Phil Vischer On VeggieTales, Success, And Evangelicalism – Ep. 10

Merging Wisdom Hey, it's Dan from Merging Wisdom. Real quick, before we get into this episode here with Phil Vischer, creator of VeggieTales. I want to just ask you guys to drop everything you're doing for just five or 10 seconds and like, follow, subscribe to Merging Wisdom on whatever platform you're on or whatever social media you use. It really, really, truly does help us to keep doing what we're doing and actually helps us to get bigger and better guests in the future.

Not bigger or better than Phil Vischer but other guests. So if you could do that, that'd be great. Now check out this episode. Phil Vischer is the creator of VeggieTales. You know from that you might know him also from the Holy Post podcast. You can check out that podcast. He's got a lot of content out there. Great stuff.

Let's get into it. All right. Well, welcome to Merging Wisdom. I'm Joel Hubbard. I'm here with Dan Heroy and Sarina Heroy, and we have a fantastic guest with us. Phil Fisher name should be familiar. Dan, what do you want to. What do you want to say before we get into our main topic? I guess people will recognize Phil.

Not the face, necessarily, but probably the voice as Bob the tomato and the creator of VeggieTales, the classic show from the 90s into the current day. And so before we get into our main topic, we just wanted to, as a wisdom podcast, glean some wisdom from Phil's experience creating VeggieTales, and and producing that show and just that journey.

There's so much there, but most of that's already been covered, and you can find it on other resources online and whatnot. But since we have Phil here, we wanted to start with that and and then we can move on. But Phil, thanks for coming. What wisdom. What one nugget or maybe two nuggets of wisdom. Or seeds of wisdom could you extract from your time doing this VeggieTales endeavor that was so, so huge, so successful in culture, not just Christian culture, but just American and worldwide culture.

What wisdom nugget can you drop from that? Hi, Dan. Hi, Joel. Hi, Sarina. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. We got kind of just dropped right in, didn't we? I'd like to back up a little bit and actually say hello. Okay. And we can cut to this. We'll cut to you saying hello because I'll edit this after.

No cutting. Oh, this is great. Okay. No editing. We're already getting so much. Wisdom from your production knowledge. Yeah. Yeah, right. Make sure you just say hi. Okay. Got it. Thanks. Okay. VeggieTales. Yeah. It's. It's a show about vegetables that love God. Is it about vegetables, though? Until Bible fruit? No. Technically, Bob and Larry are both fruit.

Because they have seeds on the inside. And that's what a fruit is. So if you have seeds on your insides, like you've just eaten some seeds, you're now a fruit. Because that's the rules. I don't make the rules. I'm just here to tell you what they are. You want wisdom? The show's about wisdom. You didn't tell me that.

But that's almost, If it has a tail. It's a monkey style wisdom right there. Yes, it is very good, Dan. That's a good one. I did. My homework. Do you know who wrote that song, by the way? No. Tell us. Interesting. It was post bankruptcy. I wasn't as involved anymore. That song was written by Andrew Peterson. You know Andrew Peterson, the singer songwriter?

Yeah, he wrote it with his friend Randall. Good game. You probably don't know Randall. Good game. But he's a children's performer. But Andrew Peterson. Clever song. Very good. He is a clever fellow. Anyway, what was the question? Wisdom from VeggieTales, not from VeggieTales. The wisdom from VeggieTales is remember, kids, God made you special and he loves you very much.

Special. You're. You're loved. You're made by God. Wisdom from my journey with VeggieTales. Be wary of early success. Very, very early success. When you're young particularly, which is common among young people. When your self-awareness is at a lower level, when you don't know yourself yet as well as you ought. The thing about success is that it starts driving the train.

You know, so when you have success, the success will often tell you where you're headed next. Here's what happens next. Now that you're a success. And when you don't know yourself well you will just follow the train of success, you know. So we'll do more and we'll do bigger. And I'll be an executive. And then you start looking for, okay, well, who am I and and who do I admire in the world?

And maybe that's who I am. And for me, who I admired most in the world was Walt Disney. So, you know, I'm I was 24 when I came up with Bob and Larry. I was a little kid, divorced parents. My dad left when I was nine. I, you know, I just I didn't have a strong sense of who I was.

I was really shy. I was kind of a basement dweller. I would have been a video game, you know, just a guy online playing video games in his bedroom. But we didn't really have video games yet. And you had to go to an arcade, you know, put a quarter in in play. Asteroids. So. So that wasn't me, but I was making films in the basement.

And my goal, you know, because people have said so. So your goal was to, like, change the world and, and teach all of the world's children about God. And it's like, no, my goal was to make a film. My goal was to see if I could make an animated film because I was, you know, 22 when I started playing around with the idea.

And then see, would anyone, like, give me money to make this film? How do you get money to make a film? And then what do you do with the film after you've made it? That might mean you could make another film that's, you know, someone asked. Someone asked Ron Howard they were interviewing about a movie and he's, you know, been making movies for a zillion years.

And they said, what's your goal for this film? And he said, every filmmakers goal is that it does well enough that I can make another film. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of how I started. And I was motivated by when I was a sophomore in high school, MTV Music Television turned on. And, you know, cable was wired through our neighborhood, and we got a set top box on our old RCA console TV.

And instead of four channels, we now had, you know, 30 channels. And it was just, wow, it's a brave new world. And I'm watching MTV and thinking, this is so cool, because it was like, there's animation and experimental stuff, and it was artsy and it was like a, you know, film school. But I was also even as a high school kid, noticing that the values being portrayed in many music videos from young rock stars who'd been given a budget and could pick their girlfriend out of a catalog of actresses to be in their music video.

The values in the videos were not what I learned in Sunday school, and in many cases were the exact opposite of what I learned in Sunday School. So I remember thinking, in high school, if everyone my age thinks MTV is as cool as I think it is, I think that might be a problem. And that's where I kind of felt a sense of calling that maybe I could do something about that because I, you know, I like animation, I'm learning computers.

I'm, you know, I have a visual sense maybe I could like, use all these tools, but for good. So that was the very baseline motivation. And then the goal is kind of make a film. Can I make a film and put it, how do I put it out in the world. Turned out VHS cassettes. We're just coming online.

And Christian bookstores were just starting to boom, really boom. So American Christians were consuming as Christians, which was kind of knew they were going to. That's right, to retail outlets that had Christian on them and buying products that had Christian on them. So Christian music, contemporary Christian music. And then what about from my kids. And so that was the opportunity.

Like, I, I get to tell a story and there's a path to market. Then unexpectedly, you know, you're 20. It did almost nothing for like two years. So now I'm now like 28. And what year would this be? Because I believe this predates even Toy Story one, the technology. You guys were kind of. Yeah. I started making it in 93.

Yeah. Came out. So it came out. The first one came out in bookstores in 94. Two story came out in 95. Yeah. Well, and then in about 96 Christmas 96, it took off just like, you know, so it was hand to mouth. How do we get how do I get enough money to pay my two animators so we can keep making, you know, the second film and then the third film and then the fourth film, and it was hand to mouth all through that period, really, really hard.

And then all of a sudden, Christmas 1996, it just caught a wave. Enough people had now heard of it, and it was starting to get picked up in, in like target wanted to carry it. And, you know, Kmart wanted to carry it. And then all of a sudden it was like, wow, this is actually, you know, God has showed up and this is working and this is great, and I'm a success.

And oh my goodness, you know, and the Wall Street Journal wants to interview me and CNN wants to interview me. And people magazine wants to send a camera crew to my house to take pictures of my wife and I making Christmas cookies with our kids. What is happening? And then, you know, success starts driving the train. It's like, okay, so now that you're successful, how how are you going to grow this?

How are you going to make it bigger? How are you going to, you know, how are you going to do. Who are you going to hire? Who are you going to hire next? Now you have money to hire people. So you need executives. You need marketing executives and licensing executives. And are you going to make it do a toy deal?

And can you get this on PBS? And let's try let's pitch it. And what you don't do when you're young is is say, yes. This is a way that it could grow, but that does this way of growing suit my wiring. Okay. Like, is this who I am, right? Am I wired to be the next Walt Disney?

And anyone who had known me well, which I was so shy that not a whole lot of people knew me well, would have said, are you sure you want to be the CEO of a company and spend your days in meetings and management? And because where you seem happiest is when you're in the basement playing with Legos and stop motion, you know, when Clay and a super eight millimeter camera and just making stuff is this are you sure this is who God made you to be?

But I didn't know that yet, so it wouldn't be, you know, for about ten years after it had, the more successful it got and the more I followed that path of, well, this is the logical next step, the less I enjoyed my life. You know, so it kept becoming more successful, and I kept becoming less happy. Yeah.

Primarily because I didn't get to play with anything anymore. You know. Well, you got to hire people to do that. There's people that are better than you at this. So hire them and they'll do that, and you'll focus on, you know, what? Are you better than anyone else at? I don't know, but you're the CEO, so just go to that meeting.

Right, right, right. And I was and because I wasn't good at that part. So it ended up shrinking my world down to a part that I didn't really enjoy and wasn't terribly good at because I was so introverted and bashful. That ended up kind of planning the seeds of the unraveling of everything, you know? So we spent, we spent I spent five years trying to build VeggieTales and my own little Disney company, and then another five years trying to keep it from falling apart when it was a big success.

And in the end, it was my lack of self-awareness of saying, hey, this is how God wired you. You know, this is not something you need to overcome simply by praying, which I would do, like every day. You know, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Please help me be a good manager today. Yeah.

And I was terrible manager because I hated it. And when you're doing something you hate, you're probably not going to do it that well. Or even if you do it moderately well, you're not going to look happy while you're doing it. And that's going to affect the people that you're trying to lead. So that's that's my bit of that's my wisdom.

Wow. That's more more than a nugget. Thank you. Do not do not succeed until you know who you are. Yeah. But even is that possible? Like I think could. Oh, failure is very possible. You can. You can fail ten times before Tuesdays. Yes. Well, you you kind of failed upward in a lot of ways with that one.

And it's a kind of be careful what you wish for. Maybe it is and also have people around you that know you well. Yeah. That's huge. You know. So because they can just say, are you sure? Yeah. Are you sure? You know, are you happy? Hey, Phil, are you happy? But but I also grew up with, evangelical workaholism in my family tradition.

You know, my great grandfather was the first non-denominational radio preacher in America. And he went on the he went on the air preaching on Sunday morning in Omaha, Nebraska, on station WOW in 1923. And he preached every Sunday morning until he died in 1964, at which point it was the oldest, longest running radio show in America. So I grew up around stories, both inside and outside my family of evangelical Christians who were just doing amazing things.

One of my one of my ancestors was the first European to enter a whole section of Erie and Gaya and bring the gospel to cannibals, you know? And so those were the stories of my childhood. And it wasn't necessarily about wasn't Uncle Einer happy? It was wasn't Uncle Einer doing something big for God? Yeah. You know, and so I wanted to do something big for God and and being happy while you're doing it.

That's terrible. Important. Hey, Joel. This is the second. This is the second episode in a row we're having a family, kind of compelling people into pursuits. We have Logan Storie either before or after this episode. It's kind of the same thing. World class athlete. The whole family was world class athletes, you know, and they just push each other and there's this pressure and expectation that kind of comes with that, that you're describing.

I am not a world class athlete, nor am I from a family of world class athletes, but I have some world class missionaries and preachers in my background. And there you go. That'll same. Thing have the same same effect. And my my other grandfather was a world class industrialist and company builder, you know, so we build things, we build things and the bigger the better.

And if they're for God, that's even better. So yeah. So that's a recipe for a shy, introverted, mad scientist personality type kid to end up in a seat that makes him miserable. Yeah. Because bigger is always better when it's done for. God. Yeah. What was the sort of arc of that falling apart, and then what emerged from that for you?

What merged from? It was an awareness that I had made what I was doing for God more important than having a relationship with God? Because a relationship with God will make you more aware of who you are. That's right. Simply working, you know, saying, hey, I gotta I gotta go to Asia or China or wherever for God doesn't help you mature.

It keeps you busy. And so coming out of that I ended up, you know, I, I was asked in the midst of the, the company going bankrupt in the midst of losing Bob and Larry and all the songs and all the stories and having to lay off 80% of the staff and then the other 20% of the staff being hired away by another company to keep making VeggieTales Without you.

In the midst of all that, Biola University asked me to come and do their spring commencement address. To inspire a bunch of Christian kids to go and do big things for God. Were you even feeling inspired at that moment? At that point. What do. You think? How could you possibly I would I don't know how. You I said no okay.

And they said, well how about our fall commencement? And I thought, okay, so I have between now and the fall to have something to say because right now I have nothing to say. Wow. And in that period of time. I was going through a Bible study about leadership. And one of the first things in that Bible study was, if what you've told the people you are doing for God isn't working.

It may be that it came from your own mind and not from God. And what God asks of you isn't impact or impressiveness, but simply obedience. And I thought, okay, well, that that cuts kind of guts. And that's when I realized I wasn't walking with God. I was working for God and trying to be impressive with what I was doing for God.

And so what I what I ended up that fall, getting up at Biola University, and I thought, well, this is going to be the worst commencement speech in history. Saying whatever you're dreaming of doing for God, whatever you're dreaming of impact, you know, like, this is what I'm going to do. This is my big idea. Are you willing to let it go and live without it?

You know, and and just rest? Yeah. In having a relationship with God and, you know, and I was waiting for the hook to come and say, you know. Whoa, dude, we just spent four years inspiring these kids to go do big things for God, and you just unraveled it in 15 minutes. And instead they, like 40 year old dads, came up to me in tears.

Afterwards. You know, and said, we always talk about our successes. We never talk about our failures. Yeah. Within Christianity, because we're all about the testimony. Yeah. And the testimony has. To inspiring. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I did an interview with guidepost magazine because they heard my talk and they said, well, this is and the journalist said, this is a great story.

And I told it to the journalist, did the full interview. At the end of it, the journalist was in tears. They wrote it up, they went back, and then she had to come back to me a few weeks later and said, they're not going to run. It now. Run it. Yeah, yeah. They want to wait until it has a happier ending.

Isn't that something? And I said, oh, you mean the part where I get it all back? Oh said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's probably that. Yeah. That is, that's exactly what it was. Yeah I don't that that's so true. There's not much room for stories in midstream like. No no. No like I don't I don't know exactly what I'm doing now.

I'm going to you know, and my best answer was I'm just going to try to be in God's will, you know, and I'm I'm going to try to do good. I'm going to try to do good work. I'm going to try to do things that I. And this was big. This was huge, actually. This almost felt wrong to me.

I'm going to try to do things that I enjoy. How about that? I'm going to try to set up my life in a way, you know, because I can, I can I get it where you say, well, it's not about having fun, you know, God doesn't promise you fun. It's like, yeah, but joy is a fruit of the spirit.

So actually, if there's no joy manifesting itself in your life, that's a sign that you're off course, right? You know, it's not a sign that, oh, you must be working really hard. That's great. Congratulations. You're joyless. Right? Yeah, right. Like. Like know if if you are walking with Jesus, your life will manifest. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.

You know, forbearance. I mean, these are the things that should be coming out of your life. And I remember reading that one night in bed and turning my wife and saying, I don't think I'm a Christian. And she was like, what? Yeah. And I said, well, this is what comes out of your life if you're walking with Jesus.

And I don't have any of this, you know, I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm worried. You know, I'm I'm I'm insecure. I like I don't have none of the things that I have are on this list. That's so different from success, isn't it? Like, I mean, the metrics isn't so much like, yeah, because we're always measuring things by by that like the success.

We measure things the American way, we measure things the American way. And that is so infected the American church that we measure spiritual success the same way we measure financial success with numbers. That's how we hire within the church world. I mean, I think that's yeah, that kind of goes with it. It's like, well, you know, segue into where we're going right now more towards that.

Like that's what seems to be showing up much, a lot in the evangelical world is like, how are we going to even hire pastors or staff or, you know, who's our heroes? Who are the stories that we're kind of right? Here's a list of the the 25 fastest growing pitches in America. Read them and be inspired. Could you be on this, which is the same as the, you know, the Inc. 500?

That's right. Your company fast growing enough to be on the ink 500 or are you can you be in the fortune 400 richest people? It's like we love to measure things, you know, that fit in spreadsheets. And then that's, you know how I know I'm doing it, right? Right. I know I'm doing it right if the numbers are going up.

Yeah. If the bar graph is going up and to the right, I know that I'm doing it right and that and then in the church we then say, and that I'm doing God's will and God is showing up. Well. And with the social media to that adds that other kind of facade of success stories, because everybody looks their best and is posting all their greatest hits on social media typically.

Yeah. Well, so we. We curate our lives. It's very tightly curated and fabricated ways. Yeah, yeah. To create the impression we want to create. I'm glad I didn't have social media when I was building VeggieTales. Right? Because yeah, I would have been, you know, we were still we were sending contracts back and forth via fax. Right? So yeah. Yeah.

And we were excited about that. Right? I don't I don't have to Fedex this. I can just put it in this machine. And then it makes really weird noises over the phone and it pops out the other side. Who? Yeah. I have a question about you were sharing such wisdom about obedience. I love how you define obedience to be in correlation with the expression and the feeling of joy and love, right?

Because often I think in a lot of Christians, obedience can have this kind of solemn, like very strict. It means whatever it is you would like to. Do. You're not allowed. To know. You're not allowing the opposite, almost. The opposite describing. Right. But then also though, like you're, you're connecting how like the American way has so infiltrated a lot of how we in the West like, practice spirituality.

And I know you have like a lot of wisdom, a lot of like understanding of even just like the history and the background of like, how did we get here today? Like where if you call yourself a Christian, it equals this very mini type thing where you're like a lot of believers or followers of Jesus or people who believe in a divine God or whatever they want to say, we have to come up with, like, this loosey goosey language because the this I don't know if standard is the right word, but the used language has become such a specific thing that is very rigid and almost like this very conservative right wing.

It's become synonymous with like politics even. It's become synonymous with like just really, not all of encompassing of what maybe Jesus was and is. Right. And so, like, even I find myself sometimes being like, what do I even call myself? What do I even say? Right? My church is like, what? Because there's beauty, right? It's the tension. There's beauty and there's goodness there.

But it's also like, I don't want to be thrown in this packaging. I. I live in Wheaton, Illinois, just next suburb over where we moved when I was in high school, which is the home of Wheaton College, which is one of the birthplaces, you know, or or it's considered the the Harvard of the evangelical world. Evangelical Christianity is the most dominant form of Christianity in America and has been for at least 100 years, about 100 years.

And I started a podcast 14 years ago, and our first episode, we asked the question, is the term evangelical still a meaningful term, or do we need to call ourselves something else? You know, in other words, there was an effort starting in the 1970s to marry evangelical Christianity with right wing conservative politics, you know, and it was whatever it was like are we you know, are we small government now.

Yes. Okay. Well that's Christian. Are we big military now. Yes. Well that's let's say that's Christian. Are we, you know, so whatever it was, are we anti-communist? Well yes. Well that's definitely Christian. Are we anti-socialist and then that's Christian, you know. Are we. So whatever it was, what do we think about the women's rights movement? I think it's not Christian.

Okay. So we'll say that's not Christian and we'll put it in this bucket that if you're a Christian, you know, you have to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. You have to oppose gay rights. You have to be pro-military. You have to be pro-gun, you know, and then you just start realizing, well, this looks a lot more like the Republican Party platform than it does.

Like anything I've actually read in the Bible is that an ax? Didn't was that on purpose? And if you dive in the history, you realize it was on? Yeah, right. It wasn't. Christian Coalition. Yeah. Yeah. Well it started before then. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it goes it goes back into the 60s and, and you know, Phyllis Schlafly and Barry Goldwater and trying to create a new Republican Party that was further distinguished from the Democratic Party, you know, because if you go back to the 1950s, a conservative Christian was just as likely to be a Democrat as they were to be a Republican.

Whether you were a Democrat or a Republican had nothing to do with your theology and much more to do with your economics. So if you were labor or on the side of labor, you were a Democrat. If you were management or on the side of capital, you were a Republican. Which is why my family was Republican, because my grandfather was a company builder.

He was management, and he had to sometimes, negotiate angrily with labor, which were the Democrats. It had nothing to do with his theology and everything to do with his economics and his, you know, his kind of social class in the capitalist system. So and that's just going back, you know, 60 years it was it was no one would assume what your party was because you were a theologically conservative Christian.

And that's what's changed radically. And we've been trying to, you know, kind of our purpose is to say it, it hasn't always been this way. And it doesn't have to be this way. How did it get this way? Let's spend a lot of time unpacking this because, you know, if you find yourself lost, the best first question is to say, how did we get here?

Yeah. Let's retrace our steps so we can how we got here, because that's going to help us, you know, kind of separate like what's Jesus in this and what's just capitalism, you know, what's Jesus in this and what's just militarism. Right. You know what's here because of the Cold War, a whole lot of American Christianity is what it is because of the Cold War.

Yeah. You know, I mean, Billy Graham is the biggest celebrity of evangelical Christianity. And he became famous because of the Cold War, because he took a very strong anti-communist stance in his early preaching, and because William Randolph Hearst, who was the biggest, you know, the biggest newspaper owner in America, told all of his newspapers, to quote Puff Graham, to elevate his.

Visibility about that, is that what happens is that then it's like, there's your platform now you have access, whereas other. You have the platform, but we're giving you this platform, not necessarily because we want people to be closer to Jesus. That's right. We want people to be closer to capitalism. And that's kind of like the algorithm boosting him at that time.

That's kind of how that worked. Yes. So it's the same now. Just different. Yeah. And so it starts this marriage. And then you get to the, you know, as you're getting into the 60s now you've got you've got the decade of disruption. And it's and it's three things. It's racial justice. It's gender justice and it's sexuality justice.

So you've got the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement and the gay rights movement that all start to emerge. And for many northern Christians, they were fine with civil rights, except when it was associated with communism, which is why the CIA was keeping files on Martin Luther King and everyone else in the civil rights movement to see if they could be linked to communism.

Yeah. The women's rights movement, people were okay with it until it was portrayed by people like Phyllis Schlafly as well. This is going to break down the traditional family. You know, and here's an inflammatory quote from this women's rights leader who says, you know, traditional marriage keeps women in bondage. What is that what you believe, Christian? Is that what you believe?

That we need to get rid of traditional marriage? Okay, now we can add we can add the civil rights movement to our list of questionable because we associate it with communism. We can add the women's rights movement to our bucket of questionable, because it seems to be against the American or the traditional family. And then of course, gay rights is pretty easy.

It's like, well, that's wrong. That one is actually here in the Bible. Yeah, yeah, the other ones, the other ones, we really had to stretch, right. To. Find a way. This one we can actually point to a verse. Thank you very much. We can't vote to a verse that says we need to support the military industrial complex.

So we're going to have to do some, some, you know, exegetical gymnastics to make that work. But, you know, LGBT rights is pretty clear. So if all of these people want the same thing, you know, all of these people want, more communism, less traditional families and a rewriting of, of sexual ethics, a broad scale rejection of what they would say, biblical sexual ethics.

Obviously, Satan is behind these guys, right? Right. And there's a nice pamphlet to tell you all the reasons why and. And also who you should vote for, which came about, you know, later 70s when when people like Jerry Falwell. Yeah. Got introduced to people like Howard Phillips, and others that were that were just purely political activists. Yeah.

You know, that weren't Christian activists, that weren't evangelists, that weren't pastors, that were just political actors who said, hey, let's partner with people like Jerry Falwell who have platforms in Christianity and see if we can form a voting bloc out of conservative evangelicals, conservative Catholics and conservative Mormons. And if we can pull all of those together, if we can make them think they're all on the same team.

Yeah. That could swing an election. Kudos to the brilliance of all of that and laying out. And it works. It works and. It worked. Yeah. And it worked still. And, you know, largely driven by conservative media, you know, talk radio, starting with Rush Limbaugh and then with with James Dobson and focus on the family. And what started out as like focus on the family started out as a child psychologist giving you parenting advice and all of a sudden was picking which which candidate you should vote for and saying, you know, if if Barack Obama wins the election, it will be the end of the church, you know, in a decade.

Yeah. You know, so the, the. The march. Yeah, it was it was kind of astonishing to see that because I grew up in all of this. You know, I grew up going to Bible conferences where suddenly in the early 80s, books about the culture started showing up on the book table rather than about the Bible, books about the culture and about the danger our children were in, in our culture, and about how we were slouching to Gomorrah in our culture.

And America was losing its Christian roots in our culture. And that all started in the 80s. And I saw it happen. And it just, you know, now that we're 40 years on, younger Christians don't remember any other reality than that. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's true. I mean, like, like you mentioned before, Sarina, and like, you're explaining, Phil, culture and Christianity have just been so merged my entire lifetime to the point where it's just it was so normal.

If somebody was smoking somebody, a Christian would go, oh, oh, they're smoking. I thought they were a Christian because that's the same thing. Or you go, hey, do you really like Dick Cheney? You know? No. Oh, I thought you were a Christian. You you should like Dick Cheney or. Oh, you voted for Obama. You're not a Christian.

So politics and culture were completely merged in every facet where that became like the standard of Christianity with some, some extra biblical, extra Christianity, you know, stance or something. And it's just muddy the waters. So unfortunately, and people forget this in the 19th century, the activists, the social activists were all Christians, okay. You know, and many were theologically conservative Christians.

Not all. There were also, you know, Universalists and some other. The 19th century was a wildly entrepreneurial time in American religion. Oh, yeah, the the 19th century gave us Mormonism, oh, seventh day Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science seventh. So all of these things, it's like, well, where did all those things come from? 19th century. Between 1800 and 1850, we got all of these spinoffs, like new innovations within that.

Also, the same period of time gave us premillennialism, which if you don't know what that means, it's the Left Behind books and the rapture and the and the Mark of the beast. And it's all going down, you know, and Jesus is coming back any day and we're going to get raptured to heaven. It's all of that. And those Left Behind books were a big market share competition for VeggieTales, too.

So there's a little bit of an ax to grind there. You know, maybe personally, the kids, the kids version specifically. I think to this day, the Left Behind books and VeggieTales are the only two Christian properties to exceed $1 billion in sales. There we go. Which is kind of interesting. Wow. So for and we not to go back to that, but VeggieTales was huge at the time.

I mean, in the 90s was large. It was a very large thing. At one point. One third of all American households with young children had at least one VeggieTales video. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy. Which which is how you end up thinking, I guess I'm going to be the next Walt Disney. And I think that's God's will.

And even though I'm not having any fun at all, I just need to keep doing the same thing, but figuring out how to do it better. Yeah, well, I mean, it it reached the cultural peak, I guess at one point when The Simpsons parodied it. I'm a huge Simpsons fans fan. That's my favorite show. So The Simpsons parody parodied.

VeggieTales four times. Yeah, Saturday Night Live parodied VeggieTales. Yeah. I mean, that is mainstream, huge culture. So yeah. And there's a whole bunch there with Christianity. You know, it's in culture and how we've how everything's kind of merged. And. Yeah, and it's interesting now that a lot of kids that grew up on VeggieTales, you know, if they have a kind of walked away from the form of Christianity that they grew up with, you know, a strict evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity, they still I've see see these kids time and time again, say, I still have fond memories of vegetables.

Yeah, like like everything from my growing up. It's the one thing that I still feel good about. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because that was on my mind. Like I've watched that as well. You know, as a youth pastor back in the late 90s, early 2000, it was vegetables was huge for our team. Did you have hair? Did you have I had hair?

It was never great hair, though I have to admit, it was always like bad. Well, that's that's good though, because if you lose great hair, that's worse. That is worse. So I can laugh at my brother who had great and he lost. Mediocre hair. So yeah, it happens, but they, they still speak of it and it's still huge for them.

But I watched how that's different from it. Always felt different to me that I could look back to VeggieTales and go, something was still different about the, the tone, the approach that you had with faith that I think still stood out. It was still different than a lot of the extremes. Well, yeah. I mean, like Left Behind is is theologically suspicious, if not really bad in some people's minds.

Or you know. Yeah. Specific. It's theologically specific. Very. Specific to a movement that started in 1830 and was launched by John Nelson Darby, a pastor in the UK who launched the was part of the Plymouth Plymouth Brethren movement. And he had and he met he came to America. He had a system of interpreting the Bible that he could diagram in one chart, but one of his followers, to explain the chart, had to write 250 pages.

So that's how elaborate his system was. Part of his innovation was was that the rapture is imminent. Jesus could come back at any moment. Another part was that, and there is a new role for Israel that is separate from the church, that there is a second role for Israel. So the future of the state of Israel is hyper important to Jesus will being done.

That was the second innovation which led to the marriage we have today between conservative American Christians and support for Israel. And all goes back to a guy named Darby, who was Irish, preaching in the south of the UK, south of England. But he came to America right around the Civil War and tried to teach his system. His 250 page elaborate explain this one graph system to American pastors like D.L.

Moody, the most famous evangelist of the 19th century. D.L. Moody, Darby concluded, did not follow the system, did not get it. But D.L. Moody latched on to two things the idea that the rapture was imminent and the idea that there's a role for Israel coming back. And he was the most influential conservative Christian voice of the 19th century leading into the 20th century, which popularized both the left Behind theology and Zionism in American Christianity.

So, I mean, this is the for me, this is really fun stuff. It's like, why was I taught exactly what I was taught growing up in church? Yeah, right. Because the answer at the time would have been because it's the Bible, right? And then you say, but I don't I don't see this so clearly in the Bible.

But don't see it like it's not. Which Bible. Yeah. But it was in my Scofield field. I was going to say yes. That's where. Study notes. Yep. Which is what spread left behind theology. The Scofield Reference Bible, the best selling Bible of the early 20th century. In print. It's in print. It's in my Scofield notes. And that's all I need to know what is true.

And then you start to kind of unpack this and say, yeah, but if I go back before 1830, no Christians were teaching this, right? So what does that mean? Yeah. And that's where, you know, because because Americans and this is just American Christians, we can be very focused on our time because we're America. Our time is now.

And what we believe is, is, is true of all always. And we don't realize, yeah, we're swimming in a cultural current that has been influenced by a lot of things. And no, if you go back to a gustin, if you go back to Aquinas, if you go back to the great thinkers of Christian history, they would have read a Left Behind book and said, what the heck am I reading?

Right? You know what? What is this? Where did this come from? So it's, you know, it's that unpacking that is so valuable because we're we're drinking a cocktail that is kind of uniquely American. You know, there's a book about how America shaped Christianity and then Christianity to return the favor. You know, so it's just this there's there's a very sort of incestuous relationship between American culture and American Christianity.

And if you don't, if you don't out enough to say, what does Christianity look like in South America? What does Christianity look like in Africa? What does Christianity look like? You know, in Eastern Europe, in the Orthodox world, if you never do that, you just think, this is Christianity. It's what I was taught in my church. And it's one of the reasons so many people are ready to say evangelicalism is corrupt and must be destroyed.

Yeah. Because they don't have a big enough picture to say there's no. And this is something, a point I made that you raised. There's no such thing as evangelicalism. There are evangelicalism. As you know, someone compared evangelical evangelicalism to, to a Walmart where you say, sure, there's some crazy people at your local Walmart, but that doesn't mean Walmart is bad.

And that's the wrong metaphor, entirely the wrong metaphor, because evangelicalism isn't a Walmart. It's a flea market. Okay, because there is no there is no barrier of entry to launching your own version of evangelicalism. Anybody can walk in, set up a booth, set up a table and say, this is evangelicalism. Yeah. You know, I mean, the range is so huge that you have to pick an evangelicalism to decide that you don't like it.

And typically that means the one I grew up in. Right. But so that's so much of a part of American culture is that protesting that protest culture. I was even thinking about what I was going to bring up today, and most of it was just vegetable related or Old Simpsons quotes. And I was just running through my mind.

I got I got to dig deeper. Maybe there's something there. And I saw the headline today was, you know, people protesting at a college and, and this and that. And I just immediately was like, people get upset when they see that, when they see people protesting like, oh, like, why do they have to do that? If it's something you don't agree with, you're like, oh, and then it's like, that is just such an American thing.

Like, we are a country built on protest, freedom of speech. We don't like it when another side does it, but then we we like it when we do it, but it's like accepting it. That's part of our fabric, just gives more understanding and maybe just context. And that's the same with like Evangelicalism or Protestantism, because that is in the nature of being a Protestant is to if you don't like something, you change it.

You where the word came from. We're always continually protesting and splintering off and splintering off and having our own revelations and our own Bibles and our own rapture ideology. And if you don't like that rapture ideology, then let's create a subtly different one. And those churches will hate each other, and we're just continually spinning out into this evangelicalism and Protestant.

Entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial. And see, here's here's the the upside of not having a state church is that you'll never be persecuted for the way you are practicing your religion in theory. Yeah. The downside of not having a state church is that every church has to compete for an audience. Sure, it is a free market. It's a market share.

Yeah, it is capitalism. Yeah. Applied across spirituality. Wow. And it doesn't matter if you're right or if you're Orthodox. It matters if you can draw a crowd, you know, and that was the that was evangelicalism. Evangelicalism as a movement is traced back to John Wesley and the launch of Methodism and the holiness movement. Wesley and George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards were all traveling preachers.

They didn't have a church. They traveled. And they want for for Wesley, it was revival meetings and tent meetings. You travel, you do revivals, you do tent meetings. It attracts people. When Whitfield came to Boston, this and this is pre American independence. So the first great Awakening is the mid 1700s. Whitfield came to Boston, wanted to preach in a church.

He was a British evangelist of the holiness movement. Came to Boston. No church would give him their pulpit. Pastors didn't want to give him their pulpit. So Benjamin Franklin said, let's build a hall in Boston because he loved Whitfield, was really inspired by him and loved to do the math, because his voice was carried so far out in the open that Benjamin Franklin would stand in the back and try to calculate how many people could hear this man's voice in just him talking, unemployed, and actually did the math.

Anyway, Benjamin Franklin built a hall just for the purpose of people like George Whitfield to come and preach without having to have a local congregation. So it became more personality driven. It wasn't, you know, are you going to your local Methodist church? It's did you hear Whitfield when he came through town, or are you going to that revival meeting that that Wesleyan or Methodist revival meeting and that created a a free market economy of religion in the New World, in America that led to exactly where we are today, where people say that preacher is crazy.

Who gave him a pulpit? Ben Franklin. Yeah. Like his fault. Culture. Freedom of religion. The Bill of rights gave him a pulpit. No one can tell someone they aren't a pastor, right? No one can tell someone. They can't start a church. No one can tell someone. It's one of the benefits of the Catholic Church is that it's top down.

It's one. You know, it's also one of the the downsides of the Catholic Church is it's top down. So if the pope goes bad, the whole thing goes bad, right? But if you have a pope like Pope Leo, the South Side of Chicago, Pope who is standing up, both standing up for traditional Christian ethics, but also standing up for immigrants standing up against the mistreatment of the poor, standing up.

So he's he's coding left and right simultaneously. And so he goes and does an open air mass in Paris, one of the most secular countries in Europe. And 800 000 people show up to see him because they're inspired by someone who doesn't see who is representing Jesus, who is not captive to politics or political categories. It's like Mr.

Rogers and Dolly Parton we love. Why are they so popular with everyone? Yeah, yeah. You know why? Because they smell like Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without any of the stink that we've added to Christianity. Absolutely. Well, Pope Leo blessed the Chicago White Sox in the playoffs. That should be a disqualifying event. That is such an unfair advantage.

Close to Jesus. He really is. I mean, who. Can discern God's will when it comes to sporting events? I don't know, it seems like. The. Yankees would have been different for you, Dan. I would have had to have been. Had to have been. That's let's move on to something else. That just means he's just been. Bought by.

Big banks. Yeah. DraftKings. Yeah, yeah. You have so much knowledge. It's it's awesome. It's so awesome. With knowing all the history and knowing all the murkiness, that kind of, like, infiltrated in the like with the free market and the capitalism culture in, like in, like Christianity or and church culture in, in, in America, like how do we sift through though and find like the through lines of of what was helpful of like where because it's not all bad right.

And I know you're not I don't hear you saying that. So that's why it's like I. Want to. Not all bad because there's no such thing as a singular it. Yes. Right. Right, right. So. Yeah. Or where do you think the hope for the future of, like, practicing faith or walking with Jesus can go? Because now, you know, life is different from just even ten years ago or 20 years ago.

Now, I don't know how old social media is, but it's like with kind of this evening platform where it's like, anyone can really have a voice now, anyone can really find the followers, like it's it's it's like hyper capital out there, right, right. It's a super free market. It's like, yeah, the free the free market is being carried to its kind of ludicrous end, right?

You know, of everyone is their own producer, you know, and it's creating a like some of us need to stop producing content just so we have time to consume the content that the other half is producing, because if everyone's just producing. So, yeah, there is there's sort of a ludicrous ness to it at some point. But but it really is, you know, who ever strikes a chord will attract an audience, right?

Whether or not what you are saying is beneficial, beneficial or even true, you know, I mean, look at the history of advertising. That's irrelevant in a free market, whether this product is beneficial and whether our marketing is even true is irrelevant. Until and we had to create some government top down structure, you know, just to control like truth and advertising, like don't in the USDA, you know, and in the Federal Drug Administration, there is no equivalent of that in Christianity.

To say what you're preaching is harmful. What you just said on social media isn't true. So yeah, we are in the wild West is a vision that Americans have always loved. We love the image of I'm just a cowboy on my own with a gun, you know, in Wild West and doing what I want to do. And that's that model applies to religion.

It applies to consumerism and marketing. And and there's unfortunately there's no way to change it because it's, that's what for many people, that's what America is. Yeah. We've lost the singularity like we everybody used to watch CBS news. Millions of people watch CBS news. Now, you know, 40,000 people tune into tons of different things. We used to have like a church movement or the Catholic Church, I guess, is the singularity.

And now we've splintered into millions of churches. Now, we used to have a podcast. One guy created it. Now every single person has their own podcast. So we've even. Even the Catholic Church wasn't a singularity because it split into the Eastern Orthodox Church. Okay, that's true. To be fair to Catholics, you've had one. We've just had 100,000, so it's kind of the same.

It's the same thing. We're all Protestant because. The Orthodox Church then split into Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox and, you know. Yeah. Well, and. The Catholic Church, because people don't get along. Yeah. Well, is there any hope, though, to get along like, I'm like, is there any. Hope. To get along? Hope I need a. Little purpose, okay.

That humans were created for connection. Like, you know, like, so are we going to get sick of it? Yeah. Anytime. Now we just connect on fortune. So. Yeah. We're connecting. Yeah. Just, you know, we connect for our best and also for our worst. And that will always be the case. We get up in front of people for our best and for our worst.

And how many people we attract to our message does not depend on our motive. And it doesn't append, you know, on our our factual accuracy. So it is dangerous what it comes, what it comes down to for me as a Christian and I'll say, even as an evangelical Christian. Even though there's no such thing. Whatever that means.

Is the sermon on the Mount is what did Jesus actually teach his followers? And if you go back to the sermon on the Mount, that's why my friend Sky, my podcast co-host, I've been doing this with for 14 years, you know, his his, not his first book, but his first book in the series that he's doing was simply entitled What If Jesus Was Serious?

And it's a walk through the sermon on the Mount, said, what if what Jesus asked us to do, he actually meant for us to do. And and the sermon on the Mount is such a challenging. Yeah. Teaching because it's, you know, they say, love your friends. I say love your enemies, you know, pray for those who are persecuting you.

If someone asks for your cloak, give them your shirt as well. If someone asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles with them. You know, it's just immensely challenging moral teaching. And it goes so it is so easy to see the conflicts between, right wing reactionary Christianity and the sermon on the Mount. And when you start people there rather than with, well, here's my ten page statement on what a Christian must believe about the world, you know, which is you have to be, you know, anti this, anti this, anti this pro this pro-military pro Israel anti big government.

You know of the anti welfare. You can't be for welfare because that's communist and Christians have to be against communism. Well wait a minute. Well we're either the sermon on the Mount and see. Does that lead you to be against helping others or for helping others a. Little more for than against? So, you know, there will be people.

There will always be people that are living healthy, Jesus following lives. They tend not to attract big crowds because they're not trying to write, you know, and frankly, on social media, a healthy Christian life is dull. It's just that because there's no outrage and all the algorithms are programed to promote outrage. You know what you click on the fastest and stick with the longest is the thing you'll be served the most. And we do.

And someone explained it this way in if you were an early, primitive, human, most of what you saw every day wandering around the savannah was boring. You'd see shrub, you'd see tree, you'd see sand, you'd see, you know, and until you saw a snake and then your brain had evolved or was wired by God, whichever you believe to say, snake, the snake gets all your attention immediately, gets all your attention, because your survival depends on it.

Social media is serving you. Snake, snake snake snake snake snake snake. So we react, you know, we give it all of our attention because we're wired to respond to threat or perceived threat, which is why so much of what actually on both sides of the aisle, the the extreme right and the extreme left, it's all about threat.

You know, it's threat marketing. Beer. It's out outrage marketing. These people are going to take your rights. These people are going to take your kids. These people are going to take your way of life. These people are going to take your welfare. These you know, it's just here's what here's the danger that's coming at you. And that's one thing that Jesus never does in his teaching and preaching.

He doesn't try to scare people. So you should always be suspicious of a religious leader who is trying to scare you. Yeah, always be suspicious because that's not what Jesus did. There will always be people that are seeking to follow seeking a healthy portrayal of Jesus again Pope Leo, Mr. Rogers, Dolly Parton and are drawn to that.

Yeah. So yes. So there is hope because people want to believe the world is good. They can't figure out the brokenness part of it and the brokenness part of humanity. It's the, you know, and as Christians, what we're called to do, and this is the concept of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God isn't heaven in the future.

The kingdom of God is wherever the will of God is done is the kingdom of God. We are invited into the kingdom. Those are the first thing Jesus preached was, hey, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Reorient your life towards this new reality. What does that mean? It means we form little communities, little mini communities, little bubbles of the Kingdom of God.

And within those bubbles, people's needs are met. People are treated equally and fairly. People are treated with love. There's justice. And that is how we inspire the world in a posture towards Jesus. It's not because of what we're preaching, it's because of how we're living in community. Yes, you can also preach. That's okay. The disciples did that, but it was the early Christian communities that changed the world, not early Christian preaching that changed the world when the Romans couldn't figure out when there's a plague, we run away from that town and these Christians run into it.

Absolutely, yeah. Why do they do that? You know, and early, early Roman leaders, as Christianity was spreading, saying, we don't know how to compete with the appeal of these people that not only take care of their own sick, but also take care of our sick. That's what made the message of Jesus appealing. So when we come today and someone is trying to say, I'm a Christian, and because of that, you should be afraid of everyone who lives near you because they're trying to take your way of life.

It's like that is so far off how Christianity has ever been practiced healthily that it's not hard to point it out. You know? It's just a matter of, well, can you get enough clicks, right? Can you get enough clicks being healthy and, you know. Fill the way you're it's hard. I mean, this is a this is an incredible, statement.

I mean, I so in tune with that. To me, the thing that you mentioned, like Mister Rogers, Dolly Parton and other people that I've encountered who are more about the fruit of the spirit than they are about the doctrinal definitions, the, the, the, the, the absolutes around that, that you must agree, not as there's this, but. There is an online crowd that will say, yeah, but what was Mister Rogers theology?

Yes. Yeah. Of course. Yeah, but. What was Dolly Parton's theology? What was her Christology? What was her soteriology? What was was she a, you know, was she a penal substitutionary atonement person? And like, okay, wait a minute. Very few of Jesus initial followers had their theology figured out. Absolutely. Because he didn't spend a ton of time preaching theology.

That's right. He did spend a ton of time preaching love of neighbors, you know? So and that's kind of the war within American Christianity, is that. No, it's about what you believe. No, it's about how you live in reality. It's not one or the other. Yeah. But if if you're looking at what Jesus calls us to do, he spends a whole much more time talking about how you live and how you treat your neighbor than he does about, you know, what's what's your view of substitutionary atonement?

In the end, it's like, look, even Jesus uses the heuristic of like in the end, look at the tree. You look, you can argue, look. Yeah, look at. The fruit. Yeah. You can, you can make all these arguments. But look at the fruit of the tree, you know. So or the veggies. I know I think. It's so that's what gives me hope because there always and there are people that you've never heard of that that are heroes of mine.

Most people have never heard of like Dallas Willard or Eugene Peterson or Richard Foster. That just lived quiet, faithful lives, you know, and they attracted people when, when, when, Dallas Willard, who died about ten years ago, you know, would speak at a conference, which you didn't do very often because he wasn't that into it. But young kids would show up in droves.

Yeah, to just pack the room, you know, because it was like it was like sitting at the feet of a saint. Someone whose life actually smelled like Jesus and could also intelligently speak about theology, you know, and that's always been inspiring. It just doesn't work well in social media. So the more you know, we try to create society through technology, the harder it is to create to shape society through incarnate living.

Yeah. And incarnate living is what Jesus called us to. You know, he didn't say, hey, make a podcast for your neighbor. He said, go and love them. And more and more, you know, it's the hipsters going back to vinyl. It's people, you know, it's people buying flip phones because they're sick of their smartphone and what it's doing to them.

And it's 800 000 people showing up in downtown Paris because they want to just be in the presence of Pope Leo from the South Side of Chicago. I suspect this is where it's going. I have been have a strong feeling about things returning to more of the embodied, more of the coming together physically being, you know, the that whole that whole movement is like.

Healthy Christianity will always be, a minority. It will always be, you know, a remnant. And that's not a surprise to anyone who's paying attention. Yeah. Because it's countercultural. Yeah. You know, and the biggest problem with American Christianity is it became cultural. Yeah. It stopped pushing back because there were so many vested interests. You know, the fact that America was launched as a plantation economy, built on slavery, built on owned labor, and the most Christian country in the world both meant that a form of Christianity would emerge that was heavily compromised to culture, because otherwise Christianity is incompatible with the mistreatment of other people.

So we had to figure out a way to make a Christianity that didn't have a problem with slavery. And there's no way that that sort of distortion, that sort of malformation, doesn't echo for the next 100 or 200 years through the culture, which it's still echoing today. Yeah, yeah. It's not like all of these other, you know, capitalism, entrepreneurial spirit, all of these.

It's not like the entrepreneurial spirit is wrong, that there's something wrong fundamentally with that. No, it's what you're saying is it's when it gets hijacked by or at least is what I'm hearing. And certainly the way I perceive it, it just gets hijacked by by interests that are, yeah, that there are not good interests that are carbon.

Capitalism works best for people with high levels of ambition. Yes. Yeah. You know, that's true. And people with high levels of ambition typically aren't the healthiest people. That's that is. This is why what you're just what you described as your own journey of like, success and then, you know, yeah. Being driven by that. Like, I think we don't talk enough about that path of dissent in the church world.

In the evangelical world, like you, you have to go through that because there's the ascent, and that's great. You have to kind of even do that, I suspect. But you also have to come to a point where you realize, like, everything is pointing out to the path of descent in your own life if you don't do that.

It gets really ugly fast. That's, that's why I, I had to change my view from God wants me to do big things and realize, no, my ego wants me to do big things. Yes. God wants me to walk with him. Yeah. You know, what does that look like on a day to day basis? Typically quiet. It looks quiet, you know?

So I've changed my my role models used to be Christians who did amazing things. Now the picture in my head is more of the happy monk tending a garden, you know, because my first thought is, well, he's not doing anything big. He must be out of God's will. It's like, no, he's tending the garden that God set him in.

Yeah. You know, and he's in. He's helping the people in his town that God set him in. His life is entirely incarnate. So even to the next town over, he is invisible on a national stage. He is invisible. Yeah, but he is completely walking with God on a daily basis, starting the day in prayer, ending the day in prayer, tending a garden in the middle of the day, helping the sick in his town in the middle of the day.

He's invisible to the world, and he's entirely faithful to God. And he's creating a bubble, a biome of the Kingdom of God. Yes, that is incarnate in a place in a time that is irresistible to the people who come in contact with it, even though there might only be ten of them in his lifetime. Yeah. And Americans say, well, that's not enough.

We got a franchise that we got a Ray. Kroc that, you know, we got to figure out a system we need for spiritual laws. We need to scale it. We need to be able to drop leaflets out of a plane that bring people from zero to Jesus with a testimony. And that came out of the early 20th century when American business was exploding and we were developing all these marketing techniques.

We were innovating ad agencies and marketing and mass sales and mass media. All of that was happening in American capitalism. And so church leaders thought, hey, let's do that too. Yeah, we'll reach more people will reach them faster. We'll reach them farther. You know, I preached to 100 million people in my lifetime. Woohoo! You. You win! And the monk, the happy little monk tending is garden.

Looks as archaic as that 18th century house that we knocked down to build a skyscraper. Yeah. But that's where. That's a good parallel right there. That's where Jesus lives. Yeah. And now that we're looking at pictures of that old house. That used to. Be there, like, that was a beautiful house. Yeah. You know, and every part of it was handmade.

Yeah. Every part of it. And look what we replaced it with a parking lot. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. It's possible be hopeful. Serena, be hopeful because there's bubbles of the kingdom of God all over the world. Yeah, they're. And they're attractive, but they're not on Instagram. Yeah. Is there any hope for like the progression of like the age we live in.

You know like it's only going to go further beyond our, our lifespan and all of that. And it's just like is there some way the relevancy of God can integrate that instead of just having to go back, you know, because like, I don't know, I'm just trying to think of the practicals, right of like and make it like, how do I live this of what I'm, I want to do life well like I want to live this spiritual life well right.

And it's like the time I live in is like, you know, being a mom and and driving around to dropping kids off and working multiple jobs and all of this, all this stuff and having to. And every, every bit of that is sacred. Yes. Okay. Thank you for saying that because I do. Think and that's what that's where I think I can find hope is like whenever something becomes this very specific picture of practicing spirituality or the opposite of what it's not, when it just becomes the reaction to, we really don't like this modern quote unquote, even the hyper fundamentalist, whatever meshed thing, you know, that

we can't necessarily fully define, but we know it's it's sometimes like what? Like instead of just reacting to whatever that is and just being like, we don't like that, then what? What can it be? And and. We what we're we've been meeting about this on our podcast because frankly, we're getting tired of talking about what's wrong with the evangelical. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

After 14 years and our, our commitment going forward is we're going to talk more about what it looks like to follow Jesus. Excellent and less about how these people aren't doing it right. Wonderful. Yeah. And I think that's going to be so helpful because I think I need that. Right. Like I want to hear more examples of that because I do think it's expansive beyond what I've been fed growing up in Western American, like American Christianity, like I've been fed the like culture is evil culture like, watch out, you know, don't get mixed up in it all.

But it's just. Like culture is culture. Great culture will will never be better or worse than our collective instincts. Yeah. And and Christianity was countercultural. And because it's an inverse of world dynamics, you know, the first will be last. The last one we first to lead, you must served. You know, if you're a leader, your servant, you the whole thing's upside down.

It's the upside down kingdom. It it has to be countercultural because the culture will always veer toward the attractive, the shiny, the appealing. The, the easier to attract dynamics of our appetites. So, so culture is, is much more a reflection of our appetites. The seasoning that Christians are called to do, you know, will this side of of God returning to make all things right will always be a minority seasoning, you know, because it's the kingdom of God is at hand, but also not yet fully here.

It's in bubbles, it's in little bubbles. So it's like we're underwater in little air bubbles. And you know, to say, when will all the water be air? Well, someday all the water will be air or will be clean. You know, we're creating bubbles of clean air, of unpolluted air because we're we're up against the powers and the principalities, which are the powers of the earth, which are greed, lust, you know, just the desire that I have more and you have less.

You know, these are the dynamics that drive human culture. And so Christianity, the teaching of Jesus, will always be countercultural and will always fit poorly with power. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, so the Christians saying, oh, we can make everything better if we just have the power, if we have the if I have the power, if I'm holding that ring.

Yeah, I can use that ring for good if I have it, if I have that ring because I'm one of the good ones. I'm one of the good people. That's right. And that's the that's the sin we commit is by saying, I can divide the world into the good people and the bad people, and I'm one of the good people.

So if I have the power, the world will be good. And that is sin, because we're all made good and we're all fallen and capable of great evil. You know, the line between good and evil runs through my heart. It doesn't run through my street, right? So, you know, when we remember that, we know we're always going to be countercultural.

But that's okay. And most of your time you will spend tending your garden, which for the little happy monk was literally tending a garden, cooking, cleaning, feeding other monks, you know, and that's so if that's where you are in life. Yes, you can do that. And you can do that in a bubble of the kingdom of God, because you've inverted the dynamics of I want power over.

You know, you can subvert the culture in your daily life simply by rejecting the values, and, you know, and the drive to dominate and to and to look better than the people around you or parent better than that lady across the street, you know, like all the things that we are pulled to because we want to be better than others, we subvert those and turn them around and we put others first.

And that makes us countercultural always, until Jesus returns to make everything right, not to take us to heaven, not to rapture us in the air. That's a misreading of those verses. Yeah. I hope I'm not left behind to set. Everything right here. Yeah. And this joy in that. I think that this is the fruit of the spirit that, you know, in part.

There's bittersweet joy. There's bittersweet. It always has to be. There can never be pure joy, because we can look at the world and we can see children starving in sub-Saharan Africa, and we can see immigrants being rounded up and put in shackles and put on military planes and dumped in the jungle in Panama, where they've never been before in their life without legal representation.

When we can see that and we can say, that's evil, that is evil. Yes. But God is good. Yes. And in the end, all things will be made good and whole. Until then, I'm running around creating little bubbles of good and whole. Yeah, and that's what I mean by joy. I mean, it's not that we're taking a naive or a willful, blind kind of approach to life, but rather that to address arena, what you're asking.

It's like even in the very thing of I'm driving my kids around or in, you know, what I'm doing in my life, the things that I find sometimes difficult, boring, mundane. It's like bringing that, even that joy in the midst of this, this I get to do this. I choose to do this with love. I choose to do this with presence.

I choose to do this with patients. I mean, that's sort of thing I think is part of addressing how do I live now rather than, you know, hoping that someday something changes off in the future, maybe someday we're going to get to heaven. Or that the culture itself can be swung. Somehow will get swung. Yeah, yeah. Direction that's outcome driven.

I don't we can't control those things. But yeah, yeah, I like the idea of the bubble. You know. The, the outcomes of my labor are God's responsibility. My responsibility is the faithfulness of my labor. Yes. Yeah. So even if nobody bought a Veggie Tales video, if, you know, I felt it was good to make VeggieTales. Yeah, yeah. Then it's good.

Yeah. Intending your garden is good. Even if it's for only three other monks or for two toddlers. Yeah. Beautiful.