56.720you confront a woman, it can look like a guy who's picking a fight with a lady and guys who pick
00:49:00.700fights with ladies are often, you know, we call them cowards a lot of the time, culturally, like
00:49:04.800if you go pick a fist fight with a lady, um, but good leaders really do have to lead the women.
00:49:09.100And so it's not that they're picking fights with them trying to get in conflict, but sometimes if
00:49:13.640us, if someone insists on a fight with you, you can't always decline. Sometimes you actually have
00:49:18.200to go to bat and say, um, even to a church lady, you need to be quiet and you need to submit to
00:49:25.320the leaders of the church and you need to do so cheerfully the way that we teach our children to
00:49:29.520obey right away, all the way with a happy heart. And this is so much of it with Friedman where he
00:49:33.520talks about having the nerve, right? To be able to, it's the JD Vance. How do you defeat that
00:49:38.220kind of weaponized empathy? You have to be able to say, frankly, Margaret, I don't care. I don't
00:49:42.860care this is right it's good for our nation and we have to push forward yeah friedman will tell
00:49:47.120the story in his book a couple different ways and times but like he'll he would be speaking at
00:49:51.860something and somebody would bring in like the colonization you know you're just a white man
00:49:56.440and you're colonizing blah blah blah and he would say that is wildly off topic i do not care about
00:50:01.560your point and if you would like to ask something relevant to the subject i'll answer it otherwise
00:50:05.360sit down and shut up and you have to do that you have to be able to absolutely to have that and i
00:50:11.860think even in the context of relationships in organizations with other men yeah where you say0.80
00:50:17.160somebody could throw a fit and say well no i you know i'm not i'm not giving up the seat or i'm not
00:50:21.300doing this thing and then you say yeah no i'm sorry like this is what's best we weren't voting
00:50:25.980we're not voting i'm telling you what's happening uh and here's another i i'll drop kind of this in
00:50:31.820here it's just uh you know put a feather in your cap but this was gary kubiak and he had a as a
00:50:38.360coach in the nfl he was a broncos coach obviously coach in the nfl yeah i'm sorry everybody knows
00:50:42.920this but a couple superbowls with the broncos obviously a couple superbowls with the broncos
00:50:47.020tip of my tongue the superbowl year i think was pivotal though because he there was one point
00:50:53.140where peyton manning wanted to keep playing yeah but he was injured because he was like 107 years
00:50:57.220old at that point in football years yes and he's injured and i think in the first half against the
00:51:03.920Chiefs he throws this is like mid-season he throws like four consecutive interceptions
00:51:07.560he had no juice on the ball because his foot was hurt and Gary calls him to the sidelines he said
00:51:12.880Peyton this is not working I'm benching you and you could see it Peyton is upset they put in
00:51:19.900Brock Osweiler Denver goes on this streak and they get back in the playoffs they went from like
00:51:25.700they looked awful to then they got the number one seed wow they end up winning the Super Bowl but
00:57:27.240Yeah, you do see this where, and I can envision exactly, there's so many examples of this thing where you can have trend chasing where it's just, this is in and so I'm going to ride it and then it's out.
00:57:41.080And so I'm now a whole new person all of a sudden.
01:31:02.460Oh, yeah. You'd think that in five years you would have figured it all out. Absolutely not. It's why in our leadership guild and in training and especially diaconal and elder ministry in our church, we very much avoid laying hands on men who are younger than about 30.
01:31:18.820And which is ironic because I just said that and I'm, I, I was ordained at like 21, something, something stupid like that.0.96
01:31:28.160But what, what we tend to select for now are men who have 10 to 15 years of good stability in their life already in their home and business and whatever else they've put their hand to.
01:31:39.620And then have desire, aptitude, opportunity.
01:31:41.960And then we say, let's give you training and test you out for a role like a deacon or an elder, or even just in a churchman guild where we're training men just to be good men in the church.
01:31:51.060um and the reason that we're doing that is because over time as an organization gets more mature and
01:31:58.500grows more and more um you start to see the value of that depth of stability and the the depth of
01:32:07.060provenness in fruit that and how valuable that truly is over time um and those people are always
01:32:14.560going to be people that have had five ten plus years in the saddle of just like proven they can
01:32:19.140handle conflict and handle problems that's easier to like when you're thinking about even for our
01:32:24.000people we're looking for long-term yeah like leaders are long-term investments but are you
01:32:29.100going to make a long-term investment if you know somebody's going to be here for two years no no
01:32:33.900and we've had a lot of people ask like hey could i come to your church and be trained for a year
01:32:37.820and then you send me out and we're like no it's not no that we don't even wouldn't love that that
01:32:42.680if that were possible it's just not possible oh there's not enough time oh it's you know
01:32:48.680You couldn't catch nearly everything you need to catch in a year here.
01:34:12.800so that you have the luxury of we've recognized man it'd be great to have four more elders right
01:34:18.060now so the thing to do is to say well when should we have started our leadership pipeline 10 years
01:34:23.680ago well now it's it's been a couple years with this leadership pipeline in place and the fruit
01:34:28.540is coming out the other end to where you're like wow this guy could be an elder he's so good let's
01:34:34.520let's invite him into candidacy we got a guy coming into candidacy right now lord willing and
01:34:39.340you're just like this is such a good a good solid guy yeah but you look back where did he start
01:34:44.900in the process even with us that was years ago yeah and i think that's the other part is like
01:34:49.920being able to identify like an 18 year old 20 year old 21 23 somewhere in there yeah and you say okay
01:34:56.780here's what you need to do in your 20s and your mid 30s so that you know you're being trained
01:35:03.240You're getting qualification and then by 40, 35 to 40 would be more ideal for participation in a lot more of the actual like diaconal elder functions of the church.
01:35:17.340And it is cool because like now we're like, well, we have time.
01:35:20.120and then you have this power band from like 25 of 25 years from 35 to 60 where you have the vigor
01:35:28.980still in body and you have the seasoning and maturity and you can just be massively fruitful
01:35:37.880and and every once like there are exceptions providentially too i think sometimes you look
01:35:42.960at a younger man and you say you know what this is that one guy in a thousand that at 26
01:40:29.280It's like, so you think of Jason and the Argonauts or David and his mighty men.
01:40:33.740It's always a tribe of people accomplishing great things.
01:40:38.720So I just want to ask you, I guess, why do you think it's so hard today for men to form, first of all, masculine friendships, but then to have tribes of men who are ruling well together?
01:40:48.440well we have such a cultural militancy against this kind of formation of because we don't like
01:40:56.360well dei actually it makes it illegal this yeah like most places actually illegal like in a
01:41:02.840company yeah pretty much illegal you just they will put you in jail or destroy your company if
01:41:08.660you try well that's actually the irony i was thinking about this like with amazon yeah my0.79
01:41:13.340brother worked there and he was saying yeah like they would have like the gay group and they would
01:41:17.640have like the trans group but he he went to them and he was like yeah i'm starting a group it's
01:41:22.540for men only and they were like we will fire you and you're like wait i don't understand0.82
01:41:28.000you're not allowed to assemble which is actually a violation of the constitution by the way free
01:41:32.120freedom to assemble long long house culture doesn't like a man it definitely doesn't like men
01:41:37.800so men the thing about men is they don't truly become fully men until they are together with
01:41:44.700other men. Yes. In some context, I don't mean like you're not a man when you're alone and all
01:41:49.340of a sudden you're a man when you're in a group, but that it takes a group of men to create men
01:41:53.260who are fully formed and forged into men. So male spaces are particularly hated by a long
01:42:00.140house culture because of their maleness. It's not that, that it, they'll allow things that are like0.96
01:42:06.560male spaces that are fake. Like they would be fine with men going to group therapy,0.67
01:42:11.980Group therapy, that's what I was thinking of.
01:42:13.580You know, they'd be fine with that.1.00
01:42:14.620They'd be fine with men going to a gay orgy.1.00
01:42:17.820Like, but they wouldn't be fine with a group of men who are just being actual men becoming more manly as they, you know, love one another and grow in friendship.
01:42:27.880But it's, you know, even that, though, the system can't keep it down.
01:42:31.840Look at the popularity of Top Gear, for example.
01:47:38.820Because if I went and I had a conversation
01:47:42.160with all 500 people who attended church a sunday ago or two sundays ago um i don't know that it
01:47:49.880would produce the same tuning fork mechanism where it's like one sermon one message we all
01:47:56.480heard it why is that function of public speech so important for for developing this tribe tribe
01:48:02.720for mentality we yeah because the the context where you're all eating the same food are very
01:48:07.560important. So that includes the same intellectual food, the same rhetorical food. When you're,
01:48:13.620when you're being formed by the same words, the same word of God preached, the same podcasts
01:48:19.280listened to, like mass communication is very, very important. There's a reason that political
01:48:24.360speeches still put a premium on a lot of people gathering in a campaign. And they say, wow,
01:48:31.760a million people came out or 200,000 people came out to hear this politician cast the vision for
01:48:37.140what he wants to do with the office that he's running for. So these are conversations where
01:48:42.720you think about them like, yeah, if there's 500 people there on a Sunday and I preach for 45
01:48:47.260minutes to all of them, you've just put in, I don't know, 400 hours or 300 and something hours
01:48:53.760of communication, man hours, listening hours of the people. I couldn't accomplish that in a whole
01:48:59.680week of 24 seven meetings. Like it just, that's how the math works. But at the same time, it's
01:49:05.500also powerful because it is like a tuning fork. It's like the conductor standing in front of the
01:49:09.720symphony and hitting middle C. And then the strings come in and then the horns come in and
01:49:16.420then everybody slowly comes in and they sing that middle C all together, or they play that middle
01:49:21.880C and they all get in tune. And then they can play a song together where they're all different
01:49:25.840and they all go out in their own ways. So one sermon is going to speak to 500 people in 500
01:49:30.400are different ways because the Lord made the world that way. It's very important in those
01:49:36.800sermons. And you guys have been good at this because I've actually tended from the pulpit
01:49:41.600particularly to sort of overcorrect away from some of the, I don't like, I think in the Acts 29
01:49:49.280world, not to pick on them again, but there was a lot of like pastors telling stories about how
01:49:56.500great they were. Like the, like where the pastor would sit down and be like, today, the sermon is
01:50:02.220called, I am literally Nehemiah. And it's going to be about, believe it or not, how I am literally
01:50:10.160Nehemiah, me, the pastor. And so I just wanted to point that out all the ways that I am literally
01:50:15.920like Nehemiah. And that really, I think there was a, there's a way in which like great men who are
01:50:23.020great rhetoricians. They can preach a sermon like that. And it really actually moves people and
01:50:27.260people want to imitate. Like there's a, there is a place for a pastor even saying, imitate me as
01:50:31.600I imitate Christ. However, I got kind of overcorrected away from that and need the team
01:50:36.580to be like, Hey, remember to tell the people like the Lord has given us a great task and he's called
01:50:44.460us to great things. And the scriptures are calling us to walk in these good works. And if we will do
01:50:50.820them and the Lord is on our side. Think of the idols that could be torn down and think of the
01:50:55.140ground that could be taken for the sake of the kingdom and think of the lives that could be
01:50:58.480freed from sin. Like that, uh, I have a dream speech moment a little bit. Um, so I'm, I, I'm
01:51:05.200even, I have to challenge myself more to say, don't forget to do that. Well, it's interesting
01:51:10.640because Friedman will talk about this, that, uh, today in leadership discussions in business,
01:51:15.680Most people think, okay, if we want to, you know, do better as a business or family institution, whatever it is, what we really need to do is we need to have better techniques.