Christian Burroughs and the hosts argue that ministries must build proactive, worship-centered "Christian boroughs" rather than waiting for cultural permission, utilizing Michael Belchior's "six L's" to counter societal erosion. They critique the saturated media landscape where latecomers fail without early adoption, urging a shift from global spreading to concentrating resources in specific strongholds like Texas or Utah. By prioritizing localism, Paideia education, and family-led economics, these communities aim to defund godless regions while seeding a new Christendom, concluding that strategic advance in winnable areas is essential for survival. [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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Building Christian Boroughs00:11:18
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They didn't wait for Washington to come and fix it.
When the Puritans landed in New England, they weren't petitioning Parliament.
They were planting churches, building schools, raising crops, and electing elders.
When Christian settlers carved towns out of the American frontier, they didn't wait for cultural permission.
They brought the book, the rifle, and the plow, and they built.
Today, too many Christians are still acting like tenants in someone else's crumbling house.
They're debating how to rearrange the furniture while the foundation splits in half.
But the new Christian right is done waiting.
We're not trying to tweak the machine.
Instead, we're walking away from it.
We're not asking what can be salvaged from D.C. We're asking what can be secured in our own counties, our own churches, and our own homes.
We're not retreating.
Instead, we're fortifying.
It's time to build Christian boroughs again, worship centered, economically linked, family led, law respecting communities that can survive the collapse and seed the next Christendom.
If that sounds too ambitious, then remember this the future does not belong to the most powerful.
Instead, it belongs to the most planted.
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You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can make a donation by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
So, how do we start?
Where do we dig in?
And which hills are actually winnable?
Let's talk strategy.
Here we are.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Good to see you all again.
Glad to be here again with you all.
Looking forward to this discussion very much.
The Gist of A's.
The Gist of A's.
This episode is going to be a little bit different in that it's going to be just more conversational as we are talking about the practicals, what actually can be done in the short, medium, and long term to build Christian boroughs, to build up Christian communities that's not just. kind of hunker and bunker down in the middle of the storm, but that actually develop into centers of cultural, political, and economic power in the nation.
And so I'm looking forward to the discussion.
In preparation for it, I wanted to just share my biggest takeaway as I was thinking through the episode.
And it is this.
We have talked a lot, Wes, especially you and me, about why the decline of the nation, especially of Christianity in early America, Seems to have happened so quickly.
Like, what did the founders not account for when they wrote the Constitution and then launched it out?
And why did the decline seem to happen?
You know, we see evidence of it pretty early on.
And there's a lot of answers to that.
This is not the definitive answer.
But I think one thing that we have to consider is, in my opinion, what Americans stopped doing was building Christian communities.
They tamed the West.
They You know, pursued the gold and the gold rush.
They built the railroad system that connected the entire continent.
But a working theory that I'm thinking through is one of the things that we did was we stopped building Christian communities.
And that had two things it allowed the perceived idea of the separation of the church and state to solidify in stone.
And what I mean is the separation of church and state is a good idea in.
Not in practice or in theory, it's a good political idea.
You don't necessarily want the church making laws and you don't want the state issuing the ordinances and the sacraments of Christ, right?
But what we failed to consider is that the fusion of church and state or religion and politics is the lives of people.
And what we stopped doing, and I think it was just the fact that we assumed a Christian perspective on all things and we stopped building explicitly.
Christian towns and cities and enterprises.
And there's something about starting something new that makes you really sharp and focused and gives you a clarity that you don't always get once you're just managing it later on.
And those who started the nation had that sharp clarity.
You know, even before the war for independence, you read the writings and you read the Charter of Canada, and it was very explicitly about the glory of God and building a place for Christians to worship, but not just to worship, to live the kind of life.
That God called free men to live.
They were building communities where they could be governed that's the state and that they could worship that's the church in the proper way.
And my biggest takeaway that I I i'll say it again at the end, but I hope that the listeners take away from this is the call and the new movement to build Christian boroughs is not simply a strategy for when we're under heavy fire and and the the cards are against us, the the chips are stacked against us and we've got no other options.
And so now finally, Is the time for us to build Christian boroughs.
This actually, I hope to make the point, ought to be the normative practice of Christian societies.
We should always be building Christian boroughs.
And one of the things, like so many other things, we live in the time of forgetting right now.
And we've forgotten how to do that.
And that's why we have to have episodes like this where we, who are trying to do it here, but I think all three of us would admit, like we have a long way to go here in Georgetown, are going to offer some advice.
And I think all of us would say, we're not experts in this.
But we've lost it from the past.
And the thing that should be normative Christian polity, Christian boroughs, Christian towns, has largely been lost.
And so I hope.
That as we begin to talk about this, number one, I hope it's not overwhelming.
If you're a guy and you've got a couple friends around you and you think, we want a Christian community, we want our town to be Christian, right?
Like, hopefully, this isn't overwhelming.
But also, I hope this is a perspective that just infects the new Christian right, not for the three years of the rest of Trump's office or the next 10 years until things have kind of cooled down.
This ought to be the pattern of Christian civilization at all times.
So, good point.
Yeah.
If you tie it to urbanization, that kind of loss of.
Because we talked about before, imagine growing up in a small town.
You had a church there, the church had a cemetery near it, and all of your life was kind of oriented towards I go to church, but also I know my end, the cemetery, and I'm here and I'm rooted and grounded.
Do you think it was kind of urbanization where people traveled more and they were more transient, and we had definitely a shift towards universality in principles versus a particular?
Would you say that was at least maybe one of the factors to blame?
I think that's largely a big part of it.
You know, one of the things that's interesting that we hold up as the example is Geneva in Calvin's time.
But one of the things that we realized is they actually were kind of the guys on the ropes at the time.
Historical estimates say that Geneva was about 12,000 people at the time, which is very, very small.
And we'll talk about it a little bit later in the episode.
But even what we think of as the cosmopolitan Geneva, the city of Calvin, it wasn't a London.
It wasn't a Paris.
It's half the size of Hutto right now.
Yep.
So, Wes, I think that's a large part of it.
And I don't know what to do about that fact.
And I'll even say, too, I literally said to my wife last night, like, honestly, like rural living, a living that's connected to the land.
Your kids are going outside.
You see the trees in God's creation.
Getting grounded.
Getting grounded.
You're touching grass, literally touching grass.
I actually do think that is a superior mode of life.
Now, not everyone can escape the city.
Not everyone has those options, but all else being equal, all else being equal.
The urban life in a concrete jungle with a job that's much more maybe technology focused or abstract or remote.
Working on the 27th story.
Working on the 27th story, on your 27th PowerPoint slide, on your 27th coffee.
No, the rural life is better.
All else being equal.
And so, if we're going to return to that, it's not like, well, we just do cities.
Like Tim Keller was big on the city.
I don't think there's a way to pack people in as tight as in New York and just go great for centuries on end.
I also don't know, though, that we're going to get rid of cities.
Cities have sprung up in all major civilizations.
Right.
And so they haven't been.
As big probably as what we see now, but I had a big group chat argument about it.
Like it went a couple hours, but I think the big thing would be density.
So, absolutely always, you look at any distribution be it height.
There's always going to be, you know, a greater cluster towards the center, less on the outside.
So, there'll always be places that are more populated than others.
To your point, though, the question is do we stack them 30 stories high?
Right.
So, you could have a city where people actually live closer together, but there's still green spaces like Central Park.
You're not stacking people as high as possible.
You're not covering over things over in concrete.
You're not putting trams, buses, all of that.
So there will always be cities, but what those cities look like, I think, is still up to us.
Well, and I've thought before on the Old Testament requirements of what constitutes, I guess for YouTube, we have to say some different word, but sexual assault, we'll put it that way in the Old Testament.
And what it had to be there was if you were in town, the woman had to yell.
Yep.
Right.
And it's so ironic that we live in a time where people are so packed together.
But if you're in an apartment in New York, You yell, the way that we have built life is such that we're actually totally separate from each other.
I don't think anyone would hear a woman yelling, really.
Or more importantly, care.
Or even would care.
But my point is like, in the great population density that we have, we aren't living an open communal life, which you would think the more densely populated we are, the more communal and in each other's lives we would be.
That has not been the case.
Why Heritage Erodes00:13:31
But it's so diverse, it's so fun.
Well, everyone is like, so you're packing them in, the density is high, but everybody's still living a life of.
Perfect isolation because we have low trust society for a number of reasons, chiefly being, you know, apostatizing against the Lord Jesus Christ and our Christian founding.
But in addition to, you know, the religious reasons, it's also, you know, multiculturalism.
It's all, you know, there's all these different factors for why people don't trust each other.
You know, like I remember we got in trouble for, I didn't even say it, I just defended Eric Kahn for saying it.
But, you know, the whole, um, somebody commentating on Aristotle, it wasn't him directly, but him saying that, you know, that a purely democratic governmental system.
In a multi ethnic environment, is just the ripe seed ground for oligarchy and for corrupt leaders to rise up through the ranks and then to pit different identity groups against each other, playing identity politics.
And all that assumes, because it's Aristotle, that it's a context that's a bad form of government, pure democracy, which all the founders.
Despise.
None of them thought that we should have a pure democracy.
None of them were advocating for universal suffrage.
They believed in representative democracy, raw, is you're really expanding the vote.
So it's not just representative or this side or the other.
How many people vote?
Yeah, elements of democracy.
Like all the founders were well versed in getting a democratic process, voting for some things.
So they all had Deuteronomy, they all had Leviticus, but they also had Plutarch, they also had Aristotle, they had Plato.
And what they were trying to form was kind of in many ways, it wasn't a pure government that anybody had really known.
In the past, maybe there were elements in Rome or elements in Greece, but they wanted something that had an element of democracy, representational government, all the way down, not to the individual, but to the household.
But they also wanted it to have elements of a constitutional republic, and then even elements of not oligarchy, but an aristocracy.
But we just have to recognize that that's what the Constitution was fashioned for.
The Constitution wasn't written in a vacuum and that it's suitable for anybody in any place and any form of government.
It was comprised for a particular people in a particular place at a particular time.
And we don't have those people anymore.
We just.
Yeah, we don't have those conditions.
We also, I think, personally, for me, it's not even necessarily a population, a matter of just raw population numerically, but geography in terms of just size.
To have a nation the size of these United States, that's one nation with one federal government, is.
It seems to be a little naive, a little wishful thinking.
Because, yes, the geography hasn't changed.
Well, it's changed a little bit over time, Louisiana Purchase and these kinds of things.
But for the most part, the land has stayed the same.
But to have this many people in that size of land, and to have not just this many people who are WASP, for instance, or Anglo Protestants, but this many people that includes Somalians and includes Haitians and includes all these different people who, many of them, don't even speak the language, English.
And then also on top of it, to walk away from the Lord Jesus Christ.
So when you think of our founding, you're thinking a fraction of the population.
You're thinking of, for the most part, homogenous in many ways.
Yes, there were some people who came in, but there's still a difference in bringing in the Irish, which there were plenty of objections at the time to the Irish and the Italians.
But there's a difference in bringing in the Irish and the Italians and some Hispanics in Texas that helped and fought, defended the Alamo, which I personally would include in heritage Americans.
When I think about, I think about pretty much, not necessarily anybody, but most people who were here before civil rights, before the Hartzeller Act.
And especially when I think of Heritage American, I'm thinking three generations plus where I can look at my neighbor and say, your granddad and my granddad fought in the same wars.
That's what I'm thinking of.
But my point is that, yes, there was immigration.
And yes, there were new peoples coming in, but you still had a fraction of the total numerical population.
Um, and you still with these people who were coming in, um, you still had a lot of commonality.
You had um, you had cousins, right?
So, so all right, if it's primarily Anglo Protestant, right?
So, British Protestants, and now you're inviting you know, Catholic Italians, there's some big differences, don't get me wrong.
And that's why the Italians, you know, with a Catholic religious uh backdrop, ended up uh, for the most part being the mob bosses in New York and destroying the city.
So, I'm not saying that there were no problems, right?
That people hated the Italians, the Irish, too, my guess, and the Irish, too, you know, and so.
And for some decent reasons.
It wasn't just racial animus, but they were actually coming in and destroying things.
But my point is still, Italians coming in, as difficult as that was, is still a far cry, a large significant difference from Haitians coming into Iowa, into one town, 30,000 all at the same time, coming into one town, and it's a third the population of that town, and they're driving motorized vehicles for the first time, not speaking English, and running over.
People and allegedly, I'll say allegedly, but potentially maybe also eating some pets.
He who has not barbecued the neighbor's cat cast the first stone.
We've all eaten a pet here or there.
Who has?
But to eat pets at that rate, allegedly, is just.
He's from the park.
It's just we don't do that here.
This is America.
We don't do that here.
And so my point is that's when you think of the founding, a fraction of the population, yes, some immigration, but you're talking about cousins, not complete strangers.
And Still predominantly a Christian foundation.
There was a time where 90% of the United States was identified as being Christian, 90% plus.
We're in New York City, you had three skyscrapers lit up on Good Friday with three crosses.
And we're talking, what was that, 50 years ago, 60 years ago?
Holy Trinity versus the United States, the Supreme Court, a Christian nation.
That was just about 100 years ago, give or take.
And so, three major elements the immigration, the overall population, And the apostasy from Christianity.
We no longer have, in many ways, a Christian nation.
And so, if Christianity is no longer the bedrock and the foundation, and you don't just have Italians, but you have Haitians and Somalians and people, millions and millions of people who don't even speak the language, and you have 20 times, 30 times, 50 times the population, at that point, you have to rethink your inks.
You have to start rethinking.
And none of this, just for the record, none of this is coming as a substitute or at the expense of doing the work of an evangelist and seeking to fulfill the Great Commission.
So, you have to be pushing for the crown rights of Jesus Christ and doing that at an interpersonal level, first and foremost with your wives and children in your home with family worship, catechism, being in a local Bible preaching church, and doing the work of an evangelist and telling your neighbors about Jesus and praying and working towards that many might be born again and come to saving faith.
So, nothing at the expense of that, but just simply recognizing that in addition to that, there are some political solutions that need to be explored.
And it may be, and I'm not even advocating for this.
This is not necessarily a prescription, but simply a description of what I predict may happen, inevitably may happen, is that the United States may have to break up into smaller land masses.
We may end up having five or six countries instead of one, because what we are currently doing, we are on a trajectory that is not feasible.
Something I've been thinking about is the elements of a nation.
And it's a curious question of how strong each of the elements of a nation have to be.
And I think that the reason it's a tricky question is because there's not like a recipe in a book.
It's one third a cup of lineage and two thirds a cup of worship and a dash of common loves and things like that.
But one of the reasons why we are dealing with the things that we're dealing with right now about the questions of ethnicity and race and all of those things is because some of the things that bound peoples together in our history.
In the past, that are legitimate, like a common worship that were very strong, are just gone.
They're eroded.
Right.
And so, then as one rubber band snaps, either other rubber bands have to become stronger or there has to be dissolution.
And that's why people are really, that's one of the reasons.
There are many reasons and many legitimate reasons why people are asking the questions about, well, what is the racial and ethnic makeup of a nation, of our nation in particular?
Well, if we had strong heritage, Shared loves, everyone obeyed the law, we were all worshiping the same God, we wouldn't be as urgent of a question.
It would be different.
The lineage question as it is right now.
But that's not where we are right now.
Right.
As Michael coined the six L's in his book, right here in Defense of Christian Nations, which you can get on Amazon, Michael Belch in Defense of Christian Nations.
But those six loves, not arguing that a nation, you held strong that a nation can never be anything less than land and lineage.
Right.
Land and lineage, people and place.
But you argue that a nation is more.
So, land, lineage, language, laws, loves, that would be tradition, rituals, and heritage, these kinds of things.
And then, lastly, liturgy, religion.
And so, what we're saying is that part of the conversation around race, which is probably not the best word, but whether it's race or ethnicity or whatever, part of the conversation around this, and the reason why this is making its way into mainstream conversation, it's not going away.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, hear me.
It's not going away.
You're going to have to carve out a position on this.
I pray that you would do it courageously.
And that you would also do it responsibly, and that you would have a Bible in your hand as you seek to answer some of these questions.
But it's not, the toothpaste is not going back in the tube.
It's just not.
The woke left overplayed their hand from 2013, definitely 15, all the way through 2024.
So you had a decade of the woke left making it nearly impossible for young white men, especially and some Asians, to be able to get into the university they wanted to get into, to be able to get the job that they wanted to get.
And then on top of it, you have Carmelo Anthony stabbing a young white boy in the heart.
You had another African American.
A woman on the back of an ambulance, you know, stabbed an EMT worker and killed him.
Two.
Two.
Only one died.
And these are back to back, you know, just in a matter of a couple weeks.
And on top, and that would be one thing, you know, but then Carmelo Anthony being able to raise, you know, GoFundMe from virtually 100% Black supporters, raising over half a million dollars so that he can get a big house and an Escalade, you know, and these kinds of things, and a lot of fear.
Surrounding the idea that it's entirely possible, hopefully it doesn't happen, but it's entirely possible that he may get off with self defense.
That he actually, I mean, and if that happens, which is entirely possible, this is a conversation that's not going away.
But to Michael's point, part of the reason it's not going away is because of those six L's, all the other ones have eroded.
And so that's why land and lineage is such a big conversation.
It matters across, I would argue that it matters.
Regardless, right, it matters regardless.
But the reason why it matters so much right now is because language is being eroded.
We have millions of people who literally don't speak English.
We have on voting booths other languages.
Why in the world would you have Mandarin, you know, or Espanol or whatever, any other language besides heaven forbid French?
French, God forbid.
But why would you have other languages on a voting booth?
If you don't even speak the language of the country, you have no business voting in it, you know.
And so, as language is eroded.
As loves, tradition, and rituals and history is eroded, right?
Even our holidays are eroded.
And certainly as liturgy, religion, faith, Christian faith is eroded, then all of a sudden, people that the eye has turned and the gaze is now fully upon lineage and race and ethnicity.
And there's a lot of people right now who are looking around and saying, we can't have a country.
Right, um, before we go to our break, just to protect the podcast, the Escalade claim is maybe not quite accurate.
Fighting for Our Cities00:15:07
The father claims he works for a used car dealership, it's a company car that he was given by the company.
I just okay, want to set the record straight there.
Thank you.
All right, let's go to our first commercial break and we'll be right back.
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All right, this is a topic that building Christian boroughs, we've actually talked about it some in the past a little bit, and it's a topic that will bear many more discussions, right?
And so what I want to do real quick is just outline this is shamelessly stolen from the New Christian.
Conference last year.
These were just some main topics that were touched on at that conference of what you should be thinking about if you want to build a Christian borough.
So I'm going to hit the five just so that you, as the listener, are thinking, okay, if I want to do this, I didn't even think about that or I didn't want to think about this, but we're going to dive specifically into just one or two of them for the rest of the episode.
So the five are a worship centric life.
So the idea of the church being the center of public life, not the governing body, but informing the consciences and practices and worship of the people.
Education in Paideia.
It's shocking to me.
When we did our episode on education a couple weeks ago, I didn't make this connection.
Harvard as a college, it wasn't a university yet.
It was started first as a college.
It was founded six years after the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts.
I mean, they were taking that seriously.
They said, we need an educated, at least elite class that can be trained in theology.
And in the higher disciplines.
So that's really crazy.
Economics, Christian economics, local businesses, but also we've talked about the parallel economy and how maybe that's not totally a realistic expectation, but being able to have access to capital, being able to have access to funding businesses, and let's just be honest, investing in the capital and money into local and state elections, things like that, the Christian economic system has to get better.
And you have to have some sort of way of both.
Propelling your goal and your vision for your town and also supporting the people in it.
So that's number three.
Number four is that it's local.
It's made up of land and family.
So it's very family focused.
It's local.
There's land involved, people owning property and expanding that ownership over time.
And then last one is the idea of as these boroughs build, it is a good idea for us as the Christian right to think about how they can be interconnected, right?
How they can be working together, not just carbon copies of each other.
Each one will be slightly different with the localism piece that Wes is going to talk about, but interconnected.
Right.
Yeah, I would think of localism.
There's a way to kind of think of it like as different streams.
I would almost think of it as a foundation.
And so, localism, we touched on this on an episode we did on politics.
I think it was about a week and a half ago or so.
But you have, you're not going to be able to save everyone.
And you've got to think of just a certain geographical limit, right?
We think of John Knox, like, give me Scotland or I die.
And that sounds great.
Like, give me the United States or I die.
My brother in Christ, Scotland is the size of South Carolina.
South Carolina is the 12th smallest state in the United States.
So, he's saying, I've got a nation, in that case, it's a nation, but it's At that point, the population of Scotland was probably significantly smaller.
25,000 people.
So, like, when he says, Give me, you know, Scotland, lest I die, he's right.
Like, he would be looking at Houston and saying, Uh, it's probably too big.
Yeah, exactly.
Give me not all of it, not the whole region, not the whole hemisphere.
It was probably about a city's worth.
Yeah, it's probably the equivalent of him saying, Give me Williamson County, yeah, lest I die.
Like, Covenant Bible, a lot of our calculus, there's a bunch of different towns around here.
You have Hutto, you have Taylor, you have Georgetown, Pflugerville, Cedar Park.
We're focused on Georgetown.
And there's other towns around that'll be impacted and have people from them.
But we've actually, I don't think we've ever gone to like the Hutto Courthouse.
We haven't gone to Pflugerville.
We've supported Christchurch in Georgetown, which is in our town.
To your point about networking.
That's exactly because they're a sister church and that's their focus.
But yeah, like our primary focus is Georgetown.
And because there's a like minded church in Taylor, we've done a little bit there.
Yep.
So our focus is a county, not a state, a city, even within that.
So in all the places that is our focus, one city.
And so think of that as the foundation.
The next layer of it, I don't think it's actually church.
Grace doesn't destroy nature, grace perfects it.
So, what grace is actually doing when you talk about, Michael, the worship centered life, that's actually resting on top of people doing their natural duties well and grace perfecting it.
If you have a church and it's 200 people and they're all dead broke, you're literally not going to be able to get much done.
You're not going to be able to run candidates for office.
You're not going to be able to employ young men.
Your children will be great Wednesday prayer meetings.
You are going to have great Wednesday prayer meetings, great Saturday, you know, men's prayer breakfast, great.
Well, the potluck will be chicken drumsticks.
But you need businesses.
You need economics.
And so you have your locale.
Where am I focused?
Then who is making money and doing things?
They're going to be the engine to support a pastor, right?
The pastor should be paid if he's doing it as a vocation, if he's doing it full time, he's doing good work in the preaching and ministry.
So you have to pay someone.
That requires money.
You want to be politically involved, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
That involves money.
You want your children to stay in the area.
So if you want your children to then take up business with you and start things of their own, They're going to go away and go to another college and work somewhere else if there's no opportunity here.
But if you say to an 18 year old man who doesn't want to go to college, come in here and run operations for me on this $5 million business, and you'll be paid a great salary and you're going to work alongside great men and you're going to be able to keep your wife at home, like that's huge.
Lots of people don't have that.
So it's locale, it's business, then the church, and then broadening out and be thinking for the locale too.
Like for us, we're 35 minutes from the Capitol.
That means many members have gone to the Capitol to protest, to testify on the side of bills.
So am I near?
My capital?
Am I near a city with a lot of influence?
If you think about Tennessee and Nashville, well, Nashville is a place where a lot of media is going in.
So maybe I have a specific media focus.
And to add one more, Michael, how are you attracting people to it?
So we've got Ogden, we've got Georgetown.
How do people know you exist?
You need to be blasting out your name.
We have so and so church in, and say maybe, you know, the actual city that's nearby would be Pittsburgh.
We're in city so and so just outside of Pittsburgh, or we're just outside of Philadelphia, or we're just outside of New York.
And so people are connecting and saying, I'm connected to a major city.
There's occupations that I can do there.
There's things, there's travel, like airports.
Like, how are you going to have a conference if the nearest airport, I think of like the Arkansas, is like two hours away?
Right.
Practically speaking, it's just going to be hard.
Where's the capital?
Where's the airport?
How do people access me?
These are all thinking about where do I put my borough?
Scotland was 800,000 to a million.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Less than the greater Austin region.
But that's actually quite encouraging because it sounds just on a finitude side.
If you tell a young man, go win the entire country of America, give me America or I die.
I mean, it's not a bad sentiment, but it's somewhat achievable to say, give me Williamson County or I die.
Yeah.
Right.
Give me X county or I die.
Right.
Right.
Like that's actually.
Now, we don't know.
Knox may have had the same sentiment if Scotland was twice as big or three times as big.
Like the point was he loved his people.
Right.
Like Williamson County, you've got maybe 15 to 20 city council seats.
Right.
That's not that hard.
You've got a couple of district judges.
Like practically speaking, 15 years.
Right.
That's not at all unthinkable.
Right.
Especially if you get with other churches.
So it's not like, well, we've got to source city council candidates all from here.
Or, no, maybe you have about five like minded churches, and at some level, the call goes out hey, this guy's running for city council.
Hey, so and so's starting a business.
Hey, he's doing this run.
Then there's support, there's block walking, elected.
Like literally, like that, you bite it off in a bite sized chunk like that, a borough becomes much more manageable.
But you have to be thinking who's here?
What towns are there?
What positions are strategic?
Where do I focus?
You don't have infinite resources, you don't have infinite time.
What are the ones that I'm most important to focus on?
That type of tactical thinking is what actually lays out a plan.
When you lay out a plan, you know what you're actually aiming at.
So, Geneva is interesting in this respect because they kind of became a refuge for reformed Christians who were being persecuted around Europe.
So, there were the Huguenots who fled from France because of the wars in France, the Catholic and Protestant wars.
But there were also some Italians that came.
And interestingly enough, John Knox spent several years in Geneva and was basically trained there and sent back.
And so, how was Geneva able to do this?
Well, partly it was because of their massive.
Effort on printing and sending out material.
They were distributing information at a rate that no one else around them was doing, which is quite remarkable for a town of 10,000 to 12,000 people.
Now, they had brilliant leadership.
They had Calvin, and he attracted all sorts of people.
And so they had really great thinking.
They had really solid church life, and they were considering all of life.
They were considering medicine and law.
They were hardcore in Geneva.
What's that?
I said they were hardcore in Geneva.
They were super hardcore in Geneva.
Yes.
But the point is, they attracted people from around Europe who came and just had to get away.
But within the first, I think it was a couple of six or seven years of this happening and Geneva kind of establishing itself, they sent 100 church planters back into France.
Right?
Like it was not like we talk about the idea, Joel, you say it all the time, and I think people sometimes think that you're joking.
Where you say we're leaving California so that our kids or our grandkids can go back and conquer it.
Right.
Right.
Like that has to be our goal.
This is not a Rob Dreher Benedict option, right?
We're just hunkering down and we're just going to be this monastery that has a well so we can have our water, right?
And no, that is not it, like, even with like you know, the Benedict option, like the thing that you know, the element that's conveniently left out is that all these monks were protected by guys who were you know, that's fighting for them, so that's true.
Um, so that only works if you you know, if you actually have somebody else is out there, you know, with blood, sweat, and tears fighting for your way of life.
Um, otherwise, it's just okay, we're you know, we're going to stay in the shire, you know, but eventually.
Um, eventually they come for the shire.
That's what happens in the book, not the movies, but in the book, right?
The shire is scoured, right?
Like your little peaceful life.
Well, we're here, we're retreating, we're just doing life and homesteading.
Congrats, Palantir is coming, and you're gonna get destroyed by drones.
Yeah, like legitimately, it's not just an option to just fully retreat, you have to be engaged and forward facing at some level.
Yeah, right.
Yep.
Okay, I have a question for you two.
Um, and I don't always see these things as clearly as you two, so I this is a legitimate question on my part.
Can a Christian borough in our time be built without people moving from other areas?
Like, can, if you're part of a church, small church, 30-person church, but you're in a town of, you know, 40,000 and your church is solid, but it's not very big, can you build a Christian borough in our time without people moving in from the outside?
I mean, what are we at?
Like, so you've got someone listening to the podcast and they're like, we're interested in this project.
Does it require either them moving or people moving to them?
Or is there a way that this can be done in kind of a grassroots sense?
Like, let's be really honest and blunt with the listener.
Yeah, I think it requires moving.
That's why I wrote this little book right there on the coffee table, Fight by Flight.
And with moving, it's not a cowardly retreat.
You're not running from a fight, you're running to a fight.
You're advancing to the rear.
And the beauty is that in the providence of God, there's a twofold fruitfulness that I'm hoping will come about.
Defunding the Unwinnable00:02:21
One, what you're doing is you're defunding the place that is currently unwinnable.
Now, no place is indefinitely unwinnable.
So, like when I say, you know, we're going to get out of California, but then, you know, we'll send our grandchildren back in to conquer the land, you're right.
I am being serious.
It's not a joke.
But what you're doing is you're defunding that place temporarily.
So, you're saying, you know, because so many places, California's a great example, it's the salt of the earth that's propping it up, you know, with their tax dollars, with all these different things.
Yeah, like it's all these people who are paying their state tax to support policies that they hate, you know, that don't represent them, that aren't good for their way of life, that are destroying everything that they love.
And they're literally funding it by the mere presence of living there.
So you're doing two things with one foul swoop, you know, two birds, one stone.
You're defunding godless places that bring them more quickly to the brink, where now all of a sudden, Gavin Newsom in California, they actually have to lay in the bed that they've been making, they have to eat their own medicine.
So, you're defunding them.
So, there's an attack by no longer funding them in one regard, the place that you're leaving.
And then there's reinforcements in the place that you're moving to.
So, you're moving to places that are more winnable.
You're moving to hills that actually can be taken, that can be fortified, defended, and the tide could actually, in the providence of God, turn in the short run.
So, you're going to a place that could be won now in order to destabilize and defund a place that can't be won now, that brings it to a point where it's actually weaker over the coming generations.
And then you're fortifying over here in a place that can be won within one or two generations and that can be won so decisively that now you have a surplus, right?
You have a stronghold in Tennessee, you know, or Texas or wherever it is.
And then when California is brought to the brink, you actually have, you know, reserves that you can spare that now you can go back in because the battle has been substantially weakened.
So to answer your question and to do so like you asked, to do it honestly, no, I don't think there's any winning scenario.
Where everybody gets to stay where they already live.
Like the reality is that it is inconvenient.
It will require moving.
Winning Somewhere Decisively00:10:31
The problem is, I talk to guys all the time.
This is one of the most common emails that I get of guys saying, I love what you're doing.
And how do we do this here?
And the answer is, in many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, the answer is, you don't.
Like we want to do it here.
We're going to start a podcast.
That's a great idea.
But 2017 cold and would like that idea back.
That was a great idea once upon a time.
The media landscape is so oversaturated and flooded right now.
It is virtually impossible.
Like you will be doing a podcast and it could be great.
You could have great content and good production.
But we're talking, the social media platforms have literally, you can read about it, they've literally changed their algorithms.
So it's not even just that it's overly saturated the space of podcasting and media, but in many ways, they've changed the algorithms to where The little guy, the new guy who's just now coming on the scene, doesn't stand a chance.
It doesn't stand a chance.
And so, like, and I've talked to guy after guy after guy who's like, we're trying to do what you did, Joel, and we're starting today.
And all of them end up disappointed.
You know, they start something, and in many cases, it's too late.
Now, in God's economy, it's never ultimately too late.
But the reality is that there are various times throughout history where it's too late for something particular.
So, I'm not saying it's too late for the next thing.
I'm not saying that there's no opportunity.
But there are plenty of times throughout history where it's like, okay, it's too late for gold, right?
But there's something else.
There's silicon, and then there's something else.
There's lithium or what?
There's always going to be, whether it's oil or whether it's the light bulb or whether it's this or whether there's always going to be new innovations.
But to say, I'm going to come into this space that's already saturated.
And I'm going to come in a decade late, and I'm going to expect that I could still somehow be successful or even experience the same measure of success as the guys who were grandfathered in, who were early adopters and started right away.
You've got guys like Mike Winger, for instance.
Mike Winger has a low production value.
It's not like this highly produced, our show is more produced than his show.
So it's like, so what's the success of Mike Winger?
And people say, oh, well, he's so educated, or he's got great content, or he has a likable personality.
And I don't want to disparage him.
I think some of that's true.
I don't think I would say it that strongly.
I don't think his content's that great.
He's pretty much just soft, evangelical, normie, Nazarene, barely complementarian, mostly egalitarian.
My point is, it's really not that special.
It's not that unique.
So then, why does he have over half a million subscribers?
Because he started doing YouTube before anybody else in the Christian space.
He just started early and long obedience in one direction pays off.
And so he was an early adopter who was doing YouTube videos again and again and again and again.
He was consistent and he didn't drop and he just kept going and kept going and kept going before anybody else did.
And it became successful.
And so, all that being said, back to the original question or like, do I have to move?
I think many people do.
Many people do.
And everybody's just kind of staying put.
A lot of guys are just staying put and hoping that the Calvary will come to them.
But the reality is it probably won't.
And so, then what are you looking for?
You know, because most people aren't even going to know that you exist.
It's like, well, so we have our borough project here in this location, but nobody knows about it.
And so it's like, all right, so you need media.
Yeah, but it's like, but if you haven't already been doing it, it's like, well, we're going to start a podcast.
Yeah, and no one's going to hear it, probably.
And so then what do you do?
Well, I think, you know, one of the things that we could do is basically the reverse of everything that we've done over the last 30, 40, 50 years of evangelicalism.
What we did.
Was instead of winning somewhere, we opted for losing everywhere.
Essentially, in a nutshell, what we did within evangelicalism over the last half a century is we spread our forces too thin.
We did this internationally with global missions, and we did this also domestically with church planting.
And we took everybody and we split them up, right?
And we had ways of justifying it, you know, and like, well, we're against megachurches or we're against this.
Well, there's nothing biblically, there's nothing inherently wrong with megachurches.
The church in Jerusalem.
We know it was a mega church.
I mean, it started with 3,000 converts that were added on the day of Pentecost when Peter stood up and preached a sermon.
3,000 people were added to the faith.
Now, there were people in town, obviously, what was going on, you know, with their customs.
There were people from all over.
And so many of those people probably went back, but there still was probably a very large church that was left in Jerusalem.
Antioch had a very large church.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with these churches.
The mega churches that we despise or that we should despise are mega churches that have grown because they've adopted attractional methods that come at the At the cost of compromising sound biblical doctrine.
Well, that's a problem.
That's a problem.
But if Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, I mean, it's grown substantially.
It's grown from just 100 people over the years to now 400, 500 people plus.
And if Refuge Ogden did a 4X in the next five to 10 years and built a new building and they had 2,000 people in their church, but they maintained their doctrinal distinctives and all these kinds of things, then that's great.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And by God's grace, they could actually take Ogden.
They could actually take it for Christ.
Same thing with us.
We started with 20 people on the couch in my living room.
And in four years, we are now over 200 people.
And we're building a church building that is under construction.
And if we grew to 1,000 people, if we 4X'd over the next five to 10 years, then that would be great.
But when you look at who actually stands a reasonable chance of being able to achieve that kind of growth in the next five to 10 years, It's going to be churches that are already known today.
Not a church that you hope to be known, but a church that already has some kind of substantial presence and is able to attract people.
Some type of foundation already.
Some kind of foundation, but then also some kind of media presence, like that it's nationally known, that people have seen it and they've heard about it.
And so then it's drawing in the reinforcements.
It's doing the reverse.
Instead of opting to lose everywhere, it's opting to win somewhere.
We're going to win in a few places, and we're going to do what it takes to win so decisively that after securing the victory and shoring it up, we're going to eventually have people and resources to spare.
So then we can win also in the town right over.
Or this place is now on the brink, and there are these seats that are available in this county and blah, blah, blah, because they're leftist policies.
The chickens have finally come home to roost.
And we depleted them of conservative resources by drawing back outside of being behind enemy lines.
But now they've depleted in their strength and they're crumbling.
And now we can go back in.
We have these resources, these people.
I think it's going to require, like a chessboard, you're not going to win without moving any of your pieces.
You're going to have to move around.
And basically, what that requires is a lot of guys, this is the difficulty.
Yes, there's the practical constraints, moving can be difficult financially, all these different things.
But for a lot of guys, it's not just practical.
A lot of guys, I think it really is.
It's more moral, it's spiritual.
And what I mean by that is what a lot of guys liked, including myself, about the church planting movement or these kinds of things, is a lot of guys who are better suited to play second chair.
They liked the church planting movement because it allowed them to play first chair.
It took a number two guy and said, You get to be a number one guy.
And that appealed to a lot of guys.
But the result of that strategy is that we lost everywhere.
We lost the country.
And so, what I'm saying is, it's going to require, yes, some financial sacrifice, these kinds of things, the practical constraints of moving and uprooting your life.
But the big factor that it's going to require, in addition to all that, is just some good old fashioned humility.
And I think that's probably the biggest hindrance to a lot of people adopting this kind of strategy.
Is it requires humility?
It requires, I'm going to go and serve with Brian Sauvay, and I'm not going to be the lead pastor.
In fact, I may not even be an elder ever.
Or if I am, I may not be an elder for five years.
It's going to require that kind of humility that I'm going to support someone else's work instead of just doing my own.
Nobody wants to go and support someone else's work, they want to do their own work.
But here's the reality, and you guys have to hear this I'm not trying to be rude.
You don't want to support someone else's work, you want to do your own.
Here's the reality your work sucks.
Your work is unimpressive.
Your work is not working.
And you know it's not working.
And at a certain point, you have to have the humility and the courage to call a spade a spade and say, what I do and who I am and what I contribute actually is inherently valuable.
But it's not enough in isolation.
But me and 20 other people like me coming and joining Ogden, Utah or Georgetown, Texas, that would be significant.
And so, you actually still do have a viable and valuable role to play, but you don't get to play first chair.
Yep.
Let's hit our last commercial break and leave us some practicals.
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So, landing the plane, we've said it a lot.
When it comes to the local sphere, localism, my state, my county, we can't hold your hand.
Your county is different.
Your church is different.
The makeup of your church is different.
Your pastoring, your denomination, all of these things.
There is no guide.
Like men, you're thinking about this.
There's no guide.
Well, I follow step one, step two, and step three.
You're going to have to figure it out.
That's what makes great men.
But here's the big tool that can help you.
And that tool is networking.
And it's networking online.
For most of you, say you're in Pennsylvania right now, right?
You think of Ogden, you think of Georgetown, maybe a couple others.
There's none that are necessarily close when you think of the big ones.
But I guarantee there are faithful pastors in Pennsylvania.
If you're a high caliber man, you run a successful business, you're doing something on the ground to where instead of you're in Pennsylvania, you're like, I see the need to move.
They take your advice, Joel.
They take stock and they say, This is a church that's dying.
It's in a small town.
There's nothing strategic.
I can take my business and move elsewhere.
If you do that, you don't necessarily have to go half a country away.
You could go an hour and a half away.
But how do you become aware of that church?
How do you see what the pastor is doing?
How do you join with what's happening?
You become aware of them because you connect with people.
You talk, you attend meetings, you join group chats.
You're just looking who's around my area?
Who's nearby?
What are they doing?
How can I help with?
If you have a media ministry, if you are a pastor, you are starting something, say again and again and again.
It's funny, Texas is so big.
Like there's been some people that they hear Georgetown and they're in Austin or like somewhere else and they don't connect the dots.
But then they're like, wait a second, Texas is huge.
I thought Georgetown was five hours.
It's 40 minutes away.
So if you're in Texas, you're in Oklahoma, hey guys, we're in West Oklahoma, just outside of X, Y, and Z city.
We're starting a church.
Telling people again and again and again, hey, we're here and we're here.
I heard, I just did this recently.
Someone was moving to the Dallas area.
Hey, do you have a church in the area?
I know great guys there that would love to have you.
Let me connect them.
You do that.
And we spend five years, different men, different places.
Some of them are going to Dallas for families.
They're not coming here.
Some of them are trying to stay in Pennsylvania to be near grandparents.
Some of them have a business, this, that, or the other.
But you do that.
That's how you also build up boroughs.
Without having just, for example, two options.
Well, I've got the Northwest out in Utah, I've got Texas down here.
What about Georgia?
And what about North Carolina?
And what about Florida?
You have to be networking to begin to become aware of what's around you.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
And that, because in a sense, what we're arguing for conflicts with other things that we've said, which is loving your land and your place, right?
It is hard.
It is hard for me, who I love the land of Washington, right?
The mountains and the beauty.
I do feel a connection to that.
Moving to Texas, it's not as natural for me to love the land of Texas as it was where I spent a significant amount of my life.
It's not natural for anyone to love the land of Texas.
Loving a Difficult Place00:01:41
Just for the record.
Davy Crockett certainly did.
It's a difficult land to love.
My point is, Wes, I think your point is well taken.
As much as we want capable and godly men to move and join our project here, There might be a way for you to still move and still collaborate resources, but somewhere that is where your grandparents still live or something like that.
But to Joel's point with the whole book, if that's not possible, then you do have to consider plan C. Yep.
Yep.
Agreed.
All right.
Well, thank you guys for tuning in.
We hope that you've enjoyed this episode and found it helpful.
And we will see you, Lord willing.
And the next episode, our schedule, just for people who are maybe new to the channel, is Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
We live stream at 3 p.m. Central Time, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
And we also have our Friday special that airs on Fridays at 8 p.m. Central Time.
And for Q2 right now, so April and May and some of June, what we're doing in that Friday special slot, Fridays at 8 p.m. Central, is we are slow dripping out one piece at a time the content from our recent conference, Christ is King, How to Defeat Trash World.
And so those pieces of content are coming out one by one.
Throughout again the course of this three month period, April and May and June.
And then we will be launching our Friday special with Stephen Wolf, Dr. Stephen Wolf, for Q3.
So that'll be July and August and September.
And so we're excited about that.
But with the live stream, that is going to be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every single week at 3 p.m. Central Time.