Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 56 | Discipling Millennials with Grant Skeldon

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

I talk with my friend Grant Skeldon about his new book, "The Passion Generation," which explains the importance of discipling Millennials. We discuss the challenges of discipleship and why it's so crucial for shaping the upcoming generation. Copyright CRTV. All rights reserved.

Hello, hello, welcome to Relatable. My name is Allie Stucky. This is a podcast by CRTV. If you're not watching this, you should watch it. We've got like our little set in a tiny corner of my little room that I'm in that you could watch and you could see how much I move my hands and all the facial expressions that I make when I'm speaking, but you have to go to CRTV.com slash Allie and you have to subscribe. You can use promo code to Allie 20, I think. And then you can get a discount or you can just listen on here. But it's not as cool. way. Anyway, today we are going to interview one of my good friends and just an incredible influencer in the Christian community. His name is Grant Skelden. He is a master of discipleship. So he travels around the country and he really invest in or invests his time in and teaches

churches and pastors how to attract and how to disciple millennials. He's a millennial. I'm a millennial. And so the conversation we have is going to center on millennials and how to not get us into church, but get us involved in our relationship with Christ through intimate discipleship. He wrote a book called The Passion Generation that really helps older generations understand our generation. We're often seen as these kind of mysterious, awful people that are completely hopeless and are going to drive our country and the church into the ground. But neither grant nor I actually believe that's true. We believe that there's hope for millennials. But of course, just like with any other generation, we need discipleship. We need help. We need others to come alongside us. And I keep

wanting to say mentor, not mentor, but give us wisdom and show us what life in Christ looks like. And in turn, we millennials need to turn to people younger than us or behind us spiritually and disciple them as well. So the conversation that I have with him is going to center on that. Full disclosure, I haven't read Grant's entire book yet. I'm sure that it's wonderful. I've read a large portion of it. I haven't read his entire book. So I'd love to hear your feedback about it. What you think about it. I know we talk a lot about theology on this podcast. And so if you have any questions or any feedback about his book that you're wondering about, I will certainly take those questions, I can direct those questions to Grant. So like I said, I haven't read it in its entirety,

but what I know of Grant is that he is so passionate for Christ, so passionate for this ministry. He's doing such good work for the church. And I am really excited for you guys to learn more about him and about his book. First, I need to talk about something really important, really important. And that is your pillow. What pillow you're sleeping on. This is a really important conversation that we need to have. You didn't think that I was going to talk to you about your sleeping habits. Actually, you probably did after the last couple of weeks of listening to this podcast because I've talked to you about it a lot. I want to talk to you about your sleeping habits because chances are you probably aren't sleeping as well as you could. Like you probably have a crick in your

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Of course, for now we are going to talk to my dear friend Grant Skelton. Grant, thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ellie. Yeah, could you tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what you do? Yeah, so my name's Grant and I have a huge passion for the millennial generation, but really bigger than that, I have a huge passion in unity, really racial unity, denominational unity. But a big part of God's using me before right now is just generational unity. As you know, there's a lot of people trying to figure out

millennials. And so I've found myself a lot of times trying to help pastors that are trying to reach millennials, parents that are trying to raise millennials and even business leaders that are just trying to retain millennials. But as I've looked into the millennial conversation, What I've found is, and really my hope is to help older generations better disciple millennials and help millennials better show honor and hunger towards learning from the generations before us because I actually think there's more of a discipleship problem than there is a millennial problem. And so whenever there's a discipleship problem, you'll always kind of have tension between generations. And that's what really your book is centered on, the passion generation.

and one of my favorite parts about your book is the there's, I don't want to call them cartoons, but they're kind of, their drawings, their depictions that I think just send a very clear message of what you're trying to say. And one part of that is I think that you made the point through one of those depictions that you shouldn't be criticizing this generation if you're not discipling this generation. So can you tell us kind of how that disconnect happened, how that happened to where baby boomers and older generation started saying, gosh, millennials, you need to fix yourselves without saying, okay, let me take responsibility and start mentoring them myself.

How did we get there? I don't think, I don't, I never try to act like millennials of the first generation to not get disciples or mentored. I think, I think that's happened for a while. However, you know, I had someone once say that like maybe a little bit after the industrial revolution, fathers and sons weren't going out together and work. working together and stuff like that. And maybe there is some truth to that.

But I really feel like, I don't know, there became a point in, I'm talking more from a Christian perspective, but it became a point when I think we wanted the church to do discipleship when we left, parents left it on the church to do the training and all that. And I think the discipleship first starts in the home. But I don't know. I don't know. I feel like it's a pretty rare story to see a millennial come to Christ and then get disciples. right after for myself. I was very lucky to the very first time I went to this new church. It was a very

broken time in my life. I was 16 years old. And I gave my life to Christ. And then two weeks later, I had an older man take me under his wing. And what I realized is I got older, and most young people never had someone like that. And so, as you may have saw in the book, I also believe that this is maybe one of the most fatherless generations. Yeah. And so that is also, I think, something that has impacted millennials and where discipleship is important is there's lack of fathers through divorce, but even spiritual fathers, as there's a huge increase of mostly women in the church now, even though a lot of churches may be led by males, it's filled by women. And so you have a lack of, I think, spiritual fathers and therefore also mentors. Yeah, I agree with you that

certainly millennials are probably not the first generation not to be disciples, but it does, or I get the feeling maybe just as a millennial, that a lot of older people think that we are the worst generation that has ever lived. They compare us to the baby boomers, the silent generation, the greatest generation. And it said, oh my gosh, these millennials, they're so entitled, they're so apathetic. And so there does seem to be this just very intense feeling about millennials. And you talk about that part of that is because, like you said, the lack of discipleship. So what is the first step that an older person can take to, instead of just criticizing younger

people for what are probably truly our fault, what's the first step that someone can take to say, I'm going to take you under my wing? Yeah. I think the first step is, of course, I think building a different culture, whether there's someone's listening and they're maybe an employer that has a lot of millennials that are frustrating you or if you're a pastor or if you maybe just maybe in your own home you have a lot of millennials. I do think having a heart shift is one of the first changes. You know, because like I said in that, I think the poster, the thing you read is it's hard to say out of one side of your mouth.

Millennials are this like lazy entitled slackivists, all these negative things. And then the other side, but we really want to reach them. Why won't they showing up? Right. No group of people would ever want to be a part of a group where they're made fun of behind the scenes or behind the back. Exactly. And there's one thing we're, our generation's really good at is being raw and authentic. And we're so marketed to that I think we can tell when you don't really want us, you want us, you don't like want to use us. You just want us to be a part and be here.

And we can kind of feel like a means to an end. And so the other thing I would say first step is I always say just discipling is not mentoring. Mentoring is when you meet with someone over coffee, which is good. But discipleship's a lot scary. It's when you allow someone to join your life. So tell me the difference between mentorship and discipleship, because I think that's probably the discipleship sounds a lot kind of scarier than mentorship because it sounds more vulnerable. Yeah, it is.

It's extremely vulnerable. Even me today. I mean, the very first person that ever asked if I would disciple them, I was 19 years old. So I had only been disciplined myself by that time I would have been disciple for three years. and this guy named Nick, who was a freshman in college, he's kind of like, hey, will you disciple me? At the time, I was pretty significantly mature for my age. I was leading ministry. I was leading on campus.

I was pretty influential. I was speaking just a little bit. And so compared to others my age, I was a little set apart. But when this kid, Nick, wanted to get disciples by me, I was like, man, if he really does get, like, if I allow him to follow me, he's going to see everything, like the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I remember thinking, man, I play call of duty a lot, like hours of call of duty. Even though I'm leading and I'm doing this. Yeah. I'm going to be embarrassed for him to see that.

Or if he sees my room is such a mess and my car is such a mess. And he's going to see like at the time I wasn't that close from my family. I was still figuring out how do I do what God's call me to do even though my dad doesn't understand. And that kind of created some tension between me and him. And he's just going to see that I'm not perfect. I'm still working it out. And so it does require vulnerability.

I actually think that God probably likes that. I think it's very easy to live a type of cultural Christianity or comfortable Christianity when you don't have someone who gets to see your junk. And so John Maxwell, I remember him saying a quote where he said, if you want to impress people, just share your successes. But if you want to impact people, share your failures. And so I found that the people that are willing to do, disciple and therefore share some of their failures in their places where they're not perfect

are very attractive to young people. I don't feel like we're looking for perfect leaders. We're just looking for real ones. Yeah. So you just touched on this, but tell me what a discipleship relationship looks like. You talked about Nick and you talked about how he decided to disciple you, but walk me from like the beginning of Nick, like did he just come up to you? And then what that relationship looked like and then kind of the impact that.

impact that it had on you and in what you took from that discipleship relationship. Yeah, I'll probably, I'll use a kid named Connor. He's another guy, disciple, because Nick was me figuring it out. And it was crazy as Nick is still in my life today. He talked to me today. And so it looks different for every person, but generally, one, I'll just say how I define discipleship for me is someone, is frequently following someone who is spiritually a step ahead. So it is a key word of frequently. I don't like to say once a week or once a day, just frequently, frequently, and then following, it's got to be joining their life. The four parts of life that I invited

Connor, who I disciples, I said, hey, you can join me in my work life, my church life, my personal life, and my family life. And usually when I ask to get disciples by someone older, and there's two guys that are doing that now, I try to find an area of their life that I really want to learn from them in. And so one of them is more of his personal life, which is like hobbies and fun stuff that he may do or or uh maybe even disciplines like this one guy who disciples me he's a very wealthy business leader a very strategic kingdom investor kind of guy uh and he runs like every tuesday and thursday at 6 a.m and so uh i want to jog with him and we did to talk about life and talk about um i'm in a relationship now and i got to talk about

uh the new year and some changes i may be transitioning into and so um it is trying to join their life. I like saying the work life, personal life, church life, sorry, family life, because the number one excuse I've found for why people don't disciple is they'll say, I am way too busy. I just don't have time. And they're right. I don't know about you or me. We were just literally talking about how we don't have a lot of time. We have to choose what we do. And so I can't, you don't have kids, right? Yeah, you don't have, well, you have a cat. I do. I have, I have for children. It doesn't count.

And so do you, you have a cat too. I tell young people, I've never met a leader who's married and with kids who's been like just twitting their thumbs every day thinking, I wonder what I'm going to do with all my free time. Yeah. And basically, they don't have time. But you, so what we have to do is figure out how do you not add something to their calendar? Right. How do you include yourself in their calendar and join their life? And so that's what disciples looks like.

It usually looks like a year for me. And I like to disciple people, maybe two to three areas that they want to grow in. And usually I found that people that I disciple tend to want to do something similar to what I do. Like they want to learn how to better communicate. They want to learn how to start an organization. Maybe they want to learn how to lead the teams, stuff like that. Yeah. So how do you know if you are, quote, ready to disciple someone?

I think a lot of people, like millennials, if we wanted to, if we wanted to go disciple someone, I think a lot of people would say, well, I'm just not ready. Who am I to disciple someone and invest into someone? Do you have benchmarks for when someone is ready? Or is it just kind of this individual thing? That's good. It's a good question. I might be very generous with it.

But I feel like, so you're hitting on the second number one reason. And number two reason I hear people not disciple. Usually it's one, I'm too busy. Or two, it's like, man, I want to. And I could make some time or I would include someone in my calendar. I just don't feel qualified to do it. And I would say, going back to your question, how do you know when you're ready to disciple? I would say when you feel like you've been following Christ for a while.

And if you've been following Christ for a while, then I'm not saying you'll never feel ready. And personally, I think if you're, you're going to be following Christ for a while, then I think if you've been following Christ for a while, then I think, if we waited till we felt ready or if everyone waited till they felt ready or qualified the disciple, I don't know if anyone would ever disciple because there's always that like whisper in our ear that we're not good enough to even probably do what we're doing today honestly in some senses. But I say like if you've been following Christ for a while, then simply say, and this is what Paul said, is follow me as I follow Christ. And so it's not a follow me because I'm perfect.

It's follow me as I follow someone who is perfect. And so it leaves room and grace for, I'm not going to be perfect. I'm going to stumble, but I'm going to stumble towards Christ. Would you want to come and follow me? And I find a lot of people say, but I just don't feel qualified. They usually think because they're not maybe good communicators, they don't know the Bible too well, this and that. I usually say, but do you feel like you're spiritually a step ahead than most millennials? And that's when they're like, of course.

And I'm like, great. then you follow Christ a little longer than they have. So just ask them to follow you as you follow Christ. Yeah. And I like your distinction between someone who, okay, I'm going to take an hour a week and I'm going to meet at Starbucks and have a Bible study with someone. I've heard you talk about this before, that that's not, there's nothing wrong with that per se, but that's not exactly discipleship.

And I think that might take, well, in some senses, it puts a lot of pressure on, but it also takes a lot of pressure off that, okay, I am not. not some, you know, Bible teacher that is teaching someone about theology. I am just inviting them into my life. I'm being open and honest about here's my relationship with Christ. Here's how it affects my life. Let's grow in this together. I think people, I don't think that most people realize that that's what discipleship is.

I think that there's a big confusion about what discipleship is. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have found a lot of people, Christians, including pastors. I mean, I would say the book, the Passion Generation, is the name of the book, and the subtitle is The Seemingly Reckless, Definitely Disruptive, but far from Hopeless Millennials. And so now I'm speaking on this book. The first half of the book is, how do you practically disciple millennials in the 21st century? And what I've found is, as I'm speaking a lot more practically about it, things.

Some people are like, and these are mostly pastors that I've been speaking to lately, they'll realize, man, we don't disciple. we mentor like we just meet with them we don't ask them to follow us and Jesus didn't go to Peter and say hey come and meet with me once a week for three years he said come and follow me and but or two another thing happens is as I define it and give more structure and language to it I've found people say you know what I realized I kind of was disciple like maybe it was just for a short while but there was this person who let me like follow them or join them a lot of times it happens in the workplace or or maybe it's a teacher that like or coach that I gave a little bit more substantial time to someone but they realized they were disciple but even though it was never called discipleship and how do you find someone to either disciple you or for you to disciple what does that process look like yeah so this is where um yeah i tend to find that i i look for two things whenever i look for a new person to disciple me i usually look for someone that has a characteristic I'm trying to grow in or that has a competency

that I'm trying to learn. And that's like I want to look how to do something or I want to learn how to be something. And so one guy that's deciphering me, the guy who's, he's an architect, he's a very influential man, but he's a very humble man, like incredibly humble for how powerful and influential he is. And I wanted to follow him just because I was very attracted to his humility. And at the time when I asked him, which was like a year and a half ago, I was. was getting a lot of platform and a lot of stage presence. And I was a little worried about if I would have the character that could kind of hold up the stage time that I was getting.

Yeah. Sometimes in our generation, we were literally talking about this is we can like get a lot of influence like in a year or in some in one video, like one single video. And they get way probably too much influence for the character that's been developed. Well, before it used to have to develop with it. Yes. And so I wanted to learn a characteristic with him. Then there's others that I want to learn a competency. Like right now I'm trying to learn how to better consult larger churches because that's

what I'm getting asked to do a lot. Right. And so I'm going to look for someone who's really, really good in that arena. And depending on how, like, your listeners, for young people, I highly stress, man, if you're young and especially if you're young and single, this is the best time ever to like go and learn from someone who is actually doing what you want to do, it's better than college. Because college right now kind of has, I think, a better guarantee of getting young people

debt than getting them a job. But if you go and get like mentored and disciples by someone who's actually doing what you feel that you want to be competent in, this is the time to do when you're young. But if you do it when you're older, like 30, 40, especially when you're doing when you're 50 or 60, they'll maybe help you, but they'll then send you an invoice and it will cost you money. It's called consulting. Yeah. But if you're young, it's called a discipleship.

And so I'm like, yo, leverage this while you're young rather than weight. And then people are a lot less open to helping. Yeah. I think that your message is really important because, and I am so guilty of this, I'm a very classic millennial in so many ways. But we are very much driven by hyper individualism. Like I am my own unique individual person. No one can tell me what to do.

No one's going to interrupt my life. whatever makes me happy, whatever is most convenient for me. And these are all, it's a sinful mentality, but a lot of millennials think this way. That's what I'm going to do. And discipleship really kind of blows that up, whether you're discipling someone or you're being disciples. It's not always convenient. It's actually kind of inconvenient.

And there might be someone who's telling you, you know, this area of your life needs to be improved. So, and I think really that can only be overcome with the power of Christ. Someone in their own sinful nature is probably just not going to approach. that. And maybe I don't even know if I have a question with that, but is that something that I guess you have encountered when you're talking to millennials about discipleship? Yeah, no. I mean, you might be disciples. Millennials, we can be kind of pretty bad at, we want advice from someone older, and we really just want them to approve of the thing we already want to do. But we

want them to, like, co-sign it. And so, yeah, I have to tell millennials a lot. Like, and it's hard, even for myself. Like sometimes you, you know you want this, but you go to, they've been there and they've done that and they say, hey, you should do X, Y, or Z. And it might be really difficult. But it is, like, trusting that person more. One of my favorite stories in the Bible where, I mean, this is,

I never seen it this way until recently. But, you know, the rich young ruler is this, like, young guy who's seemingly influential and powerful and has wealth. But he didn't trust God's advice. He didn't trust Jesus' advice. Hey, sell all you have and follow me. And in a sense, that could have been like the 13th disciple. He invited him to be a follower of his and a disciple.

While Peter, who's like a real hothead, very passionate, loose canon, Jesus goes up to him and says, hey, put your nets out again. And he did trust him and he would listen to his advice. As hot head as he was, he was still teachable. And so for young people, I say a lot, you need to be faithful. You need to be available. you need to be teachable. You try to need to be compatible to them.

And then also you need to be hungry. Yeah. So it takes effort on the part of the disciple too, not just the part of the discipller, which I think is key. I'd say discipleship hinges on the hunger of the disciple more than the availability of the older generation. So that's where like me kind of have to call out our own generation. I have to often call them out for their lack of hunger and honor.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think that's hard. It's something that I'm guilty of too. I think even Christian millennials, we get very complacent. We don't want people to speak into our lives. What is the one thing that you want people to take away from your book or maybe even the one impact that you wanted to have? My prayer a lot with the book has been that it would normalize discipleship, not just for the sake of millennials, but I, this is kind of doom and gloom. But it is sincere. I do feel.

like what we do over the next five to especially 10 years in America and the American church specifically will make or break what happens to the American church. If we don't disciple millennials, because for us, I mean, when I met you, you were a millennial conservative. I'm kind of like the millennial Christian pastor guy. Like we, in a lot of ways, we got our platform by being bold, articulate, and having a representation for a woman. millennials. And for me, the big question is, I would assume for you, it's kind of like a little bit of of how do we get millennials engaged in politics? For me, and I know that's not all of it, but for me, one of the big ones, the biggest one I probably get asked is how do we get millennials more engaged in

the church? And I personally think that's the wrong question for me is how to get millennials to church. I think the question should be, how do we not reach millennials, but how do we mobilize millennials to disciple the Z generation? Because the Z generation is very, very, very important. I think the question is very, very close behind us. They're growing every year, literally, of course. But they are more diverse than us. They are going to be, the conversation should already be mostly moving towards them, utilizing millennials to impact them. Yeah. But have you ever been to Israel before? I haven't actually. Okay. I just recently went. And it's crazy because, of course, this is where most of the Bible is written is in this region of the world. And what's crazy is like, this is where Jesus is. This is where a lot of

people have it on their bucket list to go and see where Jesus really walked and changed the world. But there's not a lot of churches in Israel, which is pretty interesting because you would think if all the Christians in the world want to travel to this one place to see like all these important sites, why would there not be churches there? But it seems like God goes wherever his people are really hungry for him. And if you're also familiar with like church history, a lot of it's in Europe, a lot of the Reformation, a lot of just church history. happen there, but now Europe is not this strong Christian location anymore. And it seemed like God then started moving through the people that were hungry in America. But now it seems like God's moving a

lot in the Middle East. It seems like he's moving a lot in South America and Asia, where his people are very desperate and hungry. And so my point is, the church will never die. But it's not promised to one location. And I do think we're in a season where we are either like Nineveh, we're either going to repent and like, hey, we got to get back to the basics. Or God's going to keep moving and the church will be alive and well, but it's not promised to America. I don't want that. And that's why I'm like, my hope going back to your question is that we would, I joke that we would make the commission great again. Because this great commission of go and make disciples, it's not like I'm trying to say, let's go do something new.

I'm saying let's do this old thing that will work until Jesus comes back. Yeah. And I think that's so important to something that I've heard pastor say in the past is that you never graduate from the gospel. And that's true. You never graduate from the Great Commission. You're not trying to rework something or reinvent the wheel. You're just saying, let's go back to that.

The same gospel that, you know, freed proverbial slave 2,000 years ago is good enough to free people today. I think a lot of people think that today we're faced with so much cultural backlash that Christianity is so looked down upon that we have so many more obstacles than we've ever had in the past. It's just going to be impossible. But that's why like your approach of really intimate evangelism, not that mass evangelism is important, but evangelism through your own life. Yeah. That, you know, there's not a law against that. There's not, there's nothing that can stop you from doing

that and the impact that it can have, you know, tangentially is, is limitless, really. Absolutely. Like, speaking on that specifically is, uh, there's a lot of fear of, like, church and state and laws that may go against us. And of course, I, heaven forbid, do not want any of that to happen. However, like, that wouldn't be a new thing for Christians. Like, literally, the church was birthed in the middle of, like, persecution of Christians. And that actually grew the church.

but there wasn't the ability to do. We're in Dallas where, like, there's huge churches. There's, you can do that here. But if that ever was to happen, it's like in China, they can't gather a lot, a lot of Christians, but they can all make disciples. And so discipleship is this model that works everyone, everywhere. And I kind of liken it to, there's a business model that I think is doing really, really well that's usually in discipleship or multiplication, if you will.

Are you familiar? Do you know what car company actually has more global presence than any car company right now? They're in Uganda. No. I've seen them in South Africa. It's not just a guess, not Toyota, not Nissan. Oh, you want me to guess? Yeah, you can guess.

I've seen them in Israel. Huh? Honda. Honda. Close. What's close to a Honda? Hi. What's the?

Hi. Yeah, what is it? It is a lot of people think it's like one of the Asian car companies. the car company that has cars global presence in third world countries to large cities is actually Uber. And so the twist is, of course, it's not actually a car company that makes cars. Right. It's a car company that gives this platform to people that already have cars.

Right. And that has revolutionized the whole car industry. They don't need to keep building new buildings or manufacture your site. It's just like for us as Christians, a lot of times we think we need to build a new building and to build new churches. Instead, discipleship, like Uber, gives the ownership to the everyday person. So you could be a mother, you could be a CEO, you could be a college student, you could be a high school student, and everyone can do it. Just like Uber, they have big cars, small cars, beat up cars. And so I just think that model is the model that works better. And this is why Jesus

can leave. Just like us, I would assume, most people don't even know who started Uber. It's this crazy car company that has changed so much, but it's not built around just them. While many of our churches today are built around one person or one communicator, Jesus' model is more built around this platform that is on the people, not just on one person and the communication abilities. Yeah. So we are the Christians are the Uber of the world. Is that way you're trying to Uber for evangelism?

Yeah. No, I mean, if two billion Christians, disciple one person, I mean, the game would be over very quickly. Yeah, totally. Okay, tell people where they can get your book. I hear that it is in high demand on Amazon. Yeah, so, okay, it is on Amazon. It's on book Barnes & Noble.

It's at Books Million Lifeway logos. But yeah, on Amazon right now, just a forewarning. If you go on there, it's going to say it takes a month to two months to get the book. that was getting changed quickly. We are sending more books, but it is a good problem. However, it is a problem that's annoying right now

that we need to get more books to them. But yeah, it's been the number one book in four different categories. That's awesome. And it's called the Passion Generation by Grant Skelden. And they can find you on Instagram,

right? Is it just Grant Skelden? Yeah, Twitter and Instagram is just Grant Skelden. And Skelden is with the D, not a T. Skelden. S-K-E-L-D-O-N. Grant Skelden.

Okay, they'll look you up. The Passion Generation, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. It'd be a really good Christmas gift. Like if you're a mom listening to this or a dad listening to this, you want to give it to your millennial or read it yourself. It's one of those books that really transcends generations. It's about millennials, but it could be about discipling them if you're even a grandparent or it could be about being disciples by them.

So it really works for any age group. Yeah, totally. I've seen a lot of parents and their kids reading together. And I've seen a lot of pastors with their, young adults reading it. But it was more designed for older generations to understand young generation. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom. I know that all of my listeners are going to glean a lot from it. And I will make sure to remind everyone again to check out your book. Thank you, Ellie. I hope that you guys learned a lot from that

conversation. I know I did. I always learn a lot from him. And I'm always really challenged by the things that he posts and the things that he writes. He's just, he's a doer. I would say that I I lean towards thinking, which is good, but action is always required, especially in the Christian life. And I would say that that's a weakness of mine. But he's just a doer. He gets stuff done. He organizes things. He makes sure that he is living up to his word, whereas I would rather just talk about things and think about things all day. Grant is someone who actually goes out and does them. And that's what we all should be like. And sometimes we need those kind of people to speak into our lives to motivate us and encourage us to get off the couch.

and actually put the Great Commission into action, which is a lot more than doing a podcast like this. It's loving your neighbor and doing the hard thing, inviting those people into your life. So I don't know. I was really challenged by that conversation, and I hope that it sparks a change in all of us. Please feel free to send me your feedback.

You can email me, Ali at the Conservative MillennialBlog.com. You, of course, can message me on Instagram. I hope that everyone has an amazing Thanksgiving. This is, I think, the first week since we started doing twice a week podcast that we are only doing one podcast this week. We're going to take a break for Thanksgiving. We're going to come back next Tuesday.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful time with their family. If you are dreading Thanksgiving, if maybe you don't have a good relationship with your parents, with your siblings, and you are worried about it, just remember, just remember, one, who you are in Christ, that your identity is, not in your family. Remember that your relationship with him is far more important than your relationship with anyone else on earth. And your goal in whatever interaction you have in your family is to be as loving and as kind and as Christ-like as possible. I know sometimes that seems absolutely just it just can't happen with your family as crazy as they are. I understand. That's our

role as Christians and of course just as human beings, being as decent and as moral and as kind as and as compassionate as we can be, even when that is difficult. I hope that you find things to be grateful for. We can all be grateful because we have the freedom and the privilege to live in this country. And we can all be grateful, too, because Jesus died for our sins. And if we believe in him, we get to spend eternity with him. Even if we had nothing else in this world, we would have that to be thankful for. That's more important than politics. That's more important than all of our differences and all of our division. That's the one thing that at the end of the day can bring Christians together and it's transcendent.

It's our only major ultimate purpose. So let us all be thankful for that. Let us take a breath just for one day. Maybe unplug, maybe don't get on Twitter, maybe don't scroll through Instagram. Just enjoy where you are, enjoy the people that you're with, and enjoy everything that God is graciously given you. That's what I'm going to try to do. It's hard for me not to be embroiled in Twitter conflict, but that is going to be my effort

this Thanksgiving. And I hope that you guys have a wonderful week. and I will see you here next Tuesday.