CNLP 781 | John Mark Comer Goes to the Desert, Clarifies Where He Stands, and Deep Dives on a Major Challenge for Modern Discipleship

The art of leadership network. And I think some people think, "Oh, he's drifting leftward." Like he's getting sucked into and it could not be further from the truth. Like I am deeply rooted in the orthodox teachings of the church and deeply rooted in Scripture. I have been drifting though I realize and it's drifting backward. I've not been drifting to the right of the left. I've been drifting back into church history. Welcome to the Kerry Newhawk Leadership Podcast. I hope our time together today helps you thrive in life and leadership today. I am with John Mark Homer. A lot of you know who he is. He's the founder and the primary teacher of practicing the way. New York Times bestselling author, what do we talk about? Well, we talk about him heading into the desert. Okay, 21 days and what it did to him or basically what it undid in him. What that means for your life, we also kind of set the record straight. Some people are like, "Yeah, where are you drifting? You know, to the left to the right." He's going to set the record straight on this one. And we also have conversations about quiet and noise and just how important it is to be still and know that God has got it. I know that sounds like a Christian tourism. Trust me when you're done with our conversation today, you'll realize it won't be. So now without further ado, my conversation in his home just outside of Malibu California, my conversation with John Mark Homer. John Mark, welcome back. Really great to be with you. Thanks for opening up your home, having a conversation. I just say, "Welcome back. I've been here for a while now." Yeah, that's right. You've been here for a while and it's our second time here at your place. You've been thinking a lot about noise. Yes. And we prayed before we started this conversation. We had a moment in silence. You're right. I mean, I had a peek at your project. I'm in LA. It is a noisy city. We live in a noisy world. What are you thinking about lately when it comes to noise distraction? Yeah. Well, there are multiple types of noise. One is the kind of informational noise of the information age and the digital world. That's just this sonic assault in our front right pocket everywhere we go. But then there's just like the auditory noise noise, you know, not the metaphoric, the literal. And LA is one of the loudest cities in the world, but most cities are really loud. And I've just been tracking a lot with the noise pollution research coming out of science and is a growing body of scientists that are really starting to sound the alarm. And I think the thought is that in the same way we look back now at cigarettes or lead paint or reoccurry or asbestos, we will one day look back at helicopters overhead and freeways because of just the devastating impact it has on the body and the mind. And so if you think about it, I'm not a scientist, but if you think about it at just like a pretty basic level, our bodies were created and evolved or whatever for quiet or sound escapes. So your body essentially, this is how I understand the science, it interprets any sound over a certain decibel range as a threat. So if you're out in nature, like I started backpacking recently and I just love it. You're out in the Sierra Nevada's or whatever in the eastern Sierra Nevada's and you're in nature, I went this summer, we saw one person in four days. If you're out there, if you hear something really loud, the odds of it being dangerous are extremely high. Right. It is a predator or it's an avalanche or it's a rock slide or in other parts of the country, it's a hurricane or a tornado or a tsunami wave. There are very few things in nature that are loud and safe. So when you're driving down the four or five freeway in Los Angeles, your left brain may know I'm just driving down the freeway and it's noisy and the subplane overhead and a garbage truck next to me, but your body is just hearing danger, danger, danger. And so it puts your body into fight or flight just being exposed to a certain decibel range, which by the way is well over the decibel range of most modern church services. And so like there's this physical element in noise that has profound implications on our discipleship to Jesus because any disciple of Jesus is going to be thinking really carefully about anxiety because once we trigger our bodies kind of autotomic fighter flight system, we have then just made loving whoever is in front of us next to impossible because you're going to go into fight or flight or free. You're not going to go into self-sacrificial love. So Christ is the Prince of Peace and it that's not just like another nice Christian virtue. It's a prerequisite virtue to become a person of love. The most loving people you know tend to be the most peaceful, you know, and highly anxious people tend to misbehave relationally everywhere they go. And I say that with no judgment. I say that as the highly anxious person. Who's doing what I'm saying. So I just think the noise of the world and we're not even talking about op-eds and political polarization and social media and the incest and conspiracy theories and the noise of our devices. Just the noise of the world. I think has profound implications that I think Christians and churches need to really think about. You did a retreat. I don't know how long ago but was it the last year or so? You're referring to the 21 day. Yeah, that was right. That was in 2021. Oh, it was. It was not when I stepped down from Bridgetown. I had a six month sabbatical. I'd wanted to do it for a long time but it's three weeks long. And I was like, how do I pull that off in my, like give all of my vacation? So it was the first time I had I had time and I did it then. So lots of people do retreats, right? But this was, do you want to take us back into what that was like because it was excruciating because of the fact I guess that there was absolutely nothing to do other than of an hour with Gandalf. Yeah. In the morning. Do you want to describe that a little bit? Sure. It was. It's a beautiful paradigm. This program is five decades old, I think. The guy who runs it now is he looks eerily like Gandalf and he is like a doctor of the soul kind of guy. He's older and he went through the program as a PhD student out of fuller back in forever ago. And so when I had done it, he'd run. I think that was his 44th year or something. Program has no name, no website. I can't tell you where to go. It's all word of mouth. You can't Google it. And it's essentially an attempt to recreate he would say what happened to Jesus in the desert or Elijah in the desert or Moses in the desert. So it's 21 days is up in the Pacific Northwest. You're in this tiny little cabin on kind of an ocean sound in a like very rural area right on the water, but it's like I went I didn't winter, which was a terrible idea. It was like over the top depressing and did it rain every day? It was literally 21 days in a row. I did get into cold plunging. That was fun. It was my first time. I just went into the ocean every day, but it was miserable. And the idea is basically for three weeks, it's the strict rule. So you turn in all of your devices like absolutely nothing. No phone, no laptop, no books are allowed. It was the part that got me. You can't even read because I'm like, great. Even the Bible like the Bible was quote aloud. That was the word he used, but with a strong warning. And he said, only if you do not use it as a distraction from God. This is not what I'm used to. And no alcohol, no more than one cup of coffee a day, no exercise. So you were allowed to go for a walk that can rural area would go in a long walk every day, but you're not allowed to push up. No, no, you can't go running. Nothing to quote discharge anxiety from everybody. You want you to feel like all of the bad stuff. And then you're one, you pack in all of your own groceries and you're one, you do all your own cooking, your one point of contact with the outside world is five mornings a week, Monday through Friday at 5.50 a.m. and I'll say, why so early? And he said, because your mind is more open to its unconscious. And you do an hour and a half of depth therapy, which is essentially like normal therapy, but without the happy feelings. And just leave you depressed. In his modality, you kind of start with your family of origin and you, you know, day one was like, let's bring dad into the room. And I mean, it was the most like out there stuff I've ever done. And it was a mix of kind of spiritual direction and clinical psychology. And you kind of start with your upbringing and you work your way in concentric circles over a couple of weeks up to the present day. And what happens when, because I looked at some writing you've done on this and you said it was, it was extremely difficult to have nothing. I mean, you wrote ruthless elimination of hurry. Yeah. And literally like you still, you, you imagine you played by a version of those rules, right? like when we message I really get anything from you in the morning. It's like cell phones away. Lots of tops away. You're in this beautiful, yeah. I live in a rural area. I'm a rural area now. You do. Yeah. At the top of mountain. Yes. And, you know, it's a pretty simple aesthetic. There's not a lot of distractions. I don't see a TV in this house. You know, yeah. I honestly, I thought I would crush it. Like this is not like, you don't get a grade at the end. Yeah. If anybody's, if I do, I know it. It'll be you. This was a few years ago. Like I'd been teaching on this virtual discipline of solitude and silence for years. I've been practicing contemplative prayer. I'm an introvert. I'm, you know, fairly let-i in my approach to technology. I thought, man, this is just going to be great. I'll get like 21 days phone free. It'll reset my neurobiology. I was so burned out from, you know, just shy of 20 years at Bridgestown Church. And it was a wonderful experience. But I was, but you're tired, man. I was a little old. You do 20 years anywhere. I was a level of tired. That, you know, the past or all thing I would say to pastures is it's not the years. It's the mileage. You know, and it's like, I was in my early 40s, but I felt like a old man. I was just bone deep tired. And, you know, what happens? But this was just a whole other level. So I thought I would do a really good job. I thought it would be a meaningful time. It was one of the top two or three most difficult moments of my entire life. It was brutal. And not in a way that like I'm uncomfortable to talk about. But, you know, it's amazing. What happens when you stop, when you get away from the noise, when you follow Jesus into the quiet, a lot of different things happen. And you're not in control, really, which is part of the gift and the challenge of that space, the desert. But the things that you have been running away from all ketchup to you. So what like pastures don't realize when they look forward to sabbatical and they think it's just going to be like a long vacation. I'm like, well, so these are all your suppressed thoughts, all your suppressed emotions. And you've got no escape. Like there's no distraction. Nothing to mediate you from your pain. And I just realize how much of my life is like pain, avoidance. And I'm not even some like any of Graham seven, but just how I've developed even in solitude, like I've done a bunch of research since then writing a book on the quiet. And, you know, when social scientists research solitude, they have, and it's a fact on the human brain and body, they have to distinguish between solitude and aloneness because you can be alone, but not meet the criteria for solitude. For example, I can be sitting in this room. Can't see this on this podcast. It's a beautiful view of the mountains. It is. I can be totally alone in this room. And I can be texting or writing a book or reading a book or reading the news or whatever I want to do, folding laundry, cooking dinner. I'm alone, but I'm not in solitude. I'm still distracting myself. It might not be through social media. It might be through making sourdough bread or reading Wendell Berry, but I'm still distracting myself or reading the Bible, but I'm still distracting myself at some level. And, you know, in true solitude, one interesting piece of research I found, because a lot of people will write me off as well, you're an introvert. So that's the thing for you. And one fascinating thing I found is when you distinguish between solitude and aloneness, introverts have no higher enjoyment of a preference for solitude than extroverts. Interesting. It's an equal plane field. And I realize that the presence of people then that sort of is the difference? No, the presence that difference between solitude and aloneness is the absence of distraction. So a newport actually, Cal newport, in a secular book, his book on digital minimalism has one of the best definitions I've found of solitude I used it in my book, but he defines solitude as the absence of any other inputs. Just in his mind, it's not working from a Christian spirituality, but I think he may be a Christian, but it's just you go into solitude and there's no other book. There's no other minds there. It's just your mind is insolitude. So I think from a Christian discipline perspective, it would be you're there with Christ in his mind and the Holy Spirit in your mind and imagination and your own heart and what's coming, but no other. So what I realized was for years, I'd been quote, practicing silence and solitude and stillness, but really it was more like time for an introverted pastor to go work. It was like, I would go through with a bag of props. I would come into solitude with like a bag of good books. I would read like two books a day. And I would come with like my calendar to plan. I bring my laptop and I know I find I'd be like very happy to go offline. Like again, I'm great with that, but I would like work and I would write and I would calendar plan and I would make decisions. And I bring a bottle of red wine when I'm in the you know, and I realize that's not solitude. That's like a loan time for an introvert to go do creative work. That's deep work. That's really beautiful, but that's not true solitude, which is literally, I would never just like go to a quiet place and just sit there before God and let whatever comes up come up. I mean, that's terrifying. And so I did that for the first time. It's profoundly changed how I try to practice as much as I can solitude. And it's amazing how it has profoundly changed. I now go in with no books as a place in Big Sur. I go to multiple times a year. I try to go in with no books, just literally my Bible, my journal and my heart. And just okay, God, what do you have? But yeah, so much. I was just I was right for it too, you know, just right kind of that seam between the long run of life. There's a lot that caught up to me. This episode is brought to you by Studio C. So one of the biggest questions pastors are asking right now is how do we support real spiritual formation without rushing people without losing the personal touch, even as our church grows? 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So if you're enjoying this episode, I think you're going to love my annual church trends report. For this year, I've identified seven disruptive trends that are shaping the future of the church. So when you dig into the report, you're going to see Gen Z surprising surge and church attendance will quantify it. That's something a lot of us didn't expect, including me. There's a new boldness and evangelism that's starting to emerge that you probably need to pay attention to. Algorithms are quietly taking control of discipleship. And guess what? As a church leader, you're paying the price and maybe most concerning of all, most churches still aren't ready for the AI revolution and that's already reshaping leadership ministry in the world. So those are a few of the trends that I am unpacking this year. The trends are backed by data, much of which is collected by Barna. And I share my thoughts on why it's important for you and what you can do about it. So if you want access to the report, head on over to 2026 church trends.com for free access or simply click the link in the description of this episode. I'll send you a copy right away and you'll be in the loop for everything 2026 church trends related. Again, it's all free by clicking the link of this description or by visiting 2026churchtrends.com. You, you know, I'm wondering what happened to the passage of time. Sometimes we're looking at it's like, oh, I can't believe it's four o'clock, right? How did that happen? What happened to whatever you can imagine? It was even worse. Just like, I just remember like, you know, you get done, the therapy is like 730 in the morning. It's still pitch black outside because it was the winter. And then, you know, I go, he would give me like a little exercise to do every day. Sometimes like kind of zany stuff. And then you journal every day. And then it's like, okay, it's like 11 in the morning. And then I'd go for a long walk. And then I'd like cook myself some lunch, clean it up extra good. And then it's like, one, and you're like, what do I do? You know, day after days, it was, I can laugh about it now, but it was excruciating. What makes it hard? When you're, I don't, I doubt that there's anybody watching this podcast who has had that experience where for 21 days, there's literally nothing to do and no inputs, no distractions. So what happens? It's almost like a detox, right? Except you're not sharing yourself for minutes. Well, I guess you are carrying yourself from an addiction or something. I'm sure there is absolutely just at a neuro-physiological level. There is like a stimulation detox that you have to go through. And the withdrawal is painful. And I do think, now with that on my radar, life doesn't always cooperate. But when I am moving into a longer time of solitude, not just my morning time or Sabbath time, but a retreat, which I try to do as often as I can. It's difficult in my stage of life, but I try to do it as often as I can. I do try to ramp down my use of technology and even the stimulation of meetings and conversations with lovely thought partners like you, because Cassie and the desert father in the fourth century essentially said how you are outside of prayer is how you are inside of prayer. So you can't just be on your phone constantly and taking 25 meetings a day and working in sane hours and pushing your nervous system to the limit. And then all of a sudden, wake up and before you go to work today have 20 minutes of blissful, contemplative prayer or go on retreat and just all of a sudden be caught up in union with the Trinity. I mean, never say never, can't just a strong word, but your body doesn't work that way. And so I think that's part of the gift of disciplines of abstinence, whether that's Sabbath or solitude is they often expose our level of addiction. So some of it was just that, but I think the harder thing, particularly as a leader and as a pastor, was there was just nothing to mediate my awareness of my shadow and of all, for example, I had to face how much of my motivational structure as a pastor was deeply compromised for the first half of life. And again, I had this weird, I've kind of started everything a bit too early and so I'd done a lot by my early 40s. And so it was a real gift where I had the gift of the sabbatical but I wasn't about to retire. So funny when I was stepping down from Bridgetown, all these people, they had just no category for it. Yeah, yeah. You know, so many of my age, 40, 41, I wasn't like leaving to go to another church. I was like, you know, and so many people said to me, congratulations on your retirement. Part of the fire movements. Good for you. Many people said that and I was like, listen, the books have done pretty well, but not bad. I thought, what do you think? I've just got to sell a lot of books, chill and garden. Yeah, you can only read so much Wendell Berry, you know? And so it was tricky, but I had this rare gift where God willing, and we do not know the future and I could drop dead tomorrow, but I will God willing have several more decades of generative work in front of me. So I had this chance to really look back and I very intentionally applied a more critical lens for the first kind of half of my life in ministry, not so much out of like a self-flagulation, but more out of like, hey, what are my regrets? Like I asked that question a lot. What are my regrets? And it wasn't like a self-hate thing. It was, hey, I hopefully have another 20, 30 years ahead of me. I don't want to just keep repeating the same mistakes. And I think looking carefully and analytically at my life with no emotional distractions, nothing to mediate me from my true broken self and without even the comfort of community, it was, so I'll tell you the story. I asked Gandalf, the clinical psychologist writing this program, like why no books? I was very perplexed by that because books play a formative role in my life since a young age. Like I love the, some writers just write, 'cause there's a book contract where like I am obsessed, I read constantly all different genres. I love to go to bookstores. I love to smell of a book. I want to read 90% of every book I ever see. And I just, I love the written word. I love it. And books have played a key role in my formation, intellectually, spiritually imprinted so deeply in my mind. It's been a chance to be mentored by people that I never could have gotten access to. And so I said, like, why no books? And he said this experience was designed to recreate the experience of Jesus in the desert, Moses in the desert, Elijah in the desert, all the great ones he said went into the desert. And then he said this line that has never left me. He said, "The desert teaches by taking away." And I realized my paradigm, in particular from an evangelical background, for learning was all learning through addition. So it was I'm gonna listen to this podcast, where he has an interview, "I'm gonna read this book. I'm gonna listen to this sermon. I'm gonna read scripture. I'm gonna study the Bible. I'm going to Google this thing. I'm gonna research this thing. It was all learning by addition. And there's very much a good and vital place for learning by addition. But what the desert or solitude and silence, if you wanna call it that, it teaches by subtraction, by pruning you and purging you and stripping away all of your props to where it's like, all of the lights go on. And it's like you went from candlelit mood on the onsen to like fluorescent lighting in the bright of day. And you're like, holy crap. I'm not as attractive as I want to believe. I was, you know? And that is a profound gift. You meet God's love at the same place. You meet your vulnerability. - You mentioned regrets. - What were some regrets you identified? - Man, probably just the pedestrian kind, the Elizabeth Kubler Ross number one regret of the dine, as I wish I had not worked so hard. I wish I had not worked so hard. How did you get that moment of clarity? Because I've heard that. And I'm like looking back on it. Yeah, in my 30s, I wish I hadn't worked as hard. But I feel like I've got a decent balance now. And I don't know if I'm 80 who know so many years you have, and I'm looking back on my life, maybe I'll wish I hadn't worked as hard. But what made you say that? - I think the number one thing would be realizing the wounding it caused to my family. So I don't have quite the right or to rephrase. I don't think I have the optimal personality to be the lead pastor of a Protestant type of large church. I'm a little bit too introverted or a lot too introverted. And I don't have the capacity for activity that I think is required or at least very helpful. And the challenge I face is I have probably with no false modesty. I probably have a much higher than average capacity to get crap done. Like I'm a task oriented personality. I can get a lot. - So you can create it. - I can't crank. I'm a hard worker. But I actually don't, probably have a lower than average capacity emotionally. So what I get is I have this glass ceiling and it's like every single day. It is a temptation to blow through this glass ceiling. And the glass ceiling is basically, this is what I can do and get off work and be a pleasant dad and husband. And this is what I can get done. And there's a huge gap. And the pastoral role, and it's a bit better now, but still start up leadership, self-employed, like those have their own similar challenges as you would know. It's really hard for personalities. Like I think a lot of people that are drawn to pastoral work, either they're drawn to people and they may have a propensity for people pleasing, especially like traditional pastor personalities. Or people like me, teacher types, they might have like a really a draw toward amoralism, even in a healthy version of moralism. Like I'm deeply drawn to virtue and goodness. And I don't think that's all bad. There's certainly a shout out to it. But the challenge is like you have demands coming at your time that are a black hole. You could never ever possibly satiate all of the demands. And if your pension, your weak point is like you want, you'll sacrifice yourself to please people and make people happy with you. Or in my case, you'll sacrifice yourself to try to be the good person or the good pastor. Or you know, 'cause everything's moralized when you're a pastor. Somebody says, "Hey, can we have coffee this week?" And you have no time to have coffee this week. If you say no, it's not like, oh, he said no. It's like he's a bad pastor and therefore a bad Christian. And like imagine that if you're just an introvert and nobody else sees your life, they just see their angle on your life. And. And it is so hard to resist that. And so, you know, you say yes too much. And I think part of the challenge of that retreat for me was when you're in your 20s and your 30s, you can blame the overwork and the exhaustion on the church. This is a black hole of need. This doesn't go away. It's insatiable. We don't have enough staff. We just need to get to the next season. We need to get through this campaign. We are dealing with trauma right now. And then you get into your 40s and you're like, wait, no, this just is church. Like Skazerra said that to me at one point. He's like, it's not that pastor's deal with crisis is that the job is to deal with crisis. It's just like crisis after crisis after crisis after crisis. That's the job. And I don't know if I said this to you before. I remember I was reading. This is not a political statement at all. I read wildly. I read tons of stuff. I disagree with it. But I was reading Obama's memoir. So I love his mind. It was so well written. And he had this two bit, like two page bit on how 90% of the presidency is two things. One, it is dealing with whatever crisis came up that week. And two, it's dealing with problems that you inherited from your predecessor. And he said, only if you execute on the 90% extremely well, do you get to spend 10% of your time doing what you actually got into politics and doing the first place? And I remember reading that thinking holy God, it's like what it's like to be a local church pastor. Like 90% of your job is getting through Sunday and dealing with crises. And only if you can do those two things and only extremely well, do you even get the 10% of time to do what you actually, this is what I'm called the do. Care about which for me would be formation and community. And I was like, oh my goodness. And so I think getting into my 40s, I was faced like I had no more good excuses for why I was overworking. And I had no one to blame anymore. And I had to realize, okay, there's an internal thing in me. There's a drive. A coach said to me recently, very lovingly, he said, you are addicted to opportunity. And it was just like right there. And another mentor kind of person said to me recently, hey, if you do 10% of your work, 10% of the things that are in your heart, that'd be a really good life. And he meant it as an encouragement. And I was like, what? I have so many great ideas. 10%. That would be a failure of a life. And he said, no, if you do 10% of your good ideas, that would be a great. I don't even know how to think that way. I'm going to do one of these 10 things that I'm passionate about. And so I just think, yeah, it was just, I had to face reality, Carrie, and how much of my drivenness, the great challenge. I think there are a few jobs like pastoral life or Christian leadership where it is easier and more dangerous to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons. Because you can spiritualize it in the same way that, you know, the world will reward workaholism, even if it's full on pathological coping. That will reward. Like certain addictions will put you on the street in downtown LA and other addictions will put you in a house in Malibu. But they're going to have the same effect on your relationship with your kids. And the world will reward you for one and punish you for the other. And the church in a weird way will reward you for addiction to work. Your dysfunction. Addiction to people pleasing, addiction to goodness, addiction to, you know, X, Y, and Z. And I just think I had to face that and it was really hard and continues. I wish I could say like, man, and that was it. And now I'm done. I never overworked. Not true. Not true. But I'm doing better. And I think that's the, my, I have this extraordinary therapist. And he said to me recently, I never used the word healed because it makes it sound like a one and done point in the journey. And he said, I like to talk about healing. So from that paradigm, I'm not healed, but I'm healing. And I just think we don't think that way enough, you know, how do I make 10% progress and compound interest but applied to the formation of the soul? How do I become the kind of person who 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now is quieter and more peaceful and still generative and hardworking and servant-hearted but unhurried. And again, the language of Cesarro is embracing the gift of limits. But we just, I just rebel against limits or not. They're like, you know, yeah, and they are a gift. But I don't feel that way. 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So if you want easy data back ways to know what fair pay looks like for your church team or even yourself had to church salary.com/carry and start for free today. That's church salary.com/carry that's C-A-R-E-Y. I don't know what else you learned about yourself and about spiritual formation during those 21 days. You've done some writing about spiritual and I said to you, you know, if this comes out as a book, your current projects, it's not supposed to be about prayer. But I found it really helpful about prayer because I've come 10 years post lead pastor to think, yeah, it's just not my gift. I pray every day. I have ADHD. I'm very distracted. I have all these competing thoughts and I'll interrupt my prayer time and you go there, man. And you go there and you're like, no, this is actually prayer. But I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what you've learned about prayer, about spiritual warfare, how it operates and what happens when you really get quiet because I love quiet. I think I crave solitude. I think I've had it in moments. But then my monkey mind, as they say, gets moving and I feed up bananas and it gets louder. Yes. Yeah. I think we all believe the lie that it's just my brain that is a chaotic mess. Mine's a chaotic mess. And I think, you know, monkey mind comes from Zen Buddhism and you don't have to embrace Buddhism. But now, now and did a similar plan. Well, yeah, now and we're from Buddhist practice and meditation and arguably Buddhism was deeply shaped by Eastern Christians by the message. Yeah, you mentioned that. 9th and 10th Christian. Yeah. I mean, that's why there's different branches of Buddhism and a lot of the more spiritual Buddhism of today is was a response to or even a rejection of the Christian gospel. So again, I'm not a historian, but now and went deeper into that than I have. But again, you don't have to embrace Buddhism to appreciate the metaphor of, you know, when you go into prayer, you know, now and would say, it's like my brain is like monkeys in a banana tree. And now and just have this extraordinary ability to name the felt experience of the spiritual life. And so he would talk about going into prayer. He's like, I'm going there to encounter the Trinity and all of a sudden, I wake up and I realize I've just been giving a long hostile speech to my enemy or imagining myself like on a stage, winning awards and getting a class. This is prayer for Henry now. I think the great spiritual master prayer was sitting there imagining himself getting an award or lecturing some person and his enemies just getting revenge, or really getting revenge. This is what I should have said. Oh my gosh. And you know, what's so helpful is reading like so there's lots of chatter and recent years about how we should read outside of the majority culture and read minority voices and female voices often and people from different perspectives. And I agree. One of the things that is sad to me is historical voices are never on that list. And first off, when you read ancient Christians, pretty much none of them are white. And there is certainly not out of our stream of the church. And it is so jarring. So I have spent, I think some people really misunderstand my journey the last couple of years because they try to map it onto the left right of America. Oh, it's great. What has your journey been? Well, I think right now we're seeing this political polarization thing. Right. And so you see a lot of people drifting either to the right or the left into cultural compromise. The middle is disappearing. And so I think some people, so I've spent my whole life, personal and pastoral in super secular, progressive cultural context. So gripping Silicon Valley, moved to Urban Portland and now we've come to the LA area. So all I've ever known is secular, post-Christian, overwhelmingly progressive. And I am not any of those things, but that's the cultural context. I read Love No Lies. Yeah, I read that. In every room I enter, I am the most conservative person I know, right? In every room. But that's my missionary call. And so when I preach, when I teach, I'm attempting to contextualize to that, not in an adoption way and often in a critique way, but I want to interact with it, right? So I think the last couple of years, moving out of the pastoral rule of Bridgetown, serving a wider swath of the church, I've just spent my whole life getting eviscerated by progressives by for being an Orthodox Christian. And so now the critique has come from Christian conservatives. And it's just been so bewildering to me. I'm like, again, I'm the most conservative person I know. And I think some of it is, there's always legitimate critique. Some of that I just think is misunderstanding. People see somebody from California, who talks like a Californian, who's contextualizing, who has a contemplative heart. And we're just so used to be-- Quotes, not even jealous. Quotes. Oh, very intentionally. Absolutely. And I will take that one for the team for deep, convictional reasons. But quotes, while they cross the spectrum, and though I have a rubric for who I do and do not quote. And I think some people think, oh, he's drifting leftward, like he's getting sucked into. And it could not be further from the truth. I have been drifting though I realized, and it's drifting backward. I spent the last-- I think I spent my 20s reading mostly unto right. My 30s mostly reading Dallas Willard. And my 40s, I've mostly been reading psychology and ancient Christians. Church fathers, apostolic fathers, medieval writers, desert fathers and mothers. It has been so jarring to me at times, because men do they think differently than I do about certain things. It has enriched and opened up my faith in ways that are just-- I feel like a profound debt of gratitude. It has so many of the things that drive me baddie about the modern church. You realize are nonexistent in other eras of the church. So many things that I took for granted, even theologically, you realize, oh, wow, nobody thought this way. And it's just so helpful for me to rediscover this kind of older paradigm. So what would be so jarring? And I mean, you are quoting from the desert fathers and mothers in the early church, writers and medieval writers, which again is a shared history. Like if you go all the way back to Jesus. Yes, absolutely. This is our history. And we're still now on a rabbit's off from your question about distraction. Yeah, well, I'm good at distraction. So what would be jarring? Well, lots of things. How they view money and possessions. So I mean, we're always culturally captive at some level. And it's like, at what point do we just live like Americans? And at what point are we, you know, we're in the market, the beast, so to speak. And you know, they have a pretty radically different take on level of standard living than we would have. I'm going to guess it's simpler. Much simpler. And again, to distraction. Yeah. So, you know, there's this great book. I've not great book like you need to read it. There's a UCLA professor of medieval history wrote this great book called The Wandering Mind, Jamie Frickett, her last name. Great book. And she writes about what we can learn about dealing with distraction, the digital age from ancient monks. And she points out that the first waves of monks were obsessed with the problem of distraction. It's no iPhone, no social media. No, it's, so this is what a fourth century or like fourth century when we're starting to read them. And they are abstract. And they are obsessed with distraction because they are attempting to follow Paul's command to pray without ceasing. They are after union with God and transformation into people of love. And so everything for them is how do I keep my mind locked into prayer 24/7, right? So for example, you read the earliest monks. Like later you get narcissism comes in, you get medieval whacking us around pleasure and self hate. But the earliest monks like why are they living in poverty? And it was very simple. It was like the more stuff you have, the more distracted you. I was just thinking about this this morning, Kerry. I just bought a motorcycle. Oh, cool. And yes, so I used to ride forever ago and then had kids and with great respect to my reform brothers and sisters, I'm not a Calvinist. And I think that I probably have a say in the day I die. And I know this is theological debate about that. Some people think it's just set by heaven. I kind of think that how I live is probably going to affect what you eat and how you drive that motorcycle. I say that playfully. I know that I have deep Jesus friends that don't agree with me on this one. But and so I got rid of my bike and then my plan was to like get a bike again when my kids are old enough that I can die. And I woke up recently, we've moved to the Santa Monica Mountains, which is some of the best motorcycle riding in the country. Yeah. I was either all the kids and right where we live is literally like just dream riding. I thought I'm diable now. Like my kids are old enough. One is out of the home, the other a year away. Kids don't look a little residual income from books. I'm like, you know what? We have some life insurance. I'm like, they would be okay. So I just bought a bike. But all that to say, so excited. I've wanted a bike to get another bike for years. But man, the amount to find a bike, go in LA, drive across the city to see it, then drive again to get it, go to the bank, get stuck at the bank, get it repainted, get this part of it modified by a mechanic, pick it up, get it home, get insurance, get a cover for it, figure out now I need to help it again and gloves again and just the level. And now by the way, I have to ride it and keep it clean and keep the oil changed. And I'm like, the level of distraction. Huh? I just brought into my life. And literally I just picked it up Thursday and by the time I got home, I was like, I think I should sell this. Like everybody who's ever bought a motorcycle. But you're thinking of that early monks were so much wiser than we are. You know, the minimalist movement talks about how every single item that you bring into your home comes with a hidden tax. Cal Newport writes the same about any work project. Yeah. You think, okay, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to write a book and it's going to take this many hours. But what we don't calculate is the hidden tax of this many meetings with your publishers and marketing and podcast interviews and this and copy adding and so on and so on. People angry at you online about this and then you have to respond and then you know, there's all that there's a tax that goes into every work project and to every item that you own. So all that to say, the monks are like, they're talking about they have a whole spirituality distraction in the desert fathers. They believe that demonic beings, nonhuman entities that are at war with God have access to our mind and our imagination. And so they're pretty quick to name invasive thoughts as demonic in origin. But whether you buy their demonology or interpret it more through the lens of just like modern ADHD, evolutionary brain, Ethan Cross, if you've read his stuff on chatter or psychic entropy from Cheek sent me high, whatever, whether you want to go through the lens of evolutionary psychology or ancient Christian demonology, you kind of end up at a similar spot where with distraction, the main way you deal with distraction is you just don't give the second thought. You like move on. And so the monks are thinking about this all of the time. Because I have just learned so much from these people living a millennia and a half before Steve Jobs about first off, just how normal distraction is. And back to what you're saying, the great lie, I think people go into, I'm going to use the work contemplative and the broad, broad sense of that word, which just means a way of quietly being with God, where you are deeply attuning to the person of Christ within you and you are loving as you are loved and you are listening as you are being listened to. And these quieter ways of being with God, which are very common in church history, very common in the global church, and tragically uncommon, at least in evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has a lot of strong, a lot of virtuous, beautiful carisms, but it has some huge weaknesses. And one is it is just so profoundly noisy. It has aped the culture of noise, busyness, size, bigger is better, celebrity. rather than even, certainly rather than critique the culture, or rather than even rebel or resisting the culture. And I just think we've really missed it here. And so what happens in particular people from a more noisy church background or faith background, they attempt quieter forms of prayer or a solitude retreat. And their brain is, it's monkey brain. It's just like, they're sitting there and they're just like pissed off at some person they haven't seen in seven years. And like, this is not prayer. Sitting here, ruminating on how much this person hurt me. But it is prayer. Or I'm thinking about my to-do list or I'm trying to wrap my sermon in my mind or just this is my prayer time. This is the work. And first of it is prayer. And you know, there's a, and there's just so many different, so many different things we could say about what you do in those moments. But at nothing else, you're getting information. And you're getting information about the state of your heart. You're getting information about what the desert fathers would call you or attachments. What modern Christians would call your idols about the things that you have an inordinate emotional attachment to that you need emotionally in order to be happy and at peace that are sabotaging your peace and therefore blocking the flow of love through you. You get information about all of this stuff. And so often, you know, if you come up with a performance orientation toward prayer, like I want to be good at prayer or a, which is like good luck there, or a consumer orientation toward prayer, like I want to enjoy prayer, which is why I think with all of the spiritual disciplines, it has to come from God. I'm just offering this to you in love. And I just want to show up. Success is, you know, successful prayer means you pray. It doesn't mean that you had an emotional higher, your cod from the third heaven or you had a download of exactly how to handle the situation. That's all awesome if that stuff happens. I believe in all of that. But success is just, I sat down today and I was quiet before God and I offered myself deeply to Him and my brain, you know, Thomas Keating used to say, I don't endorse everything he said, but he said some really good things. He used to say, if you're praying and you're fine, that your mind is wandered or not if, when you find your mind is wandered, he said, if your mind is distracted 10,000 times in prayer, that's 10,000 chances to return to God. And so you just, it's just an invitation back to love. It gave me so much hope reading through that because, you know, I'm not a pastor anymore really, you know, founding pastor. What does that mean? How much? And retired pastor, retired pastor. Exactly. And you know, that is my prayer life in the morning and I pray, I can't think of a day where I didn't pray, but it is that constant distraction and in the emptiness stuff pops up and you just surrender that to God. How do you know you're making spiritual progress? And I'll give you a, give you my test like, you know, burnout, you had a hinge point at 4041 when you step back from Bridgetown. For me, it was burnout. I was 4041 when I burned out. And in my 30s, I felt I had a great prayer life. God and I were like this. My wife and I were not like this. We were not tight. And she would say she didn't see a lot of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in me. Yeah. But the church was growing like crazy, man. Like, come on. So I'm getting validated at work while it's not going well at home. Now, we still, you know, after I burned out, I recalibrated a lot of things and one of the things that never came back was that same sense of God's presence. And I thought about that a lot. And on my worst days, I think, am I still a Christian? Like, what am I getting wrong? It didn't feel like what did you say? The consumer says was that enjoyable? Did I feel? And like, no, it's not. But my wife would say, oh, man, like you've changed the fruit of the Holy Spirit is so much more evident in your life now than it was 20 years ago in our marriage now. And I'm like, a lot of that, I don't want to claim that I worked that out in prayer, but that's what often comes up in prayer. And it feels like, you know, you mentioned a motorcycle. It doesn't actually run. It just sputters. It's like, up, stalled, stalled again, stalled again, back in the shop. That's my prayer life. But you see, Tony would say she sees fruit. And he thoughts on that for people who maybe don't have that kind of rapturous, even angelical, charismatic experience in prayer. Thought one would just be full agreement. I think if there is a metric, it is as simple as do the people who know me best. See me slowly, incrementally growing in whatever new testament kind of criteria. So the top contenders would be the sermon on the mount, fruit of the spirit and Galatians. Peter chapter one, faith, hope and love. I mean, there's very Romans 13 like there's various, you know, pick one. Any of them. Yeah, yeah. Pretty well. There's enough text there that we took a few to the people who know me best. And that's, I think that's likely your most accurate metric. Now I think that comes with the caveat of the most difficult people to love while the people were closest to. So like Willard used to say, if you, if you make a decision in your heart to really intentionally began a practicing under Jesus and becoming a person of love, don't start with your family because it's too hard to love your family. He would say like start with a coworker that doesn't report to you because it's like easier to love somebody like that. He's like, it's a small wins on the board. You know, because once you get to your, you know, if you have a family, your spouse and your children, I mean, you are so deep into your shadow, your wounding, your ego, the triggers. Yeah. And that's where it matters the most. But that's where like the ripple effect of transformation is going to hit their last. Like I saw, I saw transformation in like how our staff would talk about us way before how my kids, you know, but I think what are other people who know me well saying, which is interesting because especially when you're in a wilderness time, like I have been through or naming a bit of your experience or prayer a dark night of the soul, you feel like you're regressing not progressing. That is true. And in solitude, like you're exposed to the worst part of your heart. And so you can come away just thinking, I don't even know if I'm a Christian much less old. You set aside good Christian, you know, and and my son said to me the other 20 year old son, amazing kid, we could not be more different. And so, you know, we're working really hard to try to understand each other. I love each other. I don't know about daughters with sons with same gender and different personality. You know, I have two sons, one's much more similar to me. The other is like, wow, this is tricky. And we regularly do kind of affirmation circles. And this was for a, it wasn't for birthdays for another special event. And my family was kind enough to go around the table and affirm me. And my son said, Dad, I've really seen transformation in you in a couple of these areas. And then he said the most interesting thing that like literally shocked me. He said, are all started when we left Portland, we moved down here and he went on. He's like, that's when I really saw you start to transform. Those were three of the worst years of my life. I was an emotional mess. I was living through an identity crisis, multiple things I, not at Liberty to talk about, but it was horrible. I just felt like my life was falling apart. I felt like where is God? I was in an object wilderness time. I felt deeply abandoned by God. And here's my 20 year old son, who I've had a, you know, a hill relationship with, saying, yeah, that's when I really saw you start to transform. And I was like, wait, what is my compass even pointing at? And he was not remotely saying like, you're there. You've arrived. You're the best, you know, but and it was again, it was an affirmation circle. It wasn't, it was, it was a non normal moment. But I just think that is, that's the primary metric that matters. Do people who know me best say that I'm growing, again, healing, not healed, you know, moving forward. And yes, there are breakthrough moments. And I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, I think, Charismatics and contemplatives are both wrong and both right and need to listen to each other more. And what are we moving in the right direction? So that's the main metric I would pay attention to, but that doesn't negate the metric of how am I experiencing God in prayer. And I think, yeah, that's a long conversation. There are seasons. I very much believe in like Saint John of the Cross's basic idea around dark nights of the soul. I think that's a underdeveloped spirituality in the Protestant tradition. again because the Protestant tradition has has made Bible study the focus more than prayer. I said oversimplification, but what Protestants, the role that the Bible plays to Protestants, prayer tends to play to Catholics. And that's an oversimplification, but because of that, we're often, prayer feels a little bit, in particular quiet, or more contemplative types of prayer, feels a little bit more alien. But so there's an underdeveloped theology of the Dark Knight, I think if you want to call it that, or the wilderness, or the desert, in the Protestant arm of the church. And I think there's a lot we can learn from St. John of the Cross and others that have been through long periods of dryness. But I also think there's a stage thing there, like often where we find life with God in our earlier stages and earlier years, is not the same place that we find life with God in our middle years, which is not the same place that we find life with God in our elderly years. And so I think it's not like a formula, and you hack the formula and you figure out what you like. And then you just do that for 70 years. It's like a spiritual journey. And there are, you know, you Peterson, Eugene Peterson would write about the spiritual badlands. There are spiritual badlands and you keep walking. But so I don't know, I think there's, there's longer conversations there of, how does prayer change over a lifetime? And you mentioned, you know, the three years after you stepped down from the lead pastor role being through the worst years of your life. And obviously not everything. We talked about elements of that before and we don't need to repeat that. But to the extent that you're comfortable sharing, what was so hard about that? - Mm. You know, well, one thing that was just really hard was we left Portland. And we basically had been in the same neighborhood for just 20 years. - Yeah. - Same church. We had incredible community carry. I mean, just, in court, like the church was amazing. Our home community was amazing. Our Sabbath community was amazing. Our elders were amazing. I had been, you know, kind of brought up in a more traditional mega church approach to church leadership. And I was really impacted by my favorite book on community is by Joseph Hellerman down here in Southern California. Wrote the book When the Church Was a Family. - Hmm. - Wonderful book on the New Testament doctrine of church as family and the idea of the ideal church being like what sociologist would call a fictive kinship group, like basically a large extended family that blurs the lines between biological family and friend. And it's a beautiful book. And at the end, he writes just about how they work it out with their elders. And it like broke all of the rules that I was raised in, which is more corporate, more business oriented, all the power dynamics, all the dual, every one of those relationships, a dual relationship. And, you know, just so many wonky kind of church leadership stories. And we just gave it, we just gave it a go. COVID was actually one of the best things to have, it was a horrible time in my life. It was that one of the best things that happened to our elder group. And so we started doing group spiritual direction, confession of sin. We'd do a three hour meeting every single week. And it became this rich community, where I was able to process my entire journey of do I step down from the church or not with all of our elders. I talked to so many pastors that have to hide that. - I did that too. And it is so liberating. - It is so liberating. - It's how it should be. - Yeah. - But it only works if you have incredibly emotionally mature, spiritually mature, trustworthy leaders. Talked to somebody else who said that recently and they gave him two weeks notice and he was done screw it him over. - Heard that story and I'm careful about how I share my experience now. But yeah, we would. - I think it's uncommon. I think our experience was uncommon. - I had three or four months where they had known I was thinking, okay, sometime in my mid 50s, but then it was sort of, you know, from May, we opened the question, by October, I was done. I was 100% processed with the elders. And you know what? Of all the things that I gave up when I was a lead pastor, that's the one I missed the most. - That was the hardest. That was the hardest. It was like, gosh, I missed the elders. - You know, it was interesting. These were like my closest. I had a few, you know, you stay in leadership in a church long enough inevitably all of your friends end up in some form of leadership. - Which in hindsight, speaking of regrets. I was like, ah, save a few friends who don't even go to your church like in hindsight. Go back to my 25 year old self. I had these rich partnerships, relationships, friendships. But when Tyler came in, I realized, well, get none of these leaders want me to go. So we are discerning together at my time of leading the church coming to an end. And I am called to start practicing the way. We're discerning the sense of community and sensing the leading of the spirit. But it's not like there's bad blood and conflict that people want me out. And so here comes Tyler who now in hindsight is like a better leader than I ever was. And extraordinary like A plus A plus A plus A plus. But at the time was like a little, not a risk risk, but was like young from a way smaller church, you know. And it's like, all right, how's he gonna do? And so my role then becomes to champion him. And all of a sudden that dual relationship has to be more pastor than brother. Because now I have to help these elders adhere to his leadership come to fall in love with him, which was no problem. He's just extraordinary. But that means all of my like, oh, I got my feelings hurt or I disagree with how this was done or I really don't like how you handle that situation. The first line of emotional defense that I would normally process all that stuff with, I can't process with them. Gone, gone. Like now that creates a gap between me and my closest brothers, not a gap of unhealthy gap, like a healthy gap. Yeah, man, I just need to monitor my emergency gap. I'm necessarily a gap. You need to emotionally connect to him. He needs to begin to take a role in your life that I used to play. And so for example, now when I run into one of those leaders, I can't say to them and it's going great now. So it's not a temptation now. But the first year or two, like everything in me wanted me to be like, how's it going? Are you okay? I like how's it going? Da, da, da. I cannot be that person. No, if there is stuff that they're angsty about, what I can't be the person they come to, you know, I had a leadership coach. This wonderful. And that's why the transition went well. So the record, that's why I, well, I had this amazing leadership coach. You said to me, all right, you say you now have two roles. He said, role number one is you are Tyler, it's in my replacement. You are his number one biggest fan. You champion him. You scream for him. You cheer for him. You bless, bless, bless. Role number two, if he does a horrible job, you come back in and lead a coup. (laughing) And he's like, you turn the whole church against him, you get him fired and you take back over. And he's dead. Everything in between is completely off limits to you. (laughing) Now, thankfully, again, Tyler is a better leader than I ever was in the church's thriving. And he was on the dear friends and no, no coup was required. And hopefully he will never listen and realize that in my back pocket was a possible coup. But that was really hard. So leaving that and it's kind of a long complex story, we came to where we live now on a wild step of faith. And I'm not even ready to tell that story yet 'cause it's still being written. And there's some stuff that I think is going to happen but hasn't happened yet. So pin in that one. But we came here, Lichra, I had a dream about the neighborhood or the place I lived, and I'd never heard about it. - You told me that last time, I don't think we filmed it. But like you had a picture of what, this house, this neighborhood? - Yes, I saw this house in prayer. And it sounds really weird. I kept, I was really scared to move here. You know, it's so expensive. - The house is really hard to find. - Yeah, by the way. - It's weird up this crazy road. (laughing) And as I would pray, it really anxious about moving here, are we having to find a house? It's a small area where we're dreamed about this area. It's like wild step of faith. I am not that person. I'm like control freak, planner, left brain guy. And but we felt that the spirit, there's a couple, I won't go into it. It's a long story. But there was some really prophetic stuff. And this dream, and we felt like God was saying, take a wild step of faith and move to this place that you literally had to Google. And for no reason why, I didn't come here for some job. I didn't come here because I'm trying to like, do ministry to celebrities in LA. - No. - It was literally like, I dreamed of a place I'd never heard of. It would be hard to do something from here. - Exactly. - We just put it that way. - And it's really isolated. And we had this incredible community. We literally knew nobody here. I have a sister in downtown LA, not a soul up here at the time. And left to church where you're just like, right in the thick of a community came down to nothing and had this wild dream saw in prayer, get really anxious before the move. And I kept seeing these pictures of a house in my mind and like weird details about it. Like I kept seeing this particular door knob. I saw this siding. I saw a Buddha and a Saint Francis statue. And when I say so, I mean, I would just be sitting there in prayer and quiet. And these just reoccurring thoughts. And they kept happening. I was like, this is so weird. At one point I wrote them down in a journal. I don't know, but I see this. And I see this window and I wrote them down. I have no idea what that is. We bought this house actually site unseen. I was out of the country at the time. We put an offer in on this house and I walked in for the first time a few days after it was accepted and it had every single one of those things I'd seen it break down to the doorknob, down to weird scene. And I was like, okay, God, but we had no idea. And that's not your typical pattern. No, I'm not that kind of. All right. Yeah, I'll put a pin in this. And that's so skeptic. I mean, theologically charismatic, but my brain has been so like Portlandified and like I read. Question in a billion times. I'm so skeptical by personality. So some people make, I think leaps trying to connect the dots and everything. I probably have the opposite weakness if I'm probably too skeptical of a God saturated universe. But all that to say, we didn't even know why God brought it here. We still don't know for sure, but we think we have a much better idea now. All that to say, that was so hard, losing our community, leaving our community. We've not been transient. I don't know many Americans are transient. And I don't know how people do this. I know 30 years in the same community for us. It's, I get it. I get it. Well, thanks for sharing that. No, no, it's interesting for the non-care's, Maddox and the crowd because I grew up Presbyterian in the main line. Right. And have some Calvinist in me, but it was a series of dreams that turned out, I had for years, turned out to be a confirmation I was to go in a ministry. So I'm like, are you sure? Are you sure? I walked into our seminary. I had been dreaming of that classroom for like five or six years. Never been to it. Never been to it. Crazy. Crazy how that stuff happens. Yeah, you should have just laugh off dreams. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, you just wanted to see that. Almost like we've been co-opted by secularism and a materialistic view of the universe and almost. So let's think more about distraction in the church, and distraction in our personal lives. You know, let's start in the church because you're right. Life is loud. Our services are loud. And one of the things I've been drawn to more and more, you know, when I lead a service, which is not very often these days, but when I do, when I'm preaching, I'll try to slow down a little bit more. I'll try to have some intentional silence, not like we're all sitting there for five minutes in dead silence, but like people get so uncomfortable with it. And I realized when I started in ministry, you know, in the church I grew up in, mainline church, there was always silence. And as an evangelical pastor, I tried to fill the silence. Absolutely. It's like no silence. No dead air, no dead air, no dead air, no dead. And I did that. And I'm like, no, I think we need dead air. I think people come in and, you know, that 30 seconds, 60 seconds, whatever of silence you have during prayer, after prayer in a message might be the only silence they had all week where Alexa wasn't playing something or they weren't listening to a podcast or the kids weren't screaming. What are you thinking about the state of worship, silence and where things are going? One of the church trends I wrote about this year was that I think something shifting in Sunday morning, when you think about what you can do online, what you can do in person. Yes. And the two have been changes the game. It really does. Yes. And online is about information. You can get your Sunday experience through a web browser. What are we even doing? Yeah. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think you're right. I think we are missing a moment. And I think the world is ahead of us right now on this one. And I think there are reasons for it. You know, you talk about church trends. One trend I'm following really closely is obviously all data can be disputed. But the claim is that in the last year or two, for the first time in 250 years of US history, this is an American staff, forgive me. But I think it would be somewhat true. Yeah, most of our viewers and listeners are American. Yes. But the first time in US history, the Catholic church is growing faster than the evangelical church has never happened. America has a strong anti-Catholic bias that honestly is more political in its orientation because of Europe and King James and Statism and democracy and the founding fathers. So like an anti-immigrant bias that goes back. So this is strong, strong. The last area where it's still a liability to be Catholic is in US politics. Because yeah, I was really, when JFK was elected, it was like, you know, you heard people talk about how scary it was he was a Catholic, right? So my point is there is a anti-Catholic bias in the United States. That's hundreds of years old. And that for people like me, whenever we get, I grew up like after the Second Vatican Councils of Catholicism today is so wildly different than it used to be. I grew up in like the Pope Francis era. I was like, well, no of the Pope's, you know, I've like so many of the spiritual writers I love now and in Rollhizer and others are Catholics and the Protestant ones I love are all quoting Catholics. You know, so I just, I'm not Catholic, but I just don't have that antipathy that most Protestants do are having previous generations. But first time ever, it's a really big deal. And so that that is happening, my understanding is it's kind of data. It's fact. But why it's happening is, you know, while the opens to debate. So the two emerging theories that I think are the most credible both are important. The second one more so. First one is that Catholics did not go through the modernist fundamentalist split that the Protestants went through a century ago. So if you know your American Traitistry, early 1900s, split over social justice on one side, the Evangelical Gospel and the other. In that split, the what became the liberals of progressives, the modernists, the mainline traditions, they were made up of they were more urban, more fluent, better educated and more cultural elites. Whereas the fundamentalists tended to be more rural, small town, less educated, more secretary and more orthodox, the altitude. And they put their emphasis on physical training. They started Bible institutes, you know, as they started to reject higher education and personal conversion, right? So this split, so uniquely American thing is why I think Evangelism was so much healthier in England than in America. It didn't go through that's why it created a John stocked. You know, that was harder for an American, something like that to grow in American soil. So Catholics never went through that. So Catholics have a rich theology of vocation and culture and the arts. They have to me as a more anabaptist, theologically oriented person. They have a terrifying level of comfort with power. Because they've been in, they've been holding state power, military power for hundreds and hundreds of years. They have a robust social ethic that can even go across the partisan divides of America in a holistic view of the human person. And so there, there, if you are an emerging cultural elite in America, who is a Christian, Catholicism is generally probably going to offer you better resources than their Protestant tradition. So if you go into cultural elite rooms, if you want to go into the boardrooms of New York City, the mainstream media, floors of DC or a, you know, a set in Hollywood here. And if you search around for a serious Christian, they're hard to find. And if you find one, the odds are going to be really high that the Catholic enough Protesters because they just are in many ways. They're just better. I'm not saying I'm more alive than this. Just a little bit. A greener disagree in here. I'm just analyzing. All right. So that's one reason. And, you know, Mark Noel in the 90s wrote the scandal of evangelical mind. Punchline is that evangelicals have no mind. And the nice thing about that is I think that one is self-correcting. I look at the work of some of the best evangelical seminaries. I think of just the rich, like, outpouring of scholarship, you know, in the last 30, 40 years, from just beautiful biblical scholars. I think of the rich work that Keller at a popular level and others did on theology vocation, the work happening in the arts. I think it's self-correcting. And I think it will, I think it already is and will continue to come around. The church today is not the church I grew up in as far as how Protestants think about culture. But the second one, I don't think we're coming around at all on the second theory for why Catholicism is growing faster, especially among young people than evangelicalism, is because it's quieter. That young people, secularism is breaking down. My friend Pete Hughes in London calls it the shaking of secularism. It's a profound cultural moment. We're moving from post-Christianity to post-seculity as well. And they're both at the same time. It's not one or the other. And the secular story is breaking down. People cannot live without meaning. There's an explosion in spirituality amongst my age down. And even now emerging from cultural elites, which in the past would have been much more Darwinian materialists. Oh, yeah. Podcasters, the world television is doing too, is a secular Darwinian humanitarian kind of world. That is not the LA that I live in. It's wildly spiritual. It's not Rick Ruben, the Stought Elizabeth Gilbert, the Stought Coldplay. These people are post-Christian. and post-secular. And so there's this awakening of spirituality. And there are many people that are very comfortable coming into the concerts of passionate evangelical churches, but there are many, many others that do not want that. And are actively saying no, and instead are opting for a Catholic expression of faith, which again, wide, you know, swath general trends tends to be so much quieter. So I had this profound moment, Kerry. I had a dear friend of mine, the story's a bit old. One of my closest friends at the time. And he moved away from Portland to go get his PhD at our encouragement. This guy was brilliant. We're like, man, you need to be a literature professor. So he moved away and we kind of lost touch, didn't stay in touch well for no bad reason. And then word got back that he had become a Catholic. And he came out of this like staunchly evangelical home. His parents were both, you know, they would say saved out of Catholicism that was the language that I grew up with. And so it was just like all this drama, you know, his family was in our church and there's just all this drama. And I know, you know, for some people that should code for, they're not really a Christian. Yeah, they're not a Christian. They've left the faith. They've left their faith. Yeah. These nominal. And so I sat with them and it was the opposite. He was just thriving in his walk with God. I saw him recently. He came over for motorcycle ride and we had the best. He is just thriving, rich life of prayer, fantastic family. And he'd left our church over this. And I asked him like, and it was, again, it wasn't a loaded question for me. It was from others. But I was like, why, like, why did you change? Like, why did you opt for, you know, I don't think I said convert to Catholicism, but whatever the right nomenclature is. And it was so interesting. He gave two reasons. He said, I really wanted to work more on myself to become a better person. And two, I wanted a church that was less noisy. And I should remember it really imprinted on me. Because I hear somebody who I love and have a relational connection to who's in our church. Love's God. And they feel they have to leave our church one because something about the way we're doing church and something of our parishioner teaching makes them one feel like they can't work on becoming a more Christlike person, which is the body of your life's work to the body of my life's work and weirdly out of place and large streams of the evangelical and Protestant church. And two, they just want something quieter. So if you look at like the ex, the world is ahead of us here because it knows how to monetize everything. So it sees, okay, people addicted to their phones will give them an app on their phone to get off of their own. Exactly. And we'll charge them 999 a month to use our home space app or whatever has based app. And so the world has had a monetize this. So like the meditation, like there's all these now like quasi secular meditation studios. And these aren't like praying to demons. These are just like people who pay money to sit on the floor and have somebody help them breathe and like let go of their negative rumination and their thoughts. Like they're paying money for this. And you know, Keating, a lot of his work around centering prayer. And again, I don't endorse all of his theology. But his grief was writing in the 60s and 70s. He saw all of these youths Catholic. He saw all these Catholics leave the faith and go over with the Beatles to New Age, Eastern religion because they wanted a more meditative contemplative experience. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we have it. We have thousands of years of like not only do you get meditation, you get union with the trinity of love. It's not just like mindfulness where you like get your monkey brain under control. It's like actually experiencing the love of God and the deepest core of your being. It's everything you get from, you know, mindfulness and a thousand things more. But people thought they had to leave the church and leave the faith in order to get something that was actually there all along but had been lost by the Western church. And he's right as a Catholic. And so I do think there's a moment here where the American and British church has been so deeply shaped by revivalism. And we can debate about that. But I think everything, even if it's a good thing, comes with dangers. I think part of the danger, not a revival, but a revivalism, which is a different thing, which is more of an attitude, a strategy, a mood, an atmosphere, a culture, is it lends itself, I think, toward large, attraction, event-based church that requires and tries to drum up a huge amount of emotional fervor from people. And I think, gosh, there's a time and a place for everything. Certainly, I think that is profoundly out of touch with where people are, walking into church, so absolutely exhausted. So mind-fried and digitally distracted, they can barely even read a Psalm in the morning, much less commune with God and contemplate a prayer. And so, you know, my dream is that Sunday would feel more like the Lectio 365 prayer app. And like a rock concert, and that it would be a place where we can calm. Where instead of being stirred up, we can come to quiet. You know, I think it's a real mistake to define passion as emotional intensity. I think that is a confusion of category, passion, biblically and historically, the passion of the Christ referring to the last week of Christ's life. Passion is what you are willing to suffer and die for. And often it requires not emotional intensity calls with the New Testament writers call patient endurance. You're most passionate about what you will most patiently, quietly endure for a long period of time, even though it's painful. It's suffering love. That's your passion. And I think we need to understand that, you know, I think the early Christians got this and again, disordering throughout the baby at the bathwater of the British American emphasis on revivalism. But the early Christians, they were in a, you know, pre-Christian culture. They weren't trying to revive a nominal Christian culture. And so their emphasis was on, they actually used the word dispassion was the goal. Like maturity was coming to this place of such peace and tranquility. Like early Christian art used to bother me because the saints all looked to dour to me. None of them were smiling, right? I'm a modern American. Like you smile for the camera. Peace out. Like what's up? Hi, everybody. Jesus. Such a goofy American modern thing to do. Not even American. Like modern. Like modern. Yeah. 1890s and everybody looks dour. And then I read this beautiful like interpretation of ancient Christian art. It said, no, they're not dour. The reason they're not smiling and the reason they look so calm is the artists are trying to convey, you know, the ancient Christian word was apathetia, the peace and tranquility. That they have reached such a level of spiritual maturity. They're totally free of the world. They're like unflappable. They're Jesus asleep on the boat. They're, you know, Jesus in the garden, not my will, but yours be done. Your Paul like to live as Christ to die as gang and like, I only must testify to God. Like they're just totally free. That's what it's communicating. Not like if they're depressive or unhappy. These are deeply joyful people. Their lit. Their light comes from the inside ancient Christian art. There's no shadows like modern art. The light comes from inside the eyes and the face of the characters. And that was the picture of spiritual maturity. You radiate light from within, but it's a peaceful light. So I just think that's a spirituality that we need to recapture. It's in our genetic history as Christians. And I do think this is an area where much of the church is missing an opportunity of a lifetime where in the same way that there was a time where Sunday services took their cues from you two concerts. And I'm not even saying that was not a great idea. I think it was a cultural moment. And still is, I think, in certain places. But I wonder if now we need to take our cues from, again, electos 365 prayer app or, you know, and all of that's in the history of the church. We don't have to reinvent anything. This is not new. It's not new. And a much of it's still very popular outside of our tradition, you know? My goodness, I'll tell you, the time has flown. John Mark, any final thought we've covered a lot. I would just say don't be afraid of the quiet. Fear keeps us from the quiet, which keeps us from facing who we truly are, which keeps us from finding who we are called to be, which keeps us from leading churches, organizations, communities, into the destiny that God has for them and for us. So just vanish fear from your heart one prayer at a time, go into the quiet peacefully and gently accept what comes. Stay there long enough. You have to be patient. Anything I'm wearing, I was so convicted, Carrie, just, you know, we're recording this in December and doing my read through the Bible thing and finished a few weeks early for once and just reading through revelation, which I think is such an applicable book for our time and just the amount of time that phrase patient endurance comes up. This calls for patient endurance. I was just so convicted like I have so little patients, much less endurance, just like give me out, you know, and the patience required to just stay with the quiet, stay with the work, stay with the process, stay with the calling of God on us, stay with dreams that may take many years before they even start to come to pass, much less finish. We live in an impatient age and I want to be people of patience. Most influential book I read this year read a lot. I finally got around to reading Ellen Criter's Patient for Mental The Early Church. I would, I mean, I've never heard of it. I would definitely say top 10 books of all time. Wow. Rolling to it in the show notes. Yeah, what I call, you know, hurry, he would say that the early Christians use the language of patience for a similar or same idea, obviously in a, you know, early church setting. And he just points out that the first treatise on a virtue that the Christians ever wrote was not on love, was not on faith, was not on hope, was on patience. And then he points out that they wrote not one, but three on patience. And you know, we look at the early church as this explosive revival, this move of God sweeping the Roman Empire. He's like, yeah, it was, but it happened over three plus centuries. So we can look back on it and be like, yeah, that was like a sweeping move of God. But nobody, if you're a guy, us in the church in Corinth and Paul writes you a letter and you have 30 people in your church and maybe you die and there's maybe 85 people in your church, it wouldn't have felt like we are part of a sweeping move of God that's changing the course of human history. It would have just felt like we're a tiny little house church underneath the thumb of the empire. And let's die faithful. And so I just think man, the undervalued role, I think there are some things that we have undervalued, quiet, solitude, community, patience, hiddenness, contemplation. And I think it's time to go back and again, I've been drifting backwards. So I'm biased. I'm glad I'm half of all of us, but I'm doing that. I love it. And it has enriched my faith in ways I can't put into words. And I think there's some stuff we've lost. You know, Jesus, one of my favorite parables of Jesus, where he talks about the scribe or the teacher in the kingdom of heaven who brings out of the storehouse, treasures, old and new. And I just think the global historic church of Jesus has treasures. And some of them we still hold, scripture, preaching, evangelism, but there are some we've really lost. And I think we don't have to go to the left or the right. Better versions of everything is found backward in the story of God and the church of Jesus through history. And there's a treasure house of the long, the after effect of Jesus that we're still at to. This is rich. You know, it's been so good, but it feels I read the book of Jude today and my personal readings revelation starts tomorrow for me. And I'm like, this feels like Jude. This should have been revelation, 21 chapters long, 22. It's just it's so rich, even in the time we've had this coming out in January, your book probably won't be ready. But if it comes out in the future, some of the things we've been talking about. Yeah, no, it will. Yeah, it comes out in God willing in October, unless by day on my motorcycle. Nowadays, it will still come out, just won't be edited as well. That's right. That's right. And so the new book in October will be about quiet, so it's a contemplation about. It's an invitation to acquire or walk with God. That's great. John Mark, thank you. Bless you, Karen. It's honored to chat to you. That was a really riveting interview. And I really feel like I said to John Mark, I'm like, okay, next time we got a book like three hours because I didn't even touch my questions. You just sort of asked question one and a way you go. If you want more, we have show notes. You can find everything in the art of leadership academy.com. You can go there, sign up, join over 15,000 leaders in the academy. Probably by the time you're watching this, it's like, I don't know, 17,000, 20,000 leaders. What are the church leaders who are growing together in their leadership journey, learning everything from practical skills through to deeper conversations like the one we had today in a, guess what, troll free environment. So that's the art of leadership academy.com. You'll find the show notes in there. If you're looking for some of the links, we talked about a lot of stuff in this conversation today. Next episode, we've got Les McEwen on the podcast. He does business in church coaching. We talk about the rise of many celebrity pastors, a whole lot more also coming up Craig Grichel, Dr. Wayne Chappelle. John Christ is back for round two. I'm so excited for that Henry Cloud, Patrick Lentioni and a whole lot more. We've done a lot of in person interviews in this season. I think you're really going to appreciate those. So for those of you who are watching, wherever you're watching or listening, give us a follow, give us a subscribe. And maybe share this episode with a friend. I think you will have found it. Hopefully you found it really enriching. I know I did. And we'll catch you next time. And I hope maybe even in prayer or in your own personal walk that the conversation today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing.