Hosts argue Christianity has shifted from civilization's center to the margins, urging a return to King Alfred's "Christian burrows"—fortified, self-sufficient communities with economic and military strength. They critique shallow church planting and excessive altruism, advocating instead for men to accumulate wealth, hold public office, and form tight-knit brotherhoods while fiercely discriminating in hiring to secure cultural dominance. Rejecting isolationist survivalism, the discussion emphasizes political engagement, mega-church consolidation, and pragmatic strategies to defeat enemies through total victory rather than neutrality, warning that empires fall when they lack defensive depth and economic power. [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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Surviving Hostile Times00:14:54
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Christianity in the West has gone from the center of civilization.
To the margins.
Once it shaped laws, culture, and the moral order.
Today it's viewed with suspicion or outright hostility.
The world we live in is not the same as it once was in the 1950s.
In fact, it's not even the same as it was in 2010.
The institutions that once carried a Christian foundation have either been conquered or turned against us.
And yet many evangelicals still cling to the illusion that we can engage.
The culture on neutral ground, as if we're still in charge, as if the world hasn't already chosen sides.
But this is not the first time the church has faced such a crisis.
In the 9th century, Alfred the Great ruled a crumbling England.
Viking invaders weren't just burning towns, they were burning churches.
Christian civilization itself was at stake.
But Alfred didn't accept defeat, he didn't surrender his people to the whims of the pagans.
Instead, He built, he fortified, he created Christian strongholds, boroughs, that became centers of resistance and renewal.
And because of that, England was not lost.
We have entered into a negative world where compromise leads only to decline and surrender guarantees our destruction.
The question is no longer whether we should build strong Christian communities, the question now is whether we will have the courage to do so.
Before it's too late.
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So today we lay out the strategy.
What Alfred's Burrow system teaches us.
That is, how Christian civilization has survived and even advanced in hostile times, and the non negotiable steps that we must take if we are to reclaim ground.
Tune in now.
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Okay, this one is this episode has been outlined by Michael Belch, and so he's going to lead us off.
Okay, great.
Well, really excited to have this conversation.
And this thought started from a few weeks ago.
We had some guys in town, we were just talking about what it would take to continue the emphasis of building Christian Burroughs throughout the nation.
And it's not an idea that's new to us, it's an idea that's been talked about.
in our circles at the New Christendom Conference and people have written, people have spoken.
And one of the things that I want to point out with our episode today is it's not actually new in history.
The idea of having Christian boroughs is not a new idea in history.
Now, they weren't exactly the same how they've carried out in the past, but there are some definite carryovers that we can see as we look at what happened down through history.
One of my main takeaways from the research I did and my goals for the episode today is just for us to not despair, right?
Like the church, and I don't mean necessarily the institutional church, the people of God and Christian civilizations have faced many terrifying enemies in the past.
And lo and behold, they implemented smart, wise, and effective strategies to defend themselves and then to begin to beat back their enemies.
And so when we think about, sometimes we're very short-sighted.
Muslims, when he says beat back their enemies.
We're going to get into this Spanish Reconquista.
But one of the things that we do, we're so short sighted, we think, oh, no one's ever faced this sort of thing before.
No, no, no.
Actually, take a deep breath.
Right.
This is not this exact scenario, but things like this have happened before.
That's such a consolation, too, because there's been so many times in biblical history, just reading the Old Testament, of course, it's God's word, but reading the Bible is a constant source of encouragement.
But then seeing that, oh, it's not something that God did for a season, you know, and then he stopped with the closing of the canon, but reading church history as well.
There have been.
Multiple times, in different times with different people in different places, where against all odds, the Lord he wins by many or by few.
That happens again and again.
And it's easy for a lot of people to look at our current situation and to say, well, even when we're winning, it still would be losing by any standard of Christendom just 50 years ago, much less 100 or 200 years ago.
There's no way that we can win.
We're surrounded on all sides.
You have atheism and secular humanism, and you have mass immigration.
You have all these different things.
Yeah, that's true.
But there have been periods of times all throughout history where the church has been in dire straits and God has, in his mercy, provided victory.
Yep.
So when we think about the fact that we are newly in a negative world, right?
I mean, this is less than 10 years.
This year will be 10th if you go by the Obergefell decision.
Was that 2015 or 2013?
15.
15, yeah.
So we're coming up on 10 years.
Really, I mean, that's just a blink.
right?
The fact that we're in negative world now.
The church has faced, God's people have faced negative world many times, and they faced an invasion also.
And the other thing that's encouraging to me before I dive into a little bit of King Alfred is sometimes we think that, well, yes, the church has advanced, but I look at places like Germany, right?
Where the church, and that was Martin Luther, right?
Like that was the core of the Reformation.
And now it seems like, well, it's just gone.
And so sometimes we have this historical perspective that the church just kind of moves around.
And then once it's gone away.
It's just gone forever.
We get that from the idea of Jesus in Revelation saying, you know, repent or I'll remove your lampstand.
So there is certainly a biblical idea there where God can remove the presence of his people.
But when we look at history, we actually see times where Christendom has expanded and then enemies have attacked and it's shrunk, but it managed to re-expand, right?
And this has actually happened multiple times throughout history.
And so when we think about America, do we deserve judgment?
Do we deserve to be obliterated for our sin?
Yes, absolutely.
But Also, what God said to Abram, Abraham, I think, at the time, you know, for 10 people in Sodom, I would not destroy the city.
And there are godly people in our nation who still are committed to praying and working and fighting, beating back the wickedness.
And so I take great courage in the historical shrinking and expanding of God's physical kingdom on earth.
I always think of, would you, you know, would you spare the city even if there were 10?
And God says, yes, for 10, I'd spare the city.
And I always think, Lot should have had more kids.
That's right.
I mean, he didn't have very many, his wife had only had eight children.
Yep boom, it's done.
Yeah good, you're good, all right, go ahead, all right.
So um, I wanted to look a little bit at king Alfred and this is not a deep dive into king Alfred because um, that would be really long.
He's a fascinating character but I wanted to look at his response to the attack that England faced.
So um, Alfred was the king of um Wessex in 871 and during this time, late in the ninth century uh, the Christian civilization in Maybe not all of Europe, because Charlemagne was around at the same time, but at least in England was under dire threat.
The Vikings had come over and they were not just raiding villages along the shore.
They were actually starting to push into England from the southern, southeastern coast and pushing up into England, capturing territory.
And this was happening year after year.
And the English people were losing a lot of territory.
They were losing a lot of lives and they were losing a lot of territory.
And just for time frame, this timeline of a Christian England that's about 250, 300 years of where we're at as America right now.
You trace kind of the Christianization of England, five, 600 or so, becomes largely Christian.
So it's at the same quarter century, quarter millennial mark that Alfred is facing this.
It's been established, there's structures and everything in place, but there's a pretty significant threat from the outside.
Yeah.
So what the people of England had been doing before that was when the Vikings showed up, they would muster their troops and then they would try and go out and fight a battle and beat them on the battlefield.
And what King Alfred realized was this is not working because number one, we don't know where they're going to show up.
And number two, they are as likely as we are to pick the terrain of the battle.
And so what he did was he started building what at the time was called burrs, from which we get burrows.
Burrs.
So when I refer to burrs, I'm equating that to our modern idea of Christian burrows now.
And burrs were an interesting idea.
They were a fortified city.
They were a fortified city.
And it wasn't just one or two.
He built a network of fortified cities.
And the key was they were all um no more than a day's ride away from each other, so that if one got attacked, there was a garrison or a contingent of troops in another fortified city that could be there within a day.
Now, one of the things that the Burrs did, that was really interesting, because you think if we're getting attacked by vikings, they're threatening us militarily.
But what he insisted on, in order for a burr to be called a burr, it had to have economic potential, like it had to have production of goods, And it had to have a religious center for worship and even some education.
Now, if my people are being raided by Vikings, I'm thinking only military.
But he set up these burrs all over the nation that reinforced economic production and worship and learning.
He continued to insist that that was going to be necessary if the English people were going to beat back the Viking invaders.
And so here were some of the things.
That had to be in place for a town not to be a town but to be a burr which is a central cog in the defense of of England.
They had to have fortifications, which makes sense walls or ditches or ramparts.
They had to have a military garrison and they had to be able to feed the military garrison with their own production.
They had to have economic activity, so they had to have centers for trade markets craftsmen blacksmiths industries, things like that.
They had to have a church or religious center.
And then the population side, it had to be large enough to support a stable population.
It could not just be something that they would only run there for the winter.
They had to be able to raise families there.
It had to be a multi-generary.
It had to be able to support multi-generational families.
Okay.
Two other things.
It had to be a strategic location.
So either along key roads or near important resources like a quarry or a fishing harbor or something like that.
And then last, it had to be connected into the burgle system.
It had to be integrated into Alfred's network.
which was, like I said before, no more than a day's ride from each other.
And so the question is, why was this effective?
Why was this so effective?
Well, the reason it was so effective was the Vikings were used to raiding isolated villages.
And they could come in, they could raid, and then before any help could come, they were gone.
They had looted all the stuff.
They had taken advantage of all the women.
They killed everyone they wanted to, and then they were gone.
And so if they went to a small village like this, they faced very little resistance.
Right.
So it was effective because the burrs, they were built up all around the nation in order to defend those smaller villages.
And this is so important.
It made the Vikings have to fight the English on the England's English, the terms of the English people.
In other words, England stopped reacting.
Right.
What would happen is they would hear of a town that was raided by the Vikings and they would run there.
And the Vikings would have sailed around and said, then they're running up there.
Right.
Or the Vikings are marching there and then they're trying to get there and fast.
The burrs allowed them.
to stop reacting and to say to the Vikings, look, if you want to conquer us, you're going to have to come where we are ready.
And it was incredibly effective.
It was incredibly effective.
External Pressure and Virtue00:14:26
So Nate, could you show that first chart about how Christian burr strategies can be based on external pressure?
So this is not West quality chart.
That's more lines than I've put on any of my charts.
This is not a West quality chart.
I appreciate it.
Good chart game.
I think it looks good to me.
The black line is the key.
That represents pressure, external pressure on the church.
The rest of the lines all represent the things that burrs are supposed to do.
provide defense, church influence, some sort of self-sufficiency, things like that.
And so what I want you to see is that as the black line of external pressure has changed over time in the history of the church, so we have our time periods there, we have the early church, we have Alfred there in red, that was when external pressure was at a very peak point, right?
The Vikings were literally taking over, burning down churches.
And then we have what it's expanded.
Positive world in the US is the blue one there, kind of towards the right side up till the 1950s.
Then we have neutral world.
And now the red, the pink on the right is we live in negative world.
The point of this whole graph is to show that the Christian community has always adjusted its strategy based on the conditions that it was living in.
When external pressure was low, you see that red line down where there's isolated monastic communities.
They did not have much defense.
And in fact, they didn't have to have.
huge contingents of knights and armies.
And my point in showing this graph is God is the one working through history.
And what falls to us is to say, what time of history do we live in?
We live in a time of a lot of external pressure.
And so we need to increase certain things.
We need to increase our self-sufficiency.
We need to increase our ability to defend ourselves, both legally and culturally, not just with armies.
We need to increase our interconnectedness.
And this is something that, you know, makes me sad a lot because the burrs were designed so that they could immediately respond to aid.
And we seem to still be living in the time where our attack is as likely to come from someone that we thought was a fellow burr as maybe some secular leftist who hates God.
And the burrs were such a beautiful thing.
This is the last thing I'll say before I kind of pass it off to you guys for some thoughts.
One of the things, and I don't know what to do about this in a global world and in a big nation, but one of the things that England had that we do not have was a leader who could organize this.
Now, Trump is leading some cultural fronts, but he's not strategically thinking through the role of the Christian community, right?
And I don't know.
I think some of our progress as Christian warriors in a depraved culture will be stunted when compared to Alfred's because we don't have some people or a guy to rally around to kind of direct the flow.
I mean, we're Americans.
We inherently resist that sort of idea.
So anyway, that's really interesting about what Alfred did.
And the big takeaway again is not just that he built towns, but that he responded to the threat.
He understood the threat.
And then he built in a way that would rebuff the threat and provide for the Christian people of England to not only barely survive, but to come out on the other side defended and with many kids and still with industry.
So, comments or thoughts from you guys?
Something Alfred does really well when he does that is, and this will be the trait of every good leader, is he has maximal autonomy for those underneath him.
I got two good family members and they're trying to grow businesses and they have kind of this streak, and I have it too, of like, it's very difficult for them to give off and hand off some portion of the business.
So scale that up.
You have a whole island, you have a whole nation to defend.
Well, how do you do that unless you take someone and you say, here's the deal?
At the end of the day, you probably wouldn't do it the way that I would do it, you wouldn't have arranged defenses the same way.
You wouldn't do economics, et cetera, et cetera.
But I just don't have the bandwidth to be involved.
How many burrs were there, Michael?
Would you say?
Oh, we're saying dozens and dozens.
Exactly.
I got 50, 60 of these.
I just can't be involved in all of them.
I can't oversee construction of walls.
I can't dig into the economics.
You have to do it and you have to do a good job.
So we talk about leaders, and there's certainly right now not a singular leader.
We don't have a pope or anything like that.
But as different men maybe lead organizations and groups and publishing companies, their success.
Their ability to scale is going to be directly related in some capacity to their ability to tell other men, You go do this, I don't have the bandwidth for it, and you're going to do a great job.
So, Alfred did it well.
And even here for now, practically on the ground business, you got to give autonomy to people.
Yep.
Right.
And what that requires is trust and humility.
So, for the singular primary leader, he has to be able to trust others in order to delegate.
But also, you have to have guys who are high caliber men.
That could do, right?
They're gifted and skilled enough that they could actually be reasonably successful doing their own thing.
And yet they've opted not to because they are willing to not take the primary lead role.
They're willing to be a right hand guy, but be a part of something significant.
And, you know, I've talked about this in the past, but I think that's the opposite of what, you know, evangelicalism has done.
And, uh, Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox for that matter, but just Christendom in the West.
I think what we've done in recent decades over the last, you know, 50 to 80 years or so is we have spread our forces too thin.
And instead of winning somewhere, we've opted for losing everywhere.
Instead of winning on something, we've opted for losing everything.
And that's The church growth movement.
That's the church planting movement for sure.
That's a lot of our international and global evangelism strategies.
At every level, we determined that we had a certain level of opulence and success.
And I think we got lackadaisical and we took that for granted.
And we said, we've arrived, nothing, look at this great Babylon, which I have.
Built, you know, like look at this great kingdom that I built with my own hands.
And we got overly confident and thought, you know, we're doing fine.
And so we can afford to divide our resources, our efforts, our team, and our focus.
America's doing fine.
So we'll do a lot of work in Uganda.
You know, America's doing fine.
So we'll, you know, like this, to take it to a local level, this church is doing great.
And so We're going to take half of our elder and deacon team and we're going to send them out to be missionaries or to be church planters.
And I'm not saying that that's always wrong, but there are certain principles that are timeless, and there are certain principles that are timely.
And I think a lot of what we're missing as of late in our moment is the timely principles.
I say it all the time, but it bears saying once more the sons of Issachar, they knew the times.
There are timeless principles that we find in the word of God that apply in season and out of season, right?
That just like certain virtues that we should embody.
Regardless of what culture you're living in, or what time period you're living in, or what's going on, you know, in the newspaper headlines, it doesn't matter.
The economy is good, pursue this virtue.
Economy is bad, pursue this virtue.
This political issue is going on, pursue this virtue.
So there are some things that really are timeless.
But there are other things that really do fall into the category of strategy, timely strategies.
And I think that one of the, you know, since we're of the reform tradition, I think, you know, we can.
Speak to our own tribe.
One of the big mistakes that I think we made was I think we developed an unhealthy, over the top aversion towards pragmatism.
Yeah.
Like, really, like I feel like the average reformed guy.
Now, most of our followers at this point have probably wised up to that, whether they could express it and put it into words or not.
They've wised up to what I'm about to espouse.
And so they're not particularly bothered by subject matter like what we're covering today.
And they see Michael's chart and they're like, yeah, let's go.
But But even just a few years ago, five years ago, if you were in any Reformed tribe whatsoever, Presbyterian, Reformed Baptist, and you talk about practical strategies in the culture, immediately that would be frowned upon.
And I think it was an overreaction and a conflation of categories.
Here we go again, talking about categories, but they're so vitally important.
So when you think of the Lord's Day, Right, like a lot of people over the last, I would say, 10 years or so, kind of you know, with the new reformed resurgence in the last 20 years, um, a bunch of people, you know, overnight by the thousands becoming Calvinist, at least in terms of soteriology, their view of salvation.
And everybody all of a sudden is, you know, listening to John Piper sermons, you know, and then, you know, and then they get into R.C. Sproul and um, Martin Lloyd Jones or whatever.
Um, and they're going down that theological path, right?
That happened over the last 20, 30 years.
Well, a lot of it, you know, adopted reformed soteriology, but not reformed practices, especially when it comes to Lord's Day worship.
And then over the last 10 years or so, 10, 15 years, people had, I think, a generally correct instinct in realizing, you know what, we don't just need to be five point Calvinists in terms of God's sovereignty over salvation, but we can't have reformed soteriology, but still be using smoke machines and laser lights.
On Sunday, um, and TED talk sermons, and you know, the garage band worship, um, we, you know, like there was kind of a natural aversion as our generation that all became Calvinist in their teenage years and early 20s started getting a little older,
and then there started to be some kind of pushback towards the Driscolls of the world, which I'm not a Driscoll hater, but just I'm thinking of that time and Mars Hill, and it's kind of you know, it's Calvinism, but you know, dressed up with um.
Very modern, you know, laser light garage band kind of, you know, set designs on the stage and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, Jesus is my homeboy hoodie, you know, or whatever.
And so, you know, 20 year olds, when I was in my 20s, I liked, you know, listening to Driscoll as many other people at that time did.
But then you started to grow up.
And my point is over the last 20, 30 years, Reformed resurgence with soteriology.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, a reformed resurgence in terms of confessional reformed theology.
And a lot of that dealing with the regulative principle of worship.
What should the Lord's day look like?
How should we worship?
And so that's where all of a sudden you got into guys saying, okay, like we want to embrace Sabbatarianism.
We want to practice the Lord's Supper weekly.
We want to use wine and not Welch's grape juice.
We want to worship the Lord in spirit, but also in truth, according to what He's prescribed.
Spiritual songs and hymns and psalms.
There was an increase in psalm singing and more traditional hymns and less of a rock band type of style, family integrated worship, the kids staying with the adults instead of sending them off to another room for childcare.
All these things started kind of emerging in the reformed world.
So it wasn't just reformed soteriology again over the last 20, 30 years.
But over the last 10, 15 years, it was reformed worship, the regular principle of worship.
And in that, one of the big things that was pushed back against was pragmatism and saying, you know, it is not permitted to us.
This isn't a blank page for your own creative freedom and license.
These are things that God has explicitly told us in His Word.
The pastor or the deacons or the congregation, for that matter, do not have the luxury.
God has not afforded in His Word the luxury to us.
To be creative and strategic in the design of our Lord's Day worship service in order to try to attract people, namely the lost.
But rather, church is first and foremost, it's for God to bless and honor Him.
Second, for the sheep, for God's people, that we would be nourished and fed.
And lastly, for the unbeliever as an evangelistic context.
But we can't reverse it and put it on its head to where we're thinking of what does God want in our worship last.
And we're thinking about what do unbelievers want and doing church surveys, you know, like Willow Creek did, you know, with Bill Hybles or Rick Warren.
And what would the pagan who hates God, how would he like us to worship?
Multiplication Over Addition00:08:59
And then we'll gear things around it.
So I think, you know, again, to sum it up, the last 20, 30 years, reformed resurgence was soteriology, salvation.
How does God save?
And sermons became more reformed and exegetical and those kinds of things.
And the sovereignty of God became central in many ways in the preaching.
But the order of service.
Was not liturgical, it was very modern.
Not our theology, but our methodology was very pragmatic and seeker sensitive.
That's what it was.
It was seeker sensitive Calvinistic churches like Mars Hill.
And then over the last 20, 30 years, the last 10, 15 years, then we decided let's really embrace the Reformed tradition a little deeper, not just in preaching the sovereignty of God, but even how, not just what we embody when we do church, but how we do church.
The problem now, you know, fast forwarding to today, the problem is I think there was an overreaction towards pragmatism.
Being against mere humanistic pragmatism when it comes to how we worship on the Lord's Day is right and good, a good instinct, because God actually prescribes clearly how to worship Him when the church gathers together on the first day of the week, the day that Christ Jesus rose from the dead.
And so that aversion towards that particular kind of pragmatism, pragmatism in worship, Lord's Day worship, was a good instinct.
The problem is that reformed guys, a lot of us, we became averse to all forms of pragmatism, all of it.
So then, you know, you're doing a conference on how to win back the culture, and guys are saying they're applying the regular principle of worship to the political sphere or to business, you know, or the arts or this.
And what I mean by that by applying it is they're just poo pooing on anybody who makes any attempt whatsoever.
To be successful, and you get the Jesus juke, right?
And that's where the Jesus juke arrives just preach the gospel, man.
If you have an intruder in your home, just preach the gospel.
If somebody's saying that you should be healthy and work out, nah, just be fat and preach the gospel.
Somebody's saying you should start a business, nah, be poor and preach the gospel.
Somebody's saying that in politics, that we should actually wield the sword and we should legislate right, nah, just preach the gospel.
So that aversion towards pragmatism on the Lord's day in worship, which was right.
Became a general aversion towards all forms of pragmatism Monday through Saturday as well.
And I think that kind of sums up, that leads us to where we are today.
And I think that's one of the things that we're trying to do in this ministry push back on that and say, no, there's things that we can learn, pragmatic things, not just theology, but there are strategic, pragmatic things, practical things that we can glean from guys like King Alfred or from this over here or that over there.
That we can employ not as the church institute, but as the church, meaning Christians, people, Monday through Saturday in our weekly lives outside of the Lord's Day worship that are perfectly permissible in that sense, like God does afford a measure of creativity and strategy to us.
And there are some things that would be better than other things.
And one of those things that I'm advocating for is I think that we are currently in a moment in the West where we need consolidation.
Not spreading our forces too thin.
Right now is not the time to be thinking about how can our local church plant 10 new churches in the next 10 years.
No, now is the time to be thinking how can we bolster, re fortify?
How can our one local church be as strong as it possibly can be?
How can we start a school in addition to our church?
How can we see to it that in the next 10 years, 10% of the men in our church are seated in public office locally in town?
And how can we make, how can we disciple and encourage the men of our church to start businesses, to pursue wealth in ethical Christian ways, so that our church is a force to be reckoned with?
Instead of having 10 weak churches, what if we had one significant church?
And I think that's, and so all that being said, it requires all the way back to where I started two things.
It does require some lead men, and those guys have to be.
They have to have a certain measure of humility, but more particularly a willingness to trust, to delegate.
But for everybody else, for all the other men who don't end up being the primary lead guy, it requires an immense amount of humility.
Because if it was the 1990s, like just to be frank, you know, or especially the early 2000s with the explosion of church planting movements, if it was the early 2000s, if you got a guy who would be, you know, your typical right hand guy in one local church setting, if it's 2007, you're sending that guy out.
And every conference was geared that way.
It was all about exponential multiplication, not just addition, multiplication.
Like, I mean, the number of talks that I heard at conferences about that it's about multiplication.
Are you multiplying and replicating yourself?
And everyone, you need to do that as an individual.
You need to do that as a church.
You need to do that.
Like, at every single level of human society, it's all about multiplying.
But then what happened was all these cells.
Split and multiplied really quickly.
And what you get when that happens is cancer.
That's how that's it's like anything that grows is healthy.
Yeah.
Well, tumors grow, you know, and that's so growth is not always healthy if it's a mile wide but an inch deep.
And then something like COVID happens.
And like they've done studies on this, the whole Keller project in Manhattan.
I think it was literally, Nathan, you might remember this, but I think it was like 80 or 90%.
Of all the churches planted out of the, you know, from Keller's.
The Redeemer City to City, I think.
The Redeemer City to City?
It was a podcast with Aaron Wren you could reference.
There's a podcast that we did with Aaron Wren that you could go back and listen to.
Or somebody else did, I'm sorry.
But anyway, but I don't think I'm way off base here.
I think it was legitimately 80 to 90, and 90 sounds right.
But like 90% of the churches planted over this multiple year time period through city to city impact.
One of the big ministry, urban church planning ministry that Keller did was all wiped out in a year in 2020 with COVID.
None of them had the fortitude, none of them had the spine, none of them had virtue, none of them had courage.
And at the practical level, aside from the moral level, none of them had the resources to be able to weather that kind of storm with those kinds of challenges.
So it's like you multiplied, sure, but then you actually lost everything that you multiplied.
The mothership, the initial church that planted all these churches, she was also weakened because she had given birth 10 times all in a row.
And so then she wasn't able to weather the storm either.
And so it's kind of like the four soils, the parable of Christ, the rocky soil, it's shallow.
What that causes is because the roots can't go, there's no depth, the roots can't go down.
So the stem springs up, but it springs up so quickly without the stability.
And without the rootedness, so that when the sun comes out, right, the thorns that choke a different plant, that represents the cares of this life.
But the sun, in this context, it represents suffering and challenge, difficulty.
So then the sun comes out and the plant quickly withers and dies.
And I think the church plantative movement was, in many ways, there was good that came out of it, but in many ways, overall, it was a shallow, rocky soil that gave quick growth to lots of churches to where it's like, oh my goodness, the whole garden.
Lots of elementary schools.
Yeah.
But then the sun came out, some kind of providential challenge, suffering, difficulty, like 2020, whether it's social justice or BLM or COVID and civil tyranny, these kind of things.
And 90% of it was just evaporated like that.
So you got to know the times.
There are timeless truths.
We're Christians.
There are plenty of timeless truths.
One of the things that we try to focus on with this ministry is looking at some of the timely truths.
Consolidation for Growth00:03:13
And I think one of the timely truths right now is consolidation.
I think the name of the game is consolidation, finding where God is moving and finding a person that the Lord's hand is really upon, just in his mercy and kindness and providence, and saying, I could do my own thing.
And I'm gifted and talented enough.
I'm a high caliber man to where I could do my own thing.
I could plant my own church.
I could start my own ministry.
I could do this.
I could do that.
And it would be reasonably successful.
I could manage it.
But I think that the day of the manager is done.
It's not just managerial, but it's now looking where are some of the guys who are taking the next hill?
They're not just managing and sustaining, but they're actually gaining ground.
And how can I multiply their efforts by going and joining them?
That's my thought.
So, all right, we'll hit our first commercial break.
When we come back, we're going to briefly talk about the Spanish Reconquista and then we'll branch out from there.
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All right, welcome back.
You know, Joel, just as you were talking about that, I thought I'm the child of a missionary.
I did mission work myself.
I don't think now is the time for America to be thinking, reach the world with every last dollar.
I'm not saying mission programs are bad.
But even growing up as the child of a missionary, like my dad, whenever possible, made it a priority to get to know and to be in the good graces of the mayor.
Beyond Truncated Missions00:03:33
of the town that we lived in or of the president of the association of the neighborhood or that sort of thing.
And like, why?
Because one time when we needed special approval to use a park for an event we were doing that most people didn't get, we got because my dad had a relationship with him.
I just like, even the things that we instinctively do when we think, well, we're in another country, like get to know the political power and be in their good graces, like has just faded so far from the kind of the. perspective or the thinking of the modern Christian leader.
Like, why would I need to know the mayor?
Or why would we need to have any sort of political clout?
I don't know.
So part of what's so weird about where we are now is it's not even how we necessarily think about this if we just separate ourselves from the situation.
If we think, well, how would you reach a nation?
Well, you would establish communities.
You would, you know, you do all the things that we're talking about.
And then we say, Well, let's do that here in the US.
It's like, nope.
That's not what we do.
This is all theory, or it's all for out there.
None of it is for here.
Something about that, like gospel only or gospel first, five soul is movement.
I swear, it just damaged people's brains.
They became unable to think in just different categories, different thoughts, different ideas than just church and gospel.
I remember very early on, but I would have liked what would be the best week of effectiveness for Jesus and have been like, well, like, Monday, missional community, Tuesday night, guys' night, Wednesday night, prayer meeting, Thursday, evangelism, Friday, home group, Saturday, you know, something or the other, church, three times a week.
And my mind is like, I'm most pleasing to Jesus when it's gospel, Bible study, theology, all just on a continuous cycle.
And thank God for expanding a field of view that it's like, wait, wait, there's faithfulness in so many different domains.
And it's not just all truncated to John Owen and to theology and to small, like, missional evangelism or small group together.
It's not just the church.
Right.
Like the church.
Christians, perhaps.
Christians, yes.
Majority, right.
But there's a distinction between the church institute versus the church, meaning the collective people of God.
Yeah.
Like there's the church, like ecclesia, the gathering, as a verb, like the church churching together on the Lord's day, ecclesia, gathering together.
But then there's also the church, you know, Monday through Saturday, meaning the people themselves.
And I think we in America put so much stock in the church institute that we just, Thought like, yeah, that the doors to the church, the church building, should be open every day of the week.
And if they're not, the, you know, we should still be doing some kind of ecclesiastical gathering, small groups, you know, this, that, the other.
And then people didn't really have any time for anything else.
That was, that's pretty much your week.
You know, Sunday is the Lord's day, and that's good and right.
But then it's, you know, like what you said, Wes, Wednesday is another church meeting, and then there's a Friday prayer meeting, and then there's a small group meeting, and there's a men's breakfast on Saturday, you know.
And so that's, All of your time, and then what you ultimately had is that in every other sphere of human society and life the political sphere, um, economic, you know, the marketplace and business, and these um, in every other sphere, you had Christians became subpar because everybody else, um, right?
Discouragement in San Diego00:04:03
The pagan is just obsessively throwing himself at these other endeavors.
So it's like, so you're going to small group and you're going to this and you're going to that, and he's just clocking in 80 hours at his job.
And so he's getting ahead and he's making more money than you, and he's becoming more skilled in his labor.
And so, the young man studying to be a pastor.
He's trying to catch up without seminary, get all his reading in, practice preaching and teaching.
Which, if you're going into the pastorate, is fine.
But not all men in a church should be going into the pastorate.
Right.
But the problem is that we basically acted as though they were and treated every young man as though he was going to be a pastor.
And I did that.
Because I felt called to be a pastor, because I wanted to be a pastor, I couldn't imagine anybody not wanting to be a pastor.
I couldn't imagine anybody.
Any young man not wanting to be a pastor.
And so then I elevated that as the end all be all, just assuming that that's what every guy wanted to be.
And for me at the time, I was in San Diego.
And this was, you know, so you're talking San Diego with predominantly a young church, young people, because I was young, and you tend to attract people who are like you.
So you've got all these young men living in a place where there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity, right?
They're all a little bit.
Discouraged outside of the church, everybody was excited.
The worst wages in the nation are in San Diego, especially for cost of living.
San Diego has been rated at least twice in the last five to ten years as the number one worst city in America for building wealth.
In terms of like there are other places that are a higher cost of living, like San Francisco or DC, but in terms of the ratio between wages and cost of living, San Diego was rated number one.
So if you're in that context, with You know, predominantly a younger demographic.
And so all the men are in their, you know, mid and late 20s, you know, early, mid and late 20s.
And they're all like clockwork experiencing certain discouragement outside of church life in their vocation.
None of them are making that much money.
All of them are paying an exorbitant amount on rent.
All of them have student debt.
And then you're holding out to them the hope of, but, you know, Um, but what really matters in life is the church, which is true.
Um, and the best thing to do in the church is to be a pastor, and so then you start doing you know eldership training, you know, um, programs, you know, and you've got half of the men in the church training to be elders, you know, and meanwhile, um, and it's working as kind of like an assuaging of their conscious, like it's just a consolation, like it's just helping them to sleep at night, right?
So, like, I just, um, I'm not making money.
I'm building somebody else's wealth by renting a two bedroom apartment for $2,500 a month.
I have student loan debt, but I'm training to be a pastor.
Whereas, like, what really needed to happen is they all needed to leave, get out of San Diego, go move to some place that has jobs and a lower cost of living, and be successful.
Like, obviously, be a Christian.
So, find a good biblical church, attend that church on the Lord's Day, be a member.
In good standing, but Monday through Saturday, you don't need to go to three different eldership training classes.
Not that we ever did that many, but instead, what you should be doing is you should be working, you're in your 20s, you should be working 50, 60 hours a week.
You should, and be the very best in your vocation.
So that later in life, when you're in your 40s and 50s, you're the guy who has accrued capital, not just financially, but you have your Rolodex, your metaphorical, proverbial Rolodex of networks and relationships and all these kinds of things.
Heritage and Ancient Allegiance00:15:42
You're the guy who would stand the best chance of winning city council, or like you have power.
You have power.
Joel, I want to interrupt you real quick there because I just want to speak directly to any young men who are listening.
I wish I had been given that advice when I was 18, 19, 20.
I worked hard, but I had no idea what working strategically meant.
Whatever I did, I would work hard at.
I would work as hard or harder than anybody else.
But that idea of why are you doing this?
If you're a young man, heed what Joel just said.
Okay, back to you, Michael.
All right.
So believe it or not, Alfred was not the worst that had happened in history.
They were able to beat back the Viking invasion and through various other providential circumstances, you know, Alfred and England won and they went on to establish a great dynasty and nation.
But one interesting example to look at where things actually were quite, quite dire is in Spain in the 700s.
And so what had happened was the Moors were coming across, if you know the geography, actually, Matt, Nathan, you can put up the image of Spain.
I think it's image one.
It's the fourth one that I sent you.
So if you see the geography there, that little tip down at the bottom where the green is, I mean, the gray part down there is Africa.
And the Moors controlled Northern Africa.
And it was not hard to send little ships across.
And they were raiding Spain.
And this was the Muslim invasion of Spain.
And by the 700s, 800s, well, by the 900s, most of all of that had been totally taken over.
So if you look at the image, by 914, all that Christian Spain owned of the Iberian Peninsula was that bright yellow spot.
In the very north, right?
And so the Muslim invaders had made great inroads.
They'd basically taken over the entire peninsula, which now is two countries, Spain and Portugal.
But this was a time that Christian leaders, and it took a long time, it took like 800 years to beat this back.
God willing, we're not going to be in a struggle that long here in the United States.
But this is a sobering perspective because the Muslim Moors. took control of that country and had it for a really long time.
There's a couple interesting things though, and this is the point.
Spanish Christians may have lost the majority of control to Islamic invaders, but they did not disappear.
What they did was they fortified.
They rebuilt Christian civilization locally, and they slowly overtook and retook territory over the centuries.
And one of the things that I think we all know intuitively, but When we talk about Christian boroughs and capturing back the nation, one of the things that is happening organically, but that we need to, yes, and let's do it intentionally, is the Christians in Spain, they had to zealously guard their cultural and religious identity and heritage.
Because as the Moors were pushing north and north and north, those who remained Christian and were moving north and were left in the north, it would have been fairly easy for them to just say, look, it would be easier if we just Became Moors.
We started speaking their language.
We started worshiping like they do.
And one of the things when we think about boroughs, several people, as they've talked about boroughs, they've actually talked about, well, there's a time for fortresses and then there's a time for boroughs.
And in Spain, they had to have fortresses and they had to zealously protect.
And my point here would be Christians need to be okay zealously defending their heritage and their culture and preserving it and passing it on to their children.
Our children should know patriotic songs.
Our children should know patriotic stories.
Our children should value our heritage.
And we need to, until that's the milieu that we're all swimming in, we need to almost overcompensate because they're being told now at every turn that that heritage is evil, wrong, or it's just being erased and washed away.
Monuments are getting destroyed.
Like go out of your way.
We took our kids to a Civil War battle a couple of years ago.
And my goodness, they still talk about it, right?
Like it was fantastic.
It was at Vicksburg, which has a really great, if you're ever in the area.
You drive in your car and you pull up and you observe the battlefield and then they have a, you tune your radio station and they have a fantastically well produced kind of narrator and reenactment explaining what happened at the time.
Really good.
But my point is before they were able to beat back the Moors and it took hundreds of years, those who remained had to fortify themselves.
They had to cleave to each other and they had to really preserve their heritage, their religion and their culture.
And to some degree, we're not there yet.
But if Trump hadn't been elected, we definitely would have been.
But our culture matters and we have to preserve it.
Before we move on, I want to just hit chart three, Nate.
So this is taking King Albert's principles and making a modern spin on them.
Because what I'd like to spend the rest of the episode actually talking about is, okay, what does this mean for Christians around America who are thinking in this way?
King Alfred had the priority of a borough had to be self-sufficient.
Okay.
Now, Joel, last week, and you've been saying for a little while now, this might not mean we're homesteading anymore.
Right.
But it might, but it does mean at least what it says at the end there.
We do have to take over existing systems and turn them to good.
Like we can't, we can't continue to just even as a nation, we can't continue to have 70% of our antibiotics made in China.
That is just folly.
And locally, we have to, boroughs are eventually whether. taking over or building their own sort of systems, they have to be self-sufficient.
We have to own.
Like we absolutely have to own.
And Timon Klein and another guy, I forget who it was, had a really great article in American Reformer and they had a whole section on ownership and it was so good.
You guys should go check that out.
But we have to acquire land, businesses.
This is not new.
Defense and security, developing legal, economic, and physical defenses against external pressures and disruptions.
And part of what has been so great about Trump being in office is that he has engaged with the kind of political tools that have been available to conservatives the whole time.
And he just said, oh, look what I found in the back cellar in a dusty box.
I found we can sue or we can countersue or we can just do things.
And so defense, church and worship, that's pretty self-explanatory.
Education and formation has been talked about.
It needs to happen.
Economic networks, though.
And this is where I don't know if I agree with this analysis anymore, building parallel Christian economies through businesses.
But people need to be connected with other people in their field.
And if you're the only person at your church who is into IT, or if you're the only man at your church who's into, you know, you're trying to figure out what does, how do I practice law as a Christian?
You've got to find some other Christians that you can network with to bring a good perspective to you.
And then last political and legal strategy, you got to have political power.
Yeah.
And with so many of those, one of the key, The key terms that Christians have to embody is discrimination.
Yep.
Like Christians should unapologetically, fiercely discriminate against non Christians.
So, like the parallel Christian economy, like I get it and I appreciate that.
But it doesn't actually have to be parallel.
We don't have to just build a Christian economy next to the secular economy.
You can also just win.
You can just win.
You can just.
Just in group preference.
Yeah, in group preference.
So, it's like you start a business.
You have unbelievers that are patrons of that business, but you hire Christians and people who are not Christians, you don't hire them.
You prefer your people and you do so not with animus towards those who are not your people, but you also don't do it with guilt.
Okay, but you know, I really should probably, this guy's down on his luck or whatever, you know, and like, yeah, sure, he's a pagan.
It doesn't share any of the virtues that I have and all this, but I should probably just, you know, we already have, you know, 20 employees.
Employees and 19 of them are Christians.
And, you know, so like we should hire a guy who's not, or no, just don't.
Like one of the things I was reading just yesterday, working through the Old Testament again, and I was just, it just stood out to me how many times Israel's armies would secure a victory in some kind of battle.
But then, you know, if there was a righteous king, immediately they would follow it up by running down the enemy.
They would pursue.
So they wouldn't just win the battle, but the enemy would then begin to flee.
But they wouldn't allow them to flee and regroup and fortify and then come back against them.
It's basically the reverse of everything you just showed with that chart with Spain.
The Christians, you know, they would have to retreat, but eventually they would fortify, they would rebuild, and then eventually advance.
You know, there was the most peace and prosperity in Israel in the Old Testament when they wouldn't just win a battle.
But they would run down the enemy.
So they would secure a victory and the enemy would then retreat and flee, but they would run them down.
They would actually enshrine the victory and not give the enemies of God the opportunity.
Christians in America are just, we're soft, we're too nice.
It's this misguided, over realized sense of altruism.
And I think part of what helps, honestly, kids, you can just like the rise and fall of empires.
You can pretty much, you know, trace this through Rome and pretty much every empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, even like pretty much every empire in human history.
What happens is that eventually they achieve a level of strength that makes them invulnerable to any outside threat.
And then eventually it's only overthrown by the inside threat.
And one of the key Mechanisms to their ultimate demise is being overly altruistic.
They spread their forces too far.
They allow too many people that don't actually have, they're not actually their people, right?
So they conquer too many lands and then eventually allow standing and citizenship and all these kinds of things to people who aren't really Romans, right?
And just say, like, oh, well, you know, but Rome has conquered them.
They're flying a Roman flag, you know, and they said the magical words and this is now Roman land.
So they're on the magical dirt.
And so that makes them Romans just like us, you know?
Like, sure, me and my family, we've been Romans for, you know, this many centuries.
It's in our bloodline.
It's in our DNA.
But these people, we conquered them 15 minutes ago, and they're just as Roman as anybody else.
And you begin to overextend yourself, and then you begin to ultimately have divisions and factions, different peoples that ultimately their allegiance goes to something older and tried and true, something ancient and not just a set of propositions that they adopted last week.
And so then eventually the empire crumbles from within.
It divides against itself.
It begins to eat itself.
And a lot of it, because of not necessarily, you would think it was because of greed or being overly ambitious or in some sense being too tyrannical that they just had to conquer everyone.
No, it's actually not that.
It's actually too much charity, too much altruism.
Because it's not like, oh, well, we have to seize those lands over there because they have this certain type of resource that we don't have.
Early on, there may be some of that, but eventually it becomes no, we're actually self sufficient and not just to survive, but to thrive.
We have every resource we could possibly imagine.
We've conquered everything.
Extending the empire at this point in the game is not to accrue more resources.
It's not that we need to.
It's literally a blessing to those that we would go and conquer because they live in abject poverty.
They don't have virtue, they have a demonic religion.
And so we're going to go and civilize, you know, this people and that people and this people and that people.
But you do it too quickly, not giving time for people to really truly assimilate.
And then eventually it becomes a civil war and it collapses.
And I think America, in many ways, sadly, I'd like it to be a nation, but in many ways it has become an empire and it's become a bloated empire that has spread too far, too quickly.
And taken a ton of people into its orbit without them truly assimilating, without them really being Americans.
They don't have our values, they don't have our virtue, they don't have our heritage, our history.
And then it starts to fracture and it starts to decay.
And that allows for what you think is democracy ends up really being an oligarchy.
A few individuals with power, prestige, and money and these kinds of things are able to just manipulate the masses.
And there's all these severed factions within the whole.
And so they can play off of.
You know, um, well, this voting block over here because they want welfare, or this voting block over here because they want you know X, Y, and Z, and you turn the factions against each other and it all begins to implode.
And so, that's I think that like not what I'm saying is not just with you know the church planting movement, not just in the ecclesiastical sphere, but ecclesiastically, politically, nationally, um, economically through free trade with no limits whatsoever.
I'm at every single level, economically, spiritually, you know, ecclesiastically, politically, um.
Ethnically, at every single level, we have spread so thin and so fast, so wide, and yet only an inch deep.
And now we are paying the piper.
We're paying the piper.
And I think a lot of what we need to do if we want to survive, if we want to win, is you have to not just win a particular battle, but having won a battle, going back to the Israelites, you run them down.
Paying the Piper00:02:42
You secure the victory.
You banish all the enemies of God from your land.
You don't give them any standing.
You don't like right now, Americans, and particularly Christians in America, we need to have.
I've said it before, but we don't just need the hearts for revival, we need stomachs for revival.
You need to become impervious to propaganda.
Oh, but this family, you know, like they immigrated here, and yeah, sure, they're not natural citizens, but they have, you know, young children.
And I just saw a picture, you know, on the internet that.
Probably was AI and not even real, but I just saw a picture of this little girl crying, you know, as she's being separated from her mother.
And you need to be able to see that and feel nothing and say, No.
And it's not because I hate others, but it's because I love Christ and I love my people.
And my people are suffering.
My people have become a tax farm.
My people have been exploited.
My people, like, that's every hero in history.
That's the origin story is their people.
Are oppressed, they rise up in a moment of oppression, seeing the suffering of their people, and they say, That's enough.
Whether it's a Samson or a Gideon or this, you know, that's the Midians, you know, when Gideon he's threshing wheat, it's not because he's a coward, he's doing it because they've been so exploited by the Midians and so overly taxed.
He's threshing wheat in a wine press hidden underneath the ground so that he can feed his people, so that it doesn't all get taken by the foreigners who invaded their lands.
Like at some point, this is why the order of Morris matters it's not hatred for others, it's love for your own.
The problem with Americans is not that we're racist.
The problem with Americans is that we actually have no love.
There is no in group.
If you are a Christian, there's no Mormons, they do commerce with Mormons.
Mormons work with Mormons.
Muslims work with Muslims.
Jews, by golly, they work with Jews.
But Christians won't work with you.
Christians, Americans, and white people.
So whether it's race, white.
If it's nationality, American.
If it's Christian or spirituality, religion, Christian, those three groups, Christian, American, and white, have been brainwashed over decades, propagandized to believe that every single other religion, ethnicity, and nationality on the planet is allowed to have their people.
And we're not.
And so what happens is that we don't ever fight.
We never win a victory.
Terrorizing the Oppressor00:02:39
And my concern now is that we just have.
We just have won a victory, but we won't secure the victory by running, by.
Solidifying it by following through, running them down.
We need to, this next four years is not a moment to say, hey, we won and now we have some of our freedoms back and maybe we'll get a little bit better economy, you know, and maybe I can get a job now, you know, because DI won't, you know, tell me that, you know, that it's oppressive to hire me because I'm white.
And, you know, so we'll have 40.
No, these four years are not four years of reprieve.
They're four years for us to push the victory out to the margins and say, There has to be, Charles Haywood's going on this, but there has to be, it's not enough to just make the woke go away.
It's not enough even just to free all the J, you know, all the J6 protesters.
Praise God for that.
I'm glad Trump did that.
That's wonderful.
But you haven't won until everybody who was prosecuting the J6 protesters is in jail.
It's actually the full reverse.
So it's not just, well, let's go back to neutrality.
No, neutrality is what got us here.
So it's not just, hey, you know what?
No more oppressing people who peacefully were invited by guards into the Capitol building and have been without trial rotting in jail for four years.
It's not just that you release them.
No, you have to reward friends and punish enemies.
It's not enough just to release the good guys.
You then have to terrorize, absolutely terrorize.
Your enemies should be having nightmares every night thinking about what the Christians are going to do to them.
And it's like, that's not Christian.
That sounds terrible.
Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
I'm talking about doing it all.
Through categories, through the proper avenues.
That's what the civil magistrate is.
Romans 13, he is a terror, terrorized.
I use that word intentionally, it's a biblical word.
He is a terror to those who do evil.
The Christian prince, Christians should be in government.
And those Christians who pursue political office and attain it by the grace of God should absolutely be a terror to anybody who is a threat to Christians here in America.
So anybody who took 70-something-year-old women with cancer and put them in jail for two years for praying outside of an abortion clinic, that person should not be able to sleep at night.
That person should be looking over their shoulder every day thinking, today is probably the day I'm going to be arrested.
Christians as a Terror to Evil00:14:48
Yes and amen.
Praise God.
When the wicked are crushed, the righteous, there's so many verses like the righteous rejoice.
It's a blessing to the, and that's good.
That's a good thing.
That's nothing to be ashamed of.
We need to not just win a battle, but having won a battle, secure the victory, push the victory out to the margins, run them down.
Okay, Wes.
I'm going to take it back to Michael.
That was great.
Okay, I thought it looked like you were on the laptop, and I thought, oh man, he's cooking under that line.
He's cooking over there.
All right, Michael.
Well, we want to get into a couple of practicals for sure.
I've even seen a couple of comments like, is this theory?
Is this hypothetical?
How does it look in real life?
Because that really is where the day to day decisions that you make for yourself and your family, your church, your Your business really come into play.
So we want to come back from our second commercial break and talk about some of the practicals.
And then there have been some good questions, too.
We want to take some questions when we come back as well.
So we'll go to our second commercial break now.
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All right, welcome back.
Well, we definitely want to get into a couple of practical questions and what does this mean?
And admittedly, this is a little bit difficult because situations are different.
But one of the things that it definitely does mean is thinking about building a borough, thinking about attaining cultural dominance as Christians, that needs to be part of the way that you approach your priorities and your plans.
And just the fact that more and more men, families, and churches are actually, they might say, I don't necessarily have a great answer yet, but that a lot of them are starting to think about this.
And whereas 10, 15 years ago, this would not have even been a thought entertained by any of us at any point for years.
Now it's something that we spend a lot of time thinking about.
And to be honest, some of this, like King Alfred's solution was somewhat novel.
Like the concept wasn't novel, but the way they implemented it was timely.
And we do.
We need timely, wise ideas.
Some of them will be played out across many churches.
Like one church gets an idea and it could work in a lot of places.
And so it'll spread.
And some of them are just going to be you and your family.
Just as an example of this, like I'm not even sure.
I haven't done a lot of research into it, but Trump's sovereign wealth fund.
that he's trying to do in order to pay down the deficit.
Like no one has been talking about how to pay down the deficit.
He's like, well, we could try this.
Then we wouldn't have to cut, you know, social security or whatever.
Like my point is, we need novel ideas.
We need biblical principles rolled out with novel ideas that tackle the particular needs.
And Wes, you mentioned how one of the novel things that we have going for us now is the idea of the internet and interstate commerce.
And maybe we don't need every borough to have a blacksmith and an armor in it.
So, expand on that idea.
Well, you'd mentioned different areas like defense, ownership, and economics.
But, like defense, like right now, so David Reese has a great company, a big company.
This is not just like mom and pop, you know, in the back, like hand stitching together, armor plating.
No, a great company.
I like the fact that David Reese and his children and wife are in the back.
For yours personally, they are.
For the patrons.
But no, it's a big company.
But the point is, he's not just outfitting, armoring guys there in Phoenix, Arizona, where he lives.
All across the country, non Christian, some, but most certainly, mostly Christians.
Christians are getting his armor.
They're using it.
They're training with it.
So he is this outfitter, but not at all constrained to a geographic location.
I think of also like economics.
Like, well, we got to win economics.
We got to build businesses.
Well, new founding.
They're not just funding businesses in Dallas, they're funding businesses all across America.
Right.
Some things have to be local.
You have to touch grass.
You have to see people face to face.
So don't think every single category I have my group chat.
That's my kind of like whatever.
It's just a matter of fact.
I own property in the metaverse.
Some things you have to physically own, then supplemented with what you're importing.
NFTs or whatever, NPFs.
Yep.
Yep.
I got my rare painting.
I got my collectible.
It's worth money.
Some things have to be in person, but you are behind the curve if you think, and I've got to do all of this in person, all of my funding, all of my resources, all of my armor, all my protection, all my legal aid.
I got to try to grow them up in house.
No, you don't.
You have to form informal networks, friendships, networking, all these things.
And that is how you actually get things done.
Well said.
So let's take this question came up in that group that we had a couple of weeks ago.
Let's take a guy who is at a good church, maybe not a church that's thinking burrows, though.
What should a young man with young kids working a job that supports his family, but maybe not making a lot of extra money?
Let's try and give some practical, what should Christians be doing right now?
And I'm even rethinking a little bit.
My oldest son is, The plan he graduates this year, the plan is for him to go get a technical degree in aircraft aviation mechanics.
And so he would be able to be an aircraft mechanic.
Now I'm thinking, well, like that'll support a wife and a kid, but is that going to build any sort of empire?
Most likely not.
Okay.
So, I mean, what are the things that we should be thinking about as far as building?
And not everybody can build.
I think one of the principles that we've been talking about is you need to attach yourself.
attach yourself to someone who is building.
And people who are building, they can't do everything on their own.
They need help.
They need people who will realize the mission.
They will willingly and gladly work, like obviously being paid for it.
But we live, to your point, Wes, we live in a time where we can be very isolated and still be connecting on some levels, economic or production or things like that.
But also, how important is it?
I don't want to go down to the move place.
Again, we've talked about that a lot on this show.
But how important is it to be like what size of, here's the question.
What size of united men or families trying to build a borough would you think is a bare minimum, too small, cut your losses, go find somewhere else, join two together?
I mean, like what are some practical thoughts you guys have on this?
I'll give a practical example.
There's about three or four families at church.
So I got five of us total in a group chat.
None of you are in it for the record.
So it's not this little right response click.
But I got about four or five families, and we just get along really well.
And that's really who we're really close with.
So, especially the guys, these are the guys I work out with.
We go to sports games and stuff, hang out in the back porch.
So that's about the size that it is.
Our families will get together.
If it's some type of bigger event, sometimes two or three families do one thing or another.
And that's about the size we can maintain it.
I can't be great friends with 10 families and constantly host them and they host us and everything like that.
And if it was just one family, it would be all you do.
Like, well, I go to their house this week, they come to my house.
So, at about two to three families, and let's say maybe you're not married or maybe you don't have families that you click with like that, could it be two to three men?
And let me say this about men men are very much so like you challenge them and say, come do this.
Come, like a lot of these guys that I got together with, we started doing jujitsu together.
So, that's why we're good friends.
As you said, guys, I want to take this up, I want to try it.
Some of us had done it before, some of us hadn't.
But they were down for it.
They weren't signing up for a lifetime.
Like, absolutely, for the rest of my life, I'm going to commit to this hobby, commit to this thing.
But they said, I'd be down to try that.
And then someone suggested, what about we try this and do that?
That's how the friendship grew.
And so, even if you're somewhere and you're like, man, I don't have close friends.
I don't have a brotherhood.
I'm not moving.
We've crossed that option out already.
Man, for other men, just come try to do this with me.
Let's go shooting.
Let's go hiking.
Let's do this.
There's something, and a lot of men, they just, they really love to do it.
You're telling me I get to get out of the house.
I get to break out, you know, break out of my cycle, get to challenge myself, some type of competition.
Men really love that.
So, practically speaking, you're a man.
You want to build a brotherhood, have a burrow.
You got to start somewhere.
One of the biggest things, Let's just do things together.
It doesn't have to be Christian.
It doesn't have to be theological.
It doesn't have to be political.
It doesn't have to be running for city council.
But can you do something together that's not just sitting in the same aisle in church on Sunday?
So start there.
Add one thing, add two things, add a couple guys.
If that's where you're at, build from there, I would say.
That's good.
All right.
Another question.
Let's say you are thinking of buying a house.
And for the last five or so years, it's been homestead, have property, be outside of the reach, be able to support your garden.
And generally, if you buy something in town, it's going to be a much smaller plot, but it's going to be close to people that you can have relationships with.
Maybe the same amount of money would buy a larger piece of land outside of the town, but you're going to be pretty removed.
What do you guys, in general?
I know there's a lot of specifics there, but like, given the time that we live in, and given that buying a house is not a four year thing, I think it's like seven years if you're going to buy it, it's good to own it for seven years is the number.
Maybe I'm off on that.
So this could extend, you know, if.
JD Vance runs and doesn't win.
Buying a house is something that's more than the four year window.
But what do you guys think?
In light of building Christian Burroughs, what do you think the needs of the time are?
I'll let Joel go, but I will say those families we're friends with, we all live with the exception of one within 10 minutes of each other.
That's why we can't hang out as frequently as we do.
Yep.
Yeah.
I mean, I still think it's helpful to be.
You know, if you can afford to not have to live, you know, in like I would strongly advise no one to live in an urban setting.
Right, right, right.
I don't think anybody needs to be living in a big city.
That said, you don't want to just abandon all the big cities where that continues to be the center of commerce and influence and all these things.
And so it's just entirely now shaped by pagans because every ounce of Christian influence has been removed from it.
But you can still influence big cities and things like that without living there.
So part of the reason why, you know, the.
You know, the strategic context, you know, like that concept.
Part of the reason why we chose Williamson County is because Williamson County is, it has big city access.
We're adjacent to Travis County.
That's where Austin is, that's the capital of Texas.
So you're next to a big city that has lots of economic activity and opportunity, but it also has a lot of political opportunity, right?
Because that's the capital of our state.
So Williamson County is strategic because it's close enough to where.
Guys can live in Williamson County, have a lower cost of living.
They can find some acreage and some land, and they can still, within 40 minutes, by hopping on one of the tolls, they can go and they could work for Elon Musk if they wanted to.
They could work for Oracle, Tesla, Apple, Dell is headquartered in Round Rock, which is in Williamson County.
So there's a lot of different industries where they can work and simply commute to work.
And so they can still influence, you know.
The city politically, economically, all those kinds of things, and take advantage of those opportunities while still having a more secured, quiet life, living a little bit out of the hustle and bustle.
So I think part of it, you know, all that back to your question of like, you know, is it urban?
I would say no in terms of where you live.
You can work there, but in terms of where you live, suburban, I think it's fine.
Or is it rural?
I think.
Politics Downstream of Culture00:06:59
I like the rule lifestyle and I would advocate for that.
But if you do make that decision, you have to, you and your spouse, I think, have to make a very intentional commitment that you're going to drive.
Like you're not, because for a lot of people, like honestly, there's a lot of people, predominantly Christians, who are very conservative, but have just basically resolved to be content that the entirety of their social network would just be their family.
Like their family is an isolated unit.
Like it's just, it's me and my family.
And they tend to have large families.
So it's, you know, it's a husband, wife, and their eight kids.
And that's it.
This is our community.
And we want strong families.
But we don't want families to the exclusion of communal life in the church with other believers outside of your immediate family.
And I do think that, you know, like we're all, you know, we'd all prescribe to patriarchy.
We hate feminism.
We hate egalitarianism.
I hate feminism with a perfect hatred.
David would say, Do I not hate those who hate you with a perfect hatred?
And I feel that deep in my bones a perfect, complete, some translations say complete hatred for feminism and egalitarianism because they run completely contrary to God's natural order.
So we are patriarchal.
But what I've noticed within the patriarchal types, that movement, for lack of a better word, is a lot of them are family centered, which is wonderful.
But sometimes they are family myoptic.
They're family, not just centered, but family obsessive to the point where there are a lot of patriarchal Christian families that love Jesus.
They're absolutely Christian.
But they haven't idolized the church, which is good.
But they've gone so far to where the church doesn't really mean anything.
Like, I know there are a lot of families probably who listen to this podcast that are probably, like, I'll just say this as a pastoral admonition.
Some of you guys who listen to this podcast, I get it.
Finding a good church is hard.
And I understand that you might be geographically in a context where there's not a single faithful church within a 50 mile radius.
And it's not hyperbole, like that's actually true.
But you need to hear from me, probably, because you follow me and you've followed me and been content to do that as a substitute to church life.
You need to hear from me.
You are too content.
With not having a church.
You're doing family worship in the home.
You're doing, you're catechizing the children.
You're washing your wife in the word and you're listening to, you know, to Stephen Wolfe and, you know, Brian Sauvay and Joel and Andrew Isker.
And all those things are great.
But opting out of church is not an option for Christians.
It's not.
And it's like, yeah, but we've lived here for 10 years and we have, you know, we have 40 acres, you know, and we've, And we've worked hard for the last 10 years that we've been here.
And we bought it cheap and we've made it more valuable, not just because it's appreciated over time, but we've worked the ground and we built this structure over here on this portion of the property.
And we've got horses over here.
Over here, and we've done this, and we've done that, and we've tilled the soil, and we've planted gardens, and we like, yeah, but all that's incredible.
I don't want to disparage that, but if you have done that at the expense of it, like to where now it's, well, there's no good church nearby, but we have our family and our homestead, and we built this house with our bare hands, you give it up.
You give it up if it means that.
Without a church, like seriously, it's the people of God, it's the church of Jesus Christ, it's non negotiable.
It's non negotiable.
There is no Christian category for being churchless, you can't do it.
You can't do it.
I don't care, I have no doubt.
Like, your children, it's like, well, who are their friends?
Their friends are each other, their brothers, their sisters, and I love that.
Like, I understand that.
And in early American days, pioneering days, you had deeply Christian families.
And the next person, you know, like you had a ton of land.
The next person, you know, there wasn't another human soul outside of your immediate family for, you know, the next neighbor was two miles down the street and you didn't have cars.
And so, like, but here's the thing even in those early days, they would get up and they would pack the wagon and they would pack a lunch and a dinner for that matter and all these things.
And maybe, you know, what, and they would get the dog and the cat and the eight children and they would go to church on the Lord's day and they would spend all day there.
All day.
They would ride into town and they would only do it once a week.
And the rest of the time, they were self sufficient, right?
They ate their own food.
They made their own clothes.
They did all these things.
They worked the land.
Their kids' best friends were not out of school, you know, and it was their brothers and sisters, their siblings, and that was their community.
And I get it.
And I'm not disparaging that.
But they did not opt out of church.
They did make one exception when it came to relationships and community and those things outside of their immediate family.
And it was the Lord's Day.
It was gathering with the saints.
And They would do it at great cost.
It was an ordeal.
They would ride on that wagon for an hour or two hours.
And you're like, well, I can't drive for 90 minutes.
Yes, you can.
You can.
And if you can't, we know people who drive for two and a half hours.
We have people who come to our church from San Antonio.
God bless them.
And here's the deal if you really can't, like, one, you can.
You can drive 90 minutes.
And number two, if you can't, then you have to move.
You have to.
Right.
Like I'm talking like, no, like that, Joel, don't make it dogmatic.
Yes, there are some things you can be dogmatic with.
Not going to church is something that I can absolutely dogmatically say is sin.
It's sin.
Stop it.
You have to go to church.
And so that either means a commute and being content.
Like we are going to drive, we're going to take time and money to drive because we have to have community, and we also don't want to give up the great.
Plot of land and the homestead, and this that's like so.
You either have to just be a driving family, we're going to spend a lot of time in the car, or you have to give up the homestead, you have to move.
So, if you can do both, all that long way of answering your question, per usual, long way Joel said something long, you know, shocker.
Rural Balance and Commute00:03:27
Um, but I would say that if you can do both, great because I think the rural lifestyle is amazing.
There's a reason I don't think it's just conservative people opt for living in rural contexts, I think it's both, right?
So, just like the same way that's like, we'll pull up.
Politics is downstream of culture.
Yeah, we heard that one for the last 15 years.
But also, the law is a tutor.
So, it's not just that political policies are determined by the culture upstream, but there's also culture influenced by politics.
Political legislation and law functions as a tutor that shapes the populace and ultimately shapes and dictates culture.
So, it's not a one way stream, it's a two way street.
Well, likewise, when it comes to conservatives and opting to live in rural contexts, I think it's both.
People who are culturally and politically conservative.
Tend to gravitate towards rural areas.
They don't want to live in an urban context that's degenerate.
On the flip side, conversely, there is also something to not living on the 27th floor of a high rise structure in downtown Manhattan, where you literally never see anything green.
Everything is just concrete.
And you're a bug man.
You're literally, you are the bug man.
You know, and like there is something to be said for, and studies have actually been done on this.
The lower, I know this sounds so silly, but there's real study on it.
The lower someone lives, meaning not sea level, but the closer to ground someone lives, their voting patterns change.
And it's not just like because the person who was already conservative just, you know, self selected and decided that they didn't want to live on the 27th floor of some apartment building.
But it's also even the guy who's not that conservative.
There were a lot of people in 2020 who were liberal atheists, but even they felt like COVID went a little bit too far and wokeness went a little bit too far when it started affecting their bottom line.
It affected their business or they were being passed over for the next promotion because somebody, a person of color who wasn't as qualified as them, just got the promotion by default because the company wanted to appear that they were with the Times or whatever.
Um, and so then it like there were a ton of guys who were not conservative, who were liberal atheists.
Um, that 2020 was a wake up call even for them, and they took they decided to move out of the city and move to smaller towns and more rural areas and maybe start a garden, start a homestead, get some land.
And then here we are four years later, and they're voting Republican.
Um, it literally changed their psyche like the psyche of a person.
Literally, that's why we say, you know, it's internet lingo and it's funny, but there's something very true and literal to.
And, you know, touching the dirt, planting a garden, kids playing in the backyard, and it's more than just, you know, 10 by 10 feet, you know, tiny little.
Fewer Churches, Deeper Roots00:14:38
And all of a sudden, like you, it's a blood memory.
The blood memories start to, you know, rise, you know, bubble to the surface.
So, yeah.
So I think living.
Living in a rural area is great, but it's just, you've got to balance it.
It can't be the homestead life at the expense of the church and relationships.
But it also, I don't think, I would never, you know, make a command, you know, a commandment of men that says, and therefore everyone must live in a suburban and be within a 10 minute radius, you know, of friends.
I think you can do both, but you're going to have to make a commitment.
That community is valuable enough to where you're willing to drive.
All right, let's jump over to some questions and answer as many as we can briefly.
We had a super chat.
Yep.
Oh, we do have a super chat.
Chat.
You want to read that one, Joel?
Michael.
Thank you, Michael.
He said, Is it pragmatic to rename Fort Braxton Bragg?
Recently, left virtue signaled as Fort Liberty, now called Fort Roland Bragg, as a right wing virtue signal.
I think renaming things matters.
I think Robert E. Lee, that statue needs to be remade.
I think every statue that the left tears down needs to be replaced with a statue that's 10 times bigger.
Right.
So it's like if you tear down Robert E. Lee, then you are going to get.
Robert E. Lee.
You're going to get 100 foot.
And if you tear it down again, you're going to get a new construction.
It's going to be Robert E. Lee, and we're going to put some slaves next to it.
So, like, you better stop it.
So, yeah, no, I think that that's a good instinct.
However, the little bit that I read on this story was it wasn't actually returning to the original Fort Bragg, but it was like a World War II.
Because in the legislation, this is what's tough, Michael, about your question.
2021, the law was passed and it renamed it and it forbid the naming of forts, United States forts.
After Confederate generals.
And so it's been renamed.
And of course, right back to the great Confederate Civil War general.
Well, no, now it's renamed to Fort Rowland Bragg.
Some of that's the limitations of the law.
And it's like, is this literally the hill we're going to die on?
It is a virtue signal.
It should be put back to what it was.
We should honor the tradition, personally, I think.
But also, so many awesome things going on.
Just at the end of the day, I think that's something P has got to say.
I'm going to get to that in about four years.
Yeah, you can get to it when you get to it.
So everything doesn't, yeah, it's triage, right?
Like, um, You know, when it comes to like punishing your enemies, like it is completely permissible to say, we've got one guillotine and there's 100 people that need to lose their head, and somebody has to lose their head last.
And that doesn't mean that you're tolerating the person who's last in line.
It means, no, we're not tolerating them at all.
We're going to chop off their head.
But we're chopping off heads one at a time, and somebody's last in line.
So we'll get there when we get there.
And in the meantime, to be creative and kind of skirt around that legislation and say, no, we're literally going to rename the court.
We're still going to call it a court brag.
But it's going to be a World War II hero.
I actually appreciate that.
Now, if that's the end goal, then I would say, no, no, no, no, we need to chop off heads.
Don't lose sight.
The real end goal is 100 people need to be executed.
Don't stop at 10.
That's right.
So, no, it needs to go all the way back to where, no, it's Fort Bragg and it's the Confederate because tradition matters.
But in the meantime, to say, well, we can't do that yet, but there is a loophole where we can have a placeholder in the meantime.
And we can enrage the leftists because we're actually naming it the original name, but technically skirting around.
I actually like that kind of creativity as a placeholder temporarily, I think is great.
Love it.
Good.
Okay, some questions here.
We either are going to pick one or two and give long answers, or we're going to give short answers and get through a few.
So that will kind of be up to Joel.
A few of the questions I will exercise self control and just not answer.
All right.
Are there too many men, Neville says, are there too many men entering the ministry or a lack of them?
I have.
Heard that in a few years, when many of the aging pastors are gone, there will be not enough men to fill the positions.
I think this is just endemic of the boomer generation moving on.
In many, many areas, there's not going to be enough of the next group of young men to take their positions.
I haven't heard that specifically about pastoral ministry.
So this is one of the ones I have to answer, but go ahead.
There are too many men entering ministry and too few.
Let the reader understand.
Yes.
That's right.
Too many of the wrong men, too few of the good men.
Yep.
And if I so I completely agree with that assessment.
And then if overall it's too few, so that there's wrong guys trying to enter ministry and too few of the right guys.
But if overall it's too few, if that is correct, and I've heard that also, I think that that probably is correct.
This is where you would insert the meme of what's his name?
It's the black guy who is on, he was on the community college show back in the day.
Donald Glover or something like that.
And it's him, he's like, good.
That would actually be, I know it sounds counterintuitive, especially coming from a pastor, but that would be my response if that is true, and I think it probably is, that there's too few guys in the batting box lined up to be the next generation of pastors.
If it's true that there's too few of them, my response would be good.
Because it actually plays into Everything I was articulating at the first half of this episode.
Personally, and I'm not trying to disparage, so please don't take this the wrong way.
If a man is doing faithful pastoral ministry, praise God.
And there's nothing in scripture that would disparage a small church.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But I think, like I was saying earlier, right now, the name of the game is consolidation.
So if we have fewer.
Pastors, you're going to have fewer churches.
And if you have fewer churches, what you'll have is more boroughs.
What you'll have is more large churches.
Now, like this is again kind of what I got to earlier I think there was an overreaction within the reformed world towards pragmatism.
Like, should we have an aversion towards pragmatism when it comes to the Lord's Day worship and the normative principle that allows for, you know, over and against the regular principle that allows for fog machines and laser lights and, you know, Taylor Swift worship songs and TED talk sermons?
Uh, yeah, we should hate that kind of pragmatism, pragmatism in that arena with a holy hatred.
Um, but I think we overreacted and we started disparaging all forms of pragmatism.
And then it just really, like, let's call it what it is, it became basically just a full court press against strategy altogether.
Any kind of strategy, I despise.
And well, a person who despises all forms of strategy, there's a word for that type of person, um, stupid.
You're stupid.
Like, if you think that, um, If you're like, I won't be strategic in anything, then you're an idiot.
So that's just a purity spiraling, beautiful loser idiot.
And we already have plenty of those.
We don't need more of those.
And so that said, I think that in the same way we overreacted to pragmatism, I think, and we need to be pragmatic when it comes to Monday through Saturday, not with Lord's Day worship, but Monday through Saturday.
I think part of that is.
Again, this is a timely principle.
So I'm not saying that this would be absolutely relevant 500 years into Christendom, you know, and people should be.
No, like the book that I have sitting on the coffee table, Fight by Flight, it's not a timeless book.
It's a timely book.
It's a really helpful book right now.
I don't know if it'll be really helpful in 20 years, but I didn't write it for people 20 years.
I wrote it for this moment.
And we do need people doing deep theological work that's timeless, right?
Like Calvin's Institutes is good now.
It was good then, and it'll be good 500 years from now.
Uh, Joel's Fight by Flight, like, I'll be the first of it.
It's not Calvin's Institute, it's not even close.
Um, I'm really proud of myself just for reading Calvin's Institutes, I could never write it.
So, yeah, so I think it's okay to have timely truths, timely strategy.
And one of them, I think, is consolidation.
I think consolidation.
So, if we have fewer pastors, great.
Now, what you can't have, I think it gets to geography.
What you can't have is whole swaths of towns and counties and states that are churchless.
So, we will have to.
Cover the basis.
We will have to spread out within reason to a degree to make sure that Christians have a church.
But we don't necessarily have to have a church on every street corner.
You do that once you've secured the victory, right?
When Christendom is shining, when Christendom is adorned in all its splendor, you know, in those peak moments of Christendom, then you have a church on every street corner and then you argue about.
Superlapsarianism versus infralapsarianism, and all your arguments about baptism, mode of baptism.
You do that when you're winning.
Then you can afford the luxury of those kinds of intramural battles.
You cannot afford intramural skirmishes and battles when the orcs are on the front porch breaking down the door and they're trying to chop off the genitals of your sons.
That's just stupid.
That's absolutely stupid.
And so, right now, Um, yeah, that like we should not be having all these intramural skirmishes.
Um, we should be fighting the real enemy, we should be fighting the real enemy.
And for now, eventually, we can afford the luxury of having the Baptist church and then there's the Presbyterian church literally across the street, right?
You see that still in American tradition because the structures, the physical structures, were built, um, in our Christendom heyday, you know.
And so, you can, in some places, you can drive down the street and you will see on one street.
20 churches, right?
You've got the Nazarene Church, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church.
And what is that a marker of?
That's a monument of sorts.
And it's a monument to Christendom in its brightest shining moment.
That was when we were winning.
And so you could afford the luxury of it's almost like when capitalism is winning, right?
And you can have 20 different types of peanut butter.
But if you're a socialist country, you have no peanut butter, or maybe one kind of peanut butter, right?
Because it's slim pickings.
And so right now, we are not in a positive world.
I would argue that we're not even in a neutral world.
There are signs of life.
Praise God, He's been merciful.
So there's some hope on the horizon, some hopian that we can be taking advantage of.
But right now, I would say if there are fewer pastors that are rising through the ranks for the next generation, so be it.
So be it.
God is sovereign.
His providence, I believe, is good.
And what that probably will equate to is that you'll have fewer churches.
So then the churches that you do have could actually constitute as legitimate boroughs.
Churches, I'm not saying they have to be, you know, this is what I was trying to say earlier.
I lost my train of thought.
But the overreaction against pragmatism, I think we've had kind of in that same vein, but an overreaction against mega churches.
There's actually nothing inherently sinful about large churches.
The reason we don't like mega churches in the Reformed world is because all of them have sucked, but they don't have to.
There's nothing about a large church that necessitates theological mediocrity.
It doesn't have to be that way.
And you look at, like, you know, the book of Acts and, like, the church at Antioch, it wasn't splintered, intramural battles with, you know, 100 different churches that all disagreed with each other.
It was one church at Antioch and it was massive.
The church at Jerusalem, we know it was at least thousands because thousands were added to the faith.
In Acts chapter 2 in Pentecost, when Peter stood up and preached the gospel.
So, you had a megachurch in Jerusalem, you had a megachurch in Antioch.
There's nothing inherently wrong with megachurches.
And in fact, they became the epicenters of securing Christian victory.
And so, there's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, it can be really good.
And so, if we have fewer pastors, in my mind, that would be God providentially forcing us, right?
That would be us not taking Joel's advice of let's consolidate, and God saying, Well, I'm going to force you to take Joel's advice.
Um, by virtue, I'm just going to give you less pastors and therefore less churches, and so you're going to have to consolidate.
And by having less churches, what does that mean?
A few things number one, you're gonna have to stop being divisive, you're gonna have to learn how to get along, you're gonna have to learn the grace of humility because there's only a few churches in town instead of a hundred.
Like growing up, I grew up in Bay City, Texas, 18,000 person population, more cows than people, and um, and yet there were hundreds of churches, right?
And I don't think that's a win.
I think that that's like, that's literally an indicator.
It's an indictment.
It means 18,000 people and none of the Christians can get along.
And we all disagree about something.
And that's how most of the churches were planted.
You go back historically.
And it's like, where did this church come from?
Well, five families of this other church eventually didn't like the pastor and disagreed.
And that's the reason there's this Second Baptist Church and the Third Baptist Church and the Fourth Baptist Church.
First Century Persecution Models00:11:45
Yeah, exactly.
You get the five, you stop calling it fifth.
It's just a cowboy church.
Yeah, whatever.
But because of division.
So if God.
Says, you guys suck.
I gave you warnings.
I gave you chances.
You didn't do it.
And so I, in my mercy, am going to force your hand.
I'm going to give you less pastors that ultimately gives you less churches so that one, you stop being divisive and you learn to get along.
And two, so that you stop spreading your forces so thin.
And now you have, instead of 100 churches in your small town of 50, you have 10 churches in your small town of 500.
And each of these churches also, because it has 500 people and more resources, has a classical school.
And also, that church has enough weight and influence that whenever your mayor tries to do something that's against God's word, that church comes out with their 500 people and says, mm mm, shut it down.
Hey, you know, our small Texas town, we're going to have a gay pride parade for the first time.
No, you're not.
All 500 people in our church are going to be there and we're going to be holding hands surrounding that street that you've shut down for the sodomite parade.
And we're going to be singing together.
He lives to tread the fields of hell.
Glory, hallelujah.
And the sodomites just have to go home.
Sorry.
But you can't do that with a church of 50.
That doesn't mean a church of 50 can't be faithful.
It doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate church.
It doesn't mean that that pastor is not a legitimate pastor.
It doesn't mean that God won't bless them.
But we do need to embrace pragmatism, at least in the arena and to the extent that we acknowledge basic facts like.
Churches of 500 can do things that churches of 50 can't.
And so, if God providentially forces our hand in that direction, so be it.
Good.
Yep.
I can knock out three at once here, super quick.
BJJ wins again, asked two, and they're for me.
That's why I can knock out these first two.
Do I need to bring my gi to roll Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with Wes at the conference?
I train no gi, so we'll do no gi.
Why is Wes not following Michael on X?
We got some junior high drama.
I don't follow people that are not terminally online.
So, Michael, you just got to up your banger count five, six, seven, eight a day.
No, I didn't realize I wasn't following him.
So, I will go fix that immediately after this episode.
And then someone brought up an example.
They said, Question, this seems like it's a bit theoretical, wondering how this messes with the example of the early church not seemingly taking this strategy.
They spread out, they mixed into culture, all of that.
When you are massively outgunned, you go to guerrilla warfare.
So, the Viet Cong, for instance, the US, the UN armies, way bigger, way stronger, way more firepower.
There was no, like, we're going to hold this area and we're going to hold them off for months.
Nope, couldn't do it.
So they turned to guerrilla warfare, infiltration, deception, all of those different things.
So in the early church, we were talking a couple thousand people, 10, 20, 30,000, a massive minority, no land that they held.
That was not the time to build burrows and a wall and fortresses and reinforce.
That was the time to spread out guerrilla warfare, do as much damage as possible, preach the gospel, cause riots, get thrown in prison, go on missionary journeys.
That was that time.
Muslims are invading.
You have a wall that you set up, a fortress to defend.
Different scenario.
So, and there were a ton of places that had never even heard the gospel once, you know.
So, there's all these unreached peoples.
Um, that's that's different than America that has had an overwhelming, like all encompassing gospel witness for 500 years, you know.
Like, we've only even been around for 250.
Well, I'm not counting from 1776, I'm thinking 1500s, 1600s, covenanters, you know, Puritans, all the way back before even the 13 colonies.
Like, I'm thinking like.
Yeah, so my point is, you know, 400 years.
But the point is, for centuries, we have been immersed, a total immersion in a Christian witness.
So that's different than the apostles in the early church, the first century church, where there's, you know, whole swaths of the known world that they don't even know who Jesus is.
They've never even heard the gospel.
So I think that's one difference was God providentially, but even with that being the case, Even with a vision from heaven of this sheet by its four corners being lowered down with all these different animals that was unlawful for Peter to eat, right?
So, Acts chapter 10, Cornelius, even with a Holy Spirit inspired special revelation to Peter, one of the core apostles and a pillar in the church, even that, you could argue, in some sense, was still not quite enough to kickstart the missionary expansion.
God had to add to special revelation, providential revelation.
Goading by persecution.
And persecution is what pushed them ultimately out of Jerusalem because Jerusalem was the epicenter of the first century church initially.
The first half of the book of Acts is Jerusalem.
The second half, it then shifts from Peter to Paul and from Jerusalem to Antioch and becomes less Jewish and more Gentile.
But the reason for that was one, because of special revelation in that time, in that place, because the gospel had not yet gone out and the Holy Spirit literally telling the apostles to do this.
We don't have that special revelation in 2025 where God's coming and literally giving visions from heaven to some succession of the apostles and telling them, you must go into Cambodia or to this place or to that place and do X, Y, and Z. That's just not happening.
So we don't have the special revelation.
And also, by God's grace, we don't have the persecution.
There is a degree of persecution, but not like there was in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was not just the epicenter of the church, but it was also the epicenter of.
Persecution because of the Jews.
They hated Christ, they hated the apostles, they hated the Christian religion, and they wanted them dead.
Whereas there was actually much more.
Ironically, Antioch, part of the reason why Antioch became the new epicenter is Antioch was one of the few places where there was freedom of religion.
There was actually a pantheon of gods.
There were problems with that freedom of religion because it welcomed all kinds of idolatry.
But in Antioch, there were legal provisions for the Christians to worship.
And so when you look at that, The first church, you know, like I've heard this my whole life.
I heard, you know, in charismatic circles, especially and circles that are really big on global missions, they always would say, well, China, you know, like America sucks, you know, and Christians in America suck, and God's not really doing anything here.
Like, you know, where God's really on the move?
In China.
And when you press and ask why, the answer is always the same.
The church in China looks a lot more like the first century church.
Well, of course, it looks more like the first century church because the first century church was an unchurched place, the church was just Just coming into fruition in a place that previously had no Christian witness.
So that would be a one to one ratio to China.
And two, the first century church was immensely persecuted by the ruling authorities of the day because they hated Christianity.
That's another one to one ratio with China.
But that shouldn't tell us that, so then China's the goal.
That doesn't mean China's the goal.
That just means that, you know, throughout this church age, there will be time periods.
And geographic places, cultures, nations that have more in common with what was going on in the first century church.
And so, at those times and in those contexts, those places where it's heavily un Christianized and there's massive persecution over the Christians that there are, then yes, you're going to be looking at, you're not going to be having mega churches.
You're going to be having underground churches that are relatively small, guerrilla warfare, spreading your forces thin so that everyone gets a chance to hear the gospel at least once.
Like that.
That makes perfect sense.
That's fine.
That's not America.
That's not America in 2025.
And if you think it is, you're being silly.
America, we actually have the legal provisions and even the financial resources to where we can build a beautiful church building and have deeply conservative biblical worship each Lord's Day with a thousand people.
We can do that.
And in China, if they could do that, they would.
Right.
They would.
It's not that they're neglecting that by intention or by design.
It's they're being.
Here's the thing about Chinese Christians they're pragmatic.
And if Americans could stop being beautiful losers and idiots, maybe we could be pragmatic too and still adopt the regular principle for Lord's Day worship.
I think the question also assumes that the gospel is not for transforming nations.
And I would just say.
When a Christian people begins to live according to the principles of the Bible, freed from sin in their own particular cultural way, that is inevitably, like that is actually one of the things the gospel is supposed to do, is it's supposed to produce Christian peoples.
And for that, I just point at two historical examples.
Within two to three centuries, Rome, the dominant power in Rome was the Christian church.
and Rome transformed from being a pagan empire to being a Christian empire.
I mean, you think just within a couple of centuries.
Second, the very first Christian nation to ever recognize that it was a Christian nation was the nation of Ethiopia.
And some of the early fathers like Irenaeus and Eusebius, it's not in the Bible, but they credit the Ethiopian eunuch for going back and teaching the royal court about the principles of scripture.
And within just a couple of hundred years, Ethiopia was the first and one of the longest lasting Christian nations ever in history.
And so, like, actually, I would say you don't see it in the New Testament because that covered only a couple of decades.
But the inevitable result when Christians go and carry out God's principles among their people is you get Christian peoples.
Right.
And sometimes it takes longer.
Sometimes it's faster.
But that's the inevitable result.
Exactly.
And when you do, when you do get Christian peoples, then you build institutions.
Yes.
The Bible is not against Christian institutions.
Yep.
That's always what happens is you go in, like, even like Crete, you know, like the book of Titus is why he left you in Crete to put, like, what the order, the sequence is, you know, Paul would go on his missionary journeys with, you know, whoever, with, you know, Barnabas or whoever it might have been, and he would preach the gospel.
He wouldn't plant churches.
He would preach the gospel, and the Holy Spirit, in his sovereignty, would appoint salvation to as many who believed, or as the reverse.
To as many as believed, he appointed salvation.
No, I had it right the first time.
But basically, Paul would preach the gospel, the Holy Spirit would make converts.
Rejecting the Loser Strategy00:03:40
And then that's step one.
Step two was then with those converts, they would then organize churches and appoint officers and these things.
And then eventually, this is where the canon closes, but eventually we know from church history that it would be converts first, and then it would be churches, and then it would be institutions and governments and businesses and culture and arts and all these things.
And all that is the natural.
Work of the gospel, you know, the leaven working through the whole lump of dough, the mustard seed being planted and growing into an all encompassing tree.
And that's great.
I think the reason why we have recently in America had some of the strategies that we've had that we've reverted back to guerrilla warfare is because we surrendered.
Like we started losing.
You know, it's like we started losing.
We gave up the ground, we gave up influence, we gave up authority, we gave up.
You know, all these kinds of things to secularism, to pagans, to atheists, and, you know, and also through multiculturalism and inviting the third world and people, foreign peoples worshiping foreign gods and said, oh, well, you know, we'll honor your religion.
That's totally fine.
You can, you know, set up your shrines to idolatry in our country, you know, because we're nice and we're kind.
And so when we did all those things, then we started losing.
And when we started losing, then, you know, we were like, well, you know, We changed the metrics.
And so then it went from glorious cathedrals and things like that.
And we're like, well, it's just really about numbers and converts.
And so we're just going to have small churches spread all across the country, you know, and we're just going to do interpersonal, you know, one on one evangelism.
And we'll also, we can still win overseas, you know, like we're not competent or gifted or influential enough to win here with white people, but we can still win with colored people in third world countries that are impoverished.
So we'll go over there so we can still feel like we're winning.
You know, so we can still feel good and sleep at night.
And like, so we adopted loser strategies because we're, and that's one of those things again, it's like a two way street, you know, chicken to the egg, which came first.
Like, did we lose because we adopted loser strategy or did we adopt loser strategy and start losing?
I don't know.
My instinct tells me probably a little bit of both.
I think, you know, it was probably both.
But that's, we have been playing, we have been playing with a, not divide and conquer, but, uh, Divide and survive.
We have been in a survivalist mindset, you know, guerrilla warfare mentality for decades in the West when it comes to Christianity.
And if we really want to win significantly, then we need to be thinking big.
We need to be thinking, we need to be, you know, starting venture capitalist funds and think tanks and running for political office at a federal level and enshrining Christian virtues into law.
We need to be building cathedrals.
We need to be thinking big.
And that's what the gospel has always done in virtually every place where it's gone and permeated and actually been truly victorious over the course of centuries it's left that kind of impact.
Any other questions?
Well, they're big questions.
I don't know if you want to tackle them.
My wife's on track with a fever.
So maybe go cook with these.
Building Cathedrals for Virtue00:05:08
Okay.
I didn't know that.
Sorry.
You're telling me that for the first time?
We thought we were through with it.
The kids had it and we're like, we made it scot free.
And last night she's like, Does my forehead feel warm?
No.
We just, yeah, we just got it.
It was like a two week of waves of fever throughout our whole family.
I was the only one who didn't get it.
Nice.
But everybody else did.
All right.
Yeah, we can go ahead.
Well, Reform Radical, he said, I'm in the process of getting J Pilled.
For the listener, if you're not familiar with that, like realizing that Judeo Christianity is a psyop and maybe Israel isn't our greatest ally.
So I'm in the process of getting J Pilled.
What do you recommend as far as discernment when investigating history and politics?
It's a good question.
I'm right now going through Pat Buchanan's The Unnecessary War.
I'm reading that.
It's been really good.
Yeah, I mean, there's good info out there that's more, you could say, off the beaten path.
I would start with a core of like E. Michael Jones, Pat Buchanan, like some of the more mainstream stuff that relies on has a more established narrative that's still counter, but is corroborated.
And from there, branch out into the stuff, you know, like it's pamphlets that you can only order from like a retailer that, you know, mails them by hand.
Don't start necessarily there.
Start with a foundation of, yeah, just guys that have had a good track record through their whole life of academic, serious scholarship.
Their work stands on its own.
Like David Irving's great in World War II.
Don't agree with him on everything, but like build with those the David Irvings, the Buchanans, the E. Michael Jones, start there.
And then as you get interested in a topic, that's when you can be, feel free, I think, to branch out into some of the more esoteric stuff.
That's good advice.
Yeah, I think what happens is some guys get J Pilled and they immediately start with the most fringe material.
That you can find.
So they start with.
And some of it has good information.
Yeah, it may be true, but it's hit or miss.
Right.
That's the thing.
Like some of it may be true and it may be courageous and bold and true and good.
But starting with some guys who, like, there's something to be said for the guy who has a published book and people hate it.
But he still is in.
He doesn't do anything about it.
He doesn't hold the mainline consensus, but he's still within the mainline orbit because, and you just have to recognize he wouldn't be there if anyone could discredit him.
Right.
If anybody could legitimately, historically discredit Pat Buchanan's book, Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War, then that book would be out of print.
You'd have to order that off of the black market, directly order it, signed copy from Nick Fuentes or something like that.
But the reason why that book is still, people hate it, but they can't discredit it.
And in that book, he doesn't make the argument that Hitler is fantastic and, you know, But he does make the argument and says, like, nah, this was Churchill.
Churchill, like, I'm reading it right now and I'm finding myself frustrated with Churchill, but Churchill loved war.
I mean, he would, like, people, there's all these eyewitnesses' accounts and multiple of them.
That's what makes something more credible is like, how many firsthand accounts do we have?
Not just second, but like firsthand accounts.
And there's just dozens of people who worked with Churchill and they all testify.
He would walk in the room and he would be elated.
And he would like even quotes from Churchill where he's like, called the war delicious.
Like he loved it.
I mean, Churchill loved it.
Great Britain had an empire.
They saw Germany as a threat and they did not want to get, they wanted to be the central power of Europe and didn't want to lose it.
And so, you know, when they're going through Denmark, you know, oh, sweet, precious Denmark, you know, to get to France, they had, you know, Germany had beef with France.
It wasn't, they didn't have beef with England.
It wasn't about that.
But they had to go through Denmark to get there.
And just overnight, England all of a sudden, you know, says like, oh, but what kind of country would we be if we didn't, you know, defend?
I remember that.
And they make it about morals and like virtue, you know.
But what it really was was they knew that Germany would wipe the floor with France, that they would be reasonable with Denmark, but they would wipe the floor with France.
And if they did, then Germany would rival them as a superpower in Europe.
And, you know, England is supposed to be, you know, the empire for which the sun never sets, right?
So anyways.
I would say just two quick things on that.
Number one, just remember that as history exists as a discipline now, largely it's a tool of crafting narrative.
And so just remember that, you know, whatever history we're reading, the modern tendency is to create a narrative of it.
That hasn't always been how history was used.
Crafting Historical Narratives00:03:26
But just be aware that that's probably what's going on.
Narratives have been crafted in one way.
And probably narratives are being crafted both ways in the other way.
And then I would say, if at all possible, try and J Pill in the context of other reasonable, but also J Pill people as well.
Don't go to the fringe quarter of the internet.
Yeah, in your church.
Yeah.
Do that.
Yep.
Take that journey.
It's a worthwhile journey, but take it in a church with other believers who love the Lord.
Yeah, and don't go too far.
Somebody in the comments, I appreciate it.
Go back, Nate, real quick, because I want to give him credit for helping.
So this is T. James Boone.
He said, it wasn't Denmark, it was Belgium.
And he's absolutely right.
Thank you for that.
So, everything I said, I think, is true, except replace Denmark with Denmark.
And you weren't saying war was declared.
Someone else said, well, war was declared over Poland, which is correct.
You're talking about some of the posturing and the saber rattles in relation to Belgium.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
That's it for today.
Thank you guys for tuning in.
Lord willing, we will see you again on Friday.
If you're new to the channel, our schedule is Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
We live stream three times a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 3 p.m. Central Time.
And we often have guests who come on, join us for maybe the second or the third segment.
But On average, what we try to do is first segment, Michael or Wes, they've written, they've got graphs, they've got quotes, and they try to outline a theme for that episode.
Second segment, we further explore it or we invite a guest who's familiar with that topic.
And then third segment, we try to engage with the chat.
With those of you who are gracious enough to watch us live and engage in the chat, we try to take your questions.
And that's pretty much the rundown three segments for about an hour and a half to two hours, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 3 p.m. Central Time.
And the last thing is that we also do have a fourth piece of content.
We call it the Friday special.
And that comes out on Friday, except not at 3 p.m. when we're live streaming.
It comes out later in the evening at 8 p.m. Central Time.
Right now, we're in a series on Israel, actually.
And so it's a nine part series.
It's about 45 minutes per episode.
It's like seven and a half, eight hours of content with myself and Pastor Andrew Isker, all about the modern state of Israel and how Christians should think about it today and about Judaism.
And then looking at the scripture from Ephesians to Acts to Hebrews, and looking at covenantally.
What was God doing with Israel?
Is there anything that's still hanging over, any future promise, whether it be land or whether it be spiritual?
Or has that covenant been severed and ended?
And how should that affect the way we think politically, the way we think religiously, the way we think in all these ways today?
So, if you want to do a deep dive on Israel, Then go ahead and make sure that you tune in for the Friday special.
And if you want to get all the episodes, all nine episodes ahead of time, ad free, that's actually available right now.
Otherwise, you just have to wait week by week for each episode to drop on X and YouTube and Apple and Spotify.
But if you want to get it all now, ad free, all nine episodes are actually available, but exclusively for our members at Patreon.
So you would just go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
Again, that's patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.