Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Think Deeper Podcast. I'm your co host, Will Harab, joined by Joe and Jack Wilkie. We are coming to you guys live after my favorite weekend of the year. Personally, Thanksgiving weekend.
I just love the holiday feel, the family feel, of course, all the good food that we got to enjoy. So I hope all of our deep thinkers had a very happy Thanksgiving weekend.
For those that have not already shifting full gear into Christmas mode, I know there's some people that are in need of repentance that have already started celebrating, that started celebrating before Thanksgiving. And so the front rows are available on Sunday mornings if you are one of those people.
But no, on that note, as we talk about kind of shifting into Christmas mode and holiday gift buying mode, we do have a lot of our products on slash sale if you want to go take a look, some of our books, DVDs, products and things like that. And so take a look at that.
And then I know we've been talking quite a bit recently about some of the new books that we've got coming out. I think we talked a lot about Jack's Mark Guide two episodes ago, walking with the Word for the Book of Mark that is out and available if you would like to order that deep study of the book, Gospel of Mark. And then the second book that is right on its heels is one called Transformed Faith.
Should be coming out basically any week now. It is in the final, final stages of printing. And so if you pre order one of those, rest assured that is on its way. And if you have not ordered one of those, take a look at those I'd encourage you to take a look at. Again, it's meant to be an encouraging book basically about how our lives are supposed to be set apart. It's a collection of writings from Jack and my dad. Again, Transformed Faith is the name of that one, again in the final stages of printing. And then the third one that we've talked about, Sunday school catch up from Jack will be right on its heels immediately following that. And so a lot going on here at Focus Press. We're very grateful for the support, very grateful for everybody that supports this work so that we can put out materials like that.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: But I'll say this about the pre orders with the Mark one, when we went to print it, costs were a little bit different when we thought so we had to raise the price when we put it on full sale and we stocked it in the store. So everybody who preordered got a discount, that might happen with the other two. So you want a discount, jump on those before the price may go up when we've got them in store.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: There you go. Get you a discount. Yeah, I don't think we have anything else to talk about before we get into today's episode, which is going to be a really good one. Jack had a really good idea for this episode. So, Jack, I will go ahead and hand it over to you as we discuss kind of where the church is going to be in ten years.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I was listening to somebody talk about just kind of the church's approach to the world, evangelism wise, but also just thinking not just church wise, but the home and the society and all that, and the church's influence waning in the world. And you can kind of see the decline over recent generations. And so it just kind of hit me, like, Lord willing, that we're all still here. What is the church going to look like in ten years? And you can look back in ten year segments. You can look back ten years from now. It was 2013 and 2003. We still haven't figured out a name for the O's whatever, 2003 in those ten year segments. And in hindsight, it's always 2020. It's always easy to say, oh, it's clear that this was going to happen. And I think you can look at those and go, well, not much has changed. Not much has changed. Well, it has. There's been a serious statistical decline, Doctrinal. There's been shifts out there. Progressive has gone, more progressive.
Things like that have happened, and so there's a lot of shifts that have happened. And looking into the future, number one, when people say not much changes over ten years, we're at a really interesting time. I think everybody would agree with that. Things are different now than they were ten years ago. On the heels of COVID with where things stand in the government, the economy, there's a lot of stuff everyone's looking at going, this isn't sustainable. Some big change is going to happen societally, there's going to be a bunch of big shifts. The trans thing, where does all of this go? Well, the church is going to be a factor in that, and the church is going to be affected by that. And so I thought it'd be interesting to kind of roundtable a little bit. What do we think is going to happen in ten years? What do we think are the worst case scenarios, like ways that this can go wrong?
And what do we think are best case scenarios? Things that if we really invest in right now, ten years down the road, we're going to reap some positive fruits. Joe, I want to pass it to you first because I think you made a really good point. We need to start with if we try to maintain the status quo for ten years, that's going to end up very poorly.
[00:04:53] Speaker C: Yeah, that's the first thing that came to my mind, because Jack threw this out and we wanted to prep. Will's got some ideas on his own. Jack brought his ideas, I brought some ideas, and the first thing that I thought was, man, it's one of those don't have to go home. You can't stay here. We can't stay where we are because we are in decline. And I think you spelled that out well. Jack of we're not in a good spot. And I think there's a lot of people that are okay with the status quo because they look at it and go, well, if we're doing differently than we are now, that's going to show that we are doctrinally shifting away from truth. And I don't think that's true. I would say there are a lot of people shifting away from truth. Obviously, we are the first ones to say, absolutely not. We want to stand firm on the foundation of the gospel, on the foundation of God, and on all of the doctrines that we hold to be biblically accurate. However, okay, we have that down. And there's a lot of people that just want to stay pat with that and say, okay, don't move, don't move. That's what we got. If you don't move, you die. Stagnation is death. The church has to be out there evangelizing the culture has to be making waves in the culture. And for too long we've had this idea of, well, we stand on truth. Yes, but what are you doing with that? You're not going anywhere. You're not affecting the culture. So the culture has been affecting us. 2020 was a major turning point for the culture, really affecting us because that's where it kind of weeded out all the people that were faking ahead of time. Like, did church actually matter to you or was it more convenient to stay home? Well, all the people that are still watching online, quote unquote, oh, I watch church from the comfort of my couch. No, you don't. You can't be a part of the church and still be at home and think that's okay after COVID. Well, I'm scared of COVID Look.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: I.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: Would be scared of God not showing up. So this is where the church is, and we cannot maintain status quo for the next decade and think that that's going to be okay because we've been doing it for 50 years and it hasn't worked.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Well, I want to speak to maybe the crowd that has accused us and maybe others before of maybe being a little dramatic with how the shape that the church is in or too negative or it's really not all that bad, because we've gotten those comments before. I've heard people say it's really not as bad as you guys are saying. And kind of that almost implying that the church is actually going in a good direction currently. And I would just point out because, again, I think there are people that are, I'm going to put it nicely, blissfully ignorant, but do believe that they think that things are going in the right direction. And I would just point them to and we've kind of already touched on it. But the evidence to the contrary, obviously, we've talked about the youth dropout rate that literally look up any statistic you want. Young people are leaving. And that's evidence piece number one is that young people are leaving. Evidence piece number two, I would say congregations are dying out. You say, no, my church, we had 500 members, and now we have 650 members. Yeah, that's because you absorbed up all the smaller congregations that are now nonexistent. You see smaller congregations dying out in churches that were 75, 80 people are now down to 1015, 20 people. Churches are dying out. Young people are walking away. And, Joe, the thing that you brought up that I think might honestly be the biggest piece of evidence as to why we can't maintain the status quo and why things are currently not going in a good direction is our cultural impact is just basically nonexistent. Now, Christianity's cultural impact is going the other direction. Like you said, the culture is impacting us more than the church is impacting the culture. And again, I think that's the third piece of evidence as to why the direction we're heading is not a good one, despite what a lot of other people might want to claim. And so I think, again, the first step we have to take is to admit, yeah, the direction we're going. As you said, Joe, the status quo, if we just kind of continue down the road that we're plotting, it's not a good thing.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: It's kind of funny. I mean, this information is abundantly clear. It's out there. And I've seen progressives over the last few years hold that stuff up and just run it out there. And look, the churches of Christ are shrinking. And what this means is we need to let women preach and bring in instruments.
No, that doesn't help us. That wouldn't grow us. Number one, even for growth's sake, that doesn't grow churches. It just doesn't look in the denominations. It doesn't work. But number two, if people are leaving for that, then they're not doctrinally. They don't care about doctrine anyway. That's a problem. But number three, it's interesting to me that the progressives will acknowledge it because they have an agenda, where some of the more conservative brethren, the ones that kind of don't like it when we talk about this stuff, want to bury their heads in the sand.
I'll give the progressives that even if they have an agenda, even if they're totally wrong with their solution, at least they acknowledge the problem. And so we've got to acknowledge the problem. We always get the year two negative. We did do an episode on things we love about the churches of Christ. Go ahead and pull that one back up.
There's a lot to love about the church. That's why we want to preserve the church. That's why we want to see it thrive in ten years. But again, one of the things that drives me crazy is when people post pictures from the big mega conventions or whatever, or like you said, people that attend the big churches. Why? Church future looks bright to me.
That's kind of the let them eat cake of church growth, which I guess is not exactly a true historical thing. But the Marie Antoinette, well, the people are starving. Well, they don't have any bread. Well, then just let them eat cake like the spoiled royal lady. When you're spoiled in one of those churches, man, there's people whose churches are going to die in the next 20 years, and they don't live on the outskirts of a big town, and they can't drive 30 minutes to the bigger church. There's people whose churches are going to die, and there'll be one church in an hour radius that's going to get really hard for a lot of people. And the insensitivity for people to go, you shouldn't talk about things be going bad in the church because this church in downtown Nashville that I attend has 700 people. What does that do for the guy in the middle of Nebraska that really sets me off? Or you show up to have that attitude. Yeah.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: Show up to PTP. The future is bright. It's like half the church of Christ showed up to this. That doesn't make it bright. It means everybody came together for one thing, which is great, good for you. That doesn't show the day to day. And Jack, you were there. You preached in Pritchett. You preached in forney, not glamorous jobs, not huge congregations, congregations that struggled, congregations that had people driving a long way to get there. Like, this is the nitty gritty that people have to realize the church is in decline. So, Will, as you said, I mean, this is the biggest thing. The small churches are dying out. The big churches seem like they're expanding, and it seems all great because they're growing. It's not growth if you absorbed other Christians. I'm just going to say it. It's not growth if you did and you hear those numbers. We are growing leaps and bounds. Okay? How many of those were already there? If you are baptizing people, man, fantastic. That's unbelievable. And there's some big churches that do amazing things. I'm not dogging on all the big churches. However, don't think that that's growth because you absorbed all the small churches. We are in decline, and we are in a crisis moment. And so that's what sparks this episode, is let's look around. Let's see where we're at. And let's say they always say those who kind of lay out their goals, especially those who write it down, are way more likely to accomplish them. I think this is an opportunity to look at the worst case, but also to look at the best case in ten years and to make some goals. This is where we want to be in years. And yes, it's our goals. I'm going to go out. We always say this at the end. I want to know your guys'goals as the listeners, what do you think we should be doing in ten years? What do you think the church will look like?
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Or what do you think we should be doing now to get to the place in ten years where we want to be?
[00:12:18] Speaker C: Love that. That's exactly it. So, fellas, I'm looking through our thing, looking at the current trends, looking at where we are. Let's get into the worst case before we get into the best case. We've already talked out one of the worst cases, and the biggest thing is we can't stay here because we are laying out where we are currently. Are there any other worst case things that we want to get into? I feel like there are we got some things on our list before we end on a much more positive note of this is where we can be and this is where we ought to be on the best case. But what do you got otherwise on worst case scenario in ten years?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: I let's start on the youth dropout rate. Unless you want someone that had another one you want to start on.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Will no, that's where I was going, so I'll start it. Jack and then let you get into your Lads leaders and youth camps point, because I think that's your point. I think it's a good one.
I think I made this point on an episode way when we started over a year and a half ago. One of my biggest concerns for the church moving forward is that worldliness is growing more and more acceptable. Like, not really a problem specifically. That's for young people.
They grow up in the church, they hit their teenage years, and they're very worldly for most of those years. They're in the public schools, they're cheerleading, they go to their proms. They basically engage in everything that the world does, and they go to church on Sunday. Well, what does that make for when that young person hits 22, 23, as we're seeing the statistics reflect, a lot of the time, it reflects in just blatant unfaithfulness. They don't attend anywhere. They're not faithful Christians. The other thing that it results in that to me is, I would say probably just as alarming is that that kind of shallow, lukewarmness, apathetic, barely a Christian mentality, continues into adulthood and continues into their kids. So this young person who grows up very worldly, sure, they might still attend when they're 27 and married, but again, it's very shallow. They're not active disciples. They're not really involved in their congregations. They're still just kind of doing it to check off a box. That's still an enormous problem, and I think that's still contributing to, again, just the overall weakness of a lot of congregations. But I think it starts with young people, obviously, when we allow them and we kind of imply that, hey, yeah, you can be worldly and be a Christian, no problem. You can be worldly and still show up to church and basically you're going to be counted as a check. Mark, you are one of the ones that, quote, unquote, stayed faithful. And to me, again, that's one of the biggest problems is that generations worth of young people are growing up thinking worldliness is just fine. A lot of those young people leave in general, they just don't come back. But a lot of them, even if they, quote, unquote, do come back, they're not active disciples, they're not involved, they're certainly not going to be discipling their kids. And so it's just a nasty cycle that we have to break.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: When I talk about the dropout rate, the stat I use more than any other, because there's stats all over the place. If we lose 50%, we lose 60%, we lose 70, whatever it is. The one that I think gets exactly what you're talking about was a barna study that said by 29 years old, 80% will be spiritually disengaged whether they're attending church or not. They will say, I'm not plugged in. Basically, this doesn't matter to me. I might attend every now and then or I might attend every Sunday, but this doesn't affect my life, doesn't affect the way I think any of those things. 80%, that's four out of five. And again, to Will's point, like if they're in the pews, but that's their spiritual state, then they fell away and so that means you lose four out of five.
The other thing that's really annoying to me is I've been around, you guys have been around. Who else is talking about, like, this is one of those that these stats are real. They've been out there for decades. At this point, why is Focus Press the only one banging this drum? Like, hey, we got to do something about this. And I know again what I hear and there but why do we not have whole conferences dedicated to this? What are we going to do?
[00:16:01] Speaker A: What I hear is the opposite, that we're headed in a great direction, that the young people, man, the young people of today, again, we're not trying to just get up here and Mr. Gloom Clouds the entire time, but Jack's right, I don't understand why again, Jack, I'll let you make your last to leaders point here. I'm a big fan of Lads leaders. I think it's great. I've been to the youth conferences, not as big a fan of those, but I don't think they're necessarily harmful. At the same time, those are not indicators that, oh yeah, we're going to have a lot of faithful young people because CYC still exists or because we have a lot of lads leaders participants. And I think that's just, again, the sticking our head in the sand that a lot of Christian adults do is that man, lads leaders had 5000 people this year. That means that the church is headed in a great direction. No, it does not. It means that a lot of young people's, parents sign them up for last leaders is what and again, I'm one of the biggest lads leaders, supporters there is, but we have to stop using that as an indicator for youth faithfulness or future youth faithfulness.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Well, that's exactly it. People always post that picture, and people always tell me the church's future has a dim future, but look at all these kids. So that just invalidates all the research.
[00:17:10] Speaker C: Right? 80% of those will walk away.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah, because here's the other thing. Ten years ago, again, do the ten year pizza slice thing or ten year slice of the pie. 2013, we had thousands of kids. Where are all of them? 2003, we had thousands of kids at these conferences. Where are all of them? Why is it not growing? Why is it not bigger? Where are they?
[00:17:31] Speaker A: I was in a youth group of 25 to 30. We'll say 30, and I would say 20 of them, maybe more, did last to leaders. Guess how many of them are still faithful?
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Three or four. And that was not that long ago, man.
[00:17:43] Speaker C: Exactly a decade ago.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Almost 20 dropout. Yeah. And so just this idea that, well, we've got kids here now, so that means we always will. No, you won't. Okay. And again, my point of, like, I make this point about the climate change people, that they don't actually believe that the world's going to end in five years, because if they did, why would you talk about anything else? Why would you talk about the tax rate? Why would you talk about literally anything if you think the world's going to end in five years? If the church is on this decline rate, why on earth are we fiddling around with so many of the stupid things that we talk about, so many of the debates and the petty squabbles that we have? Like, we're going to lose 80% of our kids. That's it. That's the point. That's the focus. We got to do something about that. But we don't, because the solutions it would take hurt people's feelings, and they don't want to have that discussion. Right.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Which is a great point.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Willa, you already mentioned this. Here's a big one for me. Worst case scenario, people don't wake up to the fact that the public schools are the biggest culprit. If you don't wake up at this point, if you're still listening to our podcast, look, I realize there's reasons why you have to put in public school, whatever it is, quote unquote, man, chop off your arm to get them there. I don't care what it is. Or to get them out. Like whatever it takes. And Will, you had a great class recently on why we're losing the kids, so many kids. And we filled up a whiteboard with answers. It was kind of depressing, but I think you wrapped it up very well. But one of the biggest takeaways was do whatever it takes to keep them faithful. And the biggest thing is public education is one of the worst things in existence. It is taking our kids away.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Or young people's faithfulness.
[00:19:18] Speaker C: Yes, or young people's faithfulness. And educationally as well.
Our education is brutally low compared to the rest of the world. Like, you could teach your kid nothing and have them come out more come out ahead. However, yes, we're going to continue to bang this drum as well. It's the same as the youth dropout rate because they go hand in hand.
It's the Bodhi Bakman quote. You can't hand your kids over to Caesar for 8 hours a day and be shocked when they come back as Romans. What do you think is going to happen? So you send them to a godless postmodern world where they're learning all this, oh, not in my schools. In ten years, if we're still pedling the not in my schools lie, I'm going to hit the roof.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: That thing jumped the shark like eight years ago.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Exactly, surely.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Especially when phones got into schools and TikTok got I mean, it's everywhere.
[00:20:04] Speaker C: That's the worst case, in my opinion, is we don't wake up to it. But the same thing, TikTok and YouTube, we have to recognize those things. Not TikTok as much. YouTube can be a tool, but it is taking so many young kids away and it is contributing so much, specifically TikTok, to the youth dropout rate and specifically to the LGBTQ movement, to transgenderism. These things are getting our kids parents bury their heads in the sand. I guess the biggest thing for this ten years is stop burying your head in the sand. If we aren't more awake to these things in ten years, that to me, is the worst case scenarios. You have parents who still believe these things are harmless just before we move.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Off of the youth dropout rate, because I know there's a few other things we got to get to here as far as worst case goes. But as I'm sitting here thinking about all the reasons young people walk away and you could throw social media in there, like you just said, Joe, TikTok, you could throw in YouTube, public schools, peer influence, whatever it is. Like you said, Joe, when I did that class recently, we put up a good 30 answers on the board and probably could have put up 30 more as to why young people are leaving. If you sum it all up into one thing, it would be a combination of parents have zero plan, there's no intentionality in how they're going to keep their kids faithful. And that tied in with what you just said, Joe, which is they know the work it's going to take and subconsciously they just don't want to put in the work. Man well, that's really harsh. You're saying parents don't care if their kids are faithful. I'm not saying they don't care. I'm saying there's a laziness aspect to it of yeah, I know what it really is going to take and I don't want my kids to look weird. I don't want to be ostracized and I don't really have the time or want to put in the time. I think that's the biggest thing. There's no intentionality, there's no plan as to I mean you think about how difficult it is to keep kids faithful and so many parents think, well, I guess it'll just happen. I guess we'll just kind of figure it out. You have to have a plan for all of these threats. Again, TikTok, YouTube, schools, everything we could throw on the list. If you don't have a plan to combat those, good luck keeping your kids faithful. And so many Christian parents don't have a plan. They don't have any kind of plan. And I think that again, to wrap it all up with a bow, I think that's the biggest reason is that parents have to again, they got to step it up in the sense that you got to have some kind of plan and some kind of intentionality behind. This is how I know my kid is going to be faithful in 15 years.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Exactly.
I think that's the main point here is it's not about public school. People want to argue that all day long where the two views on public school are it's damaging to your kids or it's probably fine. Nobody's saying this is the best thing for your kids. It's probably fine. It probably won't hurt them.
You got to pick if it's going to help them be stronger, do the thing that's going to help them be stronger. You cannot make a case that that will make them stronger and that's the approach you have to take to everything is is this going to help my kid be faithful? And parents don't, you can don't do that from the pulpit. They're not told to do this because the pulpit, rather than telling people the truth, has been more dedicated to making people stay comfortable and not have their toes stepped on.
[00:23:02] Speaker C: We've got some school teachers in the audience. We got some superintendents in this church and we don't want to upset them either. Like you said, it's not about the public school. But what you're going to hear is, guys, it's too expensive where we live. My wife has to go to work. What are we supposed to do with the know? Those are just the harsh realities. We just don't have any other options.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Can't take the vacation, you know.
[00:23:22] Speaker C: Well and here's what I'll say. If you are scraping, scraping by, well get enough money to scrape by and move. I lived in Denver. Yes, it's stinking expensive. Why do you think we move to Tennessee? Partly because homeschool laws. Partly because obviously the church down here is a lot stronger. Partly because it's. Expensive and you that's your whatever it takes point. Joe that's exactly it. That's what I'm saying is you could throw up as many excuses is in the world. If you have to move to the middle of Kansas because that's the cheapest place for you to be able to support your family, where your wife doesn't have to work and you can afford it, do it. What's your kid's soul worth? Seriously, what's it worth? That's really the question.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: It comes down just we got to move on to the next point. But this about the schools. I know this makes some people mad. Well, it's better where we are. It's not that big a deal. Oh, it's easy for you to say all that stuff.
Fine.
You take the same approach, put the same level of importance on the youth dropout rate as us, and then explain how a public school fits into that and how it's going to keep kids faithful, then we'll listen, if you're going to do that, it's probably fine thing. It doesn't matter. We can do what we want. No, it's time we start acknowledging 80% are going to drop out, and we can't have another ten year stretch like that. If you agree with us on that and you can make points, I don't think there's a point to be made. The problem is nobody arguing for the public schools acknowledges the 80% dropout rate. You got to start there. And if you do, I think your eyes are going to be pretty open. So we could do this one. We've done a whole episode on this, so let's move on from this one. It's too big of I was just.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: 80 from the other day. We need to reboot that public school episode and come out with a part two. But the next thing that I think we need to get into here is something I think we all had on our list, and that is our concern about elderships.
We've had Eldership episodes in the last, I want to say six months or so, just to put it bluntly. One of the things that I put as far as again, we're still in the worst case category of this episode. We will get to the best case, but I think we have to lay out the concerns first.
The amount of qualified men to be Elders seems to be decreasing and decreasing by the year.
That's one of the things you hear is that a lot of congregations well, we don't have Elders. Well, why not? Well, because we don't have enough qualified men. That's a problem and it's a trend, I should say, that I don't see going in the right direction. It's not like we're in the college football, the draft classes where they'll say, man, this is just a bad quarterback class. We'll wait till next year. A bad receiver class wait till next year. I don't think we're in that zone where it's like, man, this class. This generation is just there's not a lot of qualified elders. We just got to wait till the next generation, next class of qualified elders. I don't think that's the case. I think it's not getting better and so it's not getting better. And so guys, let's get into this one because as Jack has mainly made the point a dozen times, weak leadership equals weak congregations. Weak leadership equals, again, no plan for young people staying faithful. Weak leadership equals just shallow unity congregations that don't go anywhere. And so this is a worst case scenario for sure, is that the number of qualified men to be elders continues to decrease, continues to get lower to the point where the leadership structure in the church either we have a bunch of men that aren't qualified, that are elders, or we just have a bunch of congregations without eldership. So guys, I don't know what you want to get into there, but I think that's obviously the next biggest concern that we have.
[00:26:37] Speaker C: I think it goes to a masculinity crisis of men stepping up and requiring men to step up and having men. And we're going to get to this. This is a separate point altogether, and it'll be on our best case of what we're hoping. But I don't think you can look at the eldership crisis without making an immediate parallel to our masculinity crisis.
I feel like for years, every single time a kid opened the Bible, it's like, you're going to be a preacher, you're going to be a preacher. We've railed on this before, but in ten years we got to get, we got to get past that where every kid who shows any interest in the Bible has to be a preacher. Because, man, you're like one of nobody that does this, one of 20 kids at this church that actually likes opening the Bible. So you must want to be a preacher. No, maybe he can be a mechanic who's really well versed in scriptures and who grows up to be an elder. And we start pushing them to really take on the idea of an eldership and an elder role. You got a lot of guys in their twenty s and thirty s now that in ten years might be ready. Specifically on a 30 end, I should say 30, 40, that in ten years, hopefully they're ready. We have to start pushing them in that direction. Now, worst case scenario, as we continue, as you're talking will with the trend of like, what are you going to do? And guys just continue to disengage while their wives stay the spiritual leader of the home. That can't happen because we're already having a crisis of like, these churches don't have elderships. And I think a lot of people are losing faith because there have been elderships that have just not handled things well. I think a lot of people have lost faith in elderships and are more content with men's meetings. Well, everybody has a say that way, so it's less messy. We don't understand leadership structure at all.
As mean as that is to say, I think a lot of people look at it like it's a democracy. Well, we all get to say every guy gets to come together and make a decision and isn't that better than an eldership? No, we don't understand leadership structure and the importance of an eldership. And yes, I realize that can come with having to say, wow, we're going to have to submit to the headship even though I don't agree with their take on it. Okay, but that's what the Bible talks about. So Jack, you got a great book coming out on this. I probably should let you do most of the talking on it because you've done a lot of thinking on this. But what are your thoughts as it goes? Do the elder cris but also maybe the pulpit crisis we're having as well?
[00:28:49] Speaker B: I think both of those things. Your point about we take every young spiritual man and say, you're going to be a preacher, so now we have preachers but not elders. But then we're starting to run out of that preacher schools. I just saw there's been two of the churches of Christ, graduate schools of theology are closing down, which not the biggest loss, they're not ones I would send people to, but there's just no interest in higher education or whatever. And so you're seeing that decline a little bit, but it's kind of the same thing you're seeing with the food crisis or the food problems. Food supply chain, all that where we went to factory farming, industrial, all this stuff where it's all done in a really big warehouse hundreds of miles away and they ship it into our Walmart rather than, hey, I've got chickens in my backyard and my neighbor grows this, that kind of thing. Well, what happens when that factory has a power outage for a couple of days? Well, eggs are $8 a dozen now. It's things like that. And you can't get eggs. The same thing. If we sent away every young person that showed any spiritual promise to a university, I'm not even going to name the universities. They're scattered all throughout the country and, oh, you got to go get your training there, they don't come back. And so you lose your homegrown talent, you lose your homegrown people that grew up and should be the future pillars of that church. You should be able to train from within. And I really think one of the best things not to get ahead of ourselves for the best case scenario, but would be to bring it closer to home, to develop our own leaders, to look internally and say, how are we going to get the guys we have into elders and even into preachers? How are we going to train preachers locally? How are we going to keep guys who know the area, know our people. Because that's one of the other things. You end up with guys that are cultural misfits. A guy from the Deep South way up north, a guy from the West Coast in the Deep South, and there's a cultural clash. Like you should be with the people. You mean like I think this is an important thing that we have gotten so wrong of. Yeah, just go somewhere, try out somewhere that they like the sermon you preach and you're going to be their preacher.
I don't think that's left us strong in the same way that man what's the term they talk about with the food supply chain of making it strong? It's sturdier. There's a term for it, I'm drawing a blank. But it's essentially like the closer your food is grown to home, the easier it is to get, the more reliable it is. The same thing with your church leadership. The closer you can grow it to home, the more you've got a pipeline to keep it coming. We haven't done that for what, 60, 70, 80 years now? Now we don't have any leaders. Look what we did.
[00:31:20] Speaker C: So in ten years we got to turn this around because worst case scenario is once again status quo.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: I think that's one of the benefits or one of the things that I think we can take positively from something like a lads to leaders. If congregations do that, know, identify as Jack is talking about who are the young men that man they come from really solid families. Maybe they show some talent or some knowledge. Whatever it is, man how can we take them and get them to be elder material in 40 years? How can we get them to I agree with the preacher point, but at the same time, how can we grow their Bible knowledge? How can we maybe get them to be preacher material? Again, a lot of this comes back to what is the plan? The plan for a lot of congregations again, to get back into the worst case scenario thing is let's give them to the youth group for their teenage years. Let's make sure they go to all the programs, let's make sure that they go to a Christian school or whatever it is. And that's not a recipe for faithfulness. But a lot of congregations think that it is a recipe for faithfulness. And so I love that point, Jack, about the kind of growing your homegrown talent there. But it starts with identifying and it starts with, again, having that plan of man, this is how we can get this young man and even young ladies on the other end, being elders, wives of being preachers, wives of being faithful, servants of the church can go both directions. And I think that can be the best use of something like aladds to leaders, is to do that to identify and to do that within your congregation.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: So the term was antifragile. That's the word I was looking for. I think this builds on our youth faithfulness point. If you look at the young people in your church and be like, these young men are going to be our preachers and elders someday, and so we've got to hang on to them. But if you're looking at them as well, at 18, we're going to ship them off and we'll see them on the holidays when they come to visit mom and dad, but that's it, which has been the status quo. You're not all that invested in keeping them faithful, which you should be still, but you don't see the tangible results of building this antifragile leadership supply chain of we're going to get our leaders from our kindergarten class and so we better start pouring into those kids. We don't think in that way. It's kind of, well, they're here for the next 13 years and then good luck. Freed and Harding and Lipscomb, they'll take care of them. How's that working out for us?
[00:33:33] Speaker C: And Will, you made a good point about lads leaders. Then we can move on. But I think people are going to listen to that and go, well, see, we're already doing it. But that's the equivalent of saying, well, my kid goes to Bible school or goes to Sunday school and therefore they're going to stay faithful.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:45] Speaker C: Once a week or once a year, maybe twice a year on lads leader stuff. That's a fantastic gauge of maybe who might be interested. This is a daily approach. This is a discipleship approach of like we have to raise them more than just send them to lads, to leaders, and more than just have them get up in front of the church every few months. See, we're including them. No, you need to be including them every single week, which is, in my opinion, a big push for small churches where they can take a leadership role. But let's move on to the next fellows. We're going to have to roll.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: We got to wrap up this I.
[00:34:13] Speaker C: Was going to say we got to wrap up the worst case. So let's go through several of these, make some points, because I do want to get to the best case here.
We've railed on this one a lot. We don't want to spend too much time. But I think one of the worst case scenarios is if we are still stuck on Doctrinal battlegrounds and no, we're not talking the ones yes, there are certain Doctrinal battlegrounds that absolutely matter. But if we are still entrenched in new heavens, new Earth battlegrounds and things like that, once again, while we're losing 80% of our youth, I think we have to get past some of those things. And even we have to get past the Bazillion articles on mechanical instruments and worship. We have to move on to the weightier matters. In my opinion, the things that people are actually leaving the church for and I don't think it's because we don't use instruments, because we don't have women in church. That's not the reason. And maybe they go to a church where that is the case and they can convince themselves that's why they left. That's not why they left. We need to make sure we're engaging on the weightier matters, in my opinion.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Well, what I would say on that and then hand it over to Jack is there are so many things in today's world that the average Christian wants to know, how do we handle this? What are the biblical answers to this? Again, transgenderism is a big one. How do we handle that?
How do we handle schools? How do we handle parenting? There's so many things that I think that our position is that the church would be better served to have the articles on. The church would be better served to have the sermons on and the classes on and to again, for the shepherds to really guide their flock, and for the church leaders, the authorities, those who have pulpits, whatever it is, to guide their flock in these very serious areas. Reproductive practices is another one like these questions that so many Christians have, questions that we've tried to do our best to answer on think deeper. And one of the things we found is Christians have these questions, and yet they're getting 40 lessons on baptism every single year. They're getting 20 lessons on instrumental worship every year, and they're getting 15 lessons on women's roles every single year. We're not trying to say that those aren't important. What we are trying to say is that there are other important things, too, that don't get discussed because we are hammering home the basics over and over and over again and so again. This is not the three of us saying baptism doesn't matter and instruments don't matter and women's roles don't matter. Of course they matter. We're going to stand on that ground as well. We got to talk about the other stuff, too. And that stuff does not get discussed in articles or in lectureships or in sermons or in all these things. These are things Christian families need to know. How do I rate my kids to be faithful? How do I home school? How do I do all these things? How do I dress? Modestly. How do I handle when my kid wants to go to the prom? Nobody talks about this stuff because we're talking about baptism and instruments over and over and over again.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: And they get 15 sermons on women's roles inside the church on Sundays, but they don't, not in the home, because we don't actually want to step on toes that way.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Of course, I think it comes down to the word doctrine, and we define doctrine as these matters of the know, what we do in the church building, how we worship elders, things like that. That's part of doctrine. But you read Timothy and titus doctrine is everything Will is talking about there of all, like how to live the Christian life, how to be a Christian man, how to be a Christian woman, how to have Christian kids, how to be a Christian employee, things like that. That's doctrine. And the conservative churches are doing what you guys are saying, well, doctrine is the mechanical instruments of worship and the five acts of worship and all that. And when you say that, then what people get is, okay, the Bible, the only thing it cares about is what happens in these doors is what happens on Sunday morning.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Nothing outside that's doctrine.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Then you get kind of the moderate churches that try and pare down doctrine to the minimal, where the other guys are trying to be maximal, but the only thing they know is doctrine is Sunday morning worship and building around that in the plan of salvation. The other ones are trying to make it to where, okay, we'll get that and kind of push that as we're not going to preach on that very much because, all right, we got that. And we're just going to kind of preach a generic, be nice, love people, love God, love others. As we've talked about it's very generic, feel good, easy to come into, and feel like you heard something. Kind of the Tim Keller winsome approach. We're not going to ruffle any cultural feathers. We're going to broad unity. We're just going to try and do something that keeps everybody happy. The more conservative, strong family people, the people that want to just do life however they want, well, they can all be together. Well, that doesn't work either. And then the progressives are like, doctrine, what's that? It's all about love. It's all about what makes people feel comfortable when they're part of us. And so in ten years, what's going to be even the point of the progressive church? You've already got pro LGBT ones, women preachers.
There's no point in them being churches of Christ in ten years. The moderate people, they can get a lot of people. They don't do anything.
And it looks like motion, it looks like activity. The seven churches critique that you have a name, that you're alive, but you're dead. I see a lot of that. On the other hand, the boy, we're dead, right? We're right on the money, on everything, but we won't touch on the things that matter. Let's get back to preaching actual doctrine that matters, actual in the home. I use the term on the 100th episode, the Theological maximalism. Here's how God invades every single aspect of your life, and you're expected to submit that to him.
I'm going to say it's the future, but it should have been the past, the present, like the whole thing. That's what we're supposed to do. And we just haven't.
[00:39:28] Speaker C: And these are important discussions. We're not saying they're not, but I do think they need to be on the back burner for now because that's not really why we're losing 80%, and that's also not what's going to take us in the future as much as we want to have these discussions. But the other thing I'll say is you challenge people on instruments and such and you go, Why don't we have instruments? Well, Ephesians 519, you kind of break apart that a little bit and talk about that. Is that the context? And is that in a worship setting and everything else, they don't know anything beyond that. So for all the preaching we do.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: We'Re not they just know the verse references.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:39:58] Speaker C: They know the verse references, but not why we don't. So even that, I would say we need to have a stronger emphasis on why. But this brings us around, fellas, unless there's anything else that we want to get into on worst case, we've kind.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Of spelled out some Positivity here.
[00:40:12] Speaker C: Yes, we've kind of spelled out a lot of the negative things of where we are. However, it's the black pill, white pill. Black is to the negative to the white pill. Do we see positives?
Yes, I think we have strong, strong potential because I think in our time where we are now, we're dealing with a more Godless generation than in ever the history of America. That is, not Ever, but specifically in American history. I think there's most Godless generation coming up, they don't know, who don't know. And you may think that's hyperbole, you.
[00:40:43] Speaker B: May think that's crazy.
[00:40:44] Speaker C: I've spoken with kids who, like, they literally said, I know more about osiris than I do about Jesus.
That's public schools for you. But as we look at the best case, we have some serious reasons for Positivity, in my opinion, but also some things that we would love to see in ten years. And so, once again, this is where we're going to do the call for comments. We want to know maybe some of your worst case, but also the best case as we get into it. So, fellas, let's jump into best case in ten years. First thing we're going to start with is Jack, what you already said, which is I think we need to localize the leader training, and that means we're going to have to have guys step up in the meantime. Who. Are willing to take an active role in leading a younger generation and in showing maybe these 30 year olds that are just their new dads, or maybe their kids are 5678 years old, but we know in a decade their kids are going to be eligible for baptism. Their kids are going to be looking to move to college in ten years, I think, or in these next ten years. What I would love to see is the men, the older men of the congregation step up and say, okay, here's how we're going to shape this man into an elder. Maybe he's not there yet.
And we're also going to have more stringent elder qualifications than okay. Are your kids faithful and have you only been married once? Yes, those are part of it. That's not all of it. We want to make sure that the.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Guy'S hoping that's a really good point.
[00:42:00] Speaker C: Yeah, we want to make sure the guy's hospitable. We want to make sure the guy knows the scriptures, that he's very well versed in the scriptures. We want to make sure he's above reproach. We go to his place of work. Do people think that he's an amazing guy or does he have some secret life? We don't know these things about people because our unity is shallow and because the only eldership things we look at is he's been married once and he's got 50% of his kids faithful. That's not the litmus test here. We need to be striving for greatness, as Will and I love to say on the gym podcast, strive for greatness. That starts with localizing the leadership training.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: Well, because we have so few elders, we just lower the bar like, well, this guy could probably qualify. We need somebody, so let's get these guys close enough. Yeah. Well, does it really mean faithful kid? I mean, like believing children?
Look where that got us.
Not good.
[00:42:53] Speaker C: Well, hey, we're starting to head toward the black.
We're trying to be positive. Best case scenario, though, I think this is possible. I genuinely think this can be done, that we can start really taking on the localized and I love the point, Jack. I just want to come back around to it because it's such a good point and I honestly have not thought of this before. So you're teaching me on this that idea of, hey, you see this five year old, you see this six year old, this ten year old. Wow, this is great.
Okay, they're going go help some church in New York. When they move to their big fancy job, we're never going to see them again.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Barely.
[00:43:24] Speaker C: Like we don't have a vested interest and we just hope that somebody else is raising their kids so that when they move to town for their job, we can then kind of get to.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Know them, which this speaks to a whole nother thing we could get into in worst case about maybe colleges should go away. But anyway, we're not going to go down that route. We're not going to go down that route.
[00:43:40] Speaker C: We need to talk three, four, five episode.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: I want to bring up something that I think is directly tied to that not on our list, but something I put down as far as best case scenario is man, I would like to see and I think this is a possibility, is that true? Godly masculinity is reclaimed and taught? Obviously that is a big point of emphasis for me and Joe with our podcasts. Obviously we've talked a lot about on this podcast as well. So all three of us have really kind know, hit this drum repeatedly. But I think finally, so many people are seeing the way the culture perverts masculinity and the way the culture, first of all, denigrates it, but then also tries to make it maybe some facade version of Andrew Tate or whatever it is. And so people are seeing the need for true masculinity. I think Christians are starting to see the need for true Godly masculinity. I don't think they're there yet. And I think that feminism's roots are ingrained so deeply in so many people, specifically Gen X, that it's going to take maybe longer than ten years, unfortunately. But as far as best case, I think that it's going in a positive direction is that young people twenty s. Thirty s I guess that'd be millennials at this point are realizing yeah, no, the masculinity version that we've been sold is a bad bill of goods and that we have to get back to teaching it. We have to get back to modeling it. And I think that's the best is that, again, hopefully it's trending in the right direction. But that leads to the eldership thing that we just talked about and the Godly men that are able to lead congregations, godly men that are able to lead pulpits and all those things. Joe, you have a thought?
[00:45:11] Speaker C: Yeah, let me say this. There are some very interesting statistics. Jack, I think you shared one of these with us the other day, some very interesting statistics that I've seen from Gen Z specifically, as much as I've made fun of Gen Z, they may be getting it right in some.
Yeah, there you go. They are rejecting more than millennials, more than their previous they'rejecting feminists, they'rejecting feminism. They'rejecting homosexuality. Actually, these are current statistics that are coming out where they're starting to question these things. And I've heard some very interesting reports. Clearly, I'm not making it a political discussion, and I'm not an alt right, nor do I think it's okay to be alt right. At the same time, you got a lot of kids in public school that are rejecting critical race theory, and they'rejecting some of those things, and they're trying to figure out what does masculinity look like. Now, it doesn't look like alt right. Where I'm not saying that's masculinity. I'm saying that's trending in a direction. I think they're swinging the pendulum back maybe a little too far, but at least they're swinging the pendulum back from feminism. And so to me, I look at that and say, in ten years, when Gen Z, if we can get a hold of this generation that doesn't they want masculinity apart from God, if we can help them understand where God rules overall and how their masculinity can fit into that and you're absolutely right. Homosexuality is wrong. Like, this isn't something that we want to embrace. They're taking it from a Godless perspective. It's the same thing. I'm starting to. See more people reject drinking alcohol from a health perspective and not from a God perspective. That's really exciting, in my opinion, because.
[00:46:41] Speaker A: It gives us a window.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: I thought we were the pro alcohol. Sorry. No. Nice, right? Just kidding. Just kidding. No. I think what you're seeing is a consolidation because Gen Z are the first people seeing the results of a feminist driven society, and it's not good, and it's not the majority of them, but there's enough of them who are coherent enough to look at and be like, wow, this is terrible. The interesting test will be when they grow up and start getting married, do the men conform because the women, the Gen Z girls are still very much on that side of things. Do the men capitulate to that because that's been our problem the whole time? Or will they say, hey, no, honey, we're not doing this. We're going to go back a more traditional biblical direction, even if they don't think it's biblical, a traditional direction. But I think we've got to bring back male only spaces that's something that just disappeared from society, coed everything, women included in everything. It's kind of funny. It's the thing where you can have women's groups, but you can't have men's groups without the women a lot of time or church men's groups that are a lot of times they approach the men like they do the women's groups. Let's talk about our feelings kind of thing, rather than, let's do something together, let's challenge each other sharpen, iron, that kind of thing. In the same way where the Boy Scouts aren't even just boys anymore. I mean, come on. And so you need that kind of thing. I want to see, and this is something I really do plan on doing when I stop writing books for, like, five minutes and catch my breath, is we've talked about our accountability group that we had among us of, like, goal setting and things like that, of pushing each other. I want to export that. I want churches. I want to be teaching guys because it's not a hard thing, it's not a challenging thing. There's a few principles you have to get right that if you don't get right, it's not going to be right. There's no coddling.
You've got to hold guys feet to the fire and say, hey, why not? What's going on here? You got this goal. You're not doing it, or you're not showing up to the meetings, man, what's going on? And be willing to kick guys out like things that we haven't been willing to do. Be willing to say, look, and as we've discussed, not making the cut.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: People want that. People desire that.
[00:48:39] Speaker B: Call them to something.
Again, I want to find a way to export that to just get guys in churches. And if you're listening, you don't need us to teach you to do it. Just start get a few guys together and say, look, let's challenge each other. Let's grow. Again, I'm sorry, the women aren't invited. They can do their own. Okay. It's kind of funny. We started our group and the wives all that's cool.
[00:49:02] Speaker C: They'll start their group.
[00:49:03] Speaker B: What did that last, like two months? And I'm glad they had each other. And there's a friendship and a connection there. It's just not the same thing. It doesn't work because of the dynamics of Masculinity and Femininity. You need those.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: They would miss their goals and be like, oh, that's okay, you'll hit them next time.
[00:49:20] Speaker B: Don't worry about it. Don't beat yourself up.
[00:49:21] Speaker C: I'd miss my goals. You guys are like, what are you doing?
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Yeah, again, yeah, but that's necessary for this training, this leadership, because again, we've said it, all of this is interconnected. You need men who are growing to be the whole point of the elder qualifications is it's the guys that everybody looks at and is like, man, that guy's taking care of business. We can trust that guy. You got to become that guy. We've got to train guys to become that guy. It's our goal, the three of us, to become that guy and be an elder someday. Because same thing with raising up kids. If there's not an intentionality, you don't get there.
[00:49:57] Speaker C: That's a great point. Um, time wise, we're going to move on, but I think we could stay on. As a matter of fact, you could almost stay on Masculinity for I don't know how many podcasts we have to.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: Will, like 48 podcasts, like 46 episodes.
[00:50:08] Speaker C: You can almost stay on it for that long.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: It's crazy.
[00:50:10] Speaker C: No and more. But check out the gym podcast if you have not. But yes, Masculinity is going to be one of the biggest things because that's where everything kind of flows from. There's a reason Adam was kind of the pinnacle, and then obviously God creates Eve for him. But Adam was supposed to be the start of everything of society, and it really breaks down to is a man being a man? Is he taking care of his family? Is he taking care of his kids, his wife, his domain, his work, his church? If we can get that right, a lot of these things are going to fall into place. But the second thing so localizing leadership training, second would be really raising up to your point will really raising up Godly men that are strong, that are in the faith, but that also are willing to just take a stand. Third thing we'd say, best case in ten years, I'd say, is invest heavily in maximalizing the Christian family.
We talk about theological minimalism and such, but we minimize so many things. And to me, we've minimized the importance of childbearing. We minimize the importance of Christian homes and Christian roles. We minimize the importance of training up children in the Lord. And I'm not even talking just training them up to be raised faithful in the church. I'm talking about raising them up to be good people, discipline structures and things like that. We have gentle parenting and all sorts of stuff we've gone off on before. I think we have to have the gospel permeate the home again and get back to there are specific ways God has us raising children, wanting us to raise the children, and no matter what book comes out that tries to teach us otherwise. God has ideas for the home, for the roles of the family, for the roles of the father, for having children, bearing a lot of children, things like that, and really starting to shift the culture in the mormons have it. Muslims have it. We're going to have a lot of kids, we're going to take over the culture. Like, why don't we have that? So I think that third thing I'd say for the ten year goal would be starting to have our generation really starting to maximalize the family anything.
[00:52:06] Speaker B: Well, so I wrote recently on the boomer millennial kind of war, and I feel like millennials need to have pity on the boomers, and the boomers need to acknowledge the same thing. We all got cheated, man. The boomers were the first generation that were cut off from traditional knowledge of how to raise a family, how to take care of husband, wife, kids, all that stuff. They were the one that was told, no, just have a couple of kids. They're the ones that were told, money, money. They were the ones that sold this fake american dream, this kind of new money focused american dream, and they were cut off from all kinds of traditional wisdom, and that's really unfortunate that it happened to them. And I think millennials hold a lot of stuff against boomers that look at these things that you left us with. It's like, well, they were kind of spiritually orphaned as well, and so we need to have that pity towards them. What the boomers have to realize is we were spiritually orphaned, and man, we had to swim these waters to acknowledge it, right? Yeah, we did the best we could, but man, we were left to sink or swim on our own, and we made some mistakes. The problem we run into is millennials are too hostile towards the boomers and want to just kick them out of the way and take everything over. And the boomers won't acknowledge the mistakes. We might have mentioned before on the podcast. It's come up in our own conversations. One of our speaking engagements, a lady got mad at joe talking about youth faithfulness, and she said, well, we did everything like our kids left the church, and we did everything right.
This is the attitude you run into a lot of times from older people. Is it's all the younger generation's fault? It's this narcissistic younger, you know, who raised the narcissistic younger generation own something.
And again, we are giving you the past to say we did the best we could. We got dealt a really raw hand where we didn't have help, we didn't have guidance. We were told to go find it in books and TV shows and radios and doctors and Dr. Spock and all these experts that just totally ruined everything.
So yeah, we made some mistakes through some of our fault, some of it not. It's the inability to acknowledge the mistakes. I think more than anything with everything we're talking about is if we're going to get things better, that whole first step is admitting there's a problem. If things are going to get better in the next ten years, we have to stop and go, we've done a lot of things wrong to this point. We have done awful at raising kids to be faithful. We've done awful with the public school thing. We've done awful at training church leaders. We've done awful at all these things. But when you do that people get so defensive of we did things right. We didn't make any mistakes. Like well then how did we get here? Can we just admit that this was not good and we can maybe change course.
[00:54:46] Speaker A: It takes a level of humility. It takes a level of self awareness. It takes a level of again, just not being insecure in the fact that, yeah, I think that's the problem is so many people they don't want to acknowledge the mistake because it does require a level of, yeah, I'm the one that messed it up. Yeah, I as a parent made that decision. That was the wrong as maybe as an elder made that decision that was the wrong decision and the humility that that requires is something jack, this is such an excellent point as we ready to wrap up here is that the best case scenario is that we do wake up to that. The best case scenario is that we do start admitting, yeah, there was a problem, you know, we are going in the wrong direction. Yes, maybe these things that are tried and true for decades in the church youth groups and all these things that we could talk about for a while, sure, but all these things that are quote unquote, tried and true, well they're not true. Maybe they're tried, but they're not true. They're not working. And I think that is a big step that we have to acknowledge but takes humility I guess is my overall point there that a lot of people just I guess they don't have joe, anything to add to that before we get to this last point.
[00:55:51] Speaker C: Poor Gen X. Forgotten again. In there. But what I was going to say is last thing I'll mention on the family and on all of this generations, parents, please work on, understand, read about, discuss how to basically create appropriate and positive secure attachment in your kids. And that sounds like kind of an off the wall psychology thing to bring in at this point of the discussion. The reason why people grow up to marry the wrong person, the reason why they fail to take a leadership role in their home is because they're afraid of being left. The reason why they want to be part of the in crowd and why they can't stand away from the public school and everything else, because they don't want to be seen as different. That all starts with attachment as parents. And so when you're not there for your kids, when you are too busy looking at your phone, when you're too busy not really investing in the home and investing in your kids, this is what causes them to grow up and marry wrong, which will end up hurting your family for 500 years all the way down the generational line. If we want to create multigenerational faithfulness, it's going to start within the next ten years. You checking into your family and putting them as top priority and creating that secure attachment for them so they don't go marry the wrong person and that they can stand up against some of the things of the world and such. So I just want to throw that in there as well. That I'd love to see that change in ten years is that parents start looking at this as like, we have to do better with our kids and get to the point where we are still invested. Even after 18, after they leave the home, they're still my kids. I'm still invested. So sorry, that's the last thing I'll say.
[00:57:23] Speaker B: I had one more point on thinking outside the building. We don't have time for it. I wrote a whole book on it. It's on sale, so check that out. Church reset onpress.org. But I'll say real quick, this is.
[00:57:34] Speaker A: Something I think that a lot of congregations are already starting to do a good job of. As far as best case scenario goes, I think there is a shift that is happening as far as congregations thinking. Again, to Jack's point that he wrote about in the book, church should be more, there should be a little bit more here. We should not just be content to just show up to worship and that's it. I think that was a big thing 1015 years ago. It's a big thing. Don't get me wrong, obviously the live stream COVID thing didn't really help, but I do think people are at least acknowledging it and there's a positive trend in the right direction.
[00:58:02] Speaker B: So I would just say that mentality is the more church family dinners around a kitchen table that happen in the next ten years, the better all of this becomes. It trickles down to everything. We've got a few other things that I'm going to save to the deep end that I like quick hits that I want to talk about, about the future of church size, the future future of youth groups, the future of lectureships.
[00:58:23] Speaker A: Jack's got a whole nother episode lined.
[00:58:25] Speaker B: Up that's right in the deep end.
We'll get into that. We'll get them quick. Three minutes apiece. And so Focus Plus is where that will happen. Focuspress.org plus again, we're running out of time on this one. We should have made this like a series or something. I don't know. Series don't do that well. But there's so much on the bone here. We'll revisit a lot of these topics down the road. If you've got things that you think would be worst case, best case. In fact, come up with one of each. Worst case, best case. If you want to leave a comment on YouTube, the Facebook page, Focus Plus, wherever it may be, I'd like to hear, what do you think is a positive change the church can make? What do you think is one that needs to change a wrong direction kind of thing. And so very fun thought experiment. I appreciate these guys kind of entertaining the idea. Did you have something to add, Joe?
[00:59:14] Speaker C: I was just going to know. I started with the Godless, and I didn't really make a point about that. Just with the godless society. The church is needed more than ever. That's really what it comes down to.
[00:59:22] Speaker B: It.
[00:59:22] Speaker C: Yeah, the church has always been needed, but it's needed more than ever in the history of America where you're going to have people that don't know God. What an exciting opportunity for the church to step up. In ten years, we could be baptizing people in droves who never heard of Jesus Christ christ who don't know anything about him. Maybe they've heard the culture, but man, I mean, that's an exciting opportunity that in ten years, I think the church could be in a much better and healthier state if we're just willing to embrace, we provide something that nobody else has and that they desperately need. And honestly, I think that they're going to want. I think that's going to be it's going to make a huge shift and change for these people's lives more than we've ever seen before. So I'm excited personally about the potential for the church.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: Great point. Good perspective. All right, we're going to get out of here. Drop us that five star review. We haven't made a plea for those in a while, and we've got some negative rolling in. So help us out with some positive reviews on your podcast app and we'll talk to you guys on the deep end or next Monday our.
