Tim Keller and Russel Moore dismantle "loser theology," arguing that retreating into safe enclaves or merely managing decline fails to address the spiritual crisis. They contrast this with St. Boniface's aggressive felling of pagan idols, asserting the church must rebuild masculine authority in rural America rather than chasing urban elites. By ignoring men's struggles for provision and identity, pastors have driven them toward figures like Andrew Tate. Ultimately, they advocate consolidating strong orthodox communities to eventually reconquer lost cultural territory through bold, grounded witness. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Rome's Unsubdued Germania00:15:00
At the height of Rome's imperial glory, she attempted for centuries to subdue the peoples beyond the Rhine.
Rome had destroyed the powerful empire of Carthage.
She had subdued all of Gaul.
She had taken Greece and nearly all the lands of Alexander's domain.
But she could not subdue Germania.
Rome had made many incursions across the Rhine where German chieftains had been made vassals, their sons given to be hostages and Romanized.
One such was named Arminius, who led a revolt against Rome about the same year the boy Jesus was teaching in the temple in Luke.
too.
Arminius, educated in all the ways of Rome, particularly her military tactics, led three Roman legions into a trap in the Teutoburg forest.
Of the 20,000 Roman troops, not a single one escaped with his life.
Germania had ended Roman imperial expansion and centuries later the Goths would snuff out Roman imperial glory for good.
It was to these unconquerable people an ambitious Saxon monk from the Order of St. Benedict, Winifred, was called to preach the victory of Jesus Christ in 716.
After a pilgrimage to Rome in 718, Winfried was renamed Boniface by Pope Gregory II.
Despite the expansion of the Frankish kingdom's domain across the Rhine, Germania remained thoroughly pagan.
If there was any acceptance of Christ, he was merely added to the pantheon of Norse gods rather than replacing them.
In short, Germania was still ruled by demons.
Into this world stepped Boniface.
After preaching the gospel and slowly gaining converts among the Germanics, Boniface traveled to the great pagan shrine in Geismar in Hesse.
There, at Donner's Oak, The pagan priests offered sacrifices to their demon god Donner, better known to us as Thor.
It was believed that if anyone profaned Thor's oak by touching it, the demon would strike that man down with a bolt of lightning from his hammer.
Boniface reared back with his axe and took one single swing when a powerful wind came out of the heavens and blew the tree over.
Astonished to see the impotence of their demon god, everyone present forsook their paganism and was baptized into Jesus Christ.
One of the things that we got to get into, I feel like right off the bat, is it's not the whole purpose of writing the book, but you are counter signaling, at least to some extent, the Benedict option.
So let's talk about that.
The Boniface option, St. Boniface, all three of us are on board.
We think that's the way to go.
That it's not just trying to avoid trash world, clown world, the demons of our age, the spirit of this age, but it actually needs to be confronted.
We've got to chop down old donors.
Oh, we got to sharpen the axe, chop it down.
And that's only half.
Of the story, we need to chop down the idols of our day, but then we also need to use, if God would be so kind, uh, the oak, the wood that of those demon gods that we confront and defeat, then use that to restore Christendom.
We have to build, so we have to confront and then we have to build, and that's very, I mean, categorically different than just trying to avoid the craziness of our day.
But that's the Benedict option in a nutshell.
Rod Dreer, he wrote the book, and you address him right out the gate in your book.
So let's talk about that.
What's the difference, Benedict?
And Boniface.
And why does the Benedict option of avoiding these things, moving to the Shire, you know, the Hobbits, and thinking we can avoid Sauron, why does that fail?
I think, you know, I think it fails.
And, you know, to be fair to that book and that idea, yeah, I think it was the very first one or very first foray into thinking through, okay, we're in a negative world, as Aaron Wren calls it.
And this world is bad.
It's now anti Christian where it hadn't been before.
And so here's the thing we should do we should have intentional.
Christian communities and retreat to those communities.
And that's a good idea.
And to that end, I'm not against it.
I think it's good.
You should go to places where you can consolidate strength.
And there are obvious prudential reasons for doing that.
But it can't stop there.
I remember reading the book six years ago now and coming to the end of it and thinking, okay, then what?
Now we've done this.
Now what?
Because they're not going to allow you to hole up in your nice, intentional Christian community and leave you alone.
That's not possible.
They.
The people that rule over us, the people that are driving trash world and have manufactured it and engineered it, they hate the gospel of Jesus Christ and they hate Christian culture.
They hate cultural Christianity.
And we think it's good.
And they want to eradicate it.
They want to completely wipe it off the face of the earth.
They want to re engineer a new kind of humanity.
And they've successfully, in many instances, done that.
And so, if we want to preserve it and recover it, We can't just hole up in these little places and then hope they forget about us.
We have to be able to, okay, we've consolidated strength and now we strike out and confront them.
And it doesn't, you know, it isn't just in this like military sense, like, yeah, we hole up in the mountains and then we fight back.
It's in a culture war sense, in the true sense of the term, not just in discussing abortion and homosexuality and things like that, but in having an actual competing culture that is, Is confrontational to the one that is prevailing and building that up within ourselves.
It's not enough to see things are bad and want to get away from them when that world still pervades everything.
It's everywhere, it's on every screen that we have, it's in the air that we breathe and the water that we drink.
And so we can't avoid it, even if we do hole up in our little Christian commune or if we move to Hungary.
It will chase you down, and if it doesn't get you, it'll get your children.
And so it has to be fought tooth and nail in every conceivable place that it exists.
And so that's more when I discuss, well, what is the Boniface option?
It's leaving this commune and fighting back, right?
It's leaving the cloister of the monastery and beginning to fight back.
And even, I mean, analogies can get kind of strained, but I think it's a good one.
Like, even.
Like the fact that the monasteries even existed in Dreer's book, like how was Saint Benedict able to set up this monastery in the first place and have all of these monks there and they're recording and preserving Western civilization by copying all these books and leading and praying and worshiping and so forth?
How are they allowed to do this?
Well, it's because there were kings that protected them from barbarians that would ransack the place and kill all of them.
Right.
So the Benedict option, it's.
It only even succeeded or appeared to succeed because somebody else was playing the Boniface role.
Yeah, that there was Christian power being wielded.
I mean, some of it gets into like Christian nationalist kind of discussions.
It's that they had Christian princes that were protecting them.
That's why it was able to work.
And we don't, and the analogy doesn't work as well because we kind of don't have that.
We don't have any people with political or economic or cultural power that are our guys that are going to be the benefactor that.
Allows us to have the monastery.
So even at that point, we have to get to that point first before we can even begin to think about doing Benedict option stuff.
And how do you get there?
Well, you have to preach, you have to build Christian community, and you have to raise men up to lead in this way.
Right.
And with that, I can't help but think if you did the Benedict option, number one, you don't have the Christian princes to protect you, to even afford that to you.
But let's say you find some small town that's off the radar of the current regime and you go there.
Well, it's like the moment that you start to succeed.
So, if you actually did develop a community of believers, And you started to build, and not just by planting a church, not just in the spiritual sense, but the church being the beachhead is never anything less than that.
It's the tip of the spear.
Our worship is warfare, but you plant the church, you're doing Lord's Day worship, but then the men in this community are now starting businesses, and you're buying land, and you're building houses, and your wives are having children.
You're not handing them over to Caesar in public schools, you're raising them up.
Maybe you start a school, the whole nine yards, you're doing all of it.
If you do that and you do it well, then what you've done is you've just painted a target on your chest.
Like you're going to have resources.
Because God will not be mocked.
A man reaps what he sows.
And if you sow poorly, you're going to reap nothing.
But if you sow well by the grace of God, then you're going to have a harvest.
And so if you go and you play the Benedict option and you play it well and God blesses it, well, by doing the Benedict option well, you now have resources where everything in Trash World is meant like locusts to simply deplete resources.
So then you're going to be a lone island in the midst of a wasteland that actually has resources.
So then what did the locust do?
They're going to come for you.
So, you better be building walls.
You better be building towers.
You better be manufacturing artillery.
And I'm speaking of all these things in a metaphorical sense, just for the record.
But you better be ready to fight.
Because even if you don't go looking for the fight, if you just seek to live a quiet life, like the scripture says, working with your hands, well, here's the thing people who just go and deplete everything, if you're building with your hands, they're not going to have anything.
And when they run out, when they spend all the father's capital, right, when they're done spending all of the resources afforded to them by a prior Christendom, and you're the only thing left that actually has reproduced and keep making resources, then they're going to come and they're going to take that.
They're going to take it through culture, they're going to take it through legislation, they're going to take it through this, through that, through tyranny.
And so you've got to be doing both.
I can't help but think of Nehemiah and Ezra, those books of the Bible.
It's the sword and the trial.
And, you know, I was preaching this to my congregation recently and I said, look, the sword really only exists at the end of the day.
It only exists to serve the trial.
It's all about the trial, it's about building.
The reason why you have the sword is not because you're excited about fighting and building.
No, it's because you want to build.
But the moment you start building, guys will come down from those on high and say, you need to stop the work.
You've got to stop.
You can't build.
So the reason why the sword exists is it's not that, that, that, Fighting is the goal.
Building is the goal.
But those who build well will garnish for themselves a fight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's true.
And I think also, to the point of the last episode, we've got to have an honest appraisal of our current situation, right?
Do we even have the people to have these monasteries or communes and stuff like that?
I think Trash World has its hooks in so many of us.
Yeah.
And we need to really recognize that.
Are we even really in a position before we confront the fake and gayness of Trash World?
To form these groups.
I don't know if we do.
You know what I mean?
We've got to actually defeat Trash World first.
In order to even get started with stuff like that, if that's what you wanted to do.
Right.
No, that's totally true.
It's like you have to, if you're going to combat the spirit of the age, you've got to make sure that it doesn't have hooks in your own heart.
Like if you're going to combat, you know, LGBT, you know, LMNOP madness, but you're looking at porn, right?
You're going to be impotent in that fight.
You've already cut your legs out from underneath you, you've already spiritually castrated yourself.
And so, like, so a lot of it starts with, The church and its own repentance.
Part of the reason why we haven't had a good defense against Trash World is because the evangelical church, like Hook, Line, and Sinker, has taken the pages out of the regime.
It participated and that they've found it like Trash World.
Here's the thing about Trash World it works.
Now, it doesn't work for a thousand years like Christendom, it doesn't work like building cathedrals over centuries, it doesn't work with longevity, but it works really well for the present.
It works really well if what you want is massive returns.
Today, without having to plant any seed for tomorrow.
And the reality is that we have, you know, loser theology.
This is what we're getting into.
The church has adopted loser theology.
So, with the world, this mentality of, you know, well, we're just going to live off of the industrial revolution and all these, we're going to outsource all of our jobs.
And we're not thinking, or maybe we are, but we don't care.
We don't care about what our kids are going to do for work, how are they going to feed their families, you know, these kinds of things.
Open borders, free trade without any limitations, all this kind of stuff, this globo homo, as you talk about.
World, you know, that's how the regime, you know, a pagan culture thinks.
But the church has done it in the same way, except the church just puts some theological language on it.
We call it dispensationalism.
That's, you know, I mean, but it is the same.
It's the same thing.
So there's boomers, there's the pagan version of boomer, and then there's the Christian version of boomer.
But both have a bumper sticker that says, I'm spending my grandkids' inheritance.
Both of them, you know, and so that's so my point is like when we think of taking trash world out of our own hearts, It's repenting of sin.
It's nipping pornography in the bud.
It's those kind of things.
But it's also getting rid of this live for today, loser theology mentality that actually thinks in terms of legacy because Christians don't do that.
They don't.
Christians have become Gnostic.
I would say that dispensationalism might be the undergirding foundation, but that might be the root.
But the different fruits that spring from dispensationalism would be, I would say, at least three Gnosticism, nihilism, And then also, oh man, I had one more.
I can't remember.
Gnosticism, nihilism.
Oh, and pietism.
Yeah.
Pietism, all your isms.
So, Gnosticism, pietism, and nihilism spring from that dispensational root.
But when you take the fruit, it has different language, it has theological underpinnings.
But when you just look at the fruit, there's very little difference from somebody who doesn't even profess to follow Christ.
All right, I'm just going to say it.
Theological Justifications for Mediocrity00:14:48
This show is fantastic.
You know it's fantastic.
I know it's fantastic, but I'm willing to admit there is one singular problem the waiting zone, right?
You got to wait a whole week for each new episode of this show to drop on Fridays at 4 p.m. Central Time, unless you go on over to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
Then you'll be able to binge watch every single episode of an entire season all in one day.
So this is a season based. Show, right?
The whole idea is a deep dive on one singular topic so that you know everything there is to know.
Each season comes out in a quarter, right?
So, a three month period, anywhere from probably eight to 12 episodes in a season.
And the moment that the first episode of a new season drops to the public, then you can go over to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries and watch all of those episodes without having to wait week by week by week for the next episode to publicly drop.
So, you know what to do.
Don't waste any more time.
Binge watch the whole season today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of it is it's twofold.
I mean, one is it's a.
Ends up being a theological justification for just living like everybody else lives.
But you just dress it up differently.
You're living basically in the same manner.
Well, you go to your job and you're building your 401k and you live in your suburb and the other guy's not a Christian, but you basically functionally live almost the same lives in your way of life, in your manner of living.
But you, at the end of the day, feel okay about that because.
You're told, well, this is a good and holy way to live.
This world is not my home.
And so I'll be dead soon and in glory with heaven.
So it doesn't matter what happens after I'm gone.
And it allows you to neglect duties that you have to your posterity and also feel holy while you're doing it.
I mean, I always remember and think about a lot what Jesus said to the Pharisees when he says, You tell a man who has received his inheritance from his parents that the eldest son is supposed to receive a double inheritance.
The reason for that is the double inheritance doesn't just go to him because, oh, you're the oldest son and you're so special.
But it's his duty to take care of his parents in their old age.
And the Pharisees would tell these guys, you can donate that whole sum of money to the temple to spite your parents because you hate them.
They're really mean.
And you want to spite them and just let them die in the gutter.
If you donate that to the temple, that's Korban, that's holy.
And you're doing a very holy thing in spite of your parents.
And Jesus says, You're violating the fifth commandment and teaching men how to disobey God, but look holy while you're doing it.
And a lot of our theology does the same thing in evangelicalism today, where you have clear, obvious duties both to the generation before you and the generation after that here's a way for you to neglect them.
Obviously, they won't say it that way, but here's a way for you to live just like your neighbors live and all the other people in Trash World live.
And you can feel holy.
But call it Christian.
Here's a couple Bible verses you can put on that.
And like you look in Deuteronomy, it's interesting.
I mean, again, this is old covenant law that isn't any longer binding on the church, but it's still instructive.
There's still wisdom there to glean from it.
And I can't remember off the top of my head what chapter it is.
I think it's chapter 18 of Deuteronomy.
The list of people who are allowed in the assembly are not allowed in the assembly.
And the first two that are not allowed are.
Um, bastards, illegitimate children, and eunuchs.
And you think about that for like a second, and you think, Well, why is that?
Do they just really mean to these people who don't know their dads and really mean to men who have been a mask, like literally emasculated?
That seems really harsh and nasty for that lot of either.
Why is God doing that?
And what the reason, the wisdom there, the reason why is these are people who don't have a connection to their past, right?
They don't have a heritage that they can look to and say, This is mine, these are my family.
And then also, on the other end, people that are incapable of having children, well, they don't have a future that they're devoted to.
Right.
They don't have a vested interest.
Yeah.
And so, both those two groups, they don't look to the past, they don't look to the future, and they're excluded from the body politic of ancient Israel.
Yeah.
They're not helping us make decisions.
Right.
They can live here, they'll be treated fairly, but yeah, they don't get a seat at the table.
Yeah.
And you think about that, and it's interesting that, like, all of virtually all the heads of state of Western Europe.
Are all childless old people.
Right.
Right.
And or they're not from that place.
The prime minister of Great Britain is not British.
He's Indian.
And so it's both of those cases.
They don't have the heritage or they don't have the future.
And those are the people, the very top making decisions.
And we reflect that a little bit in America too, where you have people that are totally divorced from the natural way of the world of both a heritage and history and a future.
And that's.
Largely part of our evangelical theology.
We don't think about those things at all.
It's just, it's hyper individualized.
And it is, do you have a relationship with Jesus?
Then you're going to heaven.
Nothing else matters.
And for us, it's both.
It's not like that we have bastards and then we have eunuchs.
We have individuals, not just in America, but even within evangelicalism, the church, who are both bastards and eunuchs.
On the bastard side, they hate their heritage.
They actually have a heritage.
Yeah, but they hate it.
They despise it.
They've made themselves that way.
Right.
So they actually do have a heritage, they have a history, but they hate it.
And then on the eunuch side of the equation, looking forward to posterity in the future, I would say it's not necessarily hatred, but it's indifference.
So it's just a complete apathy, a complete lack of compassion and love for future generations.
So there's hatred looking back in terms of heritage, and then there's indifference looking forward to posterity.
So you have, you know, heritage hating bastards who are simultaneously future legacy, you know, Apathetic, indifferent eunuchs.
And that's who we have running the show.
And that's not just who we have running the show when it comes to our body politic as a nation, but that's also those who have the chief seats.
In many ways, that describes those who have the chief seats at the evangelical table who are running the show for the church.
It almost makes me much more angry with our sort of reformed brethren that have the same attitude.
Because at least with dispensationalists, I can kind of understand.
Jesus is coming tomorrow, so I guess I could.
Excuse you for not caring about tomorrow.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But for a lot of these guys, you know, that they think they're all mill because they don't know what they think, you know, that kind of thing.
They just say all mill.
You know what I mean?
There's people that are all mill for good reasons, but a lot of them aren't.
You're almost more mad at them because it's like you don't really have the excuse that the dispensationalists have, you know?
Well, yeah, you have this heritage of Reformed theology where it is so rich and it's in the real world, in the historical world this way, where people thought this way and lived this way.
And They just kind of like, you know, go to the cafeteria and pick up the stuff about soteriology and like that that they want, but they neglect all the rest of it.
And it's like, no, you gotta, it's an entire package that you gotta take.
And they don't.
They don't.
I mean, it was funny, you know, this week, and, you know, the week that we're recording these is way off in the past once the viewer watches these.
But this week, there were, you know, some of the G3 guys went on a tour of like Scotland and all of these, you know, historic Reformation churches.
And the irony, of course, is.
Like you would condemn these guys for building these big, beautiful cathedrals because that's not very holy.
That's not, you're contributing to cultural Christianity.
That is bad.
And yet, like, that's the only reason that we sit here and even have the same or anything closely resembling the same theology as these guys is because they built all this stuff and they carried it forward generation after generation after generation until we got to this place here today.
And now we're just like, ah, well, you know, we're only worried about heaven right now and spiritual formation and these earthly things.
These are not really our concern.
We shouldn't care about it.
And, And you just care too much about politics and you care too much about culture war.
You really need to worry about the holiness of God.
It's amazing to me because you mentioned earlier, earth is not my home.
This is not my home.
But God put you here.
This is your home.
Exactly.
What are you talking about?
Right now, this is your home.
And he's going to come back and bring heaven down to earth and unite them together.
Jesus won the world on the cross for himself.
It is your home.
You shall inherit the earth.
Like, not just the 17th dimension.
Christ has all authority on earth and in heaven.
Yeah.
But a lot of it is bad theology.
But if we're thinking chicken or the egg, I really, you know, if I had to bet, I was a betting man.
I don't think it's that we're working directly from the text and that's why we don't care about the world.
I think it's, no, that's the culture that we live in.
And we just want to be like them.
We've adopted, you know, trash world mentality and then we made the text, you know, fit that.
Equations.
Yeah, we'll give it a biblical justification forever, whatever way we want to live.
And you're right.
That's a lot of what it is.
And especially like the more big Eva types, that's the entire ballgame for them finding a Bible verse.
I mean, if you could talk about finding the gospel in Taylor Swift.
Well, that's why they do that stuff.
Because that's exactly why they do it.
Yeah.
Because they're after the consumeristic Zoomer girl who's all like, we'll spend $3,000 to go see Nosebleed, have Nosebleed tickets for Taylor Swift.
And it's like, ah, we can get those people in.
It's a marketing thing.
And they know this is how people tick.
And you don't want to offend people and say, the entire way of life that you're living is insane.
It's fake.
It's gay.
You need to hate it.
They don't want to say that.
They'll say, just live exactly how you always have, but just add Jesus.
You're fine.
In terms of marketing, for lack of a better word, it is marketing.
The church shouldn't be so concerned about it, but it is.
And reform guys are no exception.
But in terms of marketing, you know, I've noticed, and I know you guys have picked up on this also, but I've noticed over the past few months, part of it is who you're marketing to.
And when I look at like a lot of evangelicalism, and sadly, even within the reform camp, they're marketing to women.
So, like when it comes to their audience, so part of it is bad theology, it's dispensationalism, it's Gnosticism, it's nihilism, and we can maybe define those terms here in a moment.
But part of it is bad theology, but then part of it also is not just what you believe, but who.
Who you're trying to reach.
And when it comes to who they're trying to reach, they're trying to reach women.
And so when you're trying to reach women, you don't necessarily talk about swords.
You don't necessarily talk about fighting.
You don't talk about warfare.
You don't talk about hatred.
You don't talk about those kinds of things because that's not really a winning, compelling recipe for persuading women to come to your conferences and to read your blog and buy your next book and those kinds of things.
So if women are your market, then Than the idea of like this world is not my home, that I'm going to be swept up.
I'm going to be rescued, right?
Because a woman wants to be rescued, you know?
So I'm going to be swept up, right?
So, I'm in the dungeon tower right now, guarded by a dragon.
And what does success look like?
Well, for the damsel in distress, for her success, it looks like being taken out of the dungeon back to this palace in the clouds.
Whereas for a man, what success looks like is kicking down the gates of hell.
That's right.
Going and killing the dragon.
And killing the dragon.
Exactly.
And getting the girl.
And so, I think the church has been feminized for so long that that is a lot of.
I mean, that's where your attendance comes from.
Like, I saw footage from the Gospel Coalition conference, and it's all women.
It's young women.
It's young women and old men.
Yeah, it's young women and old men.
And I was thinking, yeah, if that was my target market, then I would not talk the way that I'm talking.
I mean, that would be suicide.
But I think that's part of it there are bad theological underpinnings.
But there's also, I think, just a bad market, a bad market that we're going for men, not because we like men more than women, we're not gay.
You know, but like it's, but it's, you know, we're going for men because that's how you get the women and children.
We know that if we can get men, and then the men that we're going for, the men who have already been Christianized in our modern, you know, culture that's off the rails of what Christian actually means, the men who have already been won have, many of them have been spiritually castrated.
So a lot of the men that, you know, the three of us appeal to in the various things that we do, whether it's writing or podcasting, whatever, a lot of them are non Christian men.
Like, I don't know about you guys, but like frequently the emails that I get are not from Christian men.
They're from non Christian men who are, you know, their ears are perking up and they're like, wait, wait a second.
Oh, and they have questions and they want.
And so it's funny because that's another thing that Big Eva will boast of is evangelism.
But I feel like they do very little.
So they're trying to evangelize the bi female Zoomer with the Taylor Swift article.
But we're trying to evangelize this, you know, 45 year old man.
Who goes to the gym every single day, who doesn't want to eat the bugs, who shoots guns, and actually has a wife and children who may go to church, but he doesn't go with them because the church isn't for him.
Authenticity Among Non-Christian Men00:09:54
And we're saying, no, it is.
And I think that's a valuable endeavor.
The danger of centralized power is often represented by the word king.
As Americans, we hate the word king.
Civilian ownership of body armor is about helping people to have increased power to resist tyrants and criminals.
And so Armored Republic is about helping you to preserve your God-given rights to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ because he is the King of Kings and he governs kings and he will judge them.
This is Armored Republic and in a republic there is no king but Christ.
We are free craftsmen and we are honored to be your armor spread of choice.
You know, the last episode, Eddie talked about kind of his story.
Like mine is somewhat similar.
You know, I grew up in a Christian home, but, you know, in high school and early in college, I was, you know, I was mostly living like everybody else, you know.
And in the dorm room, in my dorm, there was a group of guys that had a Bible study, and they were associated with Campus Crusade.
And it was interesting because my association with church, with like youth group and things like that, is these were not.
Like you know, high status guys, these were like the nerds that were playing magic cards before school every day, and it wasn't like the football players and like the guys that I liked, right?
And uh, and you don't mean magic tricks with playing cards, you mean magic, the gathering, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what it's called, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just like they were into Dungeons and Dragons, and they, you know, they were not the cool crowd, right?
And uh, and they were all kind of wimpy and all of that.
And but I get to college, and there's this Bible study.
On my dorm floor, and all the guys in it, like one of them was an all American pole vaulter, and another one was a Marine that had just come back from Iraq, and a bunch of other guys were in the military too.
And it's like it was all men, like actual men.
I'm like, oh, I like these guys.
These guys, I want to be like them.
I want them to like me, you know, like things like that.
And they liked the Bible too.
That's interesting because I've never associated men that I can respect with liking the Bible, you know, or at least people.
Peers that I respect liking the Bible.
And I was hooked.
I'm with these guys.
And from then on in college, I spent time with these guys and was part of the ministry and all of that.
And kind of the rest is now history.
And that's what brought me in because it was actual men, it was guys that I liked and did man stuff.
And so you see that.
Like that's what brought me in.
And I've always kind of had that in the back of my head when you see how feminized.
The church is in how men are expected to leave aside any form of masculinity at the door, right?
You're supposed to, you're always supposed to speak nice and be very, very sweet and gentle all the time.
You can't ever like argue something strenuously.
You can't, you can't like care about politics.
That's very bad.
Especially where I'm from in the upper Midwest, everyone is nice.
Everyone is expected to be nice and inoffensive, and you don't ever.
Argue with anyone about anything, right?
It's the most passive aggressive state.
You're just supposed to talk about your future rescue, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's about it, yeah, right.
And and you, you, and then of course, in worship, you just sing all of these songs, which are you know, songs to boyfriend Jesus, and uh, and you, you really are just um, gelded right there in the church.
And so, regular men that I know that don't go to church, um, they see that, and I tell them, Well, you should go to church, and they in their mind, they associate church with just totally emasculated, wimpy men.
That they could not respect.
Right.
And that, you know, has to totally change in the way of doing things.
And I think it is.
I think the things that we're doing, many of the guys that we know, that we go to their conferences, things like that, many of our friends, they're doing that exact same thing.
They're appealing to men and they're not doing it.
I mean, they're accused of this, but they're not doing it in this performative way.
Like, I'm going to, you know, be like Stone Cold Steve Austin and smash two beer cans on my head.
Right, right, right.
And then they shoot a bunch of guns, you know, and it's like, like they think it's like that.
But the reality is, it's like, no, I just do regular guy stuff.
I like the same things other men do, and I can have conversations with regular men.
And yeah, you get all sorts of non Christian guys who are like, whoa, this guy's a normal guy.
This is a normal man.
He's not what I thought he was.
And the men in my church are the same way.
You know, they see that it's not just.
These wimpy, emasculated men that are expected to behave like women once you become a Christian, you can be a virtuous, godly man and still remain a man.
Yeah, we're supposed to be converted from sinners to saints, not converted from men to women.
Yeah, but that's what has become.
You know, that has to change.
And I think you have to recognize as a pastor, when you do preach, you're preaching the words of God.
And if you're doing it from this sort of like, oh, you know, like that kind of a way, that's not how God is.
And when you're pastoring his flock, You're working for the Lord.
He's got authority and He's delegated some to you.
And to do this in a way that is just trying to make the people that want to go to the Taylor Swift conference feel good about it, it's a failure.
It's a total failure.
And so, look, I'm not going to say when you get a new pastor candidate, you've got to get his T levels checked first.
I'm not saying that.
But what I am saying, though, is that.
The way that that's done and presented and all these things, your tone, it has to be appropriate for what your job is.
Yeah.
And men go to this and they're like, You say you're, I'm hearing from God right now.
And I've got this guy in the skinny jeans and the weird, you know, V neck shirt.
Like, I'm sorry.
I don't buy it.
Yeah.
Right.
And you know what?
I can't blame him.
Yeah.
God seems pretty wimpy to me.
You know, like that.
If you're representing God and you speak that way, I mean, you look at Jesus, the thing that stood out to the people before he even did miracles was he went into the synagogue and he spoke with authority.
Yeah.
Right.
They believe it.
It's like, whoa, who is this?
And that's what our pastors, our leaders should be like.
They should speak like God does.
You read how God speaks, and He is a father.
He is God.
He speaks firmly.
And of course, He is also gentle and loving and kind in the right occasions.
But most of the time, it's this is what you've done.
This is what you need to do.
This is how you need to repent.
Peter, in his epistles, he says, let the one who speaks, right?
There are various gifts.
One spirit, but the one who speaks, let the one who speaks speak as though he is speaking the very oracles of God.
And so, like, in that, you know, for a long time, I think part of this comes back to authenticity.
Authenticity has been heralded as far more of a virtue than I think it actually is supposed to be.
You know, like, I forget who said it, may have been Chesterton, probably, you know, when in doubt, you can go with him.
But that, you know, that hypocrisy is vice's tip of the hat to virtue.
Yeah.
Right?
That we actually don't have nearly as much hypocrisy in our culture today.
As I would like.
And let me qualify that statement.
What I'm saying is this.
One of the good things about cultural Christianity is that there were a bunch of hypocrites.
Yeah.
And I mean, that was a good thing.
Yeah, that's a blessing.
That's a blessing.
Yeah.
What that means is that degenerates had to go around publicly pretending to be civil people.
Yeah.
Because blatant, authentic degeneracy would not serve you well.
Yeah.
It would not play well.
You would lose clients.
You would, like, there would be.
You to behave this way, present this image that pervades everything, and now that's gone.
And where we are today, exactly where we are today, it doesn't even require hypocrisy.
And again, I'm using this old famous quote to say, again, to define hypocrisy is hypocrisy is vice's tip of the hat.
It's vice's salute.
It's vice's homage to virtue.
But when you live in a world that actually calls evil good and good evil, right?
Then vice no longer has to even pretend to be virtue or salute virtue because vice has become virtue.
It is a virtue itself.
And so, all that being said, my point is authenticity, you know, be real, man.
That was a big thing for a long time don't be a hypocrite, right?
So, be real.
And that seeped into the church with, you know, with pastors and with preaching.
And so it began don't preach at me, man.
Don't preach at me.
Just talk to me.
And it even shaped, in a physical sense, a literal sense, it shaped the pulpit to where pulpits were replaced with, you know, side table, you know, and a pastor stopped, you know, standing.
We have a side table right here, but there's a hypocrisy thing.
It's the tip of the hat.
But the point is this this is not a sermon.
This is a podcast.
This is a discussion.
Redefining Humility as Uncertainty00:02:47
But I'm talking Sunday morning, the Lord's Day in the congregation, in the church.
The guy's got the side table.
He doesn't have a pulpit.
He's not standing.
He's sitting.
He's got a coffee mug on the table with him.
He's got an iPad instead of the good book.
And there's screens and all those kinds of things.
Nobody brings their Bible anymore because you've got it on the screen, those kinds of things.
Right.
And he would even say things like this.
He'd be like, Hey, if this is your first time coming to the church, and if you're not a believer, you know, you're new to Christianity, those kinds of things, I want to just, you know, put you at ease right out of the gate.
I'm not going to preach at you.
I'm just going to share with you.
And then he proceeds to give one of the most blatantly arrogant talks.
I won't call it a sermon because it's not that you could possibly imagine because the whole thing's about him.
Yeah.
The whole thing, it's not arrogant in the sense that his tone is elevated.
It's not arrogant in the sense that he says, I know I'm right.
He'll never even make a statement.
It'll always be qualified with, Well, I think or I feel.
But here's the thing that makes it arrogant I, And it's personal story after personal story.
And you see this dominating Western culture, especially in Europe.
I remember my wife and I visiting Ireland, and there was a guy that I met, and he seemed like a sweet guy, but that was the problem.
He was too sweet, you know.
And he found out that we were from California.
We were living in California at the time, and his son and his wife were there with him.
And so they were real excited because we're from Southern California.
So they thought, you know, or at least thought it was possible that maybe we.
We were celebrities, or that we knew a celebrity.
He's got his son there, and they watch American movies.
And so he's like, Have you met Brad Pitt?
You're fine.
Of course, yeah.
But then when I made it abundantly clear that I was a nobody and that I knew nobody, then I started asking him questions about Ireland and their culture and things going on in Europe.
And it was like asking him questions that he clearly knew the answer to.
But every time he answered me, every time he spoke, His inflection would go up at the end.
So he would, and he would add the words, is it?
So I'd ask a question like, you know, who, I don't know, whatever.
Is Southern Ireland predominantly Protestant or is it predominantly Catholic?
And he's like, well, it's predominantly Catholic, isn't it?
And I was like, I asked you.
Like, why do you ask me?
Right.
But like, and I could tell, wait, no, that's just the way he speaks.
That is him giving an answer.
It's not a question.
He's making a statement.
But even when he makes a statement, he has to put it in the form of a question because he can't dominate any sense of certainty.
Because that's what we've done we started defining arrogance as certainty.
If you're certain, you're prideful.
And then we defined humility as uncertainty.
So, how do you, humility is a virtue, pride is a vice.
So, how do you have humility?
Rejecting Inoffensive Church Leadership00:16:02
You have to say, I think, or it might be, or it could be, or, you know, it's, and so all that, all that being said, it seeped into our pulpits to where, you know, in the name of authenticity, I'm not going to preach, I'm just going to share.
But the Bible, and I remember this being so convicting for me because I started preaching like that when I was younger.
But the Bible says, let the one who speaks, if you're going to speak, especially as a preacher, representative of Christ on the Lord's day, administering word and sacrament, let him speak as though he's speaking the oracles of God.
And if you think about the oracles of God and you don't know, then sit down, then don't speak at all.
So when I get in the pulpit, and I get that comment a lot of times, but like YouTube, 80% of our YouTube followers are men.
And every now and then in the comments, the 20% of the women who pipe in, They'll say, Well, you're too forceful, or it's too elevated, or it's too certain, it's too dogmatic.
And I'll say, You just don't understand preaching.
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to be.
That's right.
It's masculine, and it's supposed to be.
Not just because I'm a man and God made me to be a man, but God has called men to the pulpit.
And He's called men to be masculine in the pulpit.
And it's not just about masculinity, but it's about heralding the very oracles of God.
When the herald goes out in the town speaking for the king, He says, Hear ye, hear ye.
The king says, He doesn't say, Hey guys, so I've been thinking lately.
Anyways, I'll stop.
Well, you're right, though.
I mean, that's what we've done.
And even the denominations that are nominally against ordaining women, they've just ordained women of the opposite sex.
Right.
That's what they've done.
They have these pastors who speak like they're women.
There's this uncertainty, and that's heralded as a virtue.
Um, and because it doesn't offend anyone, right?
That's the point.
You don't want anyone's feathers ruffled ever.
You want to feel affirmed, you want to feel good, you don't want anyone challenging you.
And you know, as a result, yeah, you'll have lots of people in your churches, but they're not being discipled, they're not growing, they're not challenging anything in the world around them.
They're just being told, You're totally fine because you believe in Jesus, and that's really what matters.
That's right, and that's the key right there.
So, you don't even have to be preaching a theology of losing to have a loser kind of theology about you, because if you're preaching It is not causing the people in your church to go out there and, you know, to fell these oaks.
Right.
Then what's the point?
What good is it, really?
So they're safe for eternity, and no one's denying that.
But what about our home here?
What about our duties here?
And so even good theology presented as a loser is still a loser theology.
You're right.
Yeah.
And what about the people who, you know, 100 years from now are not going to be saved because you allowed Christian civilization to burn down and they thought.
Installing Sodom and Gomorrah was fine because you personally were saved.
Yeah, and you're a flock.
Yeah.
But what about the next one?
Yeah.
And the next one after that?
Right.
In 100 years, are the people in your church still going to exist in 100 years after you're dead?
And what are they going to be believing?
Is your community around you still going to exist?
Like these are not questions that are even pondered because we don't care about this stuff because that would require us to begin to be much more bold and to speak with authority.
I've been preaching through the book of Acts and just the beginning parts of Acts, right after the Spirit comes and the word that is repeated.
Again and again and again and again is boldness.
And great boldness came upon the boldness.
And I think about that, and I think about it in the context of American evangelicalism today.
We don't have bold pastors at all.
I remember when I was in Moscow, Doug Wilson would talk about this story about a British bishop reflecting on the Apostle Paul.
I think it's some guy in the 19th century.
And he says, wherever the Apostle Paul went, there would either be a revival or a riot.
And wherever I go, they serve tea.
And it's like that.
I mean, so it isn't just like in the last century that this has been the case for a while that we, you know, churchmen, pastors, leaders in the church are expected to be inoffensive, expected not to step on anyone's toes, and functionally the opposite of boldness.
Right.
To not have any boldness at all.
Because if you have boldness, you are going to offend people, you're going to make people mad, you're going to upset the ladies.
Like the thing you said, like, You're going to be told that's too strong.
You're too aggressive.
That's turning people off.
Too certain, too dogmatic.
Yeah.
And it's like, well, what was Peter when he's preaching?
Like, what was he?
You know, he goes to the Sanhedrin.
Like this Jesus that you crucified.
Right to their faces.
He's right in front of the Sanhedrin who had just killed Jesus.
He says, You killed him and we're not going to stop talking about him and we don't care if you kill us too.
Right.
Right.
Whoa.
Can I talk that way?
Do we have any men that talk that way at all?
No, we don't.
We should.
And if God is gracious to us, we will one day.
But that's the thing that brings in people that don't know the Lord at all.
Like we have this kind of managerial Christianity.
Yes.
Where you inherit a church and you just kind of maintain it.
You don't want to push anybody out or step on any toes or do anything that upsets the apple cart.
But then there are thousands, millions of people who have some sense of God, right?
If you ask them, I mean, especially where I am, all the way through the Midwest.
It's not very high church attendance, but if you ask people, are you a Christian?
Do you believe in Jesus?
Are you going to heaven?
And they'll say, Yeah, absolutely, I do.
When's the last time you went to church?
Well, if you don't count weddings, maybe five or six years ago at Easter, they don't go to church at all.
And they don't go for the reasons that we're talking about.
And you see this, but they care deeply about so many things, especially you see this after all the political things that have happened in the last six, seven years.
They care a lot about this stuff, and the church has nothing to say to men.
Like that at all.
They have something to say.
They have disdain for men like that.
Rusty Rumor hates those kind of men.
You are bad.
You are bad.
And if you want to go to heaven, you need to repent of being that way.
You need to repent of being men that care about your country.
And I look at it, I see the following that each of us have and many of our friends have is because we can reach men like that and say, no, you should care about your country.
You should care about your communities.
You should care about all these things.
You don't have to.
Pretend to not care about those in order to be a Christian.
Right.
Jesus cares about those things a lot.
And so come.
So come to church.
And Lord willing, there will be many, many, many more churches with that kind of vision that are planted that can reach these people because I just see fields ripe for the harvest.
Oh, 100%.
And we are not doing it.
And it breaks my heart because these are men that desperately need the church and desperately need the church.
They can be one too.
And what they see.
Is guys like Tim Keller and Russell Moore hating on them.
That's what they see.
Yeah.
And their acolytes in the local level.
That's right.
And then, if by some miracle their kids go to VBS one day and they're convinced to come to a Sunday service, what they see is the same exact thing from their acolytes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Part of the problem why we're not winning them is because we have the wrong message.
We don't have courage.
Part of it also is like, I think geographically we're in the wrong places.
Like, so when I think of like, you know, the fields being white for the harvest, I think a lot of those ripe fields are in flyover country.
It's the Neanderthal, the person despised by, you know, the sophisticated, you know, yeah, it's you.
There you go.
You know, it's me.
You know, but like, seriously, it's the, you know, it's, Not because I live in New England.
But that harvest that's so ripe right now, it's a bunch of people on the far right.
It's a bunch of red pilled millennials and Zoomers.
It's a bunch of blue collar guys who work at a factory.
It's guys in Texas and Oklahoma and Minnesota and these different places.
And part of the reason we're not reaching them is because we don't have men in the pulpit, not in the truest sense, but also because.
Whatever pulpits are filled are always on the coast because that's where the elites are, that's where the chief seats of power is.
And so, like, if you think of the just think in the last 20 years alone, how much effort, how many different crusades, different strategies, how many dollars have been pumped into one goal evangelizing the left, yeah, reaching the left missions towards blue cities in and for the city, church planting in urban places, all these places are progressive.
Yeah.
Right.
So it's all right.
You can be in and for the world, in and for the city.
You just can't be in and for, you know, a nation.
But like, you know, all, you know, that's the one thing that's not allowed.
Of course.
But at every level, my point is like, it's not that, it's not, you know, somebody said like, well, you're abandoning the mission, right?
When I moved to Texas from California, I wrote, you know, the book, you know, Fight by Flight.
You're abandoning the mission.
You're abandoning the loss.
And I was like, well, dude, this may be a shock for you.
You may be hearing it for the first time, but there are lost people in Texas.
Yeah.
A lot of them.
Yeah.
And here's the thing about the lost people in Texas.
Some of them actually give me the time of day.
Yeah.
And the lost people that you're trying to reach, you know, in the Manhattan or wherever, you know, that they don't listen to you.
No.
So, lost people in Texas will actually come and visit my church.
Yeah.
And, you know, but the lost people that you're supposedly, you know, care so much about, they hate you.
And I understand that we're called to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
But Jesus also did have something to say about those who hate you to a certain point that there is.
A line where you shake the dust off your feet and you say, Well, good riddance.
So, anyway, so I think, like, you know, reaching these people, one, you got to be the man to reach the men.
You got to be a man to reach men.
But then, two, you need to go where men are.
And I think of, like, you know, John the Baptist, you know, when Jesus is talking about him, he's like, What did you go out into the desert to see?
Right?
Did you go to see a man, you know, Malachoy?
Did you go to see a man who's dressed in soft clothing?
If you wanted to find a man like that, go look for a politician, right?
They live in palaces, they're princes.
They're, you know, But you went into the wilderness.
You went into flyover country, the fields, the factories with the blue collar to find a man, a man who wears camel skin.
He's eating locusts, and he preaches, he doesn't share.
So, my whole point is to say that, one, you need to be a man if you're going to reach men, but then you also need to go where men are.
Men are not.
And I mean, geographically, for the most part, obviously, there are exceptions, but in general, masculine men with high T levels do not live on the coast.
In our current culture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not what attracts them there.
Yeah.
Certainly.
But they would be disdained there.
Oh, exactly.
There's not opportunity for them there.
Whereas, like, they're actually welcomed in Kansas.
Like, they can be a king in their small town in Kansas, but they would be chastised every five minutes if they were working at some firm in Manhattan.
And so, anyways, all that being said, like, I think there is a ripe harvest, but the ripe harvest, I think, right now is primarily, it's primarily has to do with masculine young men who are fed up with the world.
They're angry.
They've been exasperated by their fathers.
They want a future for their posterity.
They want to get to own a home like their parents did.
They want to be able to have kids like their parents did.
They know it's impossible.
Our whole legal system prefers women over them.
They know that the moment that they marry and have their first kid, that it very possibly, that they're setting the stage for potentially to go to jail, for their lives to be ruined.
That person, I think, is, and they're going to Andrew Tate and they're going to Joe Rogan and they're going to Rollo Tomasi, and, you know, because the Christian pastors won't.
Won't actually address trash world.
They don't know what time it is.
Those guys have something to say and they live in the actual reality that these young men inhabit.
And the pastors, all they have to say to them is, well, have you tried being more holy?
Right.
Have you tried thinking about Jesus a little bit more?
And that doesn't, that's not, it's certainly a practical solution to their final destination in heaven, but it's not a practical solution to their actual life as they live it now.
Want to listen to that.
That's why they will go to these pagan men.
And that's the pietism.
The pietism.
But it's not, just real quick, it's not, have you thought about being holy?
Because I don't want to pit holiness against, because the reality is, have you thought about Jesus a little bit more?
Because what I would actually say, you know, you mentioned that, what I would say to some of these pastors, I say, you need to think about Jesus a little bit more.
You're not thinking about Jesus, not the whole Jesus, not Jesus Christ, the God man.
Jesus.
And so all that being said, there's the disconnect because we're not saying there's holiness or what we're offering over here, and we think this is.
Trumps holiness.
You should choose this instead of.
No, we're saying that a full orbed holiness comes out of, like Doug would say, comes out of your fingertips.
A full orbed holiness is not Gnostic.
It's not just spiritual with no physical implications.
When a man is truly holy and he's a kind of man inwardly in terms of his spirit, he has grit.
He loves the Lord with all his heart and he hates that which is evil, like Josiah.
That kind of man spiritually is a protector and a provider.
And when he's Spiritually, down in his soul, a protector and provider, then that starts to have physical ramifications.
Physically, he stops being weak and fat.
Physically, he gets a job and tries to perform.
Physically, he might have a gun.
Yeah.
Or maybe a couple.
Yeah, or a couple.
So these things are intrinsically connected.
And I'm not saying those things are the soul marks of holiness.
No, no, I'm saying holiness is deep within its Christ likeness, its sanctification, being formed more and more into the image of Christ.
But for a man, When he seeks Christ's likeness, it very much intrinsically involves protection and provision.
And when he is shaped first inwardly in his soul to be a protector and provider, the guy who's shaped like that, but there's no physical signs of that protection and provision, then I feel like James would have a few words with him.
He would say, Well, wait a second.
Faith without works is dead.
Let me say this I'll tell you what's going on in New York because I lived there for eight years in New York City.
And There are good churches in New York City, but they're small outposts and they're not, you know, they're not, you know, thriving, let's say.
You're not growing, that kind of thing.
They're not thousands of people.
But the reality is, nobody wants to feel like a loser.
So, a lot of these bigger churches, I think of Tim Keller's church, and there's a few others, they're growing and they seem to be thriving numbers wise.
But the way they did it is essentially by essentially firming the foundations of Trash World.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, they bring it into there.
They're consumeristic.
They want to comfort people in their sin.
That's why there's so many stories.
You can see endless stories like this of the woman, you know, a reporter.
The Cost of Comfortable Growth00:08:18
Who attended Tim Keller's church and she's like the most pro abortion advocate ever, but she felt totally comfortable at Tim Keller's church.
She scored a 100 on the.
Yeah, completely comfortable there.
That example could be multiplied 100%.
Yeah.
The reality is that the loser theology pervades almost everything.
And then these kinds of churches that are, they think they're evangelizing the loss.
The loss is evangelizing them, is what's really happening.
Right.
And they're winning.
Right.
And they don't want to feel like a loser.
So they want the numbers.
And so what do you have to do?
Well, You can't be a faithful church and really grow.
So, I guess here's what we're going to do.
We're going to stop talking.
I'm not going to be for abortion.
I'm just not going to be as.
We're not going to be so against it.
We're not going to be so much against it.
You know what I mean?
I'm not going to be for these things, but I want it to be a comfortable place for people that are for these things to be.
Right.
To learn about, maybe they'll hear about Jesus.
Right.
Which is not the Boniface option.
The Boniface option is like, oh, you see that tree?
Tomorrow I'm going to chop it down.
Not just the tree is bad.
Listen, I'll talk about the tree.
Let's maybe move the town away from the tree.
Let's just go ahead and chop it down.
Yeah.
So, with 100%.
And that's the thing how does this work out?
It's that over time, you begin to reshape American Christianity from the ground up.
And you begin to build churches and build entire denominations and an entire movement of churches that believe the same things that Christians believed 500 years ago in the same way and live the same way.
And then you can go and confront a place like New York City or the big metropolitan areas and begin to invade.
You consolidate and then you advance.
I mean, that's what you do.
I mean, I think the way to look at it is, for example, the Reconquista in Spain, right?
Spain is completely conquered by Muslims, except for this little section in the Northwest.
And from there, over 400 years, they slowly won back all of their kingdoms from the Muslims.
And that's kind of the position that we're in today.
We're holed up in here, and the Benedict option kind of is all right, we're safe and comfortable in the Asturias Mountains, and we'll just live here indefinitely while the Muslims rule the rest of Spain and call it good.
And the Boniface option is all right, we're here now.
Where do we attack next?
What's the plan?
We're going to take it back one day.
And where do we focus on right now with the resources we have at hand?
How can we prepare for tomorrow's battle?
What can we be building?
But it allows, like, For the record, the Boniface option allows for, you know, because you kind of started with step two, but step one might be first fall back.
Yeah.
But it's not fall back to survive.
Yeah.
It's fall back to survive to then fight another day.
And so, like, I think that sadly we've let things get so, so bad.
We're at, you know, stage four cancer at this point.
Not saying that things can't be worse tragically.
I think they can be worse.
But things are so bad at this point where I really think that, you know, right now the immediate strategy, if we're thinking step one, for a lot of guys, it's fall back.
For a lot of guys, it's all right, like we lost the outer wall.
Go back to, you know, they've breached the outer wall, maybe even breached the second wall.
Like, let's go back to the inner sanctum and lock it down, build, And then let's, okay, now let's go out and try to take up to the second wall.
Okay.
And that, like, then ride out to meet them.
Right.
Then ride out to meet them.
You know, like, that's it.
Yeah.
That's it.
That's it.
So you fall.
But the point is, it's not just the Boniface option, it's not the suicidal kamikaze, you know, kamikaze option.
It's, we want to win.
We don't just want to fight.
We want to fight in such a way that we actually win.
And fighting to win.
Winning strategies do include, there's more to it than this, but they include temporary tactical retreats.
Yeah.
And so right now, I think we need to realize.
So, Tim Keller, the sad reality is I believe he's with the Lord.
I'm not saying he's unregenerate, but the sad reality is that that guy, his public teaching got worse and worse throughout his life.
His earlier stuff was thoroughly evangelized by New York.
Exactly.
That's what I was going to say.
The sad thing is he went out to win New York and New York won him.
Yeah.
Like he.
He was discipled more by New York than New York was discipled by him.
It's like the tweet, you know, it's not what the city we bring to the city, but what the city brings to us.
And well, he got what the city brought.
Exactly.
So, right now, I think we need to recognize that and say, okay, part of it was Tim Keller, it was the urban church planting, it was the in and for the city, it was all these things.
But it was also, I think, just in church planting, one of the things was we spread ourselves too thin.
I think of NAM, I think of Acts 29, I think of multiple different organizations.
Everything was about church planting.
And part of it was a good instinct that we're going against the jewel in the Bible belt, these big mega churches with 15,000 people, because it's not about numbers.
But here's the thing the irony is, it was still about numbers.
We just changed which number we're counting.
So now, instead of how many butts and seats, it's how many.
Because I remember having to fill out surveys, how many churches does your church plan on planting in the next 10 years?
And we would boast of a new number.
The new number is not how many people are in one church, but how many churches we've planted.
But it was still about numbers.
But what we did is so we cared about numbers, we just changed which numbers we were counting.
Uh, and in part because of the loser kind of thing, I think we realized you know the SBC, the numbers have been going down year after year after year, and you know, so you hate to just keep reporting that to you know to the people in the pews.
So this year we lost this many more thousand, this year we lost a hundred something thousand, this year we've had uh this many less baptisms and this many less this and this many.
So then, you what do you do instead?
Well, really, isn't it all about planting new churches and reaching the lost?
And so, uh, well, this year.
So then you stop emphasizing we lost this many people across the board.
We lost, you know, we went from 15 million to 13.5 million across the nation.
Well, let's not focus on that.
Instead, we planted, you know, 8,500 new churches.
And that's the number that we're going to boost.
But in doing that, what happened is we spread everybody so thin, it became church planting became a suicide mission.
And the bar got lowered to where a guy who would barely qualify as a deacon in my church was a church planter with funding.
And with, you know, it was like NASCAR, right?
Like everybody wants to bet on a certain horse.
So that windshield is filled up.
It's got a NAMM sticker.
It's got an 829 sticker.
It's got a Gospel Coalition sticker.
It's got a, you know, like you can barely see through the windshield.
Everybody wants to, you know, claim like we've got this, we're planting a church.
And even the numbers, each of these organizations would say, we're planting 10 churches.
And it'd be 10 different organizations saying, we're planting 10 churches.
There'd only be 10 church planters, you know, who are all claimed by all 10 different organizations.
You know, and so, anyways, all that being said, my point is we went, we changed the numbers, we spread far too thin.
And we sent a lot of young men, and I was one of them.
I know this firsthand because I was one of them.
I was not qualified to plant a church, and I was given a thumbs up that I should not have received.
But we sent a lot of guys to die.
And so, to say to those guys who are dying, the ones who haven't, a lot of them apostatized, they're not even Christian anymore.
But to the guys who are still barely hanging on, to tell them it's a mercy and a kindness to tell them, you can come home.
And it doesn't mean that you're a failure.
You can come back.
And we've got a church here.
We've got some defense.
We've got some resources built up.
We've got this, we've got that.
And you can come back.
There's a place for you here.
And we're not going to say that you're a failure.
This was a losing strategy.
We were foolish.
You were a pawn in this game in Big Eva's church planting or urban church planting game.
Come back home.
You're not a failure.
You're going to be treated well.
You're going to be embraced like the prodigal coming home.
We're going to build you up.
And then eventually we'll send you out, but not 1,300 miles.
We'll send you out 13 miles and we'll just take it little by little by little.
And it's going to take us maybe 100 years, but we'll win it back.