Pastor Joel Webbin and Eric Kahn argue American Christianity faces crisis due to overextended foreign missions, causing an 80% loss of children and family breakdowns. They critique the "Jesus Juke 5000" mentality and figures like John Piper for promoting a harmful poverty gospel that hinders generational wealth. Advocating a tactical retreat to reinforce domestic strongholds in places like Georgetown, Texas, they urge building robust, wealthy households capable of withstanding cultural hostility. Ultimately, this shift toward a "full orbed Christianity" aims to secure King Jesus's crown rights by leveraging economic power rather than perpetual poverty. [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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When To Send Missionaries00:13:05
Welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
In this particular episode, I'm privileged to welcome back to the show returning guest, Pastor Eric Kahn.
Eric and I are going to be talking about missionaries.
We're going to be talking about when to send them and when to bring them home.
We're going to talk about the church in general.
What time is it?
What phase of rebuilding Christendom are we currently in?
We argue that we are in a consolidation phase, that we have spread our forces too thin, not only abroad in the case of missionaries, but also domestically.
In the case of church planting, we also spend a lot of time in the second half, the last 30 minutes of the episode, talking about wealth and talking about the poverty gospel, talking about David Platt, talking about John Piper, and some really, really bad ideas that have crippled Christian households and crippled our ability to be successful and influential that we might wield power, which is not icky, that's not a Christian idea, but wield power, which is not inherently evil.
Using it in a righteous direction for the glory of King Jesus.
These are the things we're discussing.
I think you enjoy the conversation.
Tune in now.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
Hi, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webben with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, I am privileged to welcome back to the show Eric Kahn.
Eric, thanks for coming on.
Joel, thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure.
Distinct privilege to be in your company, even if it's remotely on a podcast.
Thank you.
So, at the time of our recording, this will come out probably right after you guys finish your New Christendom conference.
So, I believe this is going to come out on Monday.
Let's see, when does the conference start?
It's Thursday.
Yep.
What's that, June 4th?
June what?
I think that's June 6th.
I have to.
Oh, that's 6th.
Yep.
So, yeah, Thursday is the 6th.
7th, 8th, 9th, 10th.
So it should be, if you're listening, it should be June 10th, Juneteenth, Juneteenth.
Not Juneteenth.
Not Juneteenth.
It's never Juneteenth.
June 10th, Monday.
So we just finished the New Christendom Conference.
What are you predicting?
What are you hoping for the fruit of that conference?
Yeah, I think it's going to be great.
We've lined up a number of good speakers, guys that we love.
Keynote kind of for the whole event is Joel Webbin, obviously.
No.
So you'll be there talking about a number of great themes.
I think that people have signed up and are coming to it has been a great encouragement to us.
So we hope that they're edified.
We're going to talk about a number of things, including Christian nationalism.
We'll have Stephen Wolf there.
He'll be talking about that.
Dr. Joe Rigney.
We're going to be doing a lot of talks kind of based on his book on emotional sabotage, just things I think that the church especially needs to hear.
So overall, I hope really what this does.
Is kind of further whatever this movement that we're all sort of a part of seems to be that God is orchestrating for the revitalization of the church.
I think just giving people hope and encouragement.
If you look at the political landscape, especially, but the way that people look at the church right now, I think a lot of people are discouraged.
And so we're sort of hoping to infuse a little bit of that post mill hope and hope for the future for people so that whether they're going to move to Georgetown, Texas or Ogden, Utah or be a part of a community or whether they're going to start one where they are.
Just that people would be fired up about that, seeing that this is a great time of opportunity for the church and men who are courageous and who are going to be faithful in their context.
So, yeah, hopefully, get to do a lot of networking with our friends.
We're looking at, I think it's going to be about a thousand people.
I still have tickets being sold.
So lots of kids.
We went this week to check out the venue.
We're excited about that.
A lot of vendors.
Of course, we'll have Zach Garrus' new book on hand with us as well.
And that is Recovering the Anti Feminist Vision of the Reformers, Calvin, Vermigli, and others.
Awesome.
So we're excited about that.
Joel, we get to talk about patriarchy and post mill theology.
It kind of sounds like a Joel conference.
Yeah.
And, you know, we're not above that.
Yep.
Yeah.
You can't be above that.
Yeah.
That's, I think, you know, conferences in large part, or at least the conferences that we host in our neck of the woods, that is, you know, one of the major goals is that it would just be a white pill weekend.
You know, like, oh, yeah.
There's so much to be discouraged by, and it's easy to lose your spirits.
And so just to remind yourself, it's just like a dose of optimism, but it's also just a dose of sanity just to remind yourself that you're not crazy and that.
You're not crazy by just remembering that you're not alone, that in any period of time, in the sovereignty and mercy of God, he reserves for himself a faithful remnant of people.
And so, yeah, you're not crazy, you're not alone.
But if we're going to make it, and we are going to make it, but if we're going to make it, there does need to be, I think, some consolidation.
You and I have talked about this before.
Maybe we could get into it a little bit here.
But this idea that, you know, I think a lot of what the church did for decades in the church growth movement and the church planting movement, thinking of like Gospel Coalition, Acts 29, you know, all these kinds of sojourners, we spread our forces too thin and we divided to conquer.
But what actually happened is we divided and we were conquered.
And we divided so much that some of what we were chopping off to start a new church wasn't actually even viable.
So it was just like kamikaze, you know, suicidal.
Missions where we would send out, you know, because, you know, you take a church and it's like, our church, we pledge, you know, at this church planting conference, we pledge to plant 10 churches in the next 10 years.
And it's like, your church is 80 people, you know, and then, you know, you're trying to break off leaders.
And what happens is that everybody gets elevated to the position of perfect incompetence, right?
So the guy who would have been a good deacon, he's an elder, but he can't actually do it.
The guy who would have been a good elder, he's now, you know, lead pastor, preaching pastor.
The guy, you know, so at every level, you, um, You're basically promoting people perfectly to the realm of incompetence and sending them off to die.
And so, as a compensation to that, and certainly we could overcompensate, you know, so we want to be aware of that and what is the Holy Spirit doing and what time is it?
You know, the sons of Issachar, they know the times.
But right now, we believe in this moment, not forever.
So, this is not an indefinite Christendom plan.
But I think, you know, there are phases of this glorious Christendom plan.
And one of the phases that we're in right now, I would say it is the same phase that the stock market is currently in.
It's consolidation.
Consolidate.
It's time to rally the cry to some of our troops, men that we've had behind enemy lines, deep, deep in the trenches, and say, Come home.
Come home.
And it doesn't mean that everything that was done was a failure.
God has used many things.
There are plenty of failures, but there are also, in His mercy and kindness, plenty of victories that we can celebrate and be thankful for.
But I do think it's time to come home.
It's time to say to, you know, and there's a lot of guys, I'm not just talking about church planters or missionaries or whatever.
I'm talking about, you know, blue collar, salt of the earth, your average Christian who is, you know, the only sense of fellowship, Christian fellowship that that guy even has is his GC and his fellow, you know, anons on Twitter.
You know, it's like that dude, like, and I get it, not everybody can, right?
Some of you guys, you've got elderly parents and they're not able to move and you have an obligation within the fifth commandment to honor thy father and mother and you can't abandon them and send them to the glue factory.
I get it.
I'm not, this is not a one size fits all.
There are disclaimers, there are exceptions.
But in general, what I'm saying is that for the average person who doesn't have some of these exception clauses, like elderly parents or whatever it might be, for the average person, I think it's a consolidation phase of Christendom.
We spread too thin beyond our qualifications.
We sent under resourced and under equipped men into the trenches alone.
We've gotten slaughtered some victories, but a lot of casualties.
Let's pull back, get in those Christian burrows, and let's get, if we can, big burrows, not just a thousand burrows, right?
Not just a thousand burrows of 13 dudes.
If we can, we need more than just Moscow.
So I'm not saying one burrow, and I'm not saying a thousand burrows.
I would love to see in the province of God, what if we had, you know, about five dozen?
But what if we had 60 Ogdens spread across the country?
That's only going to happen if people will play nice with one another.
You're going to have to have teams.
And with teams, here's the thing about teams.
One reason that we don't like teams is because if you're on a team, not everybody gets to be in charge.
So I could be a lead pastor of a church of 40 people.
But you could also be an associate pastor or just a faithful deacon in a church of 1,000 people.
Like Ogden, you guys right now, I mean, what the Lord is doing through you, you know, not trying to just blow smoke, but genuine, it's not flattery, I mean it.
What the Lord is doing through you right now, you guys are, I think, on a trajectory to have a church in Ogden, Utah of about 1,000 people, and it matters.
This is why it matters.
It matters because you could have 10 churches of 100, and that's great.
I'm not trying to disparage that.
But in this cultural moment, I believe one church of 1,000 is better, superior, for a few reasons.
One of the reasons is With consolidation, not just a thousand people spread out, but a thousand people together, there can be a gay pride parade happening in Ogden.
And you and Dan and Brian can send out an email to your church and say, Hey guys, we need to see you in five hours, all of you.
And then you show up with a thousand people strong and you're holding hands surrounding the gay parade, singing, He lives to tread the fields of hell, glory, hallelujah.
You're done.
Yeah.
You're done, LGBT progressives.
You're done.
I'm sorry.
This is Christ town.
Get the hell out of here.
You're done.
And you can't do that with churches of 50 or 60 people.
Churches of 50 or 60 people are legitimate, valid, biblical churches, so long as they're faithful.
Praise God for them.
I'm not trying to disparage that.
And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have any small churches.
But what I am saying is that in this cultural moment, I think we do need some more.
We need institutions.
Every institution has discredited itself, including the church, shot themselves in the foot.
And you know what?
That sounds cool in your naive libertarian mind, but the world doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
I don't have the time to look at WebMD and decide how to diagnose myself every time I get sick.
I need doctors and I need pastors.
And we need in media, in medicine, in academia, and all these different things, we do need society needs institutions.
And one of them is we need.
The institutional church, and we need large, successful, competent, high caliber men led churches.
We need some of those, and it can't just be Doug Wilson in Moscow.
God bless him.
God bless him forever.
But gosh, we need a few more of those.
So, anyways, I say all that to say I'm excited for your conference because I think one of the fruits, Lord willing, that'll come out of it is not just a white pill encouragement, optimism dose, sanity dose.
That's To be sure, but not just that for three days.
But some people, they will come out of this and they'll go back home with their wives and their kids and even some other families that they're close to and they'll say, three days wasn't enough.
Consolidating Christian Optimism00:05:26
We got a taste.
Now we can't get it out of our minds.
We've tasted and seen that Ogden is good.
And we're going to move there and we're going to reinforce the troops there so that instead of losing on every battlefield, We're going to win on some battlefields.
I think that's where we're at.
What do you think?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think the word that you use is consolidation.
I think that's absolutely right.
Even King's Hall season three, we've been going through that history of Christendom, and particularly in Eastern Europe, guys like Skanderbeg and Hunyadi.
So the Polish, the Hungarians, you know, one of the real problems that they face is that Christians were in fighting with each other.
And so at one point, like Skanderbeg and Hunyadi are trying to join forces.
And you've got a Christian king in the middle of them that sides with the Turks and won't allow them to come together to defend themselves.
And so it spells ruin for those countries and for Christendom for periods of time until they kind of get their stuff together and learn how to work together.
You get some periods of working together, like the Crusades, depending on which one you're talking about, like Third Crusade, First Crusade, that sort of thing.
But it is interesting because it's something that Christians in America, particularly, are allergic to power.
And they need to not be.
Because, really, militarily, as a nation, anybody trying to get anything done in the world, you have to have a consolidation of power, which is going to require competent men.
It's going to require economic resources, political resources.
And this idea for the boroughs and the conference, right?
We get this from Alfred realizing that to create protection against the Danes and protection for his people to have a thriving culture in what would become England, he had to fundamentally build.
Robust fortress cities, which are called boroughs.
So it's got a wall, they've got military practice, they can defend trade from raiding and looting and all that sort of thing.
And because you have these strong towns and you kind of link them together, eventually what you have is a strong nation.
So I think really it's just trying to encourage and teach Christians like you have to pool resources.
If you want to start a school like we've done here, it takes a lot of people, it takes a lot of resources.
Then if you think about, like, well, I don't want my The guys in my church to have to work for the soulless ghouls of Globo Homo.
Well, that means I'm going to have to create small businesses and medium sized businesses for those guys to work in.
We need economy.
And so you're going to have to attract people with, you know, capital to invest, people to run businesses.
You still need the executive C suite type mindset from people.
And then you need to invest in meme coins.
Yeah.
That's what I hear.
Especially meme coins.
Come on.
You got to be able to build it.
If you're not invested in Brett on base right now, then you're not going to make it.
I don't know what you're doing.
We now know what Joel's pet meme coin is.
Brett is one of them.
Brett is already a lot priced in.
It's still got, you know, I think it's got three to five X potential, but there's some others, right?
There's some others you don't want to sleep on.
Bitcoin, 10X.
Let's not forget about Bitcoin.
Well, Bitcoin is, I think, a long term hedge against inflation.
Oh, yeah.
And it's going to go up, but there's some other coins.
My goodness, man.
Bitcoin, I think Dan would disagree with me.
I think Dan even said like 300 for this bull cycle.
So sometime by the end of 2025, 300K.
I'm predicting like more like 169 to.
We're still good.
I mean, it's what sitting around 70s.
I think it'll 2 to 2.5x.
I think Dan is like more like 5x on Bitcoin.
I think two and a half times at the peak of this bull cycle, which means within 12 to 18 months.
And then I think there's some other coins though.
Chainlink is kind of a normie altcoin, but I think when retail comes to the picture, boom, there's your capital and then you can move to Ogden.
All right, I'll stop.
That's right.
I'll stop.
Right Response Ministries 2025 conference is a go.
This is Three days full jam packed conference with eight main sessions, three to four hour and a half long panels, and an all star super based lineup of speakers 15 speakers in all.
Who are they?
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Yeah, so I think just.
Winning The Long Haul War00:15:34
Kind of reteaching Christians about some of the spheres that have been neglected.
I think this is sort of the rod of pietism that's been in the church, right?
Is that we don't really have a robust political theology.
We don't have like an economic theology worked out, if you want to call it that.
But just thinking about, you know, the reformers had to do the same thing, thinking through vocation in a holistic sense.
Most of the people in your church are not going to be pastors.
How do they contribute to the vision for rebuilding Christendom in a place like Ogden or Georgetown or Moscow?
So, I think having the infrastructure, you know, and then I certainly think right now, obviously, we have new Christendom Press, you've got Right Response Ministries.
Media is an institution, it's a very important institution, particularly in our day and age when, quite frankly, the war, the front the war is being fought on is propaganda, right?
And so, if you can counter that, if you can have ecosystems of media, institutional learning, stuff like that, that's not tied to legacy media, which is dying and rotting and, you know, Jeff Bezos controlled and whatever else.
Then you're going to have, I think, a way to build your communities.
And I really go back to, say, like 1 Samuel 22.
What's happening in our moment?
Well, you have David.
He goes to the cave of Adullam.
We're told that his brothers and his fathers hear about it and they go to him.
So there you have, like, yeah, it's natural that family is going to move to a fortress or stronghold type location.
But it's interesting in verse 2 of 1 Samuel 22, it says, everyone who is in distress and everyone who is in debt and everyone who is bitter in soul gathered to him.
And he, that is David, became commander over them.
And there were with him about 400 men.
I think it's interesting, number one, because you don't necessarily need New York City sized population.
I don't need three to five million people to accomplish political, cultural, or ecclesiastical ends.
That's right.
You know, in this case, we kind of have the lesson through David that God loves to work through small bands of faithful men, but they're potent, right?
These will become the mighty men.
And I also think, like, look, there's so many people in our culture who are disaffected.
They would fit in that list of people.
To be in debt in a society like ours doesn't necessarily mean that you're a really terrible person.
When you think about inflation and the way our society has fraudulently been built on consumer debt, you look at people and they're in distress and they don't have economic solutions.
Even think about in the last 30 years how disaffected people will get.
Say, in the 1980s, you could buy a home for less than the average annual salary in America, median income.
Today, It's not the case.
Your average household price has got to be at least 10x of somebody's average annual salary, if not more.
So I think people are feeling that.
And then what we're trying to do is say, look, you need to go to one of these places where people can have your back.
Because if you're going to build really counter institutions, counter cultures, you have to have some inertia and some capital across all those economic, political, ecclesiastical spheres.
Amen.
Yeah, that's well said.
The cave of Adullam with David is such a palpable example of, I think, our current moment that we're in right now.
It's just guys who are disgruntled, indebted, disenfranchised.
Because we live in a world right now that really does hate men, particularly white men, and even more so, white Christian men.
Which, by the way, I've done this with Jeremy Carl.
He wrote the war on whites and anti white discrimination.
I think, for the record, I think they're two separate battles.
I think, like a Venn diagram, I think there's a lot of overlap.
So I'm not negating that.
The war on Christianity and the war on Western society.
I think there's a lot of overlap, but I do see them as two distinct battles and not just one.
So I think there really is a palpable hatred.
Toward Christianity, and there is also a palpable hatred towards whiteness to the point that you could be a white person who is progressive and liberal and hates Christ and yet still experience some measure of vitriol.
And I don't think it's because you're Christian adjacent, I think it's because you're white.
So, anyways, all that being said, we live in a moment where there is a lot of animosity towards men, towards Christian faith, towards Towards European, Anglo descent, the Western heritage, all these kinds of things.
And so you have a similar situation to where these are the kinds of guys that gather to David.
They're guys who society has completely, completely disenfranchised and they don't really have any place.
And so they go to a cave, and you would think it's almost like surrender.
Because that's really the only category.
I mean, that's why I wrote this little book, glorified blog, but Fight by Flight, because I really wrestled with that.
I was thinking, well, I don't want to.
I'm not suicidal by the grace of God.
I don't want to just like.
Just implode and destroy myself and blow up my life.
And yet, at the same time, though, I'm not a quitter.
I felt like I only had two options it was die or quit.
And neither of those sounds like good options.
And so, to have like this, to be able to carve out new theological categories of like advancing to the rear, you know, temporary tactical retreat, you know, in order to consolidate and reinforce and then go and fight.
Another day on a more strategic battlefield, you know, the decisive point, the strategic point, winnable, but also significant.
Like these guys, this kind of language was really, really helpful for me and influenced, you know, the decision that I made for my family and seven other families that followed me out of the state of California to Georgetown, Texas to plant a church.
And it influenced my writing of this book.
And it's, you know, kind of what I'm going to be talking about at the New Christendom conference.
But I think a lot of guys need to be thinking like that.
It's not that all these men gathered unto David in a cave to die.
They didn't go, they weren't quitting.
They weren't, they weren't, it wasn't surrender.
It was consolidation.
They were going to a safe place, a fortress, where they could, where they could avoid a fight.
No, so that they could regroup and re strengthen to win a fight.
It wasn't to avoid a fight, it was to win a fight.
It's really interesting, Joel, too, because you and I have talked a lot, you know, online and offline about this concept, but, you know, as the world tends toward, The globalization and homogeneity of everything.
One of the things that has happened is people are rightly turning back to what's local, physical, real, what you can look in the face.
And so there is actually a real strength to having brothers whom you see on a daily basis, whom you do business with.
And I think this is where it's helpful to also contrast sort of the Rod Dreher Benedict option, which was really like build a monastery, hide away until the storm's over.
And then hopefully rebuild culture.
Which only works.
The Benedict option only works when you have fighting men protecting you.
That's right.
And contrasting it, I think Andrew Isker has been really helpful with the Boniface option.
And what we're trying to do is no, we're regathering the troops, we're giving them hope and purpose.
And then our goal is actually to go on the offensive.
Like we're actually going to chop down the idols of the day, we're actually going to attack the things.
That are disgusting and should be hated in our world.
We're not just sitting here saying, well, we'll just wait it out.
Because I think the reality, Andrew has pointed this out right in his book, is you're not going to make it if you do that.
The world around you is hostile.
And whether you like it or not, you'd read C.S. Lewis and Prince Caspian, you know, Caspian is like, they gather the troops and he's like, what are we doing here?
And, you know, the centaur is like, well, we're going to war.
Like the time is right.
That's what we do.
And so I think for us as Christians, like, One of the skins we have to shed is this ideology of like pietistic pacifism, right?
Where we don't fight, we just, you know, basically we adopt all the core principles of the regime and we say that somehow we're still Christian.
No, we actually have to be a counter force against that.
So it really gets into this like counterinsurgency mindset we know the world's going to be hostile.
We know we're going to have, you know, mostly, I think in a lot of ways, yeah, they're going to be political, ideological, propaganda type combat that we have to get into, but that's important.
And so we have to muster people to do that.
Assault, not just roll up the gates and hope that we somehow make it.
Right.
Well said.
Should we talk about missionaries for a second?
Yeah, I think it's actually a good tie in because of where the focus is on the missionaries.
It does tie in because that's what we're saying.
We're saying fall back, right?
Not fall on your sword.
We're not advocating for that.
We're not saying we lose down here, commit suicide.
No, we're saying fall back because we want to win the war.
We want to win the war.
We're in it for the long haul.
Um, the church lives in the light of eternity, therefore, it can afford to be patient.
Like, that's you know, so we're not um advocating for avoiding a fight, we're advocating for being wise so that we might win a fight.
And so, just that's the principle that we're talking about.
It applies to individual households and perhaps moving out of a blue state or whatever, or or getting you know to a church like yours or mine.
Um, so it applies to the family, um, it also applies uh to pastors and church plants and stuff like that.
Um, if God's blessing it, go for it, brother.
Even if God's not blessing it currently, tangibly, in visible ways that you can see, you may still have a deep sense and wise counsel that says stick it out.
And that's fine too.
But at the household level, it may be time to fall back.
At the church planting level, it may be time to fall back.
And if we're talking about missionaries, it's the same thing, just another case study, but same principle.
That would just be the same conversation for church planters, but now applied instead of domestically, we would apply it abroad.
The principle applies there too.
What do you think?
What do you think?
Eric, about just the overarching evangelical, especially I think Baptists and Southern Baptists.
What do you think right now in regards to our current status of what we've done the last 50 years, where we're at today when it comes to foreign missions, international missions?
Good.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, one of the things.
I think you and I would both.
How do you think we're doing?
Yeah.
Well, I think the first thing I would lay out is like, you know, you and I have talked about this, but.
You know, the principle of sending missionaries is a good one.
It's, you've seen it throughout, you know, church history.
So we're not, we're not saying that anything about that being bad in principle.
But what we are talking about and what I would address is the order of priorities, the order of loves.
And, you know, you have to start with what's closest to you.
You know, Paul does this.
He says, He who doesn't take care of his own household is worse than an unbeliever.
So we have different obligations depending on how close and proximity something is to us and close in terms of natural affection.
So your children.
Obviously, you owe your children more than you owe my children or the children in a third world country, even.
Important as those causes may be, you have a first order priority there.
So I think when we look at major denominations like the SBC, and you go, you know, it depends which data you look at, but either way, it's bad.
If the SBC is losing like 80% of its kids, but it is still just really fixated and focused on sending missionaries overseas.
And then, by the way, you look at those missionary families coming home, and I know a lot of these people and have heard the horror stories.
And you have missionaries who went over, their kids were left here, or they were put in strange, bad situations, got exposed to all sorts of sexual immorality and drugs, and you name it.
And they come back, and the family's a wreck, and people are in jail, and marriages are dissolved.
Well, that's an example of we've misordered our priorities.
And so you could think about this just very, very simply.
If your own household isn't in order, do you need to be worried about the children in Afghanistan?
You could think about this at individual households.
States, countries, nations, et cetera.
And I think this is where America is particularly bad, not just the church, but it's sort of this mindset of like, it's our job to police the world.
It's our job to make sure that, you know, the people in a third world place are, you know, converted.
But how ludicrous is it that we haven't put a priority on our own children?
So again, you'll have people who are like, you know, giving to Lottie Moon and you're doing all those things.
That's great.
But then you're sending your kids to public school and they're being lost and indoctrinated by the people of the world.
And now they're pink haired orcs.
You know, it's like we, and the main point of this, if you think about warfare, you're never going to win a war if you don't have a strong fortress from which to conduct the war from, right?
If you don't have home base covered and if you're not educating your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, then you have no business going and telling another family in another country how they ought to be doing it.
Right.
Well said.
Do you think there's any application at all in terms of what Jesus said?
When he sends out the 72, you know, that if a town doesn't receive you, then shake the dust off your feet.
That there is a point, a certain point, where it is permissible to say, all right, that's it.
I mean, that's what the Apostle Paul does with his own kinsmen, according to the flesh.
Sure.
You know, he does that.
And it's not that he stopped loving them.
He loves his people, and even to the point, a lot more love than I'm currently able to muster, but to the point where he says he would be willing to be cut off, he'd be willing to go to hell.
Yeah, I could wish that I were accursed on behalf of my kinsmen.
That's right.
If it might mean the salvation of his ethnos, his actual people, according to the flesh.
And yet, so you can't make any argument that, well, Paul is apathetic or Paul just doesn't love this particular group of people.
He did, most certainly did.
And yet, he hits a point where he says, all right, that's it, I'm done.
And hear me real quick.
I think this is a helpful disclaimer.
Saving His Actual People00:07:35
Paul is not asserting.
That from that point on, he has some kind of special revelation from the Lord that there would not be one convert among the Jewish people from that point on.
And we know this because Paul is one apostle of Christ Jesus, and there still remain 11 plus one, Matthias, so 12 other apostles who continue to minister among the Jews.
You've got Peter and James and John, they're functioning as apostles of Christ, but also a board of elders at this church, a large church, a mega church in Jerusalem.
Capital city of the Jewish people and continuing to minister among them.
And I think it's, I'm pretty sure they're continuing to see, even if it's small, they're still continuing to see a steady flow of conversion.
So it's not as though, we know there's this partial hardening, right?
That's Romans 9, 10, and 11.
Partial hardening upon Israel, according to the flesh, would be my interpretation of that.
So speaking of physical Israel, a partial hardening, but it's not a total hardening, which means the Gentiles are flooding in.
But Israel is still experiencing some conversion.
It may be more of a trickle where the Gentiles is more of a flood.
But the point is, you could still do faithful ministry work among the people of Israel at that time and see some fruit.
And yet, Paul says, not for me.
I'm going to go ahead and pull back and focus on another field where the harvest seems to be more plentiful.
And I think that that principle can be applied for the church today.
And here's the thing.
I don't think that it must be applied as dogma, meaning, okay, so if Haiti is particularly hostile towards Western missionaries, then it now is a sin for anyone to go to Haiti.
That wouldn't be my position.
But to articulate in a general sense, not a one size fits all dogma, but as a general counsel to say Haiti is particularly hostile.
And Haiti has had Western Christian missionaries.
It's not like we discovered Haiti last month.
This is not an unknown people group, you know, in the Amazon that we just found, you know, a few days ago.
No, this is a group that has heard the gospel again and again and again and again.
And they are killing Western Christian missionaries and extremely hostile and it's extremely dangerous.
And you, Young man, you have an obligation if you're married to your wife, if you're a father, to your children.
And so, as a general counsel, not a dogmatic command, one size fits all, but as a general counsel, missions to Haiti, the current moment, may not be the best idea.
What do you think?
Is that?
Yeah, no, I definitely.
It's absolutely unhinged, huh?
No, no, I think that's right.
And again, it comes to balance and priorities, which comes first.
I think one of the things that when we read the Gospels, you know, I went to Southern Seminary and For a time.
And obviously, you feel the sense of emphasis being placed on missionary work overseas.
It's a huge thing.
And that can be important.
But I think one of the things that's helpful to remember okay, you have 12 apostles, not everyone's an apostle.
And so while everybody is called, some people were called in Ephesus, they heard the gospel, they became part of the church at Ephesus, and they never left.
That's the majority of people.
And so I think if we understand, like, what does Paul say at the end of Ephesians 5 and 6?
Their household codes.
You know, love your wives as Christ loved the church.
Wives, submit to your husbands, children, obey your parents and the Lord.
It's boring, normal Christianity that I think is in there.
Slaves, obey your masters.
Slaves, obey your masters.
Yeah, that's right.
That one's in there too.
And so I think for a lot of people, most people, you're not going to be called to be, you know, even if you take the gift of the spirit of being an evangelist.
The reason it's a gifting is because not everyone has that.
But I was sort of raised in a Christianity where it's like if you're not street.
Preaching and evangelizing and going on mission trips, basically, you're not really a Christian.
I think that's where we've gotten out of balance.
One of the other things I would point to if you look at Mark's gospel, chapter 5 and verse 18, right?
Jesus heals the demon possessed man.
It says as Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon possessed begged him to go with him, that is, with Jesus.
Jesus did not let him, but he said, Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy.
On you.
So you see, that's going to be the case for so many of us.
Like, go home and tell your family, go home and still be a part of your community where you live.
And it's going to be natural that that is going to be the focal point for most people.
Again, doesn't mean that you can't support missionary work.
It's important.
We're grateful for people who are doing that work.
But is it going to be the first order of priority for most people?
My argument would be no.
Yep.
I think it's, yeah, I think that's well said.
It's the same as pastors, missionaries.
I mean, that's what they are.
Missionaries are pastors somewhere else.
If it's domestic, we call them pastors.
If it's abroad, we call them missionaries.
That's, you know, There may be some exceptions, but in a general sense, that's most of it.
And what I was going to say is just, you know, missionary proper, capital M missionary, not everybody's called to that.
So we could, you know, because some guys say, you know, I've seen this on Twitter, right?
You know, this is like, there are different levels of Jesus jukes.
This is like Jesus juke 5000.
I mean, this is special, really special.
But there's some guys that, like, they're capable of a Jesus juke 5000.
This is what they would say.
They would say, they say, well, Did you hear what Joel Webbin said?
Imagine being a pastor, a minister of the gospel, and being so unfamiliar with the gospel that he doesn't recognize that everyone is called to do the work of a missionary.
It's like, wow.
That's a special Twitter response right there.
5,000.
Yeah, that's like level Jesus Juke level 5,000.
Incredible.
Well, unprecedented levels.
But my point is yeah, every man is called to be a shepherd, a pastor, lowercase p.
In the general sense, in his home, but not every man in the proper sense will be a capital P pastor as an ordained officer, an ecclesiastical officer in the local church.
Most people won't be.
And I think it's the same thing for missionaries.
So, is everyone called to do the work of an evangelist in their everyday lives with their neighbors, with their homes, their family?
Amen.
Yes, and amen.
So, everyone, every man is going to be a lowercase p pastor, everyone is going to be a lowercase m missionary.
But not everyone will have the ecclesiastical office of capital P pastor proper.
And likewise, not everyone is going to be qualified to be a capital M missionary proper.
And if we can't understand, but guys just, they blur.
Guys don't like to lose arguments.
Private Family Banking Action00:02:59
And so what do you do when you don't have the substance to support your position?
You just, you blur.
You just, you are.
He said, you know, and you either can't, you actually are incapable of thinking in categories, or you pretend.
To be incapable of thinking in categories because you can afford to do that.
Because some of these guys, even though I think they can think in categories, I'll be honest, a lot of their listening base can't.
And so they can pretend to be dumb and rally their base and still get those boomer donations.
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Investing Wealth For Kingdom00:15:44
And Joel, I was thinking of some examples of how you see the misplaced priority play out.
I've been in churches where a pastor is being paid $30,000 to $40,000 in the economy today in many places.
It's not a living wage.
Guys are working two or three jobs.
And yet the church would still send a $30,000 check each year to orphanages overseas.
And I remember seeing that.
And I asked a deacon about it.
In the world.
I mean, our pastor can't even, he doesn't have a living wage to take care of this church.
And you're sending all that money to orphanages.
And they said, listen, we'll keep him poor and God will keep him humble.
And I remember just being so disgusted by that.
Like, shouldn't the first order a priority?
Like, if you're sending missionaries, it should be because you have a bounty and an overflow.
Right.
Right.
And so that's what you're sending.
And yeah, we should do that work.
It's great.
Whatever.
But we can't, we're not even taking care of the guy who is serving us on a daily basis.
That seems wrong.
The other one that I would say is, you know, you used to hear things from guys like John Piper, you know, appreciate their work on missionary stuff.
A lot of it was really good.
But he would say things like, go, send, or disobey.
And it's like, so it's kind of giving you the flavor of like, you need to be like passionately involved in missions or you're a disobedient Christian.
What if I'm not passionate about running a business in my local community and employing 10 fathers and heads of household?
What if that's my passion?
And what if I devote almost all my attention, time, and money to that thing?
Well, in that category, if I'm not thinking about missions all the time, I'm disobedient.
Meanwhile, the same pastor had a really weird position where he was defending, not defending his wife against an intruder.
So I look at that and I'm like, okay, let's re examine the priorities.
We should read the Westminster Confession of Faith on, you know, murder and what's required, namely the protection of life, would be the opposite command.
So, you know, and this is going to be hard, Joel, because for a lot of us, look, I was.
An SBC lifer for a long time.
It's deeply ingrained.
You take it for granted.
These are just presuppositions that we have that really like the height of being a Christian is being a missionary.
And certainly don't want to denigrate people doing the work.
It is important.
But my encouragement to those guys would be maybe just consider the level of priority being placed on things.
And you have to start with maybe we could be wrong.
Maybe we could be wrong.
And maybe it's really hard to do.
But if we're losing 80% of our kids, not just like how do we change the youth group program, but maybe we need to rethink some fundamental presuppositions about.
The way we're approaching church, ministry, and vocation all together.
Yep.
Well said.
In terms of money and generosity, this is something I didn't realize because I didn't understand money until I was older.
But I thought for a while that if you have money, anything extra at all, and doing your best to lower your cost of living and being content with little, lowering your cost of living to the absolute bottom, and then anything above that, any surplus.
Give it.
And what I didn't account for was well, first, every single person, whether they're a Christian or not, if we're thinking in percentages, the amount of wealth that they will give in their lifetime is always 100%.
The only question is to who and when, because you can't take it with you.
You are going to give everything you have, whether you like it or not.
If not now, then.
At very least, you're going to give it away.
It will go to someone else.
It'll go to the state or some California, you know, boomer lady will give it to her dog, you know, or, but it's going to go to somebody.
It's going to go to the state.
It's going to go to your dog or it's going to go to your kids or it's going to go to charity.
You're going to give everything away because you have to.
You have to.
So if we're thinking, so the question of how much to give, the Bible does address that, right?
The Bible speaks of a tithe.
So I'm not saying it's insignificant.
But we spent a lot of time trying to answer that question how much.
But some of the questions that pastors have not really addressed when it comes to generosity is instead of how much, what to give, I think it's important to think of when to give and who to give to.
And what I mean by that is not everybody, it is not always, I don't think it's set out explicitly in Scripture as a command that you must give weekly.
Or monthly.
And for some guys, especially I think of business owners who are trying to multiply talents and trying to build up generational wealth that transcends their life and even as a blessing not only for their own posterity, but other heads of households.
Like you said earlier, other men in the church are being employed and being employed well, not just $15 an hour, but we're talking head of household salaries for multiple households being represented.
In order to do that, John Piper's understanding of money.
Basically, will ensure if you follow it, if you follow John Piper's view of money and what he would deem as Christian generosity, what it ensures is that you will never have a successful Christian man in the realm of business.
It basically hedges against all possibility of success.
It's like, it makes me mad when I think about it.
It makes me angry.
It is literally because you're actually doing harm to Christian households.
It is not a recipe for generosity.
It is a recipe to ensure perpetual failure.
It is to ensure that Christians are not influential, significant, successful in the culture at large so that we keep losing down here.
It makes me angry.
So here's my point.
You're going to give it all.
The only question is to who and when.
And so, in terms of when, it is absolutely, I believe, permissible, right?
I don't think, for instance, I don't think that every single Christian in the New Testament was giving and offering every single week because not everybody reaped a harvest or actually made money on a weekly timeline.
Sometimes, in agrarian culture, there were people who may have only made Money a few times.
And your first roots would have been like annual.
Exactly.
So for some, it was annual.
For some, it might have been weekly.
For some, it may have been monthly.
And so there are certain things where, as a business owner, using that again as an example, where it may be, well, I have this surplus right now and I could give it.
I could give it all.
But you know what you could also do?
You could invest it.
And that's not, it's not giving means kingdom.
Investing means materialism, humanism, selfishness.
No, it's not that black and white.
You could, Give it for the kingdom.
You could also invest it for the kingdom.
You could take that surplus and say, I could give it right now to an orphanage or to the local church or whatever it may be.
I could also reinvest it and turn a profit, an even greater exponential profit on this so that at another time, I will be able to give 10 times the amount of money.
And it's not just waiting 10 years, I'll give 10.
I'm talking exponentially.
I could give X percent annually.
Or monthly, but I could give exponentially more than that if I wait two years because right now we're in the process of doing this and consolidating that.
And I think that there are perfectly legitimate arguments to be made for thinking of it.
But all that, what it includes, is a Christian doctrine of success, of winning, of power, of influence, money, of wealth, of economics.
And Christians have just completely surrendered so much of that to where, yeah, we just.
If you're not poor, you're not godly.
The Pharisees, right?
At the time, I think in Jesus' day, it very much was this correlation between wealth and righteousness.
That person's rich, he must be favored by God.
Well, in the evangelical world, I understand the prosperity gospel is still alive and well in many corners.
But I'll say more specifically, in the reformed evangelical world, we've done the opposite.
If you're poor, you're righteous.
Yeah, it's really a poverty gospel.
The other thing I think is interesting here, Joel, is.
You know, if you look at like the boomer generation and the boomer mindset, obviously they're still holding a lot of wealth to this day.
But it's interesting because a lot of them don't really believe in passing on inheritances to their children.
Right.
But I think it's like this is how they assuage a guilty conscience many times.
It's like you don't see your grandkids, you don't give your kids any money, you don't create a living inheritance while you're still alive.
You go to Hilton Head and then what you do by yourselves, and then what you do is you have like six Compassion International kids on your fridge and it makes you feel less guilty.
Right.
Because you're paying $30 a month or whatever it is to these kids.
Meanwhile, you neglect your own children.
Yet at the same time, Proverbs 13 22 says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
Again, to your point, the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous.
So it's also interesting here, yet another, I think, misplaced priority where the typical pietistic movement, you know, you think about something like this like, you know, these guys who are leading Desiring God and major organizations giving away all their wealth, and that's great.
You get free books, whatever.
What about their children?
What about the inheritance?
Like, you created real wealth.
You should pass that on to children and you should employ people.
And all of that is good, but it seems like it seldom gets talked about as a real good.
And I think part of it is also sort of the flattening of every other sphere under the church.
Like the only, this was the same reason with church planning, right?
When we were a part of those movements where it's like the only real, let's be honest, the only really important job was pastor.
Everybody else was just funding his paycheck or funding missions.
Right.
And you had churches where this was sort of the mindset.
Yeah.
And so I think the shift here is sort of a Chris Wiley shift let's recover the productive household.
Let's recover things like generational wealth.
They're important.
No, being poor is actually a disadvantage to accomplishing cultural, social ends and means.
You need, again, it goes back to the same thing.
You need actual real resources to be able to accomplish those things.
So you can't be telling your people that wealth building is bad and ambition is bad.
Right.
Or that funding missions is the only reason you make money.
Yep.
Agreed.
Yeah, because one of our missions, one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to press for the crown rights of King Jesus over every single sphere of human society and life.
And one of the things that is required to do that is influence, significance, and wealth.
So one of our missions, you know, it is very possible that, you know, some business owner, one of his missions could literally be, now, this doesn't mean if he's a Christian, He should belong to a local church in membership, and he should be giving something to the local church.
And I would argue, even that even in the New Testament, a tithe applies in terms of the timing of when he gives that 10%.
I think there's a debate to be had and what is most prudent for the church and its needs, but also for him and his business and how he can be a best steward of that wealth.
And it may mean that he gives 10% at the end of the year rather than giving 10% every week.
That said, apart from that tithe, which I do believe that he is mandated to give to the local church, it could mean.
That the rest of his wealth, and this is not something other than the kingdom, it could mean that he keeps the rest of his wealth in the business.
Yeah, he's giving it to a charity, not giving it to a charity, not giving it to an orphanage.
He keeps it in the business and he does it so that his business can be.
Think about this for a second.
We so underestimate the power, the potential power of a household.
What is Amazon other than House Bezos?
Right.
What is Meta other than House Zuckerberg?
Right.
I mean, think about that.
Like, you know, SpaceX and Twitter and, you know, Tesla, House Musk.
That's all it is.
It's a house.
It's a house that has children, in some cases, a wife.
They're not, you know, haven't divorced her and sent her away.
Or let's be honest statistically, she divorced him and took his money, you know, half of it and sent him away.
But my point is if there's any decency at all, there's a wife, there's children.
But then just like Abraham's house, there are servants.
Thousands.
Abraham had 300 something, but you're talking thousands, maybe tens of thousands in the case of someone like Elon Musk or someone like House Bezos.
But here's the deal we're trying to press for the king rights, the crown rights of King Jesus in all the earth.
I wonder how much missions you could get done in terms of pushing forward the kingdom in every sphere of life, not just churchianity, but a full orbed Christianity.
If Jeff Bezos was a solid Christian believer with a full orbed, robust, you know, reformed Christian view, not pietistic, not churchianity, but all of life, how much sway do you think he could have?
Like, how much sway does he have for evil?
But, like, how much sway does he currently have when it comes to it's not like the guy's just determining the shipping price for Amazon products?
No, that dude, if you don't realize that dude is pulling levers, political levers.
With high up civil authorities.
Like that is a ton of power.
Christians could have that power, but we literally have a doctrine.
We have created a doctrine to ensure that we don't have that kind of influence and power.
We've said, you know what?
This guy right here, if he keeps going in that direction, he might actually be successful and make a difference in the world.
Gotta cut that crap out.
Yeah.
Every penny you have over your basic needs, give it.
To a third world country that's a black hole economically and it'll disappear and never see the light of day again.
Hashtag Jesus.
Yeah, nobody wants to ask.
Dude, of course we're losing.
No wonder we're losing.
Yeah, well, nobody wants to ask is, you know, is that type of giving even that effective?
Sometimes.
But having worked in the many different nonprofits in the nonprofit world, a lot of those organizations are terrible and they're bloated and they exist to create shells for people who are just trying to offload money for tax.
Purposes.
It's not what you think it is.
Using Money For Righteous Ends00:02:28
And so, yeah, once again, it's like this is regime evangelical leadership.
And when I say regime, either they're controlled by the regime or they're bought the regime narrative.
And their fundamental aim is to keep Christians poor and powerless.
Yes.
And that's working.
And, you know, I think there are a lot of pastors who probably don't realize like this is a regime thing.
They don't even think in those categories or terms, but you've sort of got to wake up when it's like, Hmm, that's weird.
David Platt is telling me to be poor and live this radical life, and he's not.
Hmm.
That's really weird.
And then you look at the church throughout history.
This is the other comparison to be made.
And it's like, yeah, all the modern leftists want to point to the failures of the church.
The church did a lot of good.
The reason you know what a hospital is is because there were people called the hospitalers, and they had, guess what, money.
And, you know, tied to the crusading era with the Templars as well, they had money.
They were able to use that money for great good and protecting.
People who didn't have medical care and stuff like that, and a lot of other things.
But again, it all comes back to power and money.
And I think, you know, so a lot of this is tied to, I would say, like, if everybody would read some David Chilton on productive Christians in the age of guilt manipulators and be reading material like that, Rush Dooney had a lot of good material on, you know, wealth.
And it's like, it's not bad, but people are allergic to it.
And by the way, all the people who are telling you not to pursue wealth, guess what?
They're wealthy regime people who keep the power and want to keep you.
So, I think you're just getting people to wake up to that.
Amen.
All right.
Well, I feel like that's been helpful.
We've talked about Christian Burroughs.
We've talked about, you know, consolidation and different, you know, different moments.
What's up?
And meme coins.
And meme coins.
We've talked about meme coins.
We've talked about, but Christian Burroughs, consolidation, it's time to come home.
Know what time it is.
What phase of Christendom are we in?
How can we recalibrate, regroup?
The cave of Odulum, right?
We're not going there to lose the fight.
We're going or avoid the fight.
We're going there to regroup so that we might win the fight.
And we've applied that to missions.
We've applied it to church planting.
We've applied it to individual households.
We've applied it to economics and Christian men being industrious in business, and how that, you know, how that does that coincide with the command to be generous to the local church and all these kinds of things.
I feel like we got it.
I feel like it's a wrap.
Opening Eyes With Hope00:01:04
Any final thoughts, Eric?
No, that's great.
And hopefully, yeah, like you said, with the conference, with a lot of material you guys are putting out, I think a lot of people's eyes are being opened.
I think that's a hopeful thing.
People are realizing this was sort of a.
Intentional or not, but for a lot of people, it was a scam.
It was a way to harm households in the church.
See a lot of people waking up.
I'm really encouraged by the number of Christian businessmen you know, but we've connected with a lot of them through podcasts, guys like Max D down in Paris, Texas, doing a lot of great work to actually build up households and to use power and money for righteous ends and purposes.
So that's really encouraging.
And I would just encourage people to be a part of companies like that, be a part of communities like that, because it will inspire you and encourage you.
To continue building for your generations.
Amen.
All right, Eric, thanks so much.
And for the listener, the new Christendom conference has ended.
But for you and I, at the time of our recording, I will see you next week.