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Behind-the-scenes, interviews, weekend follow-up, and more here from Bay Hope TV @ The Weekday.
Oh, wait, wait. Sorry. Now go ahead. Don't use the
first one. Yeah, second one. Andy note to
editor. I've gotten real good at, like, leaving myself notes when
I'm editing, because I'm. Editing and recording the microphone. Yeah, I'm
editing and recording, like, four or five podcasts a week through different
things. And so a lot of times, it's just, like, if I'm
doing it remotely, like if I'm with on Riverside or somebody with something else, I'm
watching as that other person's talking, and I'll just be saying
into my microphone, Cut that. Do you actually
say it quiet like that, too? Well, occasionally.
So one of the shows that I do is
a show that I'm literally talking about
it's with this company called Glue. And in that show, I'm literally
like, the guy that I do it with is in San Antonio. And
so I told him at the very beginning, like, hey, John, if you see me
go like this to the microphone, don't worry about it. That's just me telling
myself. So I feel like I kind of want to
do that now, knowing that you're editing this. You can just in the middle, just
like, hey, Andy, I love you. By the way.
This message is only for you, Andy. I think you're my favorite mage.
Anyway, we're still waiting.
Yeah, what are we waiting for? Mr.
Executive Director himself. Man gets a title and he's
busy. Yeah, he gets a big title, and now all of a sudden
can't yeah. Well, to be fair, nothing much has
changed.
He's later you think he'll watch the beginning part
of. We'Re just
we're not going to tell him. So here's the gag YouTube out there.
We tried this last time and he caught on. So here's what we're
doing. We actually just started the episode, and we're
going to pretend that we're going to restart, and I've
got a whole open and everything. Justin's gonna we're gonna do the whole thing,
but really maybe do another
clap. If we need yeah, yeah, we'll do. Everything, but really,
this is the real intro, so don't tell him. And then when
he watches this or listens to it, we'll see how long it takes
him to catch on. Don't tell him.
Okay. Or share this with your friends. Don't spoil it. Yeah, don't spoil
it. Justin, how's the week been so far? It's been good. It's been good.
This is my Monday today. What? This is your Monday? Cut to
myself. Yeah, this is my Monday? Yeah, that's right. I wasn't here
yesterday. I just took a regular day. Took a personal day. A
what? Took a personal day. I did. Yeah. It was nice.
I just kind of relaxed. I mean,
it was just me. Elena was working. I just had an extra PTO
day. To like what does a PTO day for
Justin consist of? Like, feet up. Like, just lay on the
couch, watch TV, watch the same movie over and over and over, because that's what
you do. Oh, yeah. I mean inception. Oh, yeah,
it's chips.
Yesterday there was a lot of hummus. Okay,
this is, I guess, a big question then, when you're doing
chips and hummus, right? And let me know in the comments below.
Are you like a tortilla chip? Are you like a
lay salt and vinegar, or like an original? Or are you like a pita chip
type of person? None of the above, really?
Yeah, so I said chip, but
my favorite thing with hummus is just, like, Wheat Thin
crackers. Oh, that's not bad. Now, do you
do the full flat, the full fat ones? I do full fat
hint of salt. So less salt.
But I feel like they're almost, like, a little sweet. Maybe it's just me. Well,
I think so. I have long said that Wheat Thins are
a little sweet, and I don't know if that's because
I think that's maybe the wheat texture I'm sure they put sugar in there just
to make you addicted to it, for sure. But I also think that
I remember when I was growing up, in my formative years,
it was a Wheat Thins versus trisket debate, right?
Yeah. And I don't think triskets no good. No,
it's like shredded wheat. Like I can't stand shredded Wheat for breakfast.
Well, not only that, too, but I mean, I don't want
to have to vacuum after I eat.
That's the most annoying part to me.
That's really good. I've never even thought of that. Have you ever seen, like, what
they eat in I mean, Shredded Wheat is kind of like that, but in England,
in the UK, they have this thing called weetabix. You ever seen what weedabix is?
I've never heard of that. Weedabix is essentially like
a six inch by six inch, so it's like the size of my
face. And there's like, maybe eight of them, maybe six of them
in a package. Right. So you get a normal box of
cereal, and then you pour out your one weedabix, and that's what you
eat, and it goes Kunk into the bowl, and then you
pour milk on it. Do you just, like, chop it up with your spoon? Yeah,
I don't know. I assume so. You've had regular shredded
wheat before, right? Like, the big ones, not the shredded mini Wheats? Yeah.
So the regular one regular? Yeah, it takes a second, and they get
kind of like soggy with the milk, and then it kind of sticks to the
back of your throat because it's like, paste. I assume it's just a big
bowl of paste, those
things. I don't mind that with
milk and stuff, but you have to eat that within 10
seconds or it's no good. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the stuff that
they make mortar out of. I feel like
you're just eating building materials. Yeah,
probably. Do you
think mortar is a little sweet? Because I feel like they put a little bit
of sugar on. No, I think that's the reason they put the sugar in there
is so that you can eat the building materials, because otherwise it would just
taste like building materials, and then you would get to experience Life as a
termite. But no, I think a little bit further on. Okay, so
next question, then. Are you a shredded Mini Wheat, like a
Frosted Mini Wheat guy? Or are you a strawberry Frosted Mini Wheat
guy? So if I had
to choose one or the other, I'd
probably choose strawberry. But
I feel like I've probably had the strawberry once,
maybe. Yeah, well, they have another one. It's a brown sugar.
Brown sugar frost. I haven't tried that one. Yeah, that's
pretty good. You ever had Life cereal before? Yeah. I like life.
Yeah, well, it tastes like Life and shredded Mini Wheats, like, kind
of jam together. Like, if you could do the jamming together.
Yeah. Okay.
The reason why I do like Life, and I definitely like it more than
the cereal. We're both pro Life.
Let me tell you. I love life. I love life. I love life. Life is
amazing. I love life. But also like regular life, too. Yeah,
true. I like the life that you can eat also. Yeah, totally.
But again, for the sugar. So
I got a question for you. Yeah. If you have just, like, a regular bowl
of unsweetened, do you like Cheerios? I do.
Okay. I do. Do you put sugar on Cheerios? When I was younger, we used
to have yes. The answer to that is yes.
The thing about Cheerios is that when we were growing up, my mom would always
buy the off brand cereal. Yeah. Which is fine. As a
parent, I understand. And I buy off brand stuff whenever possible because I'm a
big fan of saving money. And they don't usually they're, like, 80% in the
ballpark. Right. But what we would do is we would get
just regular white sugar, and it had this scoop,
and we would just take and you just scoop it out. And then the idea
was that you would walk over to the you'd pour the
milk in, and then you'd walk over and you'd pour the sugar on, or you'd,
like, drizle the sugar on. And then you'd carry your bowl and try not to
move it, the bowl, because the sugar would fall through the holes
and you want it to get this covering on it. You want it
to get that sugar dome. But instead, what would
normally happen is you'd eat your Cheerios with the sugar on it, and then you
would scoop on the bottom of the milk, and.
You would get that, like that was so good. Yeah.
I would take my spoon and just, like, dredge, hit the
bottom, waiting, like, oh, wait, there's a pile right there. Dredging,
scoop it up. It's like fishing, right? This is what fishermen do.
This is why they buy those radars to find out where the
Snook are. Yeah, okay. It's the same principle. I've
been fishing. Fishing? Yeah. You're fishing for raw table sugar
and they're fishing for things that are healthy. Wow.
Now, you said that you do it unsweetened
as you've grown up. Do you eat regular Cheerios without sugar?
I do. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I put sugar on it, but
now I kind of want to. Again, just remembering that. Yeah, but the
problem is you're older and that much sugar
probably will have an adverse effect on you throughout the day, because I'm
sure if you ate. That so here's the thing. Talking
with the rest of the creative crew and
stuff, and we were just even talking about this earlier today.
David was just saying that he went to Hungry Greek
for lunch. So it was him. That's why the bathroom smells
let me rephrase that. He doesn't ever put his hey,
Mike. Hey. Not yet. No,
we're talking about why the bathroom smells like Greek.
Someone dropped something off. David put hungry greek.
Actually, it smells like hungry Greek. Because it's hungry Greek.
Yeah. And it's in the bathroom. Yeah.
All right. You want me to clap? Yeah, go ahead and clap.
Go ahead.
I don't think you've messed it up once. Not since we had
the talk. Oh, there was a talk? Who had a
talk? We all had the talk. The talk was it Mr. Ted. It
was the birds and the bees. Well, you see Jackson
skittles. I'll have one. I'm not going to chew it in the microphone because it's
not that type of podcast. It's not an ASMR
podcast if you want to judge how good we're
doing. All right. Should I count off? Yeah, please. All
right. That was a good face, Justin. Thank you. Yeah.
In three, two, one. Action. In an
era of consistency bringing results
in a world of social media needing to be constantly
posting yeah. We here at the Weekday value
quality over quantity. Well, and we're countercultural in a
way that other people aren't. Jesus said to be
countercultural. Exactly. Right. Also, he didn't say it
explicitly. No, but it's an upside down kingdom.
Yeah. I've listened to enough sermons to know that this is an upside down kingdom.
Welcome to the Weekday, this episode. And we're back
after what episode should it be? I think it should be like
84. Should that just be, like, dubbed in or
something? This is episode 85. Great.
Yeah, I'll do that later. I'm going to be editing this episode. Okay.
So we have been off for, like, six weeks.
Has it been six weeks? Yeah, it's been six weeks. I think on the last
one, too, we said, like, oh, we're going to be back to being a more
normal because we called it the monthly well.
To be fair, this is normal now. We don't
need it to be. So the problem okay, normal.
No. Is that PTSD. That's PTSD. Yeah.
Let's not do that. We're coming up on three years of all that.
No. So we are sorry that we abandoned
you. We didn't mean to. There's just been a lot of upheaval and change.
We lost our good boy Austin Slade, god
rest his soul.
By the way, you know, my favorite emoji to use now
is the Half. Me too, dude. The half salute. Yeah, me,
too. It's just a half salute. That's, like, my favorite hold
on. There it is.
That one right there. And it's, like, not a smile. It's a face
with and that's my favorite one to use. A resolute salute.
Resolute. That's a thing. That's
why you paid the big bucks to make this podcast. We don't get
paid anything for it. Brought to you by the emoji keyboard.
Yeah, there's new emoji coming out in October. Catch on. What
is it? What's the one that people are upset about? No, I don't know yet.
I just know that there's flowers in there. There's, like, lilacs and all sorts of
stuff, and they have named, like, lilac. Do you think people are going to get
upset? Probably. For sure. Can we do a thing where
we. Guess what my
guess is going to be? It's a plate of chili that looks like an elephant
turd, and that's what people are going to get angry about. Your
turn. I was going to say, like, some religious
iconography. Oh, yeah, like the coexist thing. Somebody's going to get angry
that it says coexist. Can't you not have, like, a picture of
don't? Does anyone know what Muhammad looks like? Well, see, that's the thing. Like, what
if there's an emoji? Can we talk about this? Is this why not?
Okay. We're not going to get shut down. Okay. I just
know that that's, like, a. Real there are way worse things on YouTube than what
we're doing. That is very true. And in all honesty, I don't
know how many Muslims actually do listen to this podcast. If they do, though, right
in because I would love to have a conversation. Because I think that's about religious
iconography. Yeah. And about emoji. Honestly, what is the
most offensive? I don't know.
The offensive. Non offensive. Yeah. Because to
me, a picture of Muhammad would not be offensive. Obviously. That would be very
offensive to a Muslim. Right? Yeah. Is this
too niche of a I think so. Okay. I think we might be treading
some dangerous territory. There's other websites for you to go
I can forward you some other websites that I have seen in my I. Would
say don't do that. Please don't. For
my
sanity@bayhope.com.
Find Mike Mage's. I'm already subscribed to HN and Four Chan.
I'm not, though. No, four Chan doesn't exist anymore. Oh, it doesn't? No. Okay.
No. It's now called Seven Chan. Why? What are the numbers and
what's the chan? Chan? We don't have time to get into it, but
I do know, it started from an old IRC
thing. What's IRC? IRC was Internet Relay
Communication. And it was essentially slack before slack. Okay. But way
back in pre Slack. Well, we're talking like
early 90s, it was like chat rooms, jurassic Slack,
jur Slack. And it was chat rooms
essentially like Slack. That's where all the hashtags came from and everything. This is what
IRC was. It's fascinating. IRC is still up and running. Nerds use
it all time nerds. But anyway, we digress. Justin,
welcome to the show. First time. Long time. Long
time. We were just chatting that this is your Monday.
Real quick. This is his Monday. Yeah. He wasn't in yesterday,
right? Yeah. And today was a Tuesday. Yes, I remember that. And
yesterday was a Monday. I see. Justin, do you get a
case of the Sunday scaries or I guess Monday scaries, like when you know
you got to work the next day, do you get that feeling? Not really, no.
Do you know really you don't.
So that depends. I feel like
that depends on how busy the week is. If it's a super
busy week or whatever, then it's like, oh
man, now it's going to be time to just kind of
run. Look at my ground running. Do you see all of
the blocks? Do you want me to describe it to the
people of the Internet? Yeah. So there are
blocks and more blocks of colors. There's just
blocks everywhere of rectangular mostly. But there
are colors of days. There are sections.
It looks like there are sections. Anyway, this is great. This
is great. We're going to do this for another minute. The reason I ask about
the Monday scaries or the Sunday scaries is that I get them
occasionally on Sunday evening, even though I work for a church and we work on
Sundays. Typically what will happen when football is on, if I'm
watching the CBS game at 04:00 or it's on in the background just for like
the munge the background munge noise. And I hear that from the
60 Minutes clock. Yeah. Coming up on 60
Minutes Deon Sanders or whatever,
that gets my heart. I have palpations in my heart
because I know I got to attack that calendar that
we just saw. And my calendar is usually just a bunch of stuff.
Is it the fact that it's Sunday or the fact that it's just a clock
that's ticking down? I think it's a both and okay. I
think there's a definite time bomb thing happening. Let us know in the
comments below or in the chat if you're watching this as live premiere, if you're
afraid of a time bomb, you ever seen that
game called something
like Don't Explode or we're going to all explode or something? Essentially it's a party
game and you have the Diffusing manual and
then somebody else is trying to diffuse the bomb. Yeah, I haven't played that one
specifically, but it's like a space game. It's essentially sort of like the same thing.
Yeah, justin works fun. I've seen that. You have seen the space one or.
The don't explode, don't explode thing. Yeah, I think we should try
that here because it's a manual. You want to talk about team building?
It's fun to do and it's a communication thing and all that. But also you
can blow each other up, right? Okay, we're going to talk about something that's
actually a follow up from our most recent episode. Two years
ago.
We went from the weekday to the monthly to the yearly. Yeah, we're the
bi weekly or the bimonthly now. No, actually it would be the semi
annually. Welcome to the semiannually. I'm Andy.
We'll be right back. It's harder to brand.
Thanks for joining us here on the weekday today. And if you're interested
in anything that we're doing with our global online community here at
Bayhope Church, head over to Bahpe.com, type in digital into the search box,
and join any one of our communities, either on Facebook, on Discord,
or on any one of our social media platforms. We can't wait
to engage with you and hang out with you.
I promised we'd be back, and I didn't leave.
I am a constant. You never do. I am inevitable.
So before we snap each other out of existence, that, my friends, is a thanos
joke. Last episode, we talked about an article
called The Great Decurching from Jim David and Michael or Jake Meter in the
Atlantic written and it was about a book by Jim David and Michael
Graham called The Great Decurching. And essentially the topic was,
where did all the people go? Since 2020,
people have left the church. And there has been a number of reasons
why people have left the church. But essentially, people are leaving the church because
they're not able to find community. I think that was like the whole kind of
breakdown of everything. Right? Am I missing something? There was a follow
up blog post written on
September 14 by one of my favorite pastors out there, this guy, James Emery
White, out of Mecklenburg Church in North Carolina.
They're a multi site church. Well, no, they used to be. Used to be a
multi site church. Yeah, I think they sold. No, they just, like, launched all their.
Other campuses and just said, like, gone your church. James Emery White
is a big proponent of hybrid church, of doing digital church and
physical the digital digital. I can't stand the word digital. Of
doing physical and digital meeting together, which I don't
know if you knew. I am, too. Yeah, I'm a big fan.
But he actually wrote a thing. And one of the things and we're going to
get to this in a second, but essentially the question he asked is,
what's driving the Great D Churching? Because there was another article that was written in
Christianity Today. It was the reason that
people were leaving the church was not because of a lack of community, but a
lack of theology, a lack of deep, sound teaching, and people didn't know what they
believed, and yada, yada, yada. And so James Henry White kind of
collated all these things and said, okay, what's the real reason?
He said, the answer, of course, is all of the above. Now,
the blog post, and I'll link it below and you can go read it. It's
kind of an advertisement for his book Hybrid Church, which is a great book. I've
read it's. Oh, really? Yeah, it's a great book. I love James Henry White. He's
a great writer written specifically for churches wanting to thrive
in a post Christian digital age. So he says, what's the
way? Essentially, like, how do we get people back? How do we get people back?
Because as we talked about last episode, it was forming community. It
was making sure we're big on community. So before we
kind of get to that, he says, one key dynamic will
never change. The church must be the church, right?
The church must be the church. And this is what we have to offer the
world that the world does not already have. Authentic biblical
community. So in response to this article, what are
your initial thoughts? And then we can kind of dive in a little bit deeper
after that. Yeah,
as I was reading it, I don't know if we've talked about this on the
podcast before. Maybe we have. And we've done so many of them and haven't done
one in, like, two years. So
this church, Bayhope Van Dyke,
was running at one point,
like 4500 to 5000 people a weekend.
Definitely over 4000 people. And that was normal. Like, you couldn't find
a parking spot. It was jampacked
in and around here. But there was a way that we were
doing church that was
way more like performance based and almost like,
come see. You got to come see this, like, almost like spectacle
kind of thing. I mean, we've talked about this a little bit. That was the
idea of essentially the evangelical church starting in the late
80s, all the way up to was the Seeker Sensitive Generational
model. And so when I got
here, 2014, we were still in that
model, but it was already starting to
become.
Passe. Yeah, it was already cumbersome. Yeah, it was
starting to move its way out. People were starting to want
something different, but we as a church, hadn't
fully adapted to or, like, we're we're
continuing with this model. That really
didn't make sense. I mean, you could argue, did it ever really make
sense? That's not what I really want to do right now, but I can I.
Think that's a fascinating conversation to have. Well, and I think that the model
of, like, you have to come here to engage with the church
rather than you engage with the church because of the
people that you are around worship can look like
a few different things. It doesn't need to be a performance
on a platform with all the lights and all that kind of stuff. And obviously,
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do that because
well, you're talking. Out of both sides of your mouth then, Mike.
There's some nuance to this. D all the above. Right.
For our context, we as a church where
we're trying to move away from that between 2014
and 2020. And
even though
2008, 2009, we were running like the most people we've ever
had here. But you could argue our church was essentially the most
unhealthy that it's been in a long time. It's a mile wide, an
inch deep. Yeah. And even though it was like we had
effective ministry, don't get me wrong, there was a lot of effective things that were
happening, but the amount of people that were coming versus what the
church was actually doing,
it's almost like 2020
happened. And we lost a lot of those people who thought
that we were the church there's like the performance based
thing. And so we ended up you could look at our numbers and be like,
oh my gosh, we hemorrhaged so many people, and all that kind of stuff. But
I think what happened was we as a church started to 2020
helped us make the decision to be like, we are no longer going to be
a performance based church. We're making this
shift for our worship specifically,
and we had to redo
rethink about how a lot of how we were doing church, how we were
staffing people, how we were going about. I mean,
we came out of 2020 forgetting how to do very basic
things as a church, partially because what
was holding that up before 2020 was just
like the tradition of doing it. And we had
a first time guest process. We had a membership
class or whatever. We had mission trips and all that kind of stuff.
But one of the only reasons we had them is because we had always done
them. And so I think what happened in 2020
was the church was forced to essentially shut
down. For all intents and purposes, obviously, we as a church did not
close, but it forced us
to rethink about all of this kind of
stuff. And I think whether your church or
whether a local church was ready for that, it ended
up happening. And there were
more churches that were able
to discuss those types of things or maybe in a position
to adapt, maybe create a new model for
the way that they work their mission. And
I think that there was a lot of casualties from that. Sorry. And then
even the people who are coming, who are like the mile wide, inch deep type
thing, even for them, they would start to be like, wait, why do
I even go to church anymore? And so they're just like, well, I don't go
to church other than to just go see something. And my life
hasn't really changed now that I can't go and see.
So, like, why do I even need. To be so
that's a cool setup, and I don't think you meant to do it, but
james Emery Wright writes in an opinion piece for Christianity Today. Luke
Helm, who is the writer of this opinion piece, writes of
skipping out on church for three years so essentially during the pandemic, only
to return out of spiritual loneliness. His reason for the initial departure, and it says,
quote, faith in church have been tough for a lot of people coming out of
the pandemic. I'm one of them. The last three years ushered my wife and me
through two job changes, a cross country move, and months spent hunkered inside trying to
keep our young children healthy and ourselves sane. By the time the world began to
reopen, much felt different. Of course, until recently, I could count on one hand
the number of times I'd physically attended a church service since March 2020. I could
give many reasons for our absence a toddler and a newborn disillusionment with a church
tradition that was once home. I want to put a pin in that. Enjoying a
second weekend morning. I also want to put in that sheer exhaustion and more,
and I can resonate with all of those. And I work at a church and
I can resonate with every single one of those. And then he goes on, but
if I'm really honest, one reason stands out. The further I get from
church, the less Christian faith makes sense to me.
The physical drift begets an intellectual one. So
that's the end of the quote. James Henry White then goes on to ask the
actual question so what brought him back? Hellman ended his essay by noting that the
quote unquote strength of togetherness was what not only drew him back,
but what he noticed most about being back in church. So
this entire article is kind of a treatise on the people saying, well, this
is it. This is the end of the church. This is how church ends. Because
people are stopping coming because they don't want the attractional model, because
they're rebelling against all of these things. And instead what we're finding is that people
that are coming back to church are actual the
spiritually sensitive ones. Excuse me. One of the things
that happened last week, and then I'm going to turn it back over to you
and Justin, was that last week we had
an executive and leadership team day away, right? So it was all of the
executive directors and pastors we gather in a room for all day
and we chat and we talk. And it's loving
and learning, essentially, or loving and leading. And so we spend like half the day
talking about prayer requests and accountability and personal things, and then we'll spend
a solid portion of the day talking about. Actual
church things. Right. And one of the things that we're working on is this sort
of action plan. Yeah, we're an action, but what it is,
essentially, is how do we define a mission and a vision
into or how do we distill and
quantify a mission and a vision? And one of the things that we have
to do with that is we have to contextualize everything. We have to
contextualize it internally and we have to contextualize
it externally. And one of the things that I kept coming back to and I
finally spoke up and said it was our external
context had nothing to do with
different age groups. It was just sort of broad, sweeping generalization,
and it was nobody's fault. It was just like that was
just like kind of what was there. It was, hey, the rent really sucks right
now. And real estate prices are really, really high in Tampa, which
we're the third or fourth highest cost of living
in the United States behind Miami and Los Angeles
right now. Yeah, I mean, real estate. Yes. More and more people
are supply and demand. More and more people living here, there's. Less
demand, there's less supply, more demand, et cetera, et cetera. Everything's very
expensive around here, which it is everywhere. But I feel like everything is very
expensive around here. The
multiplication, the exponential growth has
contributed to it. Even though I think countrywide we're, like, pretty average, it
is way more expensive than it used to be. Right. Which is the hardest thing.
And the wages themselves have not gone up yes, 100% with
it. And so it feels very pressing. Anyway. One of the things I kept
coming back to was external context of
how we're doing church right now is that we have a generation behind us and
even kind of behind Justin. Although I feel like Justin's kind of on the leading
edge of it where people are way
more more, and by tolerance I
mean tolerant of everything, good and bad. They're way more tolerant. They are
way more introspective, which, rightly
or wrongly, that's because of phones and because of information and anxiety and depression and
everything being on the rise. And also, they are
way more spiritually sensitive
than you and I were. And there's a lot of contributing
factors to that. But that's our context we're living in. And so we see
that people are saying, this is the death knell for church. And James Emery White
is arguing, and I'm arguing, and I think you're arguing. No, no. This is time
for the church to be the church because people are actually the people that are
coming back. Yes. The people that are logging on, the people that are walking in
the doors of a church, by and large, they're not coming for
the show anymore. Correct. Because you can log on to Strike Force Five and get
a show every morning with Jimmy Kimmel and his married gang of idiots.
Right. Not that they're bad, but it's kind of
bad. Well, no, I mean, they would call. Themselves idiots, so yeah,
you can definitely tell they need writers. But anyway, so your
thoughts on that? And then I want to kick it to Justin. No, I got
a question for mean a good example of this is know, we're talking
about like the church was essentially declining in attendance as we
began to rehab or maybe push closer
to what we think is a healthier mission and
model to
properly express what our mission is as
a church. 2014 to 2020, we're seeing more and more
people leave, seeing more and more people, and then
2020 happens and we reopen and
there's way less people because of the disillusionment
that this guy is talking about. We kind of have to relearn how to
do a lot of things. But since last year at this time,
we have grown in physical attendance sorry,
in altogether attendance. Attendance. 11%
in physical attendance. We are outpacing the country
by 10%. We have grown
40% in physical attendance, 11% overall
us. So the fact
that people think that the church is dead, people are
not coming back, that is not what we are experiencing.
We are experiencing an exponential
growth year over year.
I'll see if I can put a card right here. Year over year
growth that we as Bay
Hope Church, van Dyke Church in the last, like 30 plus years have never
experienced before. And so
part of what james Emery White that
that I resonate with and to sort of tack
onto what you're saying that you sort of agree with what
he's saying is that there is an obvious
and always going to be a need for the church
as a vehicle of God's love, grace and mercy in a
community that can be expressed in a lot of different ways.
And when we reduce church to just a show, when we reduce church
to just an attraction to come and gawk
at, we deserve to not
grow. It deserves for people to not show
up to that because there's way too much access to way too many
things that are always going to be better than what we're
able to put on as a production on Sunday mornings.
That's a reaction, of course, to so
that exact thing right there. When I first started, I've been in ministry 15 years
now, which I just turned 40. So
40 doesn't seem old. 40 seems very when do we start.
Clapping for people's age 60s? Okay, shoot, you're early. I'm
early 65. When I think when retirement age,
then. You just like, oh, you did it. You're up, but you're alive. One
more day. Congrats, budy, you're at work. One more day. No.
So I simultaneously feel old and young at the same time. I feel like
I've been doing ministry a long time. I feel like a grizzled vet because I've
been doing this 15 years, 14 of them full time, which
is a long time. The flip side of that is I still feel young,
and I'm able to see generational trends happening.
Right. The generational trend I'm talking about, I feel like I've
seen two or three of these now happen. And the one that you're responding to
was right when I started ministry and right when you kind of were getting into
it, was that it was like, man, we're going to do everything bigger and better
than the world. We're going to bring people in with. We're going to create a
movie that's going to look awesome. Our albums are going to sound great. Or
if not great, then we're going to just take whatever heavy metal band and then
copy it and call it Christian. Or we're going to take whatever magazine is out
there and call it Christian. We're going to redeem these secular songs and play them
in church because we're edgy, right? Like Toy Story. We're going to do Toy Story
at Easter and the Hulk and things at Easter. And
what I think we're finding is that didn't work. Well, I think it
worked for that. Time, but I think the calling happened during the pandemic, which is
exactly what this thing is. So I guess the spiritual exercise we need to go
through is what do we do now? We talk about
hybrid church. Everything's hybridized now. I ran
up against this when I was searching for some
sort of dog food or something like that. Couldn't buy it online. I was like,
well, looks like I'm not buying that. I could research it online, but I couldn't
buy it online. I was like, well, looks like if I can't do it digitally,
I'm not going to do it. Sure. So, Justin, I want to turn my question
to you is, so you're younger than us by
a considerable margin. Do you want to give us your age
and your Social Security number right now? Yeah. Well, they're both the
same. I'm very old. Right? What's your mother's maiden name?
What's the city you were born in? Yeah. City you were born in. Your favorite
school teacher. And did you have one of these cars? Was one of these cars
the last three cars? Toyota
Corolla mercury Mountaineer dodge
Dakota You. Had a Dodge Dakota? Wow. He didn't
what was your first car? My first car? It's actually
the car that I'm still driving. No way. Yep. Congrats.
Get out of here, man. Yeah, it's a Mercury mariner.
Mariner? Yeah. I thought it was Mountaineer, too, because that makes
sense. It does. SUV? Yeah. Why would you drive that thing into the
water? I don't know. I've seen the office. It doesn't work. So,
Justin, my question to you is, have you seen first and foremost, have you
seen the trend shift in your young years? Have you seen the trend shift? And
second of all, we're not going to fix church
today. But I'm sorry, I'm going to title
this something the Effect of, like, how Can We Fix Church? Or is church broken?
Or something really clickbaity like that. I love it. So be ready for that. But
second of all, in response to this article, what
is all of the above for you? If you had
left church for three years, what would bring you back? Yeah,
well, I don't want to say
you come back to church ever said in the article. Yeah, okay. Because I feel
like that's a cheap way out,
but I do 100% agree
with what he said in the article. What he said
was it was the togetherness, which is
the important aspect that
he felt like you get in church, but
I wouldn't say not anywhere else, but like in church, you get that.
The biblical community of togetherness.
Sure.
As much as I don't want to say that, I feel like I do kind
of have to, because I just feel like that
is the answer,
a really good answer. Because the other stuff that he's talking about,
which he also mentioned earlier in the article, earlier in the
article, which I think it actually might have been a quote where he said.
I wish. I could have the article pulled up right now. But he was talking
about how there's other reasons
why. Well, you listed some of the
reasons. Yeah. Daniel Williams writing for Christianity Today
suggests that the deeper issue is a weak ecclesiology at the heart of most Christian
theology, particularly evangelical theology. That is that what
you're talking about? Is that the very first quote? The one that I'm thinking of
is the first quote where he was quoting the article that we read. Oh. He
says, contemporary America simply isn't set up to promote mutuality care
or common life. That rather it's designed to
maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial
success. The thing that I'm thinking of so the very last
sentence, it had something to do with the math problem there. Oh, yeah. Workism reigns
in America and because of it community in America, religious community included, is a
math problem that doesn't add. Yeah. Yeah, that's good
to I i feel
like that's something that I see a lot, and
I feel like part of that is also because that was
me for a little bit, too. Where? Because I grew up in the church. Oh.
I should probably switch my camera. No, that's okay. You can just see me looking
at my computer screen the whole time I was paying attention. Well, I
mean, I grew up in the church, and then we stopped going to church
for a while, and later
on, after I got a little bit more, a little bit older, to
where I could actually decide for myself whether or not I want to
go to church that weekend rather than letting my parents
decide for me. It was difficult, and it was
spotty. And the reason why it was spotty was exactly because of that,
which it felt like
at the time. It felt like if I wasn't going to church, I was getting
certain time on my weekend back. Even
though you weren't adding any value.
Yeah, exactly. Let's be honest, I probably
wasn't doing anything, like, amazing
during that time. Most of that time I was probably just
sleeping anyway.
But I don't
know. I think it's disappointing
how difficult it is
to make the decision against that. And I feel
like the reason for that is because when you're not at church,
kind of like what he said in the article, even when you're not at church,
it's harder and harder to justify
going. Sometimes I feel like partly because
of, or maybe all of because
of the distance that you might feel
away from
Christianity and distance away from God that you might
feel, even if it's not distance that's
it's more distance that's perceived than anything.
Well, it's crazy. I was listening to a
podcast the other yesterday actually, about this
thing that I'm, like, nerding out about. Good for you. Well, it's about drum
corps and music and all that kind of stuff. And they were talking
about this drum and bugle corps from like, 30 years
ago. They were talking about the members of it. And he's like, kids
back then right, wrong, indifferent, or whatever,
they didn't analyze things as much as kids analyze things
nowadays. And then on top of that, they didn't
have all of the extra things in their
life to compete with. And so
he's like, so we had to teach them how to do things a lot more
than we have to teach kids now. But they didn't have
to compete with all these other things in their life, so they had all of
the time in the world to just make it perfect and make it right to
be excellent. And while that's not exactly what we're talking
about, the heart of that issue is the same exact
thing, especially in America. We
are so much more educated than we used to be. Like, we
know and have access to information,
like the most information we've ever had
before. On top of that, we are shoving everything
in our life. Like, every square inch
of time is filled up with something
sometimes from a culture perspective for the sake of growth
or for the sake of careerism or workers. And, like, it's talking about
and if church is just a place for me
to come and feel good about myself, then why I don't need to
come to church. I can do that some other place on my own time in
a shorter way, and I don't have to do it around people that I don't
really want to be around. Yeah. No,
church has to be a place. The gospel will always be
compelling. Church at its finest, at its purest, will be the
most compelling place ever, the most
compelling community. But when you start
sacrificing some of that compelling, the
compelling nature, because it's difficult to cultivate. It might not go as
fast as you want it to be. When you start comparing yourself to other
communities or whatever, you play the comparison game. It's like, oh, well, we
could grow a little bit more if we do this, but we'll have to maybe
sacrifice a little bit of our spiritual integrity to make that happen or
whatever. There's a lot of
detrimental factors that play into that. I would say my last thought on this
is along that
line. So it's twofold. So we had a conversation. Do you
know yes Theory? The YouTube channel yes Theory? So they did their most
justin, do you know yes Theory? I do. Yeah. So they're the seek discomfort guys.
They're great. Their most recent episode, they went to a
prison in Korea, 48 Hours. And it's not like
prison prison. What it is, is that you get a cell that's essentially the size
of like a walk in closet, and you put your phone outside this door for
48 hours or however long. And then I've seen this literally you just sit there
and there's a window and you can make tea. Silence
retreat. It's essentially a silence retreat. Yeah, it's
that so a bunch
of things kind of mishmashed on top of that. So they came out with these
after 48 Hours, they came out with these huge spiritual revelations. Like, yes, of course
they're younger. They're technically gen Z as well. Like late 20s, early thirty.
S one of the quotes was like
the guy was sitting there saying like, I haven't been without my phone ever in
my life for longer than and he was automatically like he woke up from bed
when was automatically reaching for his phone. Okay. I mean,
I can kind of see that I have that tendency in my life. So
there's a through line here. Follow me. So the phone thing, the second
thing is you just said we have access to more information and we're jamming
as much as we can into every single moment that we have. Because
FOMO is a real thing.
It's something that advertisers play off of. It's something that mass market and mass media
plays off. Constantly missing out on something. It's something that church doesn't know how to
deal with. Sure. Still does not know how to deal with. This church in particular.
We do not know how to deal with FOMO. We can try, but churches of
our size do not know how to do it because we're not huge and we're
not small. We're like caught right in that stupid to say the
small megachurch size. We are, though. We are just
above what is a classification of a megachurch. Right? And so we don't know how
to deal with FOMO. Like, we don't know how to create the FOMO, like some
of the bigger churches do. Not saying it's right or wrong. We don't know how
to because we don't have that. So there's that line. There's also the other line
of when you jam, every single life is full of
workism and as full as you can of information and doing things all the
time. And you don't give yourself time to breathe. You don't allow
yourself time for community. You don't allow yourself time to actually think and process things.
And then you get and I love her. We have a person that is on
our staff. There's two people that are on staff. They're married. They have two
kids. We love them. They're part of our family. They have a six year old
daughter. Right. She was talking about this at our director's meeting. She has
a eight or nine okay. Oh, the same age as your son, as Caleb eight
or nine year old daughter. And she has feelings
she has feelings of anxiety as a nine year old.
Yeah. And she is a by all accounts, she is
a normal girl. Her parents are normal, smart yep. Incredibly
intelligent, like, knows the Lord, loves the Lord, all those things. Her
parents are middle class white Americans with
good jobs, a nice house, have everything. She has never had
to worry about food on her table. But she struggles with anxiety
because she knows too much, and it's not a bad thing.
This is not against the parents or anything, because this is just the world we
live in. She goes to school, she is surrounded by so much information. She comes
home, she's surrounded by information. Pressures at school are put
upon her. And again, not right, wrong, no, whatever, but just
that's the world that we are living in. Correct. And so I'm making this whole
through line. I'm not saying it's phones, mass media. I'm saying it's a conglomeration of
all of these things put together. Where do you find time for church? Where do
you find time for community? Like, I feel that poll. I don't have time for
community. Why am I going to do that? And the question that I need
to ask is, like, how do we fix that? How
do we we brought up at the very beginning of this podcast, or what you
think is the beginning of this podcast, we thought we are thinking
about how we are doing
countercultural things. Yeah. What do we do with that information?
Can we save that for the next one? Because I have a really good thought.
Do you? I do. Okay. I mean, I'm fine with that. Yeah, unless you want
to spit it and well, we've been going long right now. No, it's going to
take a whole nother episode, but okay. I'm fine with that because I think. There'S
a and because I want to give it the time for me to actually lean
into this more with the idea that I have and you're going. To be fresh
off vacation for that one. You're going to be spitting, dude. I'm either hot fire
or you're going to be laying out just like chilling. Braids in your hair.
I'm going to be so countercultural. Yeah. Braids in your hair.
Steel drum feeling hot, hot.
Yaman. Island time.
Last little thing for me. Justin, thanks for being here with you, being our
token young guy, even though you're not technically that young,
but you're younger than us, so technically
you're our token young guy. Do you feel that pressure of workism in your
life? Do you feel that pressure of everything surrounding you all the time, even at
your advanced young years? So maybe I'm wrong,
and you can correct me if I'm wrong. You're wrong. Yeah, I know.
Wow, that was good. No, you missed the high five. We're done.
Yeah. Well, I feel like
that's something that's this is just going from
what I see. I feel like this is something that's impacting the
younger generation a lot more
than the older generation. But
I also kind of feel like it's a little bit of a gradual thing
that's bleeding into the other generations also.
I don't know if you feel the same way, but I feel like it's almost
like if we have all the generations on a timeline with younger
over here, older over here, the pool
of that is here. And it's kind of like a piece of paper that's
being soaked and kind of gradually traveling up
gravity. Gravity, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
I don't know. Do you agree with that? I don't know. I like that
song. Yes. I think that.
Twice as much. Twice as good. I think that there
are certain cultural pressures and expectations and assumptions put
on maybe each generation.
And what the older, like
the boomer generation expects of
the younger generation is what
was expected of them or what they assumed that they would
get if they were to just do their job or go to
college. There's like, certain cultural expectations that were very different
40 years ago, 50 years ago, and
the world has changed a lot since then. And so I
think that the younger generation has to not only deal
with what the
generational expectations are of them, but
also that is built on top of what
already the cultural expectation of what they think that they
should also have. Does that make yeah. Yeah, it does. And then,
yes, it is working itself back up through the ages. For
sure. Yeah. I think we can keep going
for hours on this topic. We are going to have to cut this off now.
I do want to come back and have all those other chats. Justin, thanks so
much for joining in on the discussion. I have a way to fix this. Go
ahead. No, I'm just saying for the next. One, you're going to fix church
forever. Well, I'm going to fix whatever is the problem with
our culture and all of those problems and all that kind of
stuff. I have it. Why do we have to wait. It's called
a tease. Okay? Find out next time how Mike solves church. We're just
going to call it Mike Solve Church. It'll be the most listened
to podcast. Or people will just delete it immediately.
Hey, thanks so much for joining in on our semi a regularly
podcast. We'll see you next time. We love you. Bye.
Hey, thanks so much for tuning in to the weekday here at Bay Hope
Church. And if you are watching this on YouTube, do us a quick favor and
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