Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Trading FOMO for JOMO: Keith and Patrick's New Book, Joyful Outisders, Coming Soon!

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

For many Christians, fitting into the current cultural moment just feels…hard! From 40 million people having left the church in the last 25 years to less than half of U.S. adults identifying as Protestants or church attendees, one thing is clear: Christians are outsiders. But is that such a bad thing? Should we fear missing out, or consider it a joy? On today’s episode, Keith and Patrick make a special announcement: They wrote another book! Coming in January 2025, Joyful Outsiders: 6 Ways to Follow Jesus in a Disorienting Culture will explore six unique ways that Christians can joyfully accept their calling to change culture without being changed by culture. Today, they explain the story behind writing this book and why they believe it will be a practical resource for “everyday Christians needing everyday answers to face everyday problems.” They break down the three ways Christians typically respond to a tense culture: combat, conform, or cloister. Then they present a more godly approach: Six unique types of outsiders that lend themselves to a person’s God-given strengths and abilities. Are you a trainer, protestor, builder, ambassador, artist, or advisor? We hope this sneak peek gives you a glimpse of the joy that’s possible when Christians embrace their role as outsiders. Interested in joining our book launch team and helping us spread this important message? Learn more here. Prepare your heart this Advent with the 2024 TMBT Advent Calendar! Each day, receive a new prompt for Scripture, prayer, and reflection—designed to help you slow down and reflect on the Hope, Love, Peace, and Joy that Jesus offers. Sign up now to receive your free Advent calendar! 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.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I think all of us Christians have been in situations where we just didn't know what the right response is. Like you're in a cultural situation or maybe just something in your school, your workplace, your family, and you're like, what is the right way to respond as a Christian? And we feel that pinch in our life and it's hard to know what to do. I have this happen all the time where I want to be an insider, I want to fit in, and yet because of a conversation it's happening at the water cooler or something happening in my family or something happening in our culture, I start realizing, wow, I really don't fit in here. I feel like an outsider. Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with the world? I'm not sure what to do. When you say outsider, I think what you mean, I think what we mean is that the culture expects one response. Like there seems to be this obvious thing you're supposed to do, but you don't feel as a Christian. You can do it faithfully. Like I have these friends who have adult children like I do. And they were in this really tough situation where one of

their kids came to him and said that they wanted to get married to a gay partner. And this family was totally blown away like they didn't see this coming. Don't judge them because it could easily happen to you or me, right? They just were blown away. And the whole family put pressure on them to say, yeah, I accept this gay marriage and gay relationship, even though my friends weren't sure that was really the right response, there was so much family pressure, so much cultural pressure, they came to me going, what do I do? And it's not easy to answer. I think about a friend of mine, a young man who was relatively new at his company, and they were basically voting to put together a diversity, equity, and inclusion board. And somehow his name got thrown into the ring. And he cared so little about this.

He didn't even vote on it himself, but he gets back to work the day after the election and finds out that he won that he's now on this board. And he's sitting in there. And the first thing that comes up is a discussion about how some people on the DEI board want to fire and remove all of the Christians in the organization because they're a threat to LGBT people. And my friend is a Christian. And he's sitting there silent. He's like, what in the world? Do I have to speak out? Do I say, guys, I know I look cool. It doesn't mean like I'm super progressive. Like, what am I supposed to do here? Do I have to defend my fellow Christians? Or is it better for me just to follow in the sword and say, you know, I trust Jesus. And, you know, what would you

do if you're in that scenario? I think other people are in very similar situations all the time. Yeah, this is a little bit different episode than we usually do because Patrick and I want to talk about a project that we're working on that's trying to answer these kind of questions, the questions that normal people find themselves asking when they realize that they are outsiders, like they don't fit into the cultural moment. And it's not because they're crazy Westboro people. It's just that they're trying to be faithful to Christ in a culture that is far from Christ. And so we've written this book to try to help all of us figure out what do I do when I'm in these tough situations that I feel like an outsider and I don't fit in. How do I respond? Yeah, so the book is called Joyful Outsiders, Six Ways to Follow Jesus in a Disorienting Culture.

And Keith and I've been working on this for quite some time now. We're really excited to share this with you specifically, the people listening to this podcast. But here's the first thing I want to say. There are a ton of Christian books out there about how to engage. engage our culture, but there's one big problem. They're often written for pastors or academics or thinkers, and they're not written for everyday people, and that becomes really evident because the books are totally impractical. They're not really giving people practical guides for how do I respond in these kinds of scenarios? How do I know if I'm being faithful to God or if I'm compromising my conscience? We as pastors know that everyday people are facing everyday challenges, and they need everyday answers to navigate all the challenges we're facing. Yeah, so this is a book for the Normies,

and to kind of test it out. It's a book for people like me, public school people. And we tested this out by going out on the road with it. And we went to Seattle and talked to a couple different churches there in San Francisco, St. Louis. Even in our own church, we've kind of tested these ideas out and refined them a little bit by teaching this material and getting people's input and trying to address the problems that your ordinary average Christian is facing in their life. And so we're really excited about it because some of the people that we're friends with, either personally or through our podcast or whatever, have said, hey, this book is really addressing a need that isn't being met anywhere else.

I've been really encouraged because as an author, you hate your own babies. You think they're terrible. But, you know, our friends like Preston Sprinkle, Justin Wilma early, he's written some fantastic books. He wrote the Ford for the book. Brandt Hansen, another author, Justin Brow. There's a bunch of people who've talked to you. And they've been really excited about this project. And that's been really encouraging for me. because I thought, okay, maybe it's not as bad as I thought. Okay, so here's how we work, is that Patrick is the optimist and I'm the pessimist. So that's actually true. No matter what Patrick says, he thinks this is really good. And I go, oh, this is horrible, horrible, horrible. So in these people, like, he just gave some of the names, Sprinkle and Briarly and Trevind Wax,

Braithson, and they've all endorsed the book. I'm like, oh, I feel so bad because their reputation is not going to be sunk that they blurbed our book. But, you know, maybe you're right a little bit, and maybe they have seen something in there that they think can be helpful. Well, I'll share about a conversation I had with Justin Whitmell early. You know, he's not a pastor. He's not leading a church.

He's an attorney. He runs his own practice. And he said, look, I've read a lot of the books out there on cultural engagement. You know, I found them helpful in a lot of ways. He goes, but this was the first book I've read that was practical. That actually spoke to me as an attorney in my everyday life. And that's part of why he was excited about it. And that's why this is for you, whether you're a school teacher or a nurse or a lawyer,

whatever you're doing in your job, you are engaging with your culture, with your community. And you want to know, am I being faithful? And you want to know how do I respond? And that's why in the book, we actually lay out six unique ways to follow Jesus. And they're all based on biblical characters and figures from Christian history. And we'll get into those in a little bit in the podcast. But I thought it'd be cool just to start by saying the genesis of the book, why we wrote this to begin with. So a couple years ago, our community had diversity breakfast. Now, this is something that the community has been done for a long time. And it usually is around Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. And it has usually emphasized racial diversity. Yeah, it always celebrates the civil

rights movement. That's traditionally what it's for. And so over the years, it's grown. And I think this past year, there were about a thousand people in attendance. And it went along as normal, as you would expect, except for one thing is that the people organizing this had a drag show come in. And from what I heard, because I wasn't there, the response from the audience was enthusiastic. but there were a group of middle school students who had been taken to the diversity breakfast and their parents hadn't been notified that there was going to be a drag show that was, you know, probably a lot of people would think would be inappropriate for middle school students. And I would add to this, you know, we live in a very politically diverse city.

And so neither one of us was terribly shocked or even that offended by the fact that there was a drag show. The real question here was whether it was the right thing to have students there without parental permission. And so initially, you know, we thought that the school district would come out and say, hey, we made a mistake, we'll make sure this will never happen again. But honestly, the opposite happened. The governor ended up writing a letter to the superintendent when he didn't respond, saying, hey, you need to fix this. The superintendent responds loudly and says that anyone who says that the performance was of a sexual nature is going to cause harm to transgender students and LGBT students and condemns the governor. and anybody in the community who disagreed with their perspective. He said, we've had the same policy for 50 years. We're not going to change it.

We didn't do anything wrong. So here's the thing is that Patrick and I are pastors in a fairly large church in our city. And so we had people who are on all sides of this debate and caught in the middle of it. For example, one of the parents in our congregation, their child was at this event. And their child's autistic. And the way autism has affected him is that he, falls in love with kind of superheroes, cartoon characters. Entertainment.

And then just repeats what they say, like really buys into it and then kind of imitates what he's seen in these characters. And because this student is nonverbal, it was impossible for the parents to kind of really dialogue with him about what he'd seen. So this parent is saying, how do I tell the school district how inappropriate this was? Now, there were other people in the community who are firing off angry letters to the superintendent. And then others, of course, who are coming to the superintendent's defense saying, oh, this is awesome, this is great. You have done nothing wrong.

We also had teachers in our congregation who felt caught in the middle. Like, they didn't support this. But on the other hand, the last thing they needed was parents at their school being angry with them for a decision that they didn't even make. And of course, there were administrators in our church who are part of the public school system, you know, principals and other significant roles. And they also feel like they're caught in the middle. And so when the Christians in town are upset at the school, they interpret it as they're upset with me. So how would you respond if you were this parent or if you were a teacher, a principal?

And the question can go deeper and deeper. What would you do if you were on the school board? We had a church member who that was a case. What would you do if you worked for the attorney general? and maybe you're being told that you need to prosecute the school district. Again, there's people in our congregation. That was the case. So how do you respond in all of these different scenarios?

It's really confusing. Yeah, some of it depends on what role you have. So all these different people are coming to Patrick and I asking, what do we do? How do we handle this? And we kind of stayed out of it for as long as possible. I mean, I think we were hoping that the school district would change course, that bridges would be built, that there'd be healing, but the opposite happened. I mean, there's just this chasm developing between, and not just Christian,

parents, just parents in general, but there's plenty of parents who aren't Christian who were against this, who were unhappy with the school district and the way they were responding. So what we did is we wrote an article, and because we have this connection at Newsweek, we got it published there. Can I just say this? We did not do this flippantly. I mean, we spent a lot of time waiting. We spent a boatload of time counseling and helping people. And before we wrote the article, we met with other pastors. And our hope in writing it was not to cause a controversy. Our hope was to lower the temperature. Well, it didn't work. Maybe that was our hope. You're right. It was our hope. We tried to frame it in a way that was

conciliatory and saying, hey, can't we all agree on parental permission? Like, we're not going to agree on religious stuff. We're not going to agree on what's appropriate for every middle schooler, but can we find common ground that if a middle school is going to take a student to a religious event or to a drag show, they just need parental permission. That's what we tried to ask. And we thought, Gosh, that seems super reasonable. Now, just a little heads up for you out there. When you send an article into a magazine like Newsweek, they send it back to you with some edits, and you get to approve all those, you know, debate with them about it.

But what you don't get any say in is the headline or the pictures they put around it. So the headline they put on our article in the picture. Yeah, they were super inflammatory. It lit a fire in our community. So now what do we do? We tried to do something that would kind of bring people together. Instead, we've added fuel to the fire. When we published this, we reached out to the superintendent and said, hey, we're not trying to cause you any harm or damage.

We're letting you know that we publish this. We hope that we can come to some sort of consensus. And the next day, he invited us into his office. And so Keith and I were out in the parking lot of central office. And we had a little piece of paper. And we wrote down a set of goals that we had walking in. And the number one was just let's make a friend. Let's go in with a positive attitude, build a relationship with the superintendent, and let's be on his side and try to work together for the betterment of our community. Yeah, because being a superintendent, anybody in that kind of leadership, that's a hard job. It's a lonely job. And so we thought if we can just be friends, even if we don't totally agree, that would be a win for the shalom and the well flare of our city. So we get into his office and lo and behold, to our surprise, he's invited another school board member who is very antagonistic towards us. Yeah, that predates any of this.

Yeah. She had a beef with us for a long time. And we didn't know she was going to be there. So instead of just, you know, the superintendent in us, we saw this woman who we kind of, like personally, but just doesn't like us. And that kind of set up how it was going to go. It didn't go well at all. I think in the first five minutes, they accused us of increasing trans suicide and kind of participating in something like a Jim Crow. Yeah, they compare us to Jim Crow segregationists. And so we realized very quickly, friendship building wasn't going to work. Now, to be clear, we didn't say, okay, well, if you fight, we fight back. You know, we just kind of sat there and

listened to them and said, okay, we're going to walk in the way of Jesus and be peaceful and take the slap on the other cheek. But coming to the end of all this, we had to ask ourselves a question, did we do the right thing? Did we make the right choice of the Newsweek article? Did we advise people in the right way? And the honest truth is, we don't know for certain. We did our best. We tried to act with wisdom. But in the middle of all that, when we saw the after effects and we saw how it affected people, we realized that there's a desperate need for Christians to learn how to walk in this cultural moment. And so I really, I kid you not, about a week after that happened, I sat down and I wrote the introduction to joyful outsiders. That was where the entire book began with this event. And it was

with the heart of saying, even if we feel confused, do you know who's not confused? Jesus. Even if we feel like we lack the wisdom, do you know who has the wisdom? Jesus. And that let us down a project of working with others and trying to discover what's the proper wisdom for how we engage a rapidly changing world. Yeah. And there's a reason. that we feel like outsiders. And if you know anything about the demographic changes that have happened in our country in the last few decades, you know that we're not the same country we used to be in the past 25 years. 40 million people have left churches. They were going to church a couple times a month, and now they're no longer going to church. For the first time in the last century,

a majority of American adults do not identify as Protestant or attend to church. Between 1953 and 22, the proportion of Protestants dropped from 70% of the country to 34%. Now, that's not saying 70% of America was Christian, but it's saying that 70% went to church and they identified with Christianity as a religion, even if they weren't super committed to it. And now about half of that do. So you can't have those kind of changes and not think that Christians are going to feel like, man, this isn't our home anymore. America feels different than it did when my parents grew up. Yeah, and it's not just that. I mean, we have rapidly shifting moral norms, especially our moral norms around sex and sexuality. This kind of blows my mind. If you go back

to the late 90s and early 2000s, young pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Lena Gomez, Nick Jonas, all still relatively famous people. They all had to wear purity rings. And they didn't have to. They all chose to, right? And it wasn't because all of America actually practiced abstinence before marriage. It was because our culture said we had this cultural idea that that was the best way. And if you were going to be a pop star, you needed to at least pretend like that's what you were doing yourself. Just a few years later, Oregon, one of the most progressive states in the United States, it passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. That was in 2004.

In 2008, Obama couldn't be elected without publicly saying that he was against gay marriage. So we have to realize that the move in the last 10 years towards accepting that, LGBT movement and accepting premarital sex, all of this stuff is actually relatively new in our culture. It's a major change. Just to pull a thread through on the Obama thing is in 2008, I think he believed in gay marriage, but he couldn't say it or didn't think it was wise to say because he thought it would hurt him electorally, right? By 2012, now he is all out in front for it. So I don't think he changed his mind between 2008 and 2012. I think it became politically expedient for for him to be publicly for it.

And we're not criticizing him or condoning him. We're just saying culture's changed. This is a rapid shift in our culture. I mean, here's another example. In 2001, Washington, D.C. hosted kind of a big ceremony in which people were mourning and grieving over what had happened on 9-11. And Billy Graham was one of the speakers there. He was kind of America's pastor, and he was brought in to help shepherd the country

through a very difficult and dark time. Then 10 years later, in 2011, there's a similar event in New York City. This time, not only is Billy Graham not invited, but there are no religious leaders invited. It chose the way the country changed. In 2001, we won a pastor, an evangelical, Protestant pastor,

to shepherd us through it. 10 years later, we don't want any religion around this event. Yeah, so there's definitely a shift in the prominence and acceptability of Christians. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's in the House of Representative, said, the only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination. And while I don't think everyone in the nation believes that, I do think she's describing a shift that's happened in the last 10 years.

So let's go back for a second to our story about the public school system and the drag show and all the responses to it. What would you have done had you been a parent or a teacher or an administrator or a school board member or in state government? how would you have responded to any of that? Without guidance, here's how Christians usually respond. Not just to that issue, but to any kind of cultural issue they feel like is going the wrong way. One group will be combative. I mean, you know these people, right? Maybe this is you. You get angry. You rant. You have protest votes. Maybe you protest, like publicly protest in front of the school. There's another group that is more conformist. You know, they're not combative. They're more like, let's just go along with it.

Let's kind of be open-minded. Let's don't rock the boat. Let's don't be known as angry people. And the way they solve the problem is they just conform to the cultural expectation. And then there's another group that is what we call the cloistered. And these are the people who just don't respond at all. They just keep their head down. To be honest, it's what I was tempted to do in that situation.

Why are we going to engage by writing this article and going to meet with a superintendent? Let's just keep our head down and mind our own business. but if you're a combative person or a conformist or a cloistered person, I guess I'm just not sure that's how Jesus calls us to respond to our culture. So in the middle of all of this, we're asking ourselves the question, is there a different way to be an outsider? We don't want to be those kinds of outsiders, the conformist, combative, cloistered. What if there's a different way to do that?

And we think that the Bible answers that question, yes, there's a radically different way to do that. And we think that's possible if we take a few steps. And the first step is realizing this. Christians have always been outsiders. This became very evident to me several years ago when I was in seminary. I was meeting with the dean of students at the seminary, and we're very different. He's a boomer. I'm a millennial.

He was in the military. I'm just a non-military person. He's black. I'm white. But at this point, the most important difference between us was that he was very wise and I was not. And I was telling him how frustrated I was doing ministry on a college campus because of some of this cultural changing stuff, right? I was like, gosh, wouldn't it be great to go back into the past when everybody agreed about

sex and sexuality and everybody kind of thought, you know, Christianity was a good thing? Wouldn't that be great if we could just go back into the past when we weren't outsiders? And he looks at me, and in the kindest way possible asks me this question. So you're telling me, you think it would be easier to go to Mississippi in 1954 and preach the truth, the gospel truth, about race, than it is for you to be a pastor right now. Well, you know, as you can imagine, I realized how silly, how foolish I had been. And he was making a point. It doesn't matter what era of time you're looking at.

In American history or in world history, Christians have always been outsiders in one way or the other. It might change depending on the time and the place, the way in which you're an outsider. But if you're going to authentically follow Jesus and not compromise your conscience, we're always outsiders. So where do we get the idea that we aren't cultural outsiders? like Christians should be insiders and have a respected faith. And I think it's because not only like Patrick has said, do we just kind of think of it from our own personal perspective instead of looking it through somebody else's eyes.

But I think it's also because we don't have a very good grasp on history. And so we kind of think back maybe to the 1950s. And, you know, in the 1950s, it was the height of Christian culture in America. More people said they attended church than any other time in American history. The post-war boom was happening, and the church was right at the center of it. Dwight Eisenhower was the first and I think only president to be baptized while holding office. You've got the phrase under God being added to the Pledge of Allegiance. You've got, in God we trust, being made the official motto of the United States of America.

It's also in the 1950s that President Eisenhower establishes the national prayer breakfast that has continued every year to today. So if you go back to the 1950s, it felt like Christians were. We're insiders, not outsiders. Like we had cultural power. There was still prayer in the schools. People read the Bible in the schools. But it's not long, and just to get to the 60s, when all that begins to change. And that now there's no prayer in the schools.

Now there's no Bible reading in the schools. And again, no judgment on whether that's good or bad, just saying that now Christians start to feel like with the sexual revolution, the changes inside of the family, political changes, that they are outside, that they're not respected, they're not valid. anymore and that the cultures become antagonistic toward them. And as my seminary professor so easily pointed out, despite all that, America was incredibly compromised. In fact, there were polls that were done at the time, despite 70% of people saying I'm a Protestant Christian, only 40% can name one of the gospel writers. It was not truly a deeply Christian time,

and it was a deeply racist time. So to be Christian would not actually mean that you get to be the one in power. It would have meant that you were still the outsider. And in fact, this is a is what the Bible trains us to expect. Because get this, God's people throughout history have been outsiders. Ever since the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, we have existed outside. And the biblical term for that is exile. We've been exiles. Let's just think of a few Bible characters who were outsiders in their culture. Abraham, the book of Deuteronomy, is called a wandering Aramean. His family was nomadic. They're living in the land of Canaan and their regular conflict with their neighbors because they were outsiders in that culture.

The Egyptians eventually saw the Hebrews, Abraham's descendants, as being a national threat, and so they enslaved them. So you can imagine that God's people saw themselves as outsiders. They weren't respected in the halls of power in Egypt. They were the slaves, the people who are outside, the threat. Even in the period when Israel was its own nation, the Israeli people actually assimilated to the pagan cultures around them. They became idolatrous. And so the few people, the prophets who were staying faithful to Yahweh, were saying we could still only worship Yahweh. They were even outsiders inside of Israel. And then maybe you have the most famous story about God's people being outsiders.

And it's the story of how Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon invade Israel. They burn down the temple and they take many of the Hebrews, many of the Israelites, God's people, back to Babylon. And there you have the stories in the book of Daniel, Daniel, and Shadraq, Meshach, and Abindigo, and how they were at outsiders. They were given new names. They were told to bow down and worship to the golden statue. And they had to draw lines and resist. They had to figure out how do we live as outsiders in Babylon? And that's the question we're all wrestling with. How do we live as outsiders in a culture that doesn't respect our faith? And then, of course, there's the example of Jesus. Jesus was an outsider. His parents didn't hail from the halls of power. Instead, they lived in the backwaters of the Roman Empire.

they eventually had to flee for their lives from a violent king, King Herod, and they spent most of their lives living under a military occupation. According to the book of Hebrews, Jesus was crucified, quote, outside the city. He was an outsider in his crucifixion. He was condemned as a criminal. He was forsaken by his father. He was rejected by his people. He was abandoned by his friends. And he was ultimately exiled by his own creation. There's no greater outsider than Jesus himself, the creator of everything. And then the book of First Peter picks right up there, and starts calling Christians exiles. These are Christians who live in the same place they were born and grew up.

They're Roman citizens. They think of themselves as Romans. It's not that they're outsiders in this since they moved to a new community. It's that they're outsiders and that when they became Christians, they became citizens of heaven. And therefore, they were at odds with their culture. And so all throughout the book of First Peter, you find him calling Christians exiles, sojourners. And Peter says these Christians live in Babylon. Now, they don't literally live in Babylon.

Babylon is a city that is far away from them and is much diminished in stature and power. What he's saying is that Babylon has become this metaphor of being outside of God's kingdom, a rival kingdom to God's kingdom. And that's where all Christians live. We all live in Babylon. We love to talk about our identity in Christ. that leads to fantastic conversations about how we're adopted children of God, sons and daughters of God, the way that we're united to Christ. We need to know that about our identity. But there's one part of our identity that we do not talk enough about. And it's what we're discussing right now. We are outsiders. That's what God has elected you to do. In 1st Peter 1, Peter literally calls people the elected or chosen exiles. Do you realize that? God has elected you. He has chosen you for a specific office, a specific role. And it's to be in. outsider in your world, but not just any kind of outsider to be a joyful outsider. So that's your first step. You have to realize that being an outsider isn't a bad thing. It's a divine calling on

your life. The second step is that you have to start living in that story. This makes me think about the story of a man named Hero Onada. He fought in World War II for Japan, and he was sent by the Imperial Army to Lubang Island in the Philippines. And while he was there, he dug into the forest with a few compatriots and they continued to fight via guerrilla warfare, the Filipinos around them. Shortly afterwards, the war ends. And now you've got the Japanese sending out transmissions to all of their people saying, the war is over, you can come back out, you can come back home. But Hero Onada didn't believe them. He thought it was fake propaganda. He thought that other militaries were trying to defeat him because he was living in a story where Imperial Japan could not lose,

where Imperial Japan was still in charge. He ends up staying in that forest for 30 years. It's an incredible story that they finally have to send what like a military general that yeah, three of his companions either disappear or die in firefights with the Philippines and they finally reach out to someone in Japan and say we got to send someone to get this guy out. Because Hero Nato was like attacking Filipino society and they're like we got to do something about this guy. How do we get him to realize that the war is over? Now there's direct parallels to us today because we start living in the wrong story. We start living in the story. We start living in the story. that says we're insiders and we should be respected by our culture.

And when we don't get that respect, we tend to do what Hero Nata did. And that is attack, right? We're going to attack our society because we're so angry with it and we demand our place at the table. Or we could go back one of the other ways instead of being combative and attack, we could conform and just try to get along and blend in to society. Or we could cloister ourselves from our society. But it all depends on what story you're living in it. And then when you start to see yourself, though, in the right story, the biblical story, like Patrick said, we are exiles.

Then you start going, okay, that's good to know. Now that I'm in exile, I'm an outsider, just like Jesus was, just like everybody else in the Bible is, just like all Christians are, and I can embrace that role joyfully. Yeah, so you could just ask yourself, am I like Hero Anata? Am I living in a fake story? Am I pretending like the war isn't over? Am I expecting to be an insider, which is making me either combat, conform, or hide away? if that's your expectation, that's what you'll do. But if you start living in the beautiful story of exile, you'll learn what it is to have joy. And that's the third step in this process. We need to experience the joy of being an outsider. Think about Jesus for a second. He wasn't crucified by accident. He chose to go to the cross. The question is why. He went to the cross to die for our sins. Of course, that's true. But do you know why the author of Hebrews says he went to the cross? Check this out.

Hebrews 12, 2. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Do you think about Jesus that way? When he took up the cross, he chose joy. When he took up the cross, he did so because he wanted a joyful life. When he chose to be exiled outside the city, exiled by his people, to die as an outsider. He chose to be an outsider. Why?

For joy. And then we, of course, are called to imitate Christ, right? Paul says, imitate me as I imitate Christ. So we're to imitate Jesus by going outside the camp, by embracing our outsiderness with a deep sense of joy. And that's exactly what the book of Hebrews calls us to do. Here's Hebrews 13. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore, let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.

So do you see the imitation part? that we are to follow Jesus outside and embrace the suffering with joy. Now, the obvious question becomes, the Bible's calling me to go be an outsider like Jesus was an outsider. And the Bible's telling me that there's joy if I'll walk in his ways, if I'll live in his story. But how in the world do I experience joy when it feels like the world is against me? How do I experience joy when sometimes following Jesus

means having some complex, challenging relationships? How in the world is that a joyful way to live? And I think the answer to that is that you hold tightly to Jesus. Like, you just cling to him. In 1859, there was a big fad going on in America. It was tightrope walking. It's kind of like slacklining today. It's kind of, I don't know, bizarre to think that there's this famous tightrope walker,

and he's from France. And his name's Charles Blondeen. I think is how you say it. I'm not French, so forgive me if I... Keith used to always say Charles Blonde. then I'm like, it's Blundee. I did. Private school, corrected public school.

Anyway, he was this incredible tightrope walker. Like, when I tell you these stories, you're not going to quite believe them, but they're true. I promise you they're true. You can go use the Google and figure it out. In 1859, he sets a tight rope up across of Niagara Falls. It's like an inch wide, this rope.

And he walks across it, and he gets these big crowds and they come. But then he starts doing all kinds of bizarre tricks. Like, he'll take a chair out there and sit on the chair, which is resting on this tightrope with no net underneath crashing down. If you fall, you crash down into Niagara Falls and surely die. One time he had a boat come underneath him while he's out on the rope and he lowered a bottle of wine down to the boat.

One time he brought up a bottle of wine and drank it and then went across as if it wasn't challenging enough. One time he took a camera out and he took pictures of the crowd from his position out on the rope. So he does all this crazy stuff and people are really impressed and the crowds just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And one day he comes out to the crowd and he says to them, do you believe that I can do anything? They're like, yeah, of course, you can do anything on this tightrope. We believe in. He goes, okay, that's great. Then one of you volunteer to ride on my back. Crickets. Of course, no one responds. No one raises their hand except for one man, a man named Harry Calcord. and Harry climbs up onto his back and they begin to tightrope their way

across the falls and as they're going this rope wasn't designed to carry that much weight the guy wires that were holding it in place begin to snap and it's beginning to sway left and right wildly and Charles Blondin says to Harry call cord look up Harry you are no longer call cord

you are Blondeen until I clear this place be a part of me mind body and soul if I sway you sway with me Don't attempt to do any balancing yourself. If you do, we will both go to our death. Well, Harry Colcord takes the advice, and by no small miracle, they make it across to the other side.

And so when I hear what Blondin said to Colcord, I think of Galatians 220. You know, you have died. You have been crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in you. That we can have joy if we'll just hold on to Jesus because we know our faith. future is safe with him. Like our life is in his hands. We can have joy because we know that he is always with us. When Daniel at the Lions dinner, Shadrake Meeshach and Abindigo are outsiders who refuse to bow down and worship and they go into the furnace. What happens? Well, God goes with them. And whatever difficult situation we find ourselves in that we feel like outsiders, we don't need to panic because Jesus is

with us. We know he carries us. So there doesn't have to be fear and panic in our life. We don't have to resist and combat or conform to what the culture wants. We can walk in the way of Jesus because we are one with him. So here's the catch. If you want to experience the joy of nearness to Christ, being on his back, becoming one with him, living life with him, you have to raise your hand. The only person who gets on Charles Blondean's back is the guy who volunteers. If you don't want to be an outsider, if you say, look, I want to be an insider, I never want to be an outsider, you'll never raise your hand. You'll never go to be with Jesus. It is only by being an outsider that we get to walk across this rope with him. And I know that it's terrifying. I know that it's scary, but this is your

confidence. He's already done it. He's already walked across the wire. He's gone through death and he's come back out alive. And that's why you can be confident. You might not know how to engage the world around you, but he does and you're on his back. Now, the majority of the book, Joyful Outsiders, is really practical. It shows you practical ways that you can interact with the culture. Once you've decided you're not going to combat, you're not going to conform, you're not going to be cloistered off to the side. Now, what do you do? And there's not just a one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Because I hate one-size-fits-all clothing. It's going to call one-size-fits-none. We're all different, created differently, different talents, different convictions, different life experiences, education, all that.

So wouldn't it make sense that God has more than one way for us to engage with our culture? So, Patrick, let's just give a quick overview of each of the six ways that Christian, are called to interact with our very disorienting culture. So we have a chapter on each one of these, and I think you'll find them incredibly helpful, but these are the six ways. First of all, we have trainers. These are the people who change the world by changing habits. They're the kinds of people who spiritually influence others to develop habits like prayer

and Bible reading so that they can be transformed and choose virtue and goodness in their life because you can't have a transformed culture without virtuous people. We also have the protesters. It's pretty obvious. People who change the world by challenging injustice. We also have builders. These are the people who change the world by building institutions. This might be businesses. Those might be nonprofits. But they understand that if you want to change the world, you have to build something. We also have ambassadors. These are people who change the world

by changing hearts, by evangelizing, by sharing the good news. Because if you don't convert people, how can our world change? We also have artists, people who change the world by creating beauty. We have advisors, people who change the world by influencing the influential. You hear those. And maybe you quickly identify and go, oh, I bet I'm that one or that one really interests me or maybe you just go like, I'm for sure not an artist. That would be my reaction. But what's interesting is you might be more than one and it might change over the course of your life. We put a little personal inventory online at joyful outsiders.com. And you can go there and kind of take the test and try to figure out where do you

land on one of these six ways to engage culture. Which one do you identify with? Which one would God want to use you in your community, in your family, in your workplace. Are you an artist? Are you a builder, an advisor, a trainer, an ambassador? You have some role that God wants you to play, and we want you to figure out what that is so that you can be the most effective for his kingdom where you live. And the reason why we want to do this is twofold. One, we want you to know what God is calling you to do in the culture. You're not called to do everything. You're not called to be everything. So if you read this book, I think you're going to get practical tips on how to live out that particular way in the world. But number two, we want the church to appreciate all of its parts.

See, some churches, they're great with the protesters, but they don't want any advisors. Some church, they want the artists, but they don't want any trainers. And we want to say that our churches need to have all of these people, and we all need to encourage one another and understand that our calling in the world might look different. So if you're chomping at the bit, like Keith said, you can go to joyful outsiders.com, and you can take that test. Now, here's the only bad news. The book doesn't come out until January 21st. So you do have to wait.

The reason why we are doing this is, first of all, just to let you know about the book, because we thought you'd be interested and we think you'll find it helpful. But the second reason is because we are going to be starting what's called a launch team. It's kind of the early adopters, if you will, the people who say, hey, we're interested in the book, and we want to help get word about it out because we think it'll be really good for the church. And it's really easy to join that launch team. The first thing you do is go to joyful outsiders.com. you can sign up for the launch team there. We'll also have a link in the show notes if you want to do that.

The second thing you have to do is pre-order the book, and when you sign up for the launch team, you'll just put your pre-order number in there. The main thing that we'd really love for you to do, once you've gotten the book, is to write a review and to share about it online, because we think this is going to be so helpful for so many churches and so many Christians. Now, it's not just a one-way deal. We want to send you some stuff too. If you do this, we will actually send you a digital copy of the book early. So you'll obviously get your physical copy whenever it comes out, but you'll get it early. The second thing is the first 100 people who sign up for the launch team are going to get a Jomo hat. Jomo. You want to talk about Jomo? Jomo. Jomo, you've heard of FOMO,

fear of missing out. Jomo is the joy of missing out. Are we clever or what? So we kind of hate it when things are branded after the thing. It's like we don't want people walking around in joyful outsiders' hats. That seems a little lame. But we love the idea of Jomo because there is a real joy in missing out because we're choosing to have the joy of walking with Jesus. And it's kind of fun and funny. And we hope it'll be a good conversation starter. Yeah. So we really want you to be partners with us on this. Like you listen to this podcast and you have kind of bought in to some extent about how we need to engage with our culture as Christians and how we need to be light and salt in our world. So that's what we're all trying to do together. And you could really help us by

doing what Patrick said and going to joyful outsiders.com, pre-ordering the book. writing a review. And just as a thank you for being our partner, we want to send you this stuff. So just take a second and do it if you don't mind. Above all else, whether or not you want to be a part of the launch team, I hope that you'll consider picking up a copy of the book, not because we want everybody to read it, but because I sincerely think there's a desperate need for those of us, which is almost all of us who feel confused in this cultural moment to take guidance from God's word, to take guidance from Jesus, and to feel, I hope, a sense of confidence that only comes when we embrace our role as outsiders, our divine calling as outsiders, and cling to Jesus, learn the joy of living

and walking with him as outsiders in this culture.