The King's Hall - Pastoral, Plodding, & Productive

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00:00:34.700 some few hundred years ago in england there was a man who was an inquisitive traveling merchant

00:00:56.660 he would go town to town trading buying and selling not only household items but also news

00:01:02.800 and gossip from neighboring villages.

00:01:05.160 So it was of great interest to him

00:01:06.660 when traveling the muddy roads,

00:01:08.480 entering a town,

00:01:09.520 he heard the ringing sound of tool and stone

00:01:11.660 and the groans of mules and men.

00:01:14.180 He followed the sounds

00:01:15.200 and came to a new construction site.

00:01:17.620 There were great stacks of stones

00:01:19.080 and piles of earth

00:01:20.100 with many men doing the hard work of building.

00:01:23.340 The merchant,

00:01:24.600 not having heard the news of this building project,

00:01:27.440 approached three men who were cutting stone

00:01:29.560 to inquire about what they were building.

00:01:32.280 He said to the first stonecutter,

00:01:34.080 Hello, friend. May I be so bold as to inquire what you are about?

00:01:38.360 The stonecutter, with slumped shoulders and dull eyes,

00:01:41.760 briefly looked at the merchant and said,

00:01:43.740 What am I about? I'm cutting stones. That's all there is to it.

00:01:47.820 The merchant, not finding this information to be of any help,

00:01:51.660 approached the second stonecutter, who looked like an intelligent man.

00:01:55.340 He had no dust on his clothing.

00:01:57.140 His uncalloused hands were making many marks on the stone and then erasing them.

00:02:01.760 He would hum and grunt and mutter to himself, shaking his head.

00:02:05.980 The merchant said to him,

00:02:06.960 Looks like you're putting a lot of thought into cutting these stones.

00:02:10.080 What, may I ask, are you building?

00:02:11.940 The stonecutter, with a look of frustration at the interruption of this conversation with himself, snapped.

00:02:17.960 What was that? Building? It's not as simple as all that.

00:02:20.560 I'm the most knowledgeable stonecutter that you've ever seen.

00:02:23.820 There's more to stonecutting than building.

00:02:25.620 There's technique, there's the study of the stone, there's the nuance of the whole thing.

00:02:29.120 I've studied under the best stone cutters and read the best works on stone cutting.

00:02:33.040 I don't have time for building.

00:02:34.460 It's stone cutting that makes the whole thing work.

00:02:37.520 The merchant, quite frustrated at this point,

00:02:39.780 still not having attained the basic information he was looking for,

00:02:42.820 abruptly asked the third stone cutter,

00:02:45.200 Man, whatever are you building?

00:02:46.860 The third stone cutter looked up from the stone he was cutting and smiled.

00:02:50.140 His face and hair were covered in dust.

00:02:52.200 His bright eyes shining like stained glass looked at the merchant.

00:02:55.740 He said,

00:02:56.640 Excuse me, sir.

00:02:57.420 I couldn't quite hear you.

00:02:58.720 What was it, you said?

00:03:00.160 The merchant, taken aback at the look of this third stonecutter,

00:03:03.580 being so different than the others, paused a moment.

00:03:06.420 What he saw surrounding the stonecutter

00:03:08.220 was towering stacks of the most beautiful carved stone he had ever seen.

00:03:13.740 What is it you are building, he asked again with some amount of awe.

00:03:17.360 The smiling stonecutter's chest rose in pride as he said,

00:03:22.220 Sir, I am building a great cathedral to the glory of Almighty God.

00:03:28.720 The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.

00:03:39.900 Well, welcome to the third episode of the King's Hall Podcast.

00:03:43.700 I'm here with Dan Burkholder and Brian Sauve.

00:03:46.720 We are in studio.

00:03:48.120 Last time on the episode, we did a little bit of what Brian said is my favorite work.

00:03:52.900 That's the demolition work.

00:03:54.100 That's right.

00:03:54.580 And I concur, Doctor.

00:03:56.000 I concur.

00:03:56.580 We were demolishing the dominant model for building a successful church that has presided over the last century at least, and we called this the big, fast, and famous church model.

00:04:10.080 It's the 15,000-member multi-site campus with celebrity pastor-driven churches that exist in an edgy city, and they get major book deals that hit the New York Times bestseller list, even if the church bought 250,000 of those copies.

00:04:26.580 More of a sports arena than a church, the edifices this movement produces are typically just Christian strip malls.

00:04:34.520 And, Dan, you said it, shantytowns.

00:04:37.160 Shantytowns.

00:04:37.980 That's what they are.

00:04:38.860 They're shantytowns.

00:04:40.040 And they've got a ton of brand marketing power and money behind them.

00:04:43.780 But ultimately, they produce surface-level content.

00:04:47.400 They have flashy social media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers.

00:04:51.340 They have the massive production cost of a TV studio behind them.

00:04:55.720 Their pastors are well respected by the intellectual elites and cultural producing gatekeepers at People Magazine, The Dispatch, or MTV.

00:05:06.140 We believe that demolition work is necessary because despite the many implosions we've seen from Big Fast and Famous, and boys, we've seen them, haven't we?

00:05:14.440 Many, many such examples.

00:05:16.560 Many such examples, yet their methodology over the last decade continues to hold a particular allure for present generations.

00:05:25.240 Here's the glaring reality.

00:05:26.940 This model has utterly failed to produce redwood-style Christians

00:05:30.220 with their roots sunk deep in biblically rich soil

00:05:33.780 and producing spiritual, plenteous fruit that lasts for generations.

00:05:38.960 Instead, what we have is a church who's hoarded itself out to the apostate culture.

00:05:43.480 By virtually every biblical standard of growth, impact, or faithfulness to the scriptures,

00:05:49.660 the big, fast, and famous church model has been relatively worthless.

00:05:53.640 It's as disposable as last year's latest, greatest, and now obsolete smartphone.

00:05:59.140 So the question that we want to ask today is,

00:06:01.820 what do we build in the place of this big, fast, and famous church that we've been demolishing?

00:06:07.500 We want to spend this episode starting to look at the blueprints and architectural designs.

00:06:12.180 We want to envision construction plans, and we want to seek to build the new Christendom as we do so.

00:06:18.860 So as the old stonecutter's creed says,

00:06:20.960 those who cut stones must envision cathedrals.

00:06:24.160 And that's exactly what we want to do in this episode.

00:06:27.120 We want to build a grand vision

00:06:29.260 for the new cathedrals of Christendom.

00:06:31.440 And at the same time,

00:06:32.300 we want to perfect the art of cutting stones

00:06:34.420 in our local places.

00:06:36.940 It's going to take both types of work,

00:06:38.560 both grand visions translated into local action

00:06:41.480 that slowly over time transform the world.

00:06:45.500 So what is the model that we're proposing?

00:06:48.240 Well, since I'm at the helm of this episode, gentlemen, and I went to the Southern Baptist

00:06:53.180 Seminary, where we know how to do a sermon with three points and a poem, and it's all

00:06:57.460 alliteration, I'm going to call this pastoral, plotting, and productive model of church.

00:07:05.400 So when I say pastoral, I mean to emphasize an approach that is local, it's decentralized,

00:07:10.640 and it's focused on intensive care rather than the sheer number of people in the pew.

00:07:15.640 When I say plotting, I mean that we are stacking up hundreds of daily simple tasks, all done in devotion over a long period of time.

00:07:25.240 I say that we're building communities slowly and faithfully with the expectation that they endure any storm and that they will last, Dan, at least in the short term, for hundreds of years.

00:07:36.600 And when I say productive, Brian, I mean that we're not fixated on the fame of an individual or achieving celebrity status in an overnight blur.

00:07:44.260 but we are building the kind of households and communities that are still productively

00:07:48.640 contributing to this new Christendom 500 years from now. It's a legacy model of faithfulness.

00:07:56.560 So gentlemen, I want to start today by unpacking the first of these. We talked about big, fast,

00:08:01.660 and famous. We talked about big centralized power, and now we're really talking about decentralized

00:08:07.340 and local. This reminds me of something that Alex de Tocqueville said in his book, Democracy

00:08:12.680 in America. He said that America's strength lay in the robust people who were productive,

00:08:18.960 they were property-owning, they were well-educated, and they were self-governed.

00:08:23.920 The power of the nation rested not in a centralized government, but in its people.

00:08:30.160 So one of the problems with the bigness model is the centralization. So I want to ask you guys

00:08:34.800 about that. First of all, we talked a little bit about it in last show, but again, why is

00:08:39.380 centralization like Babel such

00:08:41.520 a big issue?

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00:09:22.920 Yeah, Eric, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about centralization is something

00:09:27.960 like Babel. And that's that at the bottom instinct of these massive, big, fast, and famous

00:09:34.720 centralized models is an instinct towards building empires in the name of some brand

00:09:42.120 or some person rather than the Lord Jesus Christ.

00:09:47.240 Right.

00:09:47.680 Right.

00:09:47.980 So there's this instinct where, and you can see, you can see how easy it would be because

00:09:52.980 a lot of these churches and organizations rely on men who are tremendously gifted in

00:09:58.720 some area, whether they're tremendously gifted communicators or, you know, they, and then

00:10:03.320 they start collecting people to essentially polish their brand. So they then go recruit and

00:10:09.100 pay big money to get a huge professional band and all that sort of thing and surround themselves

00:10:14.300 with excellence. Let's get a $100,000 website. Let's get an army of staff that helps me polish

00:10:19.960 and write my sermons. And ultimately, it's easy to see how initially what was like, man,

00:10:27.060 this guy's really gifted. He's going to make such a big impact for the kingdom. He's going to lead

00:10:30.600 so many people to Christ and, you know, good things like let's honor our leaders and honor

00:10:35.840 our elders and easily morph into, Hey, let's actually build a brand glorifying this one human

00:10:43.360 being. And then let's glorify the brand built to glorify this one human being. And it, you know,

00:10:49.500 it's just so easy and so human to see how that process might unfold. Yeah. And I don't want to

00:10:54.200 rehash our previous episode. But for example, when I was going to church at a Baptist church

00:11:00.020 in the nineties, I had a group, uh, it was like a search committee of some sort that actually went

00:11:07.640 to a Willow Creek, Bill Hybels church to observe their model to try to replicate it. Oh yeah.

00:11:14.780 And the thing is you can't franchise churches successfully. I mean, to my knowledge in this,

00:11:21.540 in their, in this way, in this way, unless the thing you were exporting is what we're about to

00:11:26.620 propose, which is essentially not man-based. It's not based on a man, but Bill Hybels in his

00:11:32.480 Willow Creek model is not exportable. It's based on the man himself. And so it becomes very fragile

00:11:40.880 because it's so foreign to Christianity. As you see, like Paul telling Titus,

00:11:45.900 hey i want you to go to crete and i want you to raise up elders in that place that was what he

00:11:51.740 was doing right and here's what you're supposed to instruct them and um here's the pitfalls and

00:11:56.640 warnings and everything like that that's the kind of church model that we see in acts actually

00:12:02.300 worked out and in the in the pauline epistles and such is is that sort of franchising if you will

00:12:09.800 and it's just christianity don't depart from the word stick to sound doctrine make sure that you

00:12:15.760 know, wolves are going to come in and false teachers, make sure you oppose them. Um, don't

00:12:20.620 give your enemies any room to bring a charge against you. Things like that. Whereas this sort

00:12:27.240 of big, fast, famous model, like a Bill Hybels, Willow Creek, they tried to bring it back to my

00:12:32.920 church that I was attending at the time. And it, it obviously did not work.

00:12:37.400 They can't do it. Like you said, we've all been there, right? I remember,

00:12:41.620 and I won't name names, but there was a church plant and Utah is kind of like the graveyard for

00:12:46.940 church planters because two or 3% evangelical or Protestant Christian, everybody goes and they say

00:12:52.760 we're going to go convert the Mormons and because they've read a few apologetics books on Mormonism

00:12:56.700 and they're like, wow, Mormonism is crazy. It would be easy to convert these people. Don't

00:13:02.580 they know that the entire thing's made up and you're like, yes, but you don't understand. That's

00:13:07.420 not how it works but you can't just come and convert the mormons with one apologetics book

00:13:11.140 in 15 minutes you know so we saw a church plant come into town a couple years ago and it was

00:13:16.760 coming out of the big james mcdonald movement and this was pre-james mcdonald you know turning out

00:13:22.660 that the church was funding his like bear hunt taxidermy well hold on hold on that part is okay

00:13:29.240 it was the him like hiring hiring a hitman oh yeah that was that was the thing wait refuge church if

00:13:36.280 you want to provide bear hunting you know like i would consider that but i'm the executive pastor

00:13:41.060 i guess i have okay well yeah was that actually legit though he hired a hit man he allegedly

00:13:45.280 allegedly i don't i don't want to get sued allegedly there was a lot of problems but but

00:13:49.980 you know if you've ever seen james mcdonald preach it's like he's got this really particular style

00:13:55.620 and you know he'll he'll stop and he'll say things like um you know ain't the lord good

00:14:01.540 turn and tell your neighbor the Lord's good. He can do stuff like that. And this guy comes into

00:14:06.420 town. He's been a James McDonald's, you know, handpicked pastor school. He's, he's hobnobbed

00:14:10.500 with James McDonald with the man himself. And he he's, he's opening his, his church and does

00:14:16.240 the fundraising. And it's basically like, you know, at a strip mall up the street, let's try

00:14:23.020 and recreate with a very small budget, the church, whatever James McDonald's church is called. I can't

00:14:27.760 remember. Harvest. Harvest. There you go. Harvest Bible Chapel. We weren't going to name names.

00:14:31.800 Well, here we are. And he's long gone. So it's fine. But, you know, and I remember meeting the

00:14:38.300 guy and because I want churches that preach the word and stuff to succeed here. So on the same

00:14:42.620 team. But, you know, I hear the guy preach and he just sounds exactly like James McDonald. But like

00:14:48.360 in the way that a generic cereal brand, the box looks kind of like the raisin brand. You know,

00:14:54.520 he's turning, you know, tell your neighbor, ain't the Lord good. You know, that kind of thing.

00:14:58.260 And the same thing happens. A lot of young guys listen to a ton of Mark Driscoll. And then all

00:15:02.740 of a sudden they're like little Mark Driscoll's running around on stage. They sound just like him,

00:15:07.300 but it's always a budget version because these, these celebrity pastors, a lot of them are

00:15:12.680 tremendously gifted communicators on the level of famous actors. Yeah. Right. They have that kind of

00:15:17.440 skill. And, but similarly to famous actors, they're an inch deep. You know, a lot of these

00:15:22.380 guys. They don't have moral fiber. They're not pastorally qualified. Churches were just like,

00:15:26.900 wow, this guy can get a lot of people here quick. Let's give him $250,000 a year and let him do

00:15:32.980 whatever he wants in exchange for his preaching to build the brand. So it's like when you

00:15:38.080 centralize power that way, and when you centralize the mission of the church to a gifted communicator's

00:15:46.160 brand, it's always going to be inherently fragile because that church then becomes only as durable

00:15:53.520 as that guy staying there and not openly disqualifying himself. Yeah. Which you'd

00:15:58.260 think would be not very high bars. It turns out it's a pretty high bar. It turns out it's a high

00:16:02.660 bar. You know, I think about it too, uh, like in the sports world, you think about football teams,

00:16:07.900 you know, Broncos fan and you think about what the Broncos did with Peyton Manning. Well,

00:16:12.040 they built their entire team around him.

00:16:14.360 So,

00:16:14.760 so literally like one man,

00:16:16.460 probably one of two,

00:16:18.260 three best quarterbacks of all time made the team work.

00:16:23.360 But the minute he left,

00:16:24.400 it was like,

00:16:24.800 we're jank.

00:16:25.700 Yeah.

00:16:26.120 We're,

00:16:26.400 we're rebuilding.

00:16:27.360 We're absolutely,

00:16:27.980 yeah,

00:16:28.180 we've been rebuilding for seven years.

00:16:29.880 You are now in a rebuilding phase.

00:16:31.340 It's fine.

00:16:32.000 We're on our third rebuild after rebuilding.

00:16:33.700 We just call it rebuilding and then it's fine.

00:16:35.780 But I think a lot of teams and a lot of other sports,

00:16:37.860 you can use this example.

00:16:38.940 You look at,

00:16:39.880 you know,

00:16:40.080 maybe even like Urban Meyer when he was with Florida,

00:16:42.740 like he can plug and play quarterbacks and the system is there and they keep

00:16:47.200 working.

00:16:47.580 Bill Belichick,

00:16:48.220 the Patriots,

00:16:49.000 not quite what they were without Tom Brady,

00:16:50.880 but anyway,

00:16:51.800 the point being,

00:16:52.360 it's not all just writing on the back of one guy.

00:16:55.880 So Dan,

00:16:56.160 I want to ask you about this.

00:16:57.220 We talk a lot about anti-fragility.

00:16:59.620 So one of the principles of anti-fragility is actually decentralized power.

00:17:04.640 So what I want to ask you is when you talk about the local church and

00:17:07.640 decentralization,

00:17:09.180 What things are we actually talking about?

00:17:11.880 Boots on the ground, local community.

00:17:14.480 What are we actually talking about with decentralization of the local church?

00:17:17.960 And how does that impact how we're going to build Christendom?

00:17:21.460 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:17:22.220 So let me define anti-fragile first, just to make sure that we're talking the same language.

00:17:27.480 Yeah.

00:17:27.900 This is a term coined by Nassim Taleb, however you say his name, in his inserto series.

00:17:34.420 It's probably in his book, Anti-Fragile.

00:17:35.760 But anyway, he said that he was looking for a word that would be directly opposite of fragile.

00:17:43.000 Like, what is the opposite of fragile?

00:17:45.020 He's like, durable, isn't it?

00:17:46.920 Because kind of resilient, but not quite.

00:17:49.220 Yeah, right.

00:17:49.720 So the example I give is like, you know, Eric has a really sweet off-road setup, Toyota, something or other big tires.

00:17:58.220 Right.

00:17:58.420 And Brian has a 90s Ford Escort.

00:18:00.840 and you could take them both off-roading and Eric's truck is going to be more durable,

00:18:05.380 but eventually it's going to break. And he said, that's, that's just not the right word. And so

00:18:10.680 he came up with this term anti-fragile to mean when something is opposed, such as rough roads

00:18:17.820 or whatever, the thing actually gets stronger. It has an opposite effect, similar to like

00:18:24.060 weightlifting where you are encountering resistance and the result is you actually

00:18:28.080 get stronger. And so when you're comparing that to the decentralized local church,

00:18:33.780 what do you see happening in times of crisis? That's really the benchmark, right? So we just

00:18:39.420 talked about James McDonald at Harvest. By the way, I've been to that church. Have you? Yeah.

00:18:44.260 My buddy in college took me there. So this is early 2000s and it is, it puts our local mall

00:18:50.420 to shame. It is a monstrous church or it was, I don't know what it, I'm sure it's still there,

00:18:55.380 And so this, in times of crisis, say your lead pastor does some really wicked stuff and all of a sudden it gets closed, right?

00:19:03.660 That's a time of crisis.

00:19:05.360 What happens when there's a national catastrophe or a local catastrophe?

00:19:11.220 Where should people look?

00:19:12.440 They should look to the local church.

00:19:14.440 Or even a more boots on the ground example.

00:19:19.380 Say you get some tragic news in your family, health news or something like that.

00:19:24.380 what is where are you going to go for that to help to have help and it's the local church

00:19:31.380 and you're not going to get that in the same way from these big centralized models you're not going

00:19:38.280 to get that because the very power of the the body of christ being so decentralized is that

00:19:45.540 there are communities of people that are actually the hands and feet of christ that are serving one

00:19:50.440 another. And when you have a top-down model, it completely destroys that. It just does not,

00:19:57.620 it's not going to produce that kind of fruit. And so I think that's really what you need to

00:20:01.660 look at is times of crisis. What kinds of fruit are you getting? And you can look through history

00:20:07.720 at the church and see like, I don't know, when there's like pandemics and such, the pastors

00:20:12.980 were going out and taking care of the sick, the Christians were taking care of the sick,

00:20:16.100 or, or I mean, Christian burial. We, we talked about that in our after hours. One of the greatest

00:20:22.220 ministries of the early church was taking people that had died and giving them a Christian burial

00:20:27.360 instead of letting their bodies be burned or, or put into mass graves. And so that's one of the

00:20:32.480 benchmarks I think that you can look at for the local churches being anti-fragile.

00:20:37.060 Yeah. I think that's huge. One of them, Brian, I want to ask you about this is say like in the

00:20:41.700 Moses model, people always talk about the Moses model. And I think traditionally they mean like

00:20:45.400 one big guy doing everything yeah yeah but what's interesting about that and even the way it gets

00:20:49.580 used right Moses father-in-law comes to him is like look you need to decentralize a lot of this

00:20:55.740 power that's right right you need to delegate the authority you need to have lots of heads of

00:21:00.320 households so I want you to unpack this for us because what I'm getting at is when we talk about

00:21:05.040 decentralized power we're saying not one big guy yeah but in the local church we're saying strong

00:21:10.260 households. Yeah. We're talking about lots of local faithful pastors who maybe you'll never

00:21:15.320 have a 15,000 member church. Yeah. So just, yeah. What does that look like? Let's build this out

00:21:20.040 from the ground up because when we say decentralization, what we're talking about is

00:21:24.080 really the Christian body, like Dan said, being the Christian body. We're saying that, and you

00:21:29.360 can look at the Christian body writ large, you know, Paul says there's one body, many members.

00:21:33.340 And in that section in first Corinthians, he's talking both about the church as a whole,

00:21:39.060 that if you were to picture the whole universal church,

00:21:41.820 not all our hands, not all our feet, not all our mouths,

00:21:44.760 and that's true, and it works on that level.

00:21:47.300 So you can look at the whole church and say,

00:21:48.800 yeah, there's a lot of diversity in this unified thing.

00:21:53.360 Well, that also works for the local church.

00:21:55.560 God also doesn't make local churches

00:21:57.260 where in the local church, everybody is a mouth.

00:22:00.040 Paul is clearly talking with an eye towards application

00:22:03.380 to the smaller version of the universal church,

00:22:06.320 the local church,

00:22:07.500 where there's a gathering with pastors and deacons and families and men and women and young

00:22:12.880 and old and lots of different gifts. So within the local church, Paul envisions that there would be

00:22:17.540 this diversity and decentralization of the ministry where every individual member is

00:22:23.740 performing some function. So I think what Paul gives us there is a model that should be true of

00:22:29.260 both the big, the whole church, and the small picture. So when you look at decentralization,

00:22:35.640 it could apply to single individual human life that there should be, you know, it's,

00:22:41.140 if you have a single point of failure in your entire life, then you're probably not,

00:22:45.760 not walking in accordance with biblical wisdom, right? If all of your eggs are in one basket,

00:22:50.780 and if one thing goes wrong in your life, therefore you're just done now, you're probably

00:22:55.640 not walking in accordance with wisdom in a family. If all of, you know, if, if one family member does

00:23:01.600 everything. And everybody else just gets around and looks and claps, which is basically what the

00:23:07.100 megachurch does. It's like dad is the megachurch pastor and he does impressive things. And

00:23:12.200 everybody's like, yeah, go dad. That's not how a family works. Yeah. Local church. It's not how

00:23:20.200 a local church should work. Decentralization means that activity, power, gifting, talents are

00:23:27.080 distributed across God's people and they're all doing lots of different things. And so there's

00:23:32.020 no single point of failure. You know, it's like in the, and I think it's important to say that

00:23:37.920 when you start centralizing things, you don't immediately see failure day one, right? Like if

00:23:42.560 your church starts to slowly morph towards it, you know, having this celebrity model where you

00:23:47.480 were kind of a normal church and then you get a new pastor and, you know, over time it starts to

00:23:53.020 be like the brand of this guy and it's easy to default to that easy to do super easy to do it's

00:23:59.600 not as if the next day everything's going to fall apart right yeah it reminds me of in you know in

00:24:05.460 the mid 18th century in the 1740s or 50s in ireland uh the the wealthy landed gentry introduced

00:24:14.380 this new crop and it was the potato and uh it became so popular over the next century that

00:24:22.860 the potato, this one variety of potato became known as the Irish lumper potato. That was what

00:24:27.680 it was, the Irish lumper. And things were great. It was like, here's some cheap carbohydrates,

00:24:32.040 lots of calories. It became a huge part of the diet of the poor because it was shelf stable

00:24:37.780 through the winter months. They could just, it's easy to keep a potato. You just, it's hardy. You

00:24:42.240 put it on a shelf in the right temperature, pretty much. It's going to be fine. It's not like a

00:24:46.840 tomato. You know, you can't put a fresh tomato on the shelf necessarily and have the same result.

00:24:51.200 you got to can it, you got to do something else, dry it out. But a hundred years later, you know,

00:24:56.960 into this thing, all of a sudden, and I think 17, what was it? It was 1845 or 17, 1845, I think is

00:25:07.140 when it was. And this little fungus, fungus type organism attacked the potato and it was a tomato

00:25:16.100 slash potato blight. And this little organism all of a sudden started wiping out the entire

00:25:22.120 potato crop. It was, you know, these Irish lumper potatoes were particularly prone to it,

00:25:27.200 started spreading through Ireland. And pretty soon, it was almost a decade, it was seven years,

00:25:32.300 the potato crop virtually failed because of this one little thing, this little microorganism got

00:25:37.840 in there and spread. And the result was something like a million people either starved to death or

00:25:43.960 died of malnutrition related diseases. And then another million people had to flee the country to

00:25:49.040 United States or England to the big cities just to try and not starve to death. And it was like,

00:25:55.300 there's an error on two levels. One, a monoculture, you have one type of, there's a single point of

00:25:59.420 failure. It's all the same crop. And two, it became such a large part of their diet that if

00:26:03.420 you have a 5% of the staple is this one potato and then it dies, well, that's fine. We'll just

00:26:09.660 move to some grains or some other kind of staple. And it just goes to show that when you centralize

00:26:16.520 all of your eggs into one basket like that, one point of failure, well, when failure comes to that

00:26:21.220 one point, it's catastrophic. Yeah. But the church of Christ isn't supposed to be like that. It's not

00:26:26.480 supposed to be this mothership sort of organization. It's supposed to be like yeast going out to all

00:26:34.740 corners of the world, these little yeast organisms that take over the whole lump. And if any one

00:26:41.560 little yeast dies, who cares? It's just one part. It's just one thing. We should have, you know,

00:26:47.300 in a place like Utah, our goal isn't to build this church that we all happen to be a part of,

00:26:53.180 to be a church of 20,000 people. No, we would much rather see a hundred churches planted in

00:27:01.580 in unity on mission and, and connected in important ways. But, you know, a hundred pastors,

00:27:09.080 hundred sessions of elders, hundreds of families, hundreds of different types of emphasis because

00:27:15.080 the mothership is fundamentally weak. Yeah. Because if it's all in one place,

00:27:20.100 I think of just like, like a target of all your goods are stored, uh, your money, whatever it is,

00:27:25.080 if it's all stored in one place, well, you just hit that place and then everything

00:27:28.920 falls apart. We see this with a lot of pastor. You see it also, though, in the literature,

00:27:34.680 federalist and anti-federalist papers that were written around the founding of the country was

00:27:38.640 there's always been this temptation to we can be really big and powerful if we centralize all the

00:27:43.960 power. And so you had a lot of founding fathers saying, no, we actually we actually want to

00:27:50.280 disperse this among the states. Yeah. And so that there isn't this behemoth. Well, it's because what

00:27:56.000 is the instinct there? The instinct is wanting to be God. Yes. That's the instinct. It's the

00:28:02.480 instinct of Babel of wanting to say, look what we can do. Look at the glory of man. Yeah. I am going

00:28:08.220 to become a God-like figure. And the fundamental error of that is that the church has a God

00:28:14.160 and it's Yahweh and the church has a head and it's Christ and we are his body. We're the joints

00:28:22.380 and ligaments nourished and knit together

00:28:24.280 with the growth that comes from Christ,

00:28:25.760 like Paul says in Colossians.

00:28:27.300 So it's like centralization as a human instinct.

00:28:30.740 And this is true in government.

00:28:31.860 It's true in tyrannical fathers

00:28:33.180 who become poisonous patriarchs of their family

00:28:35.900 instead of godly patriarchs.

00:28:37.320 It's true of megachurch pastors.

00:28:39.060 It's true of even little churches

00:28:41.020 with a hundred people in them

00:28:42.140 with a pastor who wants to be God.

00:28:45.620 When that happens,

00:28:47.240 the reason it doesn't work fundamentally

00:28:49.620 is because they're not God.

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00:29:51.040 Let's go ahead and get back to the show.

00:29:54.500 So, Eric, I got a question for you.

00:29:56.560 Maybe you can help.

00:29:58.540 You know, looking at a megachurch,

00:30:00.180 it still has pastors, elders, ruling body,

00:30:02.800 and you have a small church like ours, a local church,

00:30:07.040 has pastors, elders, ruling body.

00:30:09.920 What is the difference fundamentally?

00:30:12.940 Where is the authority different then?

00:30:14.380 if it's all centralized, supposedly, and at a mega church, it's all centralized at the very top.

00:30:19.200 What is the difference between that model and essentially what we're proposing? Where is the

00:30:24.400 power differential? Yeah, I think a lot of it sometimes, and I'm not super familiar with what

00:30:30.560 the authority structure, I know Mark, like say Mark Driscoll. I know that he had like elder and

00:30:35.940 then, you know, elder led church basically. So plurality of eldership. I've heard him talk a lot

00:30:40.880 about that i think sometimes the question is functionality how does stuff functionally work

00:30:45.640 yeah not on paper not yeah so a lot of times i've noticed this with a lot of like the patriarchal

00:30:50.720 dad types like if dad is a really strong individual and sometimes really competent

00:30:54.520 his sons can be very weak men because dad always does everything right he may even do it well but

00:31:00.620 he's not the kind of guy who's good at saying you guys need to have your moment in the sun

00:31:04.460 you guys need to be trained up to do this work so i think that's kind of the part of the culture

00:31:08.840 that's not on paper it maybe it's not in your bylaws maybe it's not in your church constitution

00:31:14.060 but it still plays very big you think it's like a delegated authority authority then is what you're

00:31:20.040 saying i i think that's part of the answer um i think some of it too though is i mean look paul

00:31:26.680 dealt with the same thing with they had a certain structure in their church but the congregations

00:31:32.060 in corinth still wanted to elevate celebrity people right again it's like centralization

00:31:37.260 That's still our tendency. So I think if we're being wise, what we do is we say, okay, we actually

00:31:42.420 have to actively as like elders, pastors in our churches, we have to actually push back against

00:31:46.920 that tendency. Yeah. Right. You want to make a celebrity and we're saying, no, we're actually

00:31:52.120 going to keep delegating and, and keep structuring the church so that multiple people have different

00:31:57.280 functions, roles. So, so then where do you think when you're delegating, who are you delegating

00:32:02.620 to? I mean, that's the important question, I think. So how do you make sure, how do you insulate

00:32:07.880 yourself as a pastor? Brian's the preaching pastor every week. He had a tweet, go big. He's

00:32:13.120 celebrity, right? How does he make sure that he is continually delegating this authority of raising

00:32:19.840 the level of the people around him? Where does that primarily live then? I mean, that's a good

00:32:24.980 question. I'd be interested to hear what you guys think, but I would say a lot of it is having,

00:32:28.460 so in this case you know you know our case locally i think a lot of it is having strong

00:32:34.600 enough men around brian or around whoever so that they're like there's genuine pushback i think

00:32:39.960 for mark there actually was for a long time and then there stopped being pushed back um and a lot

00:32:45.620 of it was because those guys fell into sin and and you know we're out of the picture now but i

00:32:50.540 think having genuine pushback a genuine um you know separation of church and state that's why

00:32:57.880 we have branches in the government as well so like you know we don't just say brian here's all

00:33:03.740 our church money here's everything um you know let us know if you need anything because you're

00:33:08.780 actually just setting him up to fail so again separation of powers is one and fundamentally

00:33:13.560 it's not just a systems issue is it no i mean the very no nature we talked about last week was

00:33:19.420 the big part big fast you know and to be famous that that's that's the problem right is is that

00:33:26.820 the goal is numbers and so i think one of the keys i wasn't trying to play stump the chump or

00:33:33.700 anything like that or put you on the spot i'm just trying to chew through this a little bit

00:33:37.300 i think one of the emphases and we touched on this last week is the primary importance of families

00:33:44.920 of durable houses of like you said taking men that are in the church surrounding yourself with

00:33:51.960 godly men raising the level of men because the, I mean, the family is the very foundation of,

00:33:57.640 of society, of human society. It's civilization itself is based on, on the husband and wife and

00:34:03.540 them loving one another and raising godly offspring. So, so Brian, what have, what have

00:34:10.580 you done with the, what have you done? No, what have you done with the church to try to encourage

00:34:15.840 these sorts of things, even on just like a regular Sunday week to week basis that are

00:34:20.220 more family centric instead of just bring in as many unbelievers into the church as possible.

00:34:26.580 What sorts of things have you done to do that? Well, I mean, what we're talking about,

00:34:30.740 and I think it's really insightful that you guys pointed that it's not a systems issue only. It's

00:34:34.740 not because on paper, Mars Hill Church had a plurality of elders. Mars Hill Church at the

00:34:40.240 time of its implosion had something like 60 to 70 elders. And in one, I had an acquaintance,

00:34:46.340 I have an acquaintance who, um, was an elder at Mars Hill and he was, he was actually personally

00:34:52.360 fired by Mark Driscoll. Uh, and he was personally fired by Mark Driscoll for as an elder, basically

00:34:59.700 saying, bringing this critique along with other elders that, um, Mark, you are functioning as if

00:35:07.540 we're a Moses model where Mark had himself. And there were like one or two other guys in this

00:35:12.600 inner ring that were, they were functionally in charge of the entire thing. And they had 60 or

00:35:19.040 70 elders, you know, on top of that. But those guys basically had no real authority, no real

00:35:24.780 honor. And their responsibility was basically limited because, you know, you can't give somebody

00:35:31.940 responsibility without corresponding authority. So if you don't give them that authority,

00:35:35.660 their responsibility is an illusion because they can't actually make decisions lead and do what

00:35:40.500 needs to be done as a leader. And so, you know, if you look at it on paper, the gap between the

00:35:46.140 paper and the reality was chasmic. I mean, it was Grand Canyon-esque. So it's not enough to just

00:35:52.700 have the right systems. It's not enough to just have the right doctrine. And what we're really

00:35:56.560 talking about in decentralization of power and in fighting against big fast and particularly that

00:36:01.580 famous model. And the thing is, the reason that we like fame is because it makes the big and the

00:36:05.920 fast thing happen. Yeah. Right. The famous person is the one who makes the big and the fast happen.

00:36:10.780 What you really need to do is leaders need to make sure. And when I say leaders, I mean,

00:36:16.820 husbands in their home with their children and their friends. I mean, deacons and elders in the

00:36:21.800 church. I mean, men in their businesses. I mean, mothers mothering their children and, you know,

00:36:27.940 interacting with other women in the church. We need to outdo one another in showing honor.

00:36:32.780 We need to cultivate a culture, cultivate a culture inside of the church community that

00:36:40.540 essentially is obsessed with giving honor to others, with not viewing my neighbor or my brother

00:36:50.080 or my fellow elder as a competitor for a fixed pie of glory and believing the lie that glory and

00:36:57.840 honor is a zero sum game where we're all competing for honor. And there's this fixed pie of honor

00:37:03.180 and glory. And if Eric gets some glory and honor, it means that I get less. And if Dan gets some

00:37:10.060 honor over here and someone's like, Hey, good job, Dan. In this counseling situation, the church,

00:37:14.460 you really helped this family. Like they're just night and day different after you sat down and

00:37:17.920 counseled with them. And then all of a sudden I have to interject and be like, well, I told Dan

00:37:23.340 what to tell him. Yeah, it was me. It was really me. Well, Dan learned everything. I taught Dan

00:37:28.040 everything he knows. Gay. Yeah. Because what I'm doing is I'm acting like, oh, if Dan gets some

00:37:34.920 honor, then all of a sudden people must think I'm nothing. And in reality, the kingdom of God is not

00:37:40.380 like that because at the heart of the kingdom, we have this father who is all glorious. He is

00:37:47.500 infinitely glorious and he doesn't run out of honor and glory as he bestows it on his creation

00:37:55.220 and on his creatures. So there's not a fixed pie. There's not a fixed pie. Big, fast and famous in

00:38:00.840 its hyper-centralization actually ends up making a person God. And that God really does have a

00:38:05.360 fixed pie of glory and it's very small and he wants all of it. And that's the problem. So the

00:38:10.420 culture from the ground up has to be built on a pastor, a father, whoever, you know, all of these

00:38:16.940 men actually wanting to elevate everybody around them and actually wanting for my brother and my

00:38:24.500 neighbor and my church to succeed and not I'm going to win and everyone's going to see me win

00:38:30.260 and they're going to be so impressed with me. Yeah. No, that's, that's the, that's the kingdom

00:38:35.580 of hell. That's the reek of hell. That's just hating and hating one another. Nobody loves each

00:38:42.340 other, nobody honoring one another. And so really when you get into the reason that all failures of

00:38:47.560 the law are going to be failures of love somewhere because the law is summed up in loving God and

00:38:51.260 loving neighbor. And so what is the fundamental error of this big, fast, and famous centralized

00:38:57.080 fame kind of thing? Well, it's the fundamental error that I will not love my neighbor because

00:39:03.560 I want my neighbor to worship me, right? So, I mean, this has a million, we could talk practical

00:39:11.020 implications of this forever. I mean, that means like get other guys on the stage, give other guys

00:39:15.720 responsibility, let them fail, let them succeed, honor them, you know, honor your children. What

00:39:21.920 else do you get? What other implications? Yeah. One of the things that, so we were part of Acts

00:39:26.060 20, a couple of Acts 29 churches and church plants in Kentucky while going to seminary there.

00:39:31.600 And actually Mike Cosper was at one of them, Sojourn. And what was interesting to me is the

00:39:37.440 pastors in those churches had like a cadre of really talented interns basically who are really

00:39:43.500 talented you know pastors would be pastors around them going through school whatever

00:39:47.900 but they were doing the same thing mark was doing with real marriage where like these guys would do

00:39:53.060 all the research and the hard work and then the pastor would straight rip it off and claim it for

00:39:57.000 his own yeah and i remember thinking like this is all about it really actually built a network so

00:40:04.060 they saw how big Mark got. And then you had all these other pastors who were like really wanted

00:40:08.560 that too. And so it actually accelerated the love or fame, celebrity, et cetera. So I think that's

00:40:16.460 one thing. The other thing I was going to say that's tied to it is for me, a lot of this comes

00:40:21.140 back to the very definition of pastor. So pastor is the Latin word for shepherd. And we start to

00:40:28.080 look at scripture and there's lots of parables. There's a lot of examples that we could look to

00:40:31.820 because the agrarian shepherding model is throughout.

00:40:36.300 Essentially, shepherds are, you know,

00:40:37.980 they're shepherding or exercising care over people's souls.

00:40:42.100 So one of the things that you notice is the, you know,

00:40:45.900 the tendency to leave the 99 and go after the one.

00:40:49.400 There's intensive care, but it's also incredibly inefficient.

00:40:53.620 So I was thinking this a couple of years ago.

00:40:55.660 I went with a friend in Wyoming to do some calving.

00:40:58.720 And, you know, it's miserable work.

00:41:00.540 I was there for like a week and a half, um, you know, cows giving birth. So you got to go out in

00:41:05.600 the middle of the night and check. Yeah. It's basically storms or freezing. Yeah. It's just

00:41:09.720 crazy. And in Wyoming's nasty weather. Yeah. I think we were doing it early spring. So very,

00:41:14.820 very cold, a lot of snow on the ground. One of the things that struck me though, is, uh, my friend,

00:41:20.260 as I'm watching him work, like he'll spend an inordinate amount of time with, with one calf.

00:41:26.220 And, and he would, you know, if a calf was struggling, he'd take it to the barn. They'd

00:41:29.720 be bottle feeding it. And I remember saying to him, cause you know, I'm from the corporate world.

00:41:34.700 I've been in basically like intellectual work, but factory style industrial time clock. And

00:41:40.720 the beauty of this is that the agrarian world does not work on a time clock. And you realize,

00:41:45.980 I asked him at one point, I said, you're spending a lot of time on one animal. And he goes, well,

00:41:51.280 yeah, that's my job. And I'm like, you stay up all day, every day for like a month. And you get

00:41:58.180 like two hours of sleep at a time, and you still got to care for your family. And I said, man,

00:42:01.760 these animals are a pain in the butt. And he was like, yeah, but isn't it great? And it was

00:42:06.080 convicting because I was pastoring at the time. And I remember thinking that model of pastoral

00:42:11.000 care, like the Lord looked at that and said, that's what I want. That's what I want for my

00:42:15.840 pastors. And then you look at the celebrity CEO pastor. And I think it's not only not the picture,

00:42:25.240 it's actually an affront to God and disgusting.

00:42:28.420 It seems like totally contradictory.

00:42:31.700 So I want to ask you guys about that.

00:42:33.160 You both pastored for a long time.

00:42:35.500 You know counseling.

00:42:37.480 Can the big, fast, and famous celebrity pastor,

00:42:41.020 all this bigness,

00:42:43.200 can it jive with the model of a true pastor from Scripture?

00:42:47.980 It's possible.

00:42:50.040 But it won't happen.

00:42:51.720 It won't happen because of the issue of it being centralized.

00:42:54.720 So you can even see for a time with Mark Driscoll, just listening to the rise and fall of Mars Hill, there are men that come on and say, yeah, if it wasn't for Mark and his teaching and whatever, it ends mostly in his words, the air war that produced some of that fruit.

00:43:09.540 And then you have men that are growing together at that time, but ultimately it falls apart.

00:43:14.260 and if you think about pastoring in the way that you described right you've got a weak animal

00:43:19.180 what's the goal is to strengthen that animal yeah so that it not only just survives because if you

00:43:25.900 just have cattle that survive you can go to any third world country and see cattle that's surviving

00:43:30.500 you see their ribs yeah i don't want my cow to have visible ribs unless i'm butchering it i want

00:43:36.440 them to be big and fat and strong and healthy yeah and so that's the goal of shepherding is to have

00:43:41.420 healthy sheep. You can't have that with a centralized model. And so the way that even

00:43:46.560 the way that you set up Sunday, Sunday morning worship is really important for the way that

00:43:52.100 you're feeding your people. Cause that's really important because you're, you're not just

00:43:55.520 performing some sort of act like in a big fast and famous model. You're not performing some sort

00:44:00.940 of act, some dog and pony show to just get people in the door. What you're doing is you're actually

00:44:05.440 laying out a feast for your people to eat and to be strengthened by the word of God, by singing

00:44:11.920 psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to one another, by bringing your children into the worship service

00:44:17.440 so that they can worship as God's people so that we're not saying, hey, little children actually

00:44:22.620 don't come to Jesus. So that's how we're trying to shepherd around this decentralized sort of

00:44:30.440 model is by intentionally making the sheep going after the one stronger. Think about it like the

00:44:36.940 difference between a shepherd with his flock of sheep that he knows, and he knows their number

00:44:42.220 and all of that. They know his voice. Yeah, they know his voice. And then a factory farm

00:44:46.300 with 15,000 sheep. And the main goal of the factory farm is just the profit of the owner of

00:44:54.600 the sheep. Right. And, and, and this is actually a distinction that God makes in Ezekiel. I think

00:45:00.760 it's Ezekiel chapter 34 or 35. You might correct me if I'm wrong. The abuse of other sheep. Yeah.

00:45:07.800 Shepherds. God, Christ rebukes the shepherds of Israel because they were shepherds, but they were

00:45:16.060 shepherds who just used the sheep. The, the, the sick, you did not bind up the lost. You did not

00:45:21.200 find, that you did not feed them. And you ate the sheep, you devoured the sheep. Basically,

00:45:26.980 he was saying the sheep existed for you. They were just for you. You didn't care about them.

00:45:32.840 You cared about you and you were using them. And fundamentally, the model of fame as pastor,

00:45:38.300 famous person as pastor, what is it? It's just, I need people because I can't be famous without

00:45:44.800 people. I can't have the worship I want without people. You don't care about the people. It's a

00:45:49.500 failure of love. Whereas the example of the biblical shepherd in Christ said, so I, you know,

00:45:53.940 Yahweh will come and be their shepherd. And that's Christ. He's the good shepherd who lays his life

00:45:57.700 down for his sheep. He came and that's how much he loved them, that he was actually willing to die

00:46:01.700 for his sheep. So when we talk about a biblical pastor, it requires fundamentally that he loves

00:46:11.480 the sheep. He actually has to love them. Like Dan said, when he's pouring in, when your buddy's

00:46:16.980 up at night spending an inordinate amount of time with this one. And that's what it feels like

00:46:21.200 pastoring. You're like, you got one, it tends to be that one, you know, five or 10% of the flock

00:46:26.760 for in any given season requires more care. And this is just people like sometimes your kids are

00:46:31.160 sick. Sometimes they're, they're well, and the sick kid is going to be the one that you stay up

00:46:34.840 at night with. I'm not complaining about our church right now. This is how it works. This is

00:46:38.960 reality. Right. And, and the reason that you're spending time with that 10% in any given time

00:46:45.100 is because you love them. You want them to succeed. And you understand that if they succeed,

00:46:51.200 what that means, man, what this means is massive. If I help one dad be a better dad,

00:46:59.160 overcome his, you know, terrible childhood, didn't have a good father. And if you come

00:47:02.960 alongside as a pastor and you help one guy who's addicted to porn, not being a good dad,

00:47:07.160 not being a good husband, and you shepherd him biblically to repentance and faith in Christ,

00:47:12.220 not in you, but in Christ, to the obedience to the scriptures, you have just changed the next

00:47:17.760 10,000 years of human history. Wow. Because you've helped that one guy be a better dad to three or

00:47:23.880 five or six or two kids who are going to go have kids. You're reaching out and you're actually

00:47:28.940 putting your hand pastorally on generations of people. And Big Fast Famous wants to use the

00:47:34.540 generation in front of them to get worship. They don't want to push faith and obedience downstream.

00:47:39.360 and that's why decentralization when we use the term decentralization because that's what it is

00:47:45.860 it's that i'm pastoring one person and this other person this other person so that they can go make

00:47:51.920 more healthy people and make more disciples and and make more healthy families and and produce

00:47:57.360 fruit that i would never produce myself yeah and it's therefore it's a force multiplier a massive

00:48:03.840 kingdom force multiplier yeah i think about it like it's the difference between having like a

00:48:08.500 crop and having like, you know, these 10,000 acre, you know, farms that are all government

00:48:13.600 subsidy. Yeah, exactly. The same genetic, no genetic diversity. Yeah. It's that versus like

00:48:18.660 the Amish model where you have 120 acres. The irony is we've talked about is that the Amish

00:48:23.040 are actually quite productive and make good money and don't need subsidies. And the corollary is a

00:48:29.540 church with 200 people that is really healthy will produce so much more fruit than a mega church

00:48:34.640 with 1500. That's right. When a lot of them are unregenerate and they're not pastoring biblically

00:48:38.580 and it's just basically a brand. Yeah. And it's interesting. The last thing I'll say about that

00:48:42.280 is just, that is, I think one of the reason they're not just cute stories, but that's one of

00:48:46.300 the reason the Lord made the world a certain way. He hardwired it a certain way. And then he gives

00:48:52.080 us all these parables, stories, et cetera, about, you know, pastoral ministry and life being like

00:48:56.980 that. It's not like a factory. Yeah. It's utterly not like a factory. Um, Brian, one thing you

00:49:02.440 mentioned, I want to ask you about this. You've said in the past that the big church model

00:49:06.460 actually isn't big enough. Even if you got 50,000 people in your church, we're still called to reach

00:49:13.300 the world. And so you've said what we want is a decentralized world swallowing type entity,

00:49:19.980 not an elaborate sandcastle. So I just want to ask you, what do you mean by this? Why is this

00:49:24.760 so important? Yeah. So if you take that mothership model and you say, let's just say Lakeside Church

00:49:31.100 or whatever Joel Osteen's church is called, I think they've got maybe 50,000 people. It could

00:49:35.200 be, it could be more than that. You know, they're at the, this big stadium of a church and,

00:49:40.200 and then you go big whoop. Texas has how many people? The world has how many people?

00:49:48.580 Big whoop, 50,000. Well, and number one, that's not big enough. And number two,

00:49:55.540 it's bigness in a sense is actually hindering the actual bigness of the church. Because

00:50:00.900 think about this at a church like that, let's say, let's say you even got a good church. Like

00:50:06.120 let's take Joel out of the equation. Let's say you got a solid Protestant and reformed church

00:50:10.700 and you got it to 20,000 people all in one room. And I'm not going to be like, oh, that's a sin

00:50:16.100 right there. There's a hard number limit on the number of people that can gather. But I do look

00:50:20.820 at that and I say, well, what's happening there? We've probably got an elder team. Let's say they

00:50:25.860 even had something like 50 elders, right? 50 elders of these 20,000 people or 50,000 people.

00:50:32.500 And it's like, well, instead of that, you could have had 150 churches that spin off from that,

00:50:39.380 each with their own elder session, you know, all coordinated in a region and they're going to be

00:50:44.840 spread out. You're going to, you're going to be seeing a hundred times more gifts being exercised

00:50:49.640 in God's church because all of a sudden, instead of how many guys can really preach at a 50,000

00:50:55.460 person church in a given year. How many guys can, you know, functionally pastor in that environment?

00:50:59.520 Not that many, really. Christ's vision for swallowing the world, which is his vision,

00:51:05.580 by the way. I mean, the stone strikes the statue that represents human empires. That statue turns

00:51:11.800 to dust and blows away. And then that stone becomes a mountain and swallows the world.

00:51:15.480 That's Daniel's vision, right? That the kingdom of heaven is like three measures of flour that

00:51:20.140 a woman leavened until it was all leavened. It's like the goal really is to take over the whole

00:51:25.000 thing and it's not going to happen with how many nations are there and then one church in each of

00:51:31.620 those nations that's like a million people that's not what it's going to be well i feel like that's

00:51:35.620 even so much of the battle right now like we talk a lot about globalization and fundamentally the

00:51:41.520 church is like no we're going to take over the world but not like that right it's not because

00:51:45.300 we have one currency one world leader it's not gonna be one world government it's gonna be like

00:51:49.840 a million churches making a million communities that are all different and they are all nourished

00:51:58.100 and knit together in the joints and ligaments with the growth that comes from God. They're

00:52:00.840 one universal body, but they are genuinely going to be extremely diverse, extremely different from

00:52:07.500 one another. There are going to be so many leaders and families. That's why when we say

00:52:11.500 the Kings Hall podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world, that's what

00:52:15.760 we're talking about. It's going to take billions of Christians worshiping the living God with

00:52:22.740 everything they've got. That's what will end up winning the world. And the instinct of

00:52:28.700 centralization and fame and big and fast is the instinct that is exactly inverse from that.

00:52:35.520 Yeah. Yeah. Instead of a top-down model, which is a centralized, big, fast, famous

00:52:39.820 sort of model, it's a top-down thing. And we think this way all the time in politics,

00:52:44.860 If we just had the right guy, we could get rid of abortion.

00:52:47.500 We could lower taxes.

00:52:48.520 We could do X.

00:52:49.100 No, it's because the people actually want that stuff.

00:52:51.580 That's why we have the politicians and the policies that we, we have.

00:52:55.600 And so it's going to take the people that actually worship the holy and living God that

00:53:00.800 go to church on Sunday and sing Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs to one other, one another,

00:53:05.500 go home, disciple their kids, love their wives, make businesses, live like Christians

00:53:11.600 with a brotherhood making partnerships communities that's what actually changes thing

00:53:18.260 a 50,000 person church you're right it is so limited 50,000 is about all you can do and it

00:53:26.080 doesn't really function that well now what you need are 50,000 people in small churches

00:53:31.180 that are making culture ultimately in and glorifying the holy and living god that's

00:53:38.220 actually going to change the world and that's how it's going to happen it's inevitable it's really

00:53:43.580 easy like what can 50 000 people do they can watch a movie that's about it but that's functionally

00:53:48.960 what the church service can be and i know they sing and i and i again i don't want to say big

00:53:53.400 like small is inherently holy or big is inherently unholy but it's just not even that impressive

00:53:58.940 there are limitations 70 000 people that go and watch a football game right that 50 000 people

00:54:04.360 gathering in one place on a Sunday is not unusual in our country. It's interesting too though in

00:54:08.580 those models like CJ Mahaney was big on this but I don't know how big their church was we'll call

00:54:14.260 it 10,000 but functionally what they actually had to do was have small groups which were like small

00:54:20.380 churches. Yeah the problem with that model is you're asking a small group leader to pastor and

00:54:26.020 he's not qualified. Right and but they still have to break it down and I think a fundamental issue

00:54:32.880 here and sociologists secular sociologists actually found this out it's like one of those gravity

00:54:37.980 type this is how the universe is hardwired yeah past 150 people you can't really know them oh yeah

00:54:43.540 it's like impossible it's impossible so they say even in military units 150 people you're like i'll

00:54:48.980 die for them you get bigger than that and it's like i don't really know that guy i don't care

00:54:52.980 either i mean i know like intellectually you can know yeah but but you can't love them the way that

00:54:59.160 you love your wife or that you love your brother next to you. So it even seems like, and I guess

00:55:04.760 what I'm getting at, even the size, like we can pretty much look at numbers and say, look, if

00:55:10.300 your church is 10,000 people, there's no way you can be doing that. So here's what we need to do.

00:55:15.000 We need to be honest with our megachurches and actually name what they are. So megachurch

00:55:20.680 pastors aren't pastors, they're bishops. They're not pastors. They're not shepherds. They're

00:55:25.120 bishops, right? They're not shepherding many individual people. They're attempting, they even

00:55:29.900 say it, I'm a leader of leaders. I'm a pastor of pastors. Well, let's just be honest and say that

00:55:34.880 you're Anglican or you're something that you're, you're, you're just establishing a really informal

00:55:39.060 Baptisty bishopric, right? And then you're trying to influence a bunch of leaders to go in. So let's

00:55:45.340 be, that can actually work. That can be fine. Let's, let's go ahead and say that there are

00:55:49.500 going to be leaders in the church that influentially lead and pastor many pastors. Let's, let's be

00:55:55.060 honest about that, what, what that actually is doing. And then let's not say that they need a

00:55:59.480 pastor, a 20,000 person church. Let's let them, you know, be a leader of leaders and go around

00:56:04.620 and coach and mentor, or let's, you know, let's have them pastor a normally sized church and then,

00:56:09.480 you know, lead in an influential way in a region amongst multiple churches, like almost like a

00:56:14.860 Presbyterian or something, you know, like that. And in that way you can have a guy that has,

00:56:20.900 he's a 10 talent guy. He has outsized gifting. God did that. God does that all the time. God is

00:56:28.160 not like, God's not a socialist. We've said it before. God gives some people one talent,

00:56:32.840 some people half a talent, and he gives some people 15 talents. And he did that. Yeah. And

00:56:37.540 it wasn't immoral that he did that. And so sure, let's let the 15 talent guy be a 15 talent guy

00:56:43.980 and go turn a profit on it. Let's let the one talent guy be a one talent guy and go turn a

00:56:48.720 profit on it, but let's just be honest about what we're actually doing instead of pretending like

00:56:53.940 I'm just a, you know, local church pastor guy. Oh, how big's your tree? Oh, 25,000 people. And,

00:57:00.000 you know, no, I mean, let's be, let's, let's be honest. And let's say, let's honor guys that are,

00:57:05.980 you know, I can think of some influential godly pastors that have an outsized influence on lots

00:57:11.380 of other pastors and they, you know, within their presbytery or within their, their group or within

00:57:16.460 their denomination. They're a leader of leaders and lots of other pastors, younger guys are getting

00:57:23.220 help from them. Praise the Lord. Yeah. Praise God for that. But let's do it that way. Instead of

00:57:31.500 having that guy say, bring all of your people to me. You guys can all be small group leaders.

00:57:37.500 I'm the pastor. No past, you know, like, and this is why I think guys like John Piper could

00:57:42.240 have protected themselves early by intentionally planting more churches. I'm really encouraged to

00:57:48.840 see what, you know, for example, Christchurch is doing right now with particularizing their

00:57:53.860 downtown campus, with their, not campus, their downtown church. There's Doug Wilson, Moscow,

00:57:58.820 Idaho. Moscow, Idaho. And Pastor Toby Sumter is now the pastor of King's Cross Church. And they're

00:58:04.200 in the same presbytery and praise God they're working together. They're both trying to reach

00:58:08.780 the Palouse for Christ. They're in the stovepipe of Idaho, but they recognize the way that you

00:58:15.140 reach the Palouse isn't going to be one Christ church. That's 25,000 people. It's going to be

00:58:19.480 a hundred churches that are a hundred people, 50 people, 200 people, 500 people all over the place.

00:58:25.500 Yeah. And it's interesting too, because in a lot of those churches, you can, you can think of

00:58:28.480 Moscow as well. I think that people have a misperception that like Doug is the guy and

00:58:33.600 he does everything. And then you go up there and you realize there is like dozens and dozens of

00:58:37.780 really gifted, wonderful guys doing a lot of the leadership.

00:58:42.080 We have two points left.

00:58:44.360 Do we?

00:58:45.220 Yeah, well, sort of.

00:58:47.000 We've got a little bit of fast.

00:58:48.480 We've got a little bit of famous.

00:58:49.600 We've talked about a lot of these.

00:58:51.280 But just a few questions that I want to conclude with.

00:58:55.620 Contra fast.

00:58:57.380 So we talked last week, fast growth is like cancer.

00:59:01.180 We've talked about, you know, certain things like even the Amish being slow to adopt novel

00:59:06.080 technology.

00:59:07.780 which has made them incredibly stable.

00:59:10.140 One of the things Rory Groves talks about

00:59:11.880 in his book, Durable Trades,

00:59:13.960 technology is inherently volatile.

00:59:16.480 It's intended to be that way.

00:59:18.160 So if you bank all your chips there,

00:59:19.800 you see a lot of change.

00:59:21.380 And one of the things is because of technology,

00:59:24.540 like Mark Driscoll could get as big as he got.

00:59:26.960 The downside is he could fall as fast as he fell.

00:59:30.460 And so what we've seen with industrialization

00:59:32.300 and technology is the rises are quicker

00:59:34.580 and so is the fall, they're quicker and bigger.

00:59:36.380 yeah so my question is why is this mindset of plotting just being faithful in the daily small

00:59:44.220 things and being content with that why is plotting so closely connected with stability

00:59:49.460 one reason eric is that think about the question how long does it take to make a godly man

00:59:56.240 how long does it take to make a godly man to make and i'm saying how long does it take to make a

01:00:02.540 pastor? How long does it take to make a guy that you would tell everybody in the church,

01:00:07.080 go be like that guy? A couple decades. A couple decades. It takes a long time. They cook for a

01:00:11.440 long time. How long does it take to impart a culture to someone? A while. A long time. Yeah.

01:00:18.420 It takes a long, long time. So when you're seeing fast growths of organizations made up of people,

01:00:25.240 fundamentally, even if they're there for a good reason, they're not cooked yet. They're not

01:00:31.740 matured yet. And you're likely in this organization, not all of a sudden, like take a Mars Hill

01:00:37.160 church in Seattle. It's not as if Mars Hill all of a sudden attracted 20,000 really healthy,

01:00:42.260 mature Christians. No, no, man. They had people coming up because, because Pastor Mark was,

01:00:46.420 the air war was good often. He was preaching against the big idols of the day, you know,

01:00:50.180 whether on purpose or on accident, he ended up hitting the target with that. And so lots of

01:00:54.480 guys were showing up and being like, yeah, I'm looking at porn. I'm, you know, got my girlfriend

01:00:58.040 living here. We got three kids and I don't know if I'm going to marry her. And then they got

01:01:01.180 punched in the mouth. They became Christians, but even so, even six months in, they'd had six

01:01:06.900 months of good preaching. Yeah. They weren't done cooking yet. So when you grow fast, you just have

01:01:12.600 to understand that that growth is not mature. It's not mature. When you, when you go to prune a fruit

01:01:18.500 tree, you're cutting what person, you know, Dan, you can speak to this more. How much of the growth

01:01:23.240 are you, the new fast growth are you cutting back every year on a fruit tree? Yeah. Well, so on

01:01:27.720 grapes it's radical it's it's over 90 percent of the previous year's growth that you're cutting

01:01:31.800 off on 90 percent 90 percent yep on so 90 percent of the new growth is stuff you have to cut cut it

01:01:37.780 off yep and it depends on if you're spur pruning or cane pruning you know i won't get it nerdy now

01:01:43.120 but but on a tree i mean i've got an apple tree in my yard is big it's a standard tree which means

01:01:48.700 that it's got a lot of vigor and i every year cut a wheelbarrow load of really branches off of the

01:01:55.840 thing just to keep it at a manageable size. Because what'll happen is that it grows too much

01:02:00.620 vegetation and it doesn't fruit. Or the fruit's small and sour and not good. And it'll fall off

01:02:06.360 and it gets diseases because it's weak. Anyway, so yeah, you have to trim a lot. And so we've

01:02:12.740 experienced this before, just periods where you get a lot of new people into the church and all

01:02:17.420 of a sudden you've got a lot of problems. And there's a lot of that shepherding that needs to

01:02:22.340 happen and a lot of it is pruning it's it's preaching them out of the church oh man or

01:02:27.400 how many times have we sat in my office or your office and looked someone in the eye

01:02:32.260 and told them something that is just radically uncomfortable no you may not be a member of this

01:02:37.960 church until you go back and try to reconcile with the husband you unbiblically divorced 10

01:02:42.460 years ago yes stuff like that yeah and they don't come back they don't come back they do not sometimes

01:02:49.180 they do. Sometimes they repent and they submit to the pruning and they turn and repent and they

01:02:55.760 produce fruit. Yeah. You get a different kind of growth in that situation. Yeah. But it still

01:03:01.200 takes time because they have to heal. They have to heal. They have to recover. They got to grow.

01:03:05.700 Okay. Everything I was doing was wrong before. I guess I have to change everything. Yeah. And it

01:03:11.620 still takes time. It's just slow. Yeah. You get these, you know, that's why big, fast and famous,

01:03:16.580 their goal is to get a lot of growth. Our goal isn't to get a lot of growth quickly. Our goal

01:03:22.000 is to get a lot of growth over the next 40,000 years and play our part in that. Like that's our

01:03:26.400 goal. We want to play our part faithfully in Christ, increasing his kingdom massively over

01:03:32.140 the next 40,000 years or so, you know, just he told Abraham a thousand generations, thousand

01:03:37.540 times 40, 40,000 years. Let's say we got 37 and a half left. Okay. You know, so that's what we,

01:03:42.320 that's the kind of big that we want, but we want it slow. And we're willing to preach people out

01:03:48.020 because you have to understand this principle that God has built into the fabric of reality,

01:03:52.680 that fast growth is almost always immature. Yeah. I think that is such an important thing

01:04:01.220 to look at. Dan, I want to ask you about this is when you look at business. So one thing I noticed

01:04:07.160 working in the firearm industry, you've worked in the same industry.

01:04:11.380 We're on these cycles every year, new products, new, new, new, new, new, new.

01:04:15.140 One of the things that struck me was Beretta.

01:04:18.460 They've had some new products over the years,

01:04:21.160 but they're one of these unique companies that

01:04:23.160 they're always looking for the legacy product.

01:04:26.020 Yeah.

01:04:26.680 That company, I think, has been around for a couple hundred years.

01:04:31.320 Italian gun maker.

01:04:33.100 It's interesting because they're explicitly not,

01:04:35.620 Like they're thinking in decades, what's going to make us money over the next couple of decades.

01:04:39.880 So when you think about this growth model, how should, you know, you're a dad, you're

01:04:44.820 a father in the pew.

01:04:46.440 How should you be thinking about the growth for your family, not just in five minutes,

01:04:51.000 but in, in decades?

01:04:52.720 I know you talk a lot about this.

01:04:54.320 Yeah.

01:04:54.620 Yeah.

01:04:54.860 Actually what Brian said about going after the sick and wounded sheep.

01:04:59.540 And if he teaches one man to be a good dad and a good husband,

01:05:04.480 he is steering generations of blessing.

01:05:08.280 And so to me,

01:05:09.500 I've got kids,

01:05:10.260 I've got,

01:05:10.600 I'm responsible to shepherd them and obviously in the church,

01:05:14.260 but to my kids every night,

01:05:16.540 I'm praying for them that they would be godly,

01:05:19.080 masculine men that would not depart from the faith,

01:05:22.480 not be on that.

01:05:23.780 They would not waver from,

01:05:25.320 from the hope that's in them,

01:05:26.720 that they would produce fruit.

01:05:28.800 for a thousand generations.

01:05:31.100 I ask for that every night.

01:05:32.380 I pray for my, I only have boys.

01:05:34.000 I pray for their, my future daughter-in-laws.

01:05:37.580 I pray that God would provide godly women

01:05:40.220 that would be beautiful.

01:05:42.740 I mean, you got to shoot for the stars, right?

01:05:44.400 They would be beautiful and they would be fruitful,

01:05:47.020 like fruitful vines in their house and around their table.

01:05:50.020 And so when we get to church on Sunday,

01:05:53.200 you probably wouldn't see it in the pew

01:05:55.200 because I've got four boys, four and under,

01:05:56.900 and it's chaos. It is absolute chaos. And this is, it's actually kind of a good picture for

01:06:04.500 fast growth is that it's fairly chaotic, right? And so there's a lot of pruning that needs to

01:06:09.720 happen. So we have a spoon in the backpack that we bring in the diaper bag. And so I thankfully

01:06:16.100 have an office in the basement. And so we're doing a lot of pruning during, during the church

01:06:20.940 service, but ultimately it's all steering one way. It's all steering in one way. It's not just so,

01:06:25.440 hey, hey, be quiet so I can listen. Or you're embarrassing me. I'm a pastor. I could be

01:06:31.000 disqualified for not managing my household well, even though that comes into my head every once

01:06:34.540 in a while. But the goal is like, no, you guys, you're Christians. You're being trained in how

01:06:39.640 to worship the holy and living God. That's what we're doing here. And so I need you to pray with

01:06:45.000 us. I need you to get on your knees and confess because you need to know how to confess because

01:06:49.440 you're a Christian. And so you need to be able to go to the throne of mercy and receive grace.

01:06:54.160 uh, no throne of grace and receive mercy in your time of need.

01:06:56.860 You need to be able to know how to do that.

01:06:58.640 You need to be able to understand how to eat at the table, right?

01:07:02.000 You need to know how to use your fork and knife.

01:07:04.260 Metaphorically speaking, when you go to the table,

01:07:06.560 you need to know the gravity of what you're doing when you go and you have the

01:07:11.080 bread and you have the wine. Uh, when you,

01:07:13.640 when you sit down to listen to a sermon and be fed through the preaching of the

01:07:17.880 word, all of those things, uh, are pointing at a legacy because, you know,

01:07:23.060 I think Doug says this, when you, when you spank your kids, you're, you're spanking your grandkids.

01:07:27.560 When you're disciplining your kids, you're disciplining your grandkids because they're

01:07:30.400 learning from you how to be Christians, how to be godly men and women. And so that's what I'm

01:07:35.060 thinking about when I'm in the pews. And it's, it's just a long-term sort of slow. You can't be

01:07:40.980 frustrated or undone with one bad week, but you got to think over the long haul.

01:07:47.540 Yeah. Even, even that principle of children, um, and especially since we've become Presbyterian

01:07:52.680 you know 10 years ago now i guess um understanding like church growth is going to be pretty natural

01:07:57.400 as you're having kids and teaching you know household responsibility but that growth is a

01:08:02.100 lot slower than like hey let's go door to door and just get 100 people to come to church on sunday

01:08:06.880 very different one of the things that's a good transition that dan was talking about with legacy

01:08:12.460 models um i always think dan of the story of arthur guinness so guinness beer arthur guinness

01:08:18.860 in 1759, took out a 9,000 year lease for his original brewery in Dublin, Ireland. 9,000 years.

01:08:26.600 I believe he was paying 45 pounds a year. He got a pretty good deal. Dang. It was expensive at the

01:08:31.660 time, 45 pounds a year. But he was looking ahead. You know, he got the starting money, 100 pounds

01:08:38.860 from an archbishop who died. Really? He was willed the startup costs. That's amazing. And so he's

01:08:45.560 like, yeah, this four acres of brewery. Yeah. We're going to lease it 9,000 years. There's

01:08:49.620 actually a plaque or a, uh, in the, in the streets, you can see where it's been leased

01:08:55.700 for that long. It's paid off now. Yeah. It's paid off, but I love the idea of 9,000, 9,000

01:09:02.780 year lease. How many of us would think to even do that? So for several centuries, it

01:09:06.260 was the largest brewery in the world is still the largest brewery of stout beer. It's think

01:09:11.460 about this it's lasted through several world wars i mean think about what it's been through

01:09:16.740 several world wars the industrial revolution talk about a durable trade making beer was actually in

01:09:22.080 rory's book yeah so the industrial revolution it survived that it survived societal upheaval

01:09:27.620 technological advances and changes so here's my point a man who takes out a 9 000 year lease

01:09:33.880 isn't thinking about celebrity status for the next five minutes that's right this man is thinking

01:09:39.180 about his children, his children's children. He's looking ahead for a legacy model. So I think in

01:09:45.500 many ways, as we close, the Guinness story is the perfect example of the pastoral plotting and

01:09:50.440 productive model. So Brian, I want to ask you this as we're closing. You think of Arthur Guinness.

01:09:58.360 Yeah. And in one sense, we could say that he's not seeking glory, but in another sense,

01:10:03.780 what he's building and what he's seeking is glory. That's right. So how do we parse that out?

01:10:07.940 Yes. What you need to understand is that when we're talking about building this cathedral of

01:10:12.720 Christendom, we're talking about not avoiding glory. We're talking about pursuing glory with

01:10:19.620 everything that's in us. We're talking about, see, sin is falling short of the glory of God,

01:10:25.080 meaning that sin is letting your highest glory, the apogee of your glory land on something that

01:10:32.200 is far too small, like worshiping sex. Sex is glorious. The problem isn't that sex isn't

01:10:38.260 glorious. Like the problem with the adulterer isn't that he has chosen something that is

01:10:42.720 completely worthless. It's that he's acting like this thing that is just creationally glorious

01:10:48.360 is ultimately glorious. And it's not. God is ultimately glorious. So if I take everything

01:10:56.900 in my life, everything that I am, every strength I have, every gift that God's giving me, all of

01:11:00.640 my children, all of my moments, everything, and I say to all of it, as for me and my strength,

01:11:07.660 we will serve the Lord. As for me and my gifts, we will serve the Lord. As for me and my talents,

01:11:12.120 we will serve the Lord. As for me and my children, we will serve the Lord. As for me and my wife,

01:11:15.960 we will serve the Lord. As for me and my vocation, we will serve the Lord. And I say, for my entire

01:11:20.640 life, I'm going to aim not for no glory. I'm going to aim for the most possible glory ever,

01:11:25.340 which is the glory of God himself. And I'm going to, I'm going to say to every aspect of my being,

01:11:31.300 you serve the Lord. Then you do start to think that way. You start to actually realize that,

01:11:38.000 wow, you're not actually that glorious in the end. Even all of that stuff that I just said,

01:11:41.880 it's not actually that glorious, but you know, it is glorious is the idea that, and I think about

01:11:46.640 this all the time. I have five kids right now, three boys, two girls so far, Lord willing,

01:11:51.400 there'll be more. And I think, wow, I'm, I won't be able to do all of that, you know,

01:11:58.160 produce all that much glory in my life for the sake of Christ. But my boys might go get married

01:12:04.660 and have a couple of kids themselves. And those kids might get married and have a couple of kids

01:12:08.980 themselves. And in 500 years, the Sovey name might be a few hundred thousand people here in Utah.

01:12:16.320 And those who hate wisdom love death. So the Mormons are going to crumble and the pagans are

01:12:20.040 going to crumble. And it's probably going to be way harder than I imagined. And the path is going

01:12:25.160 to be way more circuitous than straight. Like I think of a straight line towards glory with us

01:12:29.180 taking over Utah. America will probably fall. There'll be like the pagans will come in. I don't

01:12:34.180 know. Maybe like the Chinese will invade for a couple of generations, but whatever. By the end

01:12:38.280 of the thing, I think, man, the surveys just with simple faithfulness, each generation, each

01:12:43.880 thinking of, you know, cutting stones, envisioning cathedrals that by the end of that,

01:12:49.860 that's a lot of glory. Oh yeah. That's amazing. Like that's far more glory than any one man

01:12:57.240 deserves to have any part of. And yet God in his grace said to every man, to every woman,

01:13:03.620 to every one of his image bearers, you can be and participate in this.

01:13:08.880 It's amazing too, because when you talk about that, I think of like the small mindedness that

01:13:13.600 I grew up with and you're like, oh yeah, I thought the glory in my life was going to be like, oh,

01:13:18.280 I'm going to have a really cool job. Get a good retirement. Gay. Have 15 years with no work living

01:13:23.860 off my retirement. Exactly. It pales in comparison, Dan, does it not to this glory? Pales in

01:13:30.400 comparison. Man, talk about robbing your generations too. But anyway, that's an episode

01:13:34.540 for a different day. Boomer retirement. Boomer retirement. I love it. Well, as we conclude,

01:13:40.400 gentlemen, this episode, I want to encourage everyone, our listeners, as we do ourselves as

01:13:44.260 well, be thinking about the Arthur Guinness story, and we can get to work building a household church

01:13:49.300 and community that will last for 9,000 years to begin with. Those are just the early years.

01:13:54.500 So ask yourself as you listen, what would a patient, plotting, and productive model

01:13:58.640 for your household church and community look like? What if Americans stopped thinking big,

01:14:03.340 fast, and famous, and started investing with a pastoral care in their local place, economy,

01:14:08.140 in people. How will the world be different if personal care outweighs celebrity status?

01:14:13.360 Start with a 50, 100, and 500-year plan. As you invest in your local place, begin plotting

01:14:19.060 patiently, start dreaming, and think about the centuries. And always remember the stonecutter's

01:14:24.100 maxim, we who cut stones must envision cathedrals.

01:14:38.140 Thank you.

01:15:08.140 Well, in case you didn't know, we have another Kings Hall show called The After Hours, and it's available only to our patrons.

01:15:14.600 We have a great time in The After Hours. I play hype songs, which Brian loves.

01:15:18.160 Sometimes we even talk about Brian's cut. We talk about recent news on X and answer listener questions.

01:15:23.080 Overall, it's a great time, so I'd encourage you to head over to patreon.com slash thekingshall if you'd like to support the show and get some extra content.

The King's Hall - March 11, 2022

Pastoral, Plodding, & Productive

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