Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - BONUS: Keith & Patrick's New Book, Joyful Outsiders, Coming Very Soon!

Episode Date: January 18, 2025

Christ against culture. Christ for culture. Christ transforming culture. Which approach is correct? Shouldn’t Christians have a one-size-fits-all, agreed upon set of principles for engaging with culture? The truth is that the Bible doesn’t give us one right answer. More like…six! On today’s episode, Keith and Patrick are previewing the six types of culture changers they lay out in their new book, Joyful Outsiders. They introduce each type: the trainer, the protester, the advisor, the artist, the ambassador, and the builder. The two share key insights for each, as well as biblical examples and temptations, or weak spots. They highlight the importance of unity and diverse churches that can make room for such different approaches to culture change. Plus, which type are you? You can find out before the book’s release by taking our free self-assessment today!  TAKE THE SELF-ASSESSMENT Our new book, Joyful Outsiders, is coming January 21, 2025. Want to start reading now before release day? Download the first chapter for free now. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here.

For centuries, Christians have been arguing and debating about how they should engage the culture that they live in. And there's been a wide variety of views. And while Christians might all agree on some things about, say, who Jesus is or how a person has a relationship with God, they haven't agreed on how Christians should interact the culture that they live in. And this is kind of surprising to me because every Christian throughout the centuries, no matter what culture. culture you lived in, no matter what century you lived in, you've had to interact with the culture. So you would think by now Christians would have kind of an agreed-upon set of principles that they use to interact with a culture. But that's not the case at all. You're totally right. I mean, you have, you know, Christ against culture, the Christ of culture,

Christ transforming culture, Christ over culture. There's so many different views, and there's hardly been a consensus. And when we were putting together a book, Joyful Outsiders, I think one of the key insights God gave us was that if we want to talk about how to be a lot of how to engage our world well, we need to pay attention to Christian history. We need to look throughout traditions, throughout history, and figure out how have different Christians responded in different times and places, and what can we learn from them? Let's not get fixated on one-size-fits-all solutions, because, I mean, I don't know, but you. I literally never buy one-size-fits-all clothing. Do you? You a big fan of that? Of course not. Yeah, no one-it-is. Right? Who likes a one-size-

I mean, for a hat or something, it works. Yeah, okay. Right? Or maybe. Maybe for hats. But then, I mean, in general, one size fits all clothing sucks. You know, it's either too big or it's too small. I mean, if I see one size fits all, I throw it away. And that's true of clothing.

How much more so should it be true of how we're engaging our culture and our world around us? And one of the things that really brought this into focus for me was just by asking myself a question, if I was going to create a fake mental room and bring in the best Christian luminaries that I can think of from, maybe recent history, who have changed the world, would even those people agree with one another? Well, I don't know if you could say that Dietrich Bonhoeffer changed the world, really, but he tried to influence his world, right? He tried to influence Nazi Germany. And his approach was kind of stealthy. He created this underground seminary, where he was trying to train Christians and how to resist the evil of Nazism. And then he joined this assassination plot. And then he joined this

assassination plot against Hitler, it wasn't an easy decision at all. I mean, he really stressed and strained over it. Should a Christian be willing to violently overthrow a leader like Hitler who is doing so many incredibly horrible things? And so he finally joins it. And then eventually, because he joined that assassination plot, he dies in a concentration camp right before the allies free it. And so here you have Bonhofer, sitting in Nazi Germany, trying to resist the evil of the culture. Yeah, here's a great quote from him. He said, we are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself. So here's one person in our mental.

Drive a bullet. Here's one person in a room, Dietrich Bonhofer. But I would, of course, want to add another, Martin Luther King Jr. He led the nonviolent civil rights movement in America from 1955 to his assassination in 1968. But he was not just opposed to violence as a matter of strategy. Like, hey, I don't want to be violent because it won't work. he was opposed to violence in action morally. In fact, here's a quote from Martin Luther King. He said, we adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to

persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. And the acts were, of course, nonviolent resistance, allowing themselves to be arrested, beaten. So these are very different approaches to how you should challenge and change the world. And you can imagine King and Bonhofer, maybe even getting into disagreements about how we should be affecting changes in our culture. I think there'd be a really interesting debate between Bonhofer and King. Both of them were tempted by violence, and yet both of them were elected to use violence. One of them eventually acquiesced, and the other one held the line. I don't know where I come down on that. I respect both of them tremendously. But then take somebody totally different, say Mother Teresa, St. Teresa of

Calcutta, India. And she is trying to influence her culture by caring for the least of these. She cares for the people who are dying. She cares for orphans. She cares for lepers. People that no one else will have anything to do with. And that's her contribution to try to make this a better world. One more quote. She said, if you want to bring peace to the world, this is actually in her Nobel Prize speech when she received the Nobel Prize. She said, if you want to bring peace to the whole world, go home and love your family, your neighbor, the poor, and the unborn. She actually really fixates on the unborn specifically in that speech towards the end of it, which was a challenge to the audience, many of whom would have been pro-choice, pro-abortion. These are three very different

ways of challenging and critiquing and seeking to change the world and the culture around you. And I like to ask, well, who was right? And I ask that question because there's part of me that wants to say, well, in some ways, I think they were all right. I think they all had unique insights that we need to listen to and hear from if we want to be the sort of people who are changing the world around us. The problem is that if you go to the average church, we tend to pick one way of engaging the world. You know, so you get like protest or churches. So the way we change the world is we protest what we see as being wrong or unjust. Or you get, you know, maybe really spiritual churches. They say, look, we don't get involved in politics and laws and all that nitty, gritty stuff. Instead,

we're focused on disciplining people because if you don't change people's hearts and lives, you can't change the world. And you can keep going down the list and come up with other ways that churches tend to create a one-size-fits-all solution. And I think what I would contend is that we actually need churches that have a diversity of ways of engaging the world. Because what we need are churches who kind of honor the entire biblical witness. And when you go to the Bible, what you find are, there are different ways that people in the biblical story interacted with culture. I mean, sometimes they seem contradictory. Well, think of somebody like Daniel. He was an advisor to pagan kings, Nebuchadnezzar, first in Babylon, and then Darius and others in Persia. And he was an insider. He kind of made

peace with these kings trying to influence them in the right direction. And then you've got somebody like Esther, who is also in Persia. She's also an outsider, but she tries to kind of outmaneuver, almost deceive her pagan king at Xerxes. Well, I mean, just do a compare and contrast here. When Daniel's life is threatened, he says, okay, you can throw me into the lines in. You can turn me into a feast for the lions. And when Esther sees her people being threatened, she does almost the exact opposite. She says, I'm going to throw a feast, and I'm going to use that to allow the Jews to defend themselves and, in fact, kill her enemy, Haman. So these are very different approaches.

I think about Nehemiah, you know, he's a guy who came along and said, we need to build walls if we're going to protect Jerusalem from outside threats. Threats within the Persian Empire, people like who would later become the Samaritans. But then Jesus comes along, and what does he do? Well, he says, I'm going to die. And Ephesians literally says, and tear down the wall that's dividing Jew and Gentile. And of course, dividing Jew and Samaritan. And so we see this amazing diversity in the Bible. There's not a one size fits all solution. So it turns out that the reason Christians have been arguing and debating this issue of how do you engage culture is because the Bible doesn't have one simple answer, one simple approach. There's no formula that everybody should do X, Y, and Z when they live in a culture that is hostile to them. Instead, there's a bunch of different ways, and it starts to make you think, well, which way should I choose? Like, should I model myself after Bonhofer or King or Nehemiah or Esther or Daniel or Jesus? Well, maybe there's not just one approach that every Christian should have. Maybe there's room for Christians to have different approaches to engaging culture, approaches that are all biblical

and approaches that every Christian should respect and honor and have room for. Yeah, so it's really interesting. as Keith and I were writing our book, Joyful Outsiders, which comes out in two weeks, and we hope if you're listening to this, you'll pre-order it. I think you're going to find it to be beneficial, and we're going to talk about some of the themes in the book today. But when we were working on the book, we were actually talking with our editor. This was a much earlier book idea, much less good book idea at the time. If you don't know it, writing books takes a lot of time, a lot of energy. He had this comment. He said, you guys have helped people in your church navigate their culture,

their cultural moments so well. And the proposal you've given me, which is not the book, we ended up writing is good, but it's not practical enough. He said, it's kind of like you need to open up the hood of the car and show people how the engine works. That's what you guys need to do in this book. And that was a really helpful insight for us because it made us realize that the book that Christians need when it comes to cultural engagement is not another high-level philosophical book. And we can fill the Grand Canyon with books like that. There's plenty of books for thinkers and writers and pastors. You're living your everyday life in your business or in your family or in your friendships. And you're just asking, how do I navigate the confusion? And I think the answer, and I think the

answer is by paying attention, like we just said a moment ago, to the ways that various different biblical characters engage the world around them. And so we kind of sat down and said, as pastors, how do we help people in our church navigate these issues? And we realized that there's at least six common ways that we equip and help people to be culture changers, culture transformers, culture engagers. Yeah, and I'm not even sure that there are only six. Yeah, absolutely. There might be other ways to frame this, but we've identified six. We've been able to lay out six biblical characters that each of them exemplified one of these ways. And then we've gone back in history and grabbed somebody in history that live this out in their life. So I think this offers a chance for every

Christian to go, who am I? How has God wired me? What are my convictions? What's my experience been like? What's my heart for? And to feel like they can engage the culture in a way that is specific to them and yet respect people who do it differently. Because one of the things that really bums me out is when I see Christians inside of churches or on social media all arguing with one another and attacking and accusing one another because people aren't doing it their way. And it acts like their way is the best way or their way is the only way instead of saying, no, my way is one good biblical way, but there are others.

There's room for others. And just like we need everybody in the body of Christ, because like Paul says, as the eye and the foot all need each other. So we need one another when it comes to influencing culture. So let's walk through the six ways and just kind of unpack them. To state the obvious, in the book, we have a lot more depth than what we're going to be providing this podcast. But one thing you could do right now is pause the podcast and go to joyful outsiders.com. If you scroll to the bottom of that web page, there's actually an online test you can take that will help you identify which of the six ways you're maybe designed by God to live in the most.

me one thing we're going to be really careful to say is that in some sense Christians are called to all six of these ways but there might be one or two that you are particularly adept at that maybe God's put you in the right place to be that kind of person and so quick overview here the six ways and we'll talk about each of them is first of all the trainer this is someone who changes the world by changing people's habits they disciple people we have the ambassador people who change the world by changing people's hearts through evangelism we have the protester people who changed the world by challenging injustice. We have the builder, people who change the world by building institutions, the artist, people who change the world by creating beauty. And we have the advisor, people who are

insiders who change the world by influencing influential people. And maybe even hearing those six descriptors, you already know, oh my gosh, that sounds like me. But if that's the case, have you had the opportunity to really go deep in that, to really think deeply about how God is calling you to use those gifts and those talents in the world? So let's hit each one. Yeah, one more thing before we jump in is that I think I've been different ones of these at different times in my life. The only one I for sure have never been as an artist because I can't create any beauty. But I'm pretty sure. If you've never heard Keith sing, count yourself blessed. This poor man can't hold the tune. No, I can't even clap on beat. I have

to watch other people clap and they clap. So you're like right behind the clap. That's so good. They're hitting their hands. You're like, okay, got it. Well, yeah, I can't be the artist. but all these other ones I identify with. So maybe you'll find that there are several that you kind of resonate with. Here's one I'd love to start with. It's one of your chapters. So we divided these up between the two of us, but it's the protester. And I want to start here because in some ways, I think this is, for many of us, the thing we

first think about when we think about people who are changing the world or changing culture. So starting with this one, give us some of the key insights of this way of changing the world, the protester. Well, the protester, like you already said, they want to engage the world. by calling attention to injustice. And this is really, really important because we live in a broken, unjust world. And Christians should be out there saying that.

You know, we can't tolerate injustice. We can't look the other way when injustice comes. And injustice might take the form of something like human trafficking. It might take the form of paying unfair wages. It might take the form of exploiting the weak. I mean, there's so many ways that we can be unjust, sexual abuse, whether that's inside the church or other institutions, Christians need to be out there, unwilling to compromise, unwilling to sell their integrity and say this is wrong.

And that's what the protester is passionate about. So do you have any examples of Christians who've done that? Well, just something about really recent, and you might not even have noticed it if you weren't really paying attention. But the president of the United Auto Workers Union is a guy named Sean Fang. And when I was reading about him in the Atlantic, I was just surprised at how much he drew on his Christian faith in order to rally his people to strike. And, you know, wherever you are on unions and how appropriate it is for unions to go on strike, you have to give him credit for saying, hey, look, God has promised us a better world, a world in which people get paid fair wages. And he didn't try to rally the people through some Marxist kind of ideology about the workers unite.

Instead, he went to the scripture and painted a vision of heaven where people are equal and people have what they need. And so here's a protester who comes from not what you would think of as the Christian right, but what you would almost maybe identify as the Christian left. He's sharing scripture with his union men and calling them to stand. end up for what he thinks is right. Here's a quote from his speech to the union. It's based on Matthew 19. I think you'll notice the biblical reference in it. He says, why is it easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? I have to believe that the answer, at least in part, is because in the kingdom of God, no one hoards all the wealth while others suffer or starve. In the kingdom of God, no one puts themselves in a position of total domination over entire communities.

In the kingdom of God, no one forces others to perform endless, backbreaking work just to feed their families or put a roof over their heads. So here's Sean Fane kind of striking this biblical vision calling people to work for a better life. He's protesting. He's saying that the way we're being treated by these big companies is wrong. It's evil. And the Bible addresses this. One of the most fascinating insights that I've heard in recent history is that the idea of protest actually really originates in the Bible. And it goes all the way back to the book of Exodus, Chippro and Pua, these two women who the Pharaoh says,

hey, you need to go as midwives and kill the firstborn sons of all of the Israelites. And they refuse to do it. And so we have this first example of kind of a nonviolent refusal, nonviolent action. That's where it comes from is inside the Bible. But I'm also really curious, for people. who say, yeah, that's me. Like, I love to be the one who speaks up. It's hard, but I want to challenge injustice. What are some of the shadow sides that come with that? What's some of the temptations that come for someone who feels that way? Well, I think one that is very obvious is there's a tendency

to see the world in black and white, good and bad, us versus them. And there's a tendency to demonize your opponent, to say, hey, these people who are against me, they're not just wrong, but they are wicked. And it's one of the things I really appreciated about Dr. King is that he had this sense that we need to love our enemies, that even the people who opposed civil rights, even the people who were entrenched in racism, whether it's personal racism or institutional racism

that he was fighting against, he refused to let his followers demonize them. He said, these are real people that we need to love and serve, and that what we're looking for is not to win instead what we're looking for is to see justice done in the world. And there's a really big difference between trying to win and defeat your opponent rather than seek justice. So he refused to let people justify their hatred.

Another part of the shadow side of a protester is that it's easy to kind of virtue signal. So this is kind of like slackivism, social media protesting, where, you know, back in the day, you're supposed to put a black square in support of George Floyd. And it gives people the appearance that I'm doing something. You know, if I post something on Instagram or I post something on X, that I've done something, I've said my piece. But that's really not costing you anything. If a protest doesn't cost you something, it's probably not much of a protest.

A protester puts themselves out on the line. Think Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendigo when they refuse to bow down to the golden idol. In some sense, that is a protest, right? They're saying, I refuse to do this because it's wrong. But remember that that cost them something. It wasn't virtue signaling. They stood before the fiery furnace and were threatened with it and were willing to go into the furnace because of the injustice they were protesting. It's been interesting as people have been reading joyful outsiders. You know, some people will hear about this and think, oh my gosh, that's me. But others will say, I'm so afraid of speaking out in this way. There's no way that's possible.

me. And it's fascinating because a lot of those people fall into a different way of engaging the world. And that's the trainer. So let's talk about the trainer a little bit. Okay. So you wrote that chapter on the trainer. And to be honest, it's one of my favorites because I think it's something that every Christian can see themselves in. Every Christian has been to some extent trained and sees themselves as training someone else, whether it's someone in their family or their church or or small group or that kind of thing. So how does the trainer, though, really change culture, or influence culture? So the trainer is kind of your classic disciple, someone who changes the world by changing other people's habits. There's a story, it's in the 1980s. A Longshoreman and his

family, they hold this baptism that I think they rented out a VA hall. And it's this huge celebration. It goes on until midnight. And then somewhat inexplicably, a bunch of gang members, local gang members arrive, and they start opening fire on the group. They ended up killing several people. In fact, when paramedics arrived, the gang members ran over paramedics to try to stop them from helping others. It was this terrible, inexplicable, awful, evil event. That's a crazy story. It is a totally wild story. And in the news interviews afterwards, there was a woman who asked a question I think we all

asked when we hear that kind of incomprehensible violence. She said, why does this happen? Why do these things happen in the world? And it's interesting because if you ask the average, you know, psychologists or sociologists, you know, they'd say, well, you know, there's something wrong. with our society that leads people who are basically good to do bad things or there's something wrong with our psychology leads basically good people to you know become maladjusted and do bad things but there's a philosopher named dallas willard who taught in california he's passed away now

and he said this is all got it wrong he said the reason why these things happen is because people are not this side of the garden actually good that we don't actually come with a inward readiness to do good he said instead we actually come with an inward readiness to do evil and when circumstances are right that can blow up and that can cause terrible evil to happen in our communities now oftentimes circumstances don't allow that always to happen but this is the key inside of the trainer is they say if we want to change the world we have to do something about that inward readiness to do evil and we have to actually train in ourselves an inward readiness to do good because if you have a culture that you want to change it if you can't do good if you can't train people to do good you can't change the

world around you. So who in the Bible kind of demonstrates this? And when you think about changing culture, can you really do that through discipleship? Is that really going to make a difference? I think there are countless examples, obviously, of this kind of person in the Bible. But one of my favorites from the story of exile, someone who was definitely a joyful outsider himself, was Ezra. And Ezra, if you don't know his story, he's someone who grew up in Persia. He was a child of the exiles who were taken out of Jerusalem. They're moved to Babylon, forcibly. He's one of their children. And when Persia takes over, they kind of have this new policy where they start sending people back to their homeland. And Ezra is identified as this individual who knows God's law,

who's trained himself in God's law. Ezra 710 says that he studied it, that he applied it, and then that he taught it. And so the King of Persia sends him back to Israel to actually train people in God's law, in God's ways. And if you're in the mindset of Ezra, when he gets back, everything's going wrong. I mean, the people have all married pagan wives, they're worshipping other gods. And he doesn't come in and say, oh, I'm going to change all the loss. He doesn't come in a protest and say, okay, I'm going to protest and get really loud. Instead, what he does is he starts training and teaching people to read the Bible. Why? Because the Bible is the means by which God destroys, takes away that inner readiness to do evil and develops in us a inner readiness to do

good through the disciplines, through prayer, through fasting, through scripture reading. These are the gracious means by which God actually transforms us. And a transformed people are able to transform the world. What's funny is to think of a trainer. Somebody who's disciplining others helping them develop godly habits could have a shadow side. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with helping people read their Bible and pray and have the fruit of the spirit, grow in holiness, grow in love for your neighbor? Does that have a shadow side? Like, that goes bad somehow? Well, I guess do as I say, not as I do. Because in my own experience. I identify a lot with the trainer. Back when I was in college, I'd become a Christian when I was 19, and very quickly became very committed to these spiritual disciplines, to changing my

own habits and trying to help other people change your habits as well. And there's this little chapel on campus, AP Green Chapel. Did you ever go into AP Green Chapel when you were there? Absolutely. It's kind of got pews in it. It's old school. It's very small. Ugly green carpet when I was there. I was there a few decades before you. You were. I would go in there. I mean, really, pretty much every day, I would pray, I would read my Bible, and I would pray for revival and renewal on our campus. And I got this idea from Tim Keller and some other figures who said, you know, prayer is this key component to changing culture, changing campuses. And I would always invite

friends to come along with me, like, hey, let's go, let's pray for our campus. And, you know, they would show up once or twice, but it would always drop off. And over time, I would start getting frustrated. And that frustration that I initially have started to become self-righteousness, right? I'm like, well, I'm obviously the serious. serious Christian. These people aren't the serious Christians. It's amazing how much you and I are the same person, because I've never heard you share that story before, but I did the same thing, like 20 years earlier. We'd go in there and pray, and then I got this big head, like I was the most spiritual. But I wasn't doing it for the right reasons. I was doing it almost out of competition or out

of discipline or to see if I could do it, you know? And it sounds like that's the trap you fell into. Like, I'm righteous and you're not because I showed up here and you didn't. Yeah, well, then self-righteousness becomes anger, frustration, and so I would start critiquing people. And I basically tell them, like, hey, if you're not doing this, you're not a serious follower of Jesus. And the sad part for me is I actually think some of those people took me seriously. In other words, some of those people walked away from their faith. And I'm not saying it's because of my self-righteous. But maybe it was a little bit because they're like, well, this guy's really serious.

And he's telling me I'm not serious. Maybe he's right. Maybe this thing isn't for me. And so trainers can really backfire when they're basically like, I don't know, bodybuilders showing up at the gym for all the, you know, overweight people and be like, why did you guys like me? Can't you keep up with me? Like, that doesn't help anyone. A good trainer is someone who's there to help others along wherever they're at in the process. They're not fixated on the end.

They're starting where people are at. You know, before we jump to the next one, we were talking about the protester, and then you're telling that story about the violence. It made me think of this guy, I'm not going to butcher his name, but who just shot the CEO. Oh, Luigi Mangione. Okay, so there's his name. He was protesting. Yeah, right?

I mean, he was protesting what he thought is an unfituary. health care system. And he took matters into his own hands and somehow made himself above the law. And there's a lot, as we're recording this, that we still don't know about him or his motive, exactly why he did what he did and what led him to do it. And was it a psychotic break? And was it because of a back surgery? People are speculating right now. By the time you listen to this, then maybe you'll know more than I do now. But he was protesting. And you talk about a shadow side. He demonized his opponent. So much so that he killed him.

Right. Instead of working within a system, he perpetrated violence. But it's in the name of protest. And I think a lot of Christians, you know, I mean, you have some Christians out there who are protesting by shooting abortion doctors, you know, which isn't totally different than what this person, Luigi Mangione, has done. But how you interact with a culture, I mean, it's really important that you understand the gospel, you understand grace, you understand God's heart. God has a means of protest and it's nonviolent action. It is throughout the Bible. This is a principle that gets repeated over and over and over again.

And it's fascinating because if you look at how history works, some of the most effective protest movements have actually been nonviolent protest movements. There's something about nonviolence that actually changes. In fact, I remember we talked some about how there's studies that show that the minute a protest gets violent, it goes sideways. Well, yeah, definitely accurate. It's because a protest movement needs a critical mass. It needs more and more people to buy in to be willing to go to the street,

or to be willing to write or whatever. And as soon as it gets violent, it loses some of the people who would ordinarily be a part of it. Now, that's not a biblical or a principled decision. That's just a strategic decision, but it's still important. In fact, when you look at some studies, it shows that when protests around the 1968 election got violent, it actually drove people away from the Democratic candidate and toward Richard Nixon. Now, that was the opposite of what the protesters wanted. They wanted Hubert Humphrey to win that election, but they ended up kind of sabotaging him because of their violence.

We can't like talk about all these as much, but let's dive into another one. I'd love to talk about the advisor, another chapter that you worked on. So help us understand who the advisor is. So I love the advisor. I want to be an advisor. I think he would be an advisor if you weren't a pastor. I just can't figure out a way to be an advisor. Yeah.

So the advisor is in the room where it happens. You know, that's the line from Hamilton. I love that musical. I saw it in New York City. Oh, my gosh. It was one of the best times in my life. So in that story, Hamilton gets to be in the room with Jefferson and Madison as they make this deal about the federal banking system and where the nation's capital is going to be. And Aaron Burr is outside the room.

And he just longs to be in that room. So there's a lot of... You're going to sing it for us? No. You've already told them. In the room where it happens? How bad that it is. But it is an awesome song if you ever get a chance to listen to it. So the advisors in the room,

the advisor, whether it's a man or woman, doesn't usually have the power. Like, they're not the person who is sitting in the decision-making seat. So they're not like the CEO. They're not the president. They're not the principal. They're not the governor. But they are a friend. They are an advisor. They get to be in the room and influence the conversation. So the person I think of in the Bible that exemplifies this is Daniel. He's in the room. room with these pagan kings, he's being able to contribute to the conversation, but he doesn't get to make the decision. And you can imagine that a lot of things go differently than Daniel wanted. So he had to be willing to navigate the moral ambiguity of living in Persia, trying to influence

the Persian king, but yet having to somehow support policies he didn't quite agree with. And the advisor is usually hated by the protester, because remember the protester, we said, they see everything as being very clear. You know, it's kind of black and white. It's obvious what you should do. Call out injustice. And the advisor would say, well, slow down there because the protesters always on the outside. They don't really have much power. I'm on the inside now. I have an opportunity to influence the person who's going to make this decision. But if I call out every single time that I think they've done something wrong, well, I'm going to be kicked out of the room, right? And therefore, I'm going to lose my power, my opportunity to help. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of that classic

question of, is it better to have a Christian in the room who doesn't say all the things, or is it just better to have no Christian in the room at all? Yeah, and this was a question that Christianity today asked about Billy Graham. Here, he is a guy who's in the room with all these different presidents from every political party. He's able to participate in the conversations, but he isn't able to influence it the way that most Christians wanted. He didn't have the power. He had to kind of be willing to live in the gray and work toward whatever justice he could, knowing that he couldn't get as far as he wished or as he wanted. Could you kind of double-click on that for a second?

Just the idea of proximate justice? Yeah, proximate justice is the idea that you're working toward what's possible, not the ideal. And some people are just wired that I'm all or nothing. So there's these group out there called abortion abolitionists. And they believe that if you support any lessening of abortion laws that is short of absolutely abolishing it and calling abortion murder. So like a 15-week ban or a six-week ban? They think that would wrong to take it from a 15-week ban to a six-week ban. I mean, they would be glad it happened, but they wouldn't vote for that because they think it's still acknowledging

that you can terminate a pregnancy and in their mind kill a child at some point. Maybe it's six weeks instead of 15, but they would say, no, all abortion is murder. And that's the only thing I'm willing to settle for. Now, the person who's an advisor or who is willing to work for proximate justice says, sure, I wish there was an abortion ban. That's what we should work toward. But I think going from 15 weeks to six weeks is moving in the right direction. And that's all we can get right now politically in this environment. Culturally, it's where people are. So I'll take that as a win. Advisor has to be willing to work for proximate justice, what's possible, not just what they would prefer.

We already said the one that I am least familiar with I could never do is the artist, right? All these other ones I kind of identify with to one degree or another, but not the artist. So help me understand how an artist influences culture. You didn't help me much on that chapter. Not much service on that front.

No, other than to say, are you sure we should put that in there? But to be honest, it really fits. I see it now better than I did then. It makes sense. but when I first heard it, I was like, really? Well, so it's fascinating. I said if you weren't a pastor, you'd be an advisor.

I think if I weren't a pastor, I'd be an artist. So what we found a way were very different. Yes, absolutely. Artists are people who change the world by creating beauty. And that can sound a little bit, I don't know, ethereal, vacuous, not substantive. But there are so many examples of this. I hate that we keep going back to Dr. Martin Luther King. But one of my favorite examples of this is his oratory.

I mean, we know him as a great speaker, but we forget that he was a poet. I mean, when you read through his words, the cadence, the rhythm, the imagery, the metaphor, the similes, they're powerful. And he was clearly an artist in his speech. And of course, his most famous speech was the one he did before the Washington Monuments on the March on Washington. This is the I Have a Dream speech. And what a lot of people don't realize is it was a monumental task getting 200,000 people to the Capitol. And so he didn't even start working on that speech until about 12 o'clock the night before he gave it. He didn't finish it until, I think, three or four in the morning.

So the way it worked back then is they would actually send the speeches out to all of the news broadcasters, so they'd kind of have an idea of what he was going to say. And so he gets through his prepared remarks, and they're beautiful, they're fantastic. But he has still not said the phrase that we know it for. I have a dream. And so he pauses for a moment. And actually, a lot of the news networks shut off because I thought he was done with the speech at the time. And then he says it. He says, I have a dream.

And there was a gospel singer there, Mahalia Jackson. and she somehow connected with him on it, and she starts crooning out to him. Tell him about the dream, Martin. And this back and forth between them creates one of the most beautiful and poetic speeches. But what I love about that speech and what made it so beautiful

was that it held two contrary realities alongside one another. On the one hand, he is absolutely critical of the evils of racism. When he describes Mississippi and Georgia and the wickedness of lynching and violence that had been enacted on black people, That's inside that little I have a dream speech,

but also right alongside it are some of the most famously beautiful and hopeful pictures of people being judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And that's what I think real beauty is. It's this in-between place where we're able to both empathize with the pain and darkness and hurt in the world and speak it in a poetic, beautiful way that is true to people's experience, and on the flip side, point people towards hope, point people towards the possibility of a better world.

And when you live in that little in-between space, what I like to call border walking, got that from another artist named Makado Fujimura, when you live in that borderland between life and death, heaven and earth, hope and despair, that's where real beauty happens. And when people experience that beauty, it changes the world. I mean, the only thing that died on that day with the I Have a Dream speech was Jim Crow. That speech truly did change the world. And I think that's the power of art. That's a power of beauty to change the world around it. So poetry and rhetoric is definitely an art form. What about something like a painting? I went to Italy and I got to see Michael Angelo's David. And one of the dumbest things I ever said was before that trip. I thought, well, my wife really wanted to go. My mom gave us some money. And so I was like, okay, we could go.

But this is going to be kind of dumb because I'm going to get there. I'm going to see this art. And it's going to just like it looks like on Google. I mean, I could get it from free on Google. You did not say this. I did. I for sure. It was one of the reason that was like.

You said you could get the art on Google. Yes, I was like, you know, okay, the David. Like, okay, it's in Florence. We're going to spend all this money and all this time. We're going to go over there. And you know what it's going to look like? Is the picture on Google? That's what I said.

And that was one of the dumbest things I think I've ever said my life. Because when I stood in front of the David, and I remember, I have nothing about art in me. I was like, overwhelmed. You almost get emotional seeing that, thinking in 1500, he created this sculpture out of nothing. And I just was blown away by it. So my question a little bit is, does. that kind of art affect culture, or are we talking more the art that comes in words? I think that's a fantastic question. And you're describing a visceral experience almost every person

has had. It might not have been with a Michelangelo. It might have been with a piece of music that you were listening to. It might have been with a television show or a movie you were watching. We've had these profound moments of art touching us in ways that we almost struggled to articulate. I mean, even as you were describing it, you didn't have words for what you experienced. in the theologian Paul Tillick, he made this great observation. He said, all arts create symbols for a level of reality which cannot be reached in any other way. You can describe the scientific reality of how, you know, something like photosynthesis occurs, right? There's a way to describe that. And it's using very logical language. But art's a different kind of language. He goes on, he says, a picture in a poem reveal elements of reality which cannot be approached scientifically. In the creative work of art, we encounter reality in a dimension which is closed for us. us without such works. And so I think what he's trying to highlight there in that quote is the way in which art maybe cuts across our logical mind, the way in which art sometimes cuts across how we think and how we believe and cut straight into the heart. And I think that visual art has this incredible

power to do exactly that. Another fantastic example is, of course, the work of Vincent Van Gogh. I recently got to take a trip to New York City. I visited the MoMA. I got to see Starry Night, which is one of my favorite paintings. And have we ever seen it? Yeah, I think I have. It's a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be. And unfortunately, it's behind glass now because all these people are destroying Van Gogh paintings. Well, they're protesting. You know what I mean?

I mean, the protest goes crazy. And those people are protesting by destroying beautiful art instead of appreciating that that art is contributing to the change they hope happens. Yes, yes. And it's so tragic. It is so tragic in the case of these beautiful pieces. But one of the things that Van Gogh wanted to do with his art, it was actually a Christian. A lot of people don't realize that. He was a seminarian for a time.

He was a missionary. To like minors. Yeah, to minors in the bournage. Yeah, so one of the things he wanted his art to do was to humanize people. And rather than painting the aristocrats or these, you know, scenes that were full of, you know, aristocratic beauty and grandeur, he really focused on the peasants, on the weavers, on the harvesters, on the people who were ignored. And he said, he told his brother, his great goal in his art was to show the light that he saw

on them, was to show the beauty of their humanity, which was often ignored or discarded by other people. It's one reason why he spent a lot of time painting prostitutes, actually, was he was trying to show that even these women that have been discarded by society have a life and a beauty and a goodness to them that others can't see. I think that's the power of art. It shows us things that we wouldn't recognize. I could walk past a homeless person on the street and not look at him once, but someone goes and they paints him in a way that captures his life, his heart, that he's made in the image of God. And they do that, by the way, by doing what I said before, they show the hope, they show the despair, they show the darkness that someone in that situation feels. and yet they also show the beauty, the life, and the goodness.

So somehow what I think you're saying, and what Tillick was saying, if I understood that quote right, is that art bypasses some of our logical brain and touches us deep in this part of us that longs for something beautiful, longs for the light, longs for a better world. And somehow standing in front of the David or a starry night or a painting of a prostitute or a homeless person shows us truth that we don't have access to by just reading a book or something more didactic. Absolutely. I think if you think about your own experience, you know that to be true. And if you listen to this are an artist, you might not be a professional artist. You might be someone who does art as a hobby. You know, maybe you play music on the side or you paint,

or you write. Or even if you're someone who consumes art, I think understanding how your artistic calling is part of your divine calling, what God's calling you to do, is incredibly helpful because a lot of artists are kind of cast aside by the church. Like, that feels like something that shouldn't be in this book, as we already said. And it absolutely belongs in the book because there's so much change in transformation that's happened in our world because truths were spoken in ways that they could not have been heard otherwise. But if the church doesn't appreciate artists and doesn't embrace the role they have in influence in culture, then what it does is drives artists away from Jesus, away from the church, away from truth, away from the gospel. And, you know, unfortunately, like you said, Christians and churches

have done that. They've said, well, this isn't spiritual. And therefore, it's not valuable. But that's a huge mistake. It's very unbiblical thinking. Okay. So we've gone through, I think, four so far. And we still have two left, the ambassador and the builder. So trying to keep ourselves in a normal time link for the podcast. Let's hit both of those rather quickly. And I think these are, by the way, going to be two of the biggest ones that a lot of people resonate with. So, Keith, let's start with the ambassador. Who is that? Well, I think the ambassador is the person who says, I want to influence culture by sharing the gospel, because the only way the culture is going to change is if people change. How's that different than the trainer? Well, the trainer's trying to change

people's habits through discipling them. And the ambassador is saying, I'm going to represent Christ and bring people to faith in Christ. So I'm going to address the most fundamental need that people have. Like, the ambassador looks and says, you can change laws about abortion, but it's only by people coming to faith in Christ that you're going to really see people not want to get abortions. Like, you can change laws about race discrimination, but the only way you're really going to see healing and justice is by people coming to faith in Jesus. So the ambassador wants to tell as many people about Jesus as possible so that people will come to faith, and they think that if enough people come to faith, then the culture will change, not from the top.

down, but from the bottom up. It's a really grassroots approach. I mean, if you think about the Apostle Paul, there's a lot of injustice happening in the Roman world. But he doesn't lead a protest movement. This is what the ambassador would say. He doesn't try to influence Nero. He doesn't create art. You know, what does Paul do? He just goes around and he tells as many people as he can about Jesus, and he establishes these churches that represent Jesus in their community because that's the way he's going to make a difference. And I think this is the way that most Christians are most familiar with. Like if you ask most Christians that are committed to church, how should we change the world?

They'd say, well, we have this message, this truth that Christ died and rose again and people can be forgiven. And we need to go share that widely. An ambassador gets enthusiastic about it and doesn't just talk about it, but actually does it. And I think it's pretty cool to see people come to faith in Christ and to see their families change. and then they begin to change their little area of influence, their sphere. And that's how they think the world changes. Sometimes you can see ambassadors getting crossways with artists. Because I think sometimes for ambassadors, there's this mindset that, you know,

there's only two things that will last outside of this world, the souls of men, and the Word of God. And so why are you spending all of your time over there on your little art projects when there's people to be saved? Well, this is where I was when I was in college. I've tried to become a Christian. I would have definitely been an ambassador, not a good kind of ambassador that wants to share Christ but also appreciates what other people are doing and contributing. I was the bad side of the ambassador, the person who became self-righteous because I thought other people weren't committed enough. I stopped going to class. I stopped doing anything that wasn't focused on

seeing people come to faith in Christ so that like you said, their soul could live forever with God. So there's a good kind of ambassador, the kind who really wants to go into their workplace, into their neighborhood, into their family, and represent Jesus well, get to know people and build relationships, and then use those relationships as an opportunity to point people to Jesus. And the ambassador is just motivated by the sense that Jesus has changed my life. And therefore, I want him to change yours too. They really love people and care about people. Yeah, and like you said, we go into so much more depth in the book, but just with the limited

time, why don't you walk us through the builder? Who is the builder? What do they build? The builder are people who change the world by building institutions. We all got to admit, the word institutions is not the sexiest world. No one's getting excited right now. But when I say institutions, I'm talking about the durable forms of our common life. All of the places where we live and work and have our being.

Your workplace is an institution. Your church is an institution. The schools that you send your kids to or that you're in, those are institutions. Marriage is an institution. The family is an institution. So it turns out our life is a life lived in institutions. I mean, maybe with the exclusion of all the time we spend online. So does that mean like every parent is the leader of an institution in some sense?

And I say I let to say, this is a chapter that I think applies to everyone in some way, whether you're a business owner or you're running a charity or you're teaching in a classroom or you're the principal of a school. You are leading these institutions. Now, what I think is fascinating is that all institutions have goals. Like they have a direction to where they're going. And in America, it's no surprise we direct our institutions towards the American dream. That's what we want to do.

So what's the American dream? I like how Brian Ficker puts it. He says the goal is to make people into autonomous consumption machines. That's the American dream? Like, I want to become an autonomous consumption machine. Of course, no one says that. This is what the American dream is. I want to be independent.

I want to be self-reliant. And I want to have lots of stuff. I want a nice car. I want a nice house. I want the picket fence. That's what the American dream is. Yeah. I mean, that sounds very familiar.

That's what most people I know think they want in their life. I think there's plenty of Christians who are running after that. And that's how we design our businesses, right? What's the goal of the business to give people enough money to live the American dream or to give shareholders enough money to live their own American dream? And it can also, by the way, become the goal of nonprofits. Now, these are people who are materially poor, but what's the goal? To get them enough stuff to go live the American dream.

And so virtually any institution can be built around this goal of turning people into independent, autonomous consumption machines. The key for a builder is realizing that Jesus has a different dream. You know, Jesus came saying he came to set the oppressed free, to bring shalom and wholeness and flourishing in people's life. And he had a holistic vision of what that looked like. It looked like people being in healthy relationships with one another. It looked like people showing up to care and help one another.

It looked like having healthy marriages, healthy friendships, healthy communication, showing forgiveness and loving our enemies. I could keep going. But he had his own institution that he wanted to start. And so I think the key for the builder is saying, how can I build my business? how can I build my nonprofit? How can I build my classroom in a way that's actually orienting itself towards God's kingdom? Because that's how you change the world. The world is made up of institutions. If you start changing institutions, whether or not the people in them are Christians,

their lives start changing as a result of the values and the directionality of those institutions. If you think about it, God was the first builder. Yeah. I mean, God back in Genesis 1, he gets his hands dirty by creating. He creates the world, first of all, but then he also creates the family. And he creates a world with lots of potential for then us, his kind of vice regents, to go out and actualize the potential that he put into the world. So God is the first builder. We work because God works. We care about creation because God cares about creation. But when sin comes in the world, that's where our building becomes more corrupt and becomes more self-centered. So in a sense, what the builder is doing is getting back to Genesis

one back to what they were created and designed to be. You could look at some of these ways of changing the world and say which ones existed before the fall and after the fall. For example, would there be protest if there was no sin? I don't know. Would you need ambassadors to share Jesus with people if there was no sin? You need an artist because art will still be creating beauty, right? And I think you'd need builders, right?

Because Adam and Eve were stewards of the garden before they were sinners. He gives them a sacred space to build, to fill. He gives them sacred time. I mean, that's what institutions are. He tells them how to run their relationships, how to be in relationship with him. And so this is why so many of us are builders is because it's almost fundamental to who we are as being made in the image of God. I thought what you said a second ago is really good about institutions affecting culture,

whether or not people individually are Christians. Yeah. And I think this is where the ambassador and the builder can kind of butt heads is because the ambassador is looking from the ground up. They're saying as individuals change, the culture will change. And I think what the builder is doing is saying, well, not exactly. As institutions change, then culture changes. Because take something like a social media user versus the person who works on the algorithm at Meta.

Well, the person who works on the algorithm at Meta has a lot more influence on the culture than that individual user. And so institutions have more impact than individuals. At least that's what the builder says. And that's why they're trying to create institutions that glorify and honor God. and treat people well. Well, and here's the good news. We don't have to pick. We can have ambassadors, we can have builders and advisors and artists and trainers.

We can have everybody, protesters in our churches. And that's the goal of joyful outsiders, is to help churches and help Christians both understand their own calling in life, but also learn to appreciate the callings of other people and live in peace with one another. And in fact, encourage one another to walk in the way as God's designed them to walk. So, again, if you're listening to this and you haven't yet, go to joyful outsiders.com, go to the bottom of the page,

take that little assessment to figure out which of these six most closely connect with your life. And if that's helpful to you, I'd encourage you to pick up a copy of the book and go deeper. Learn more about how to walk in the way God's designed you to walk.