Theology in the Raw - #734 - How Habits Shape Desire: A Conversation with Drew Dyck

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

On episode #734 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with Drew Dyck. Drew is an acquisitions editor at Moody Publishers and a contributing editor at CTPastors.com, a Christianity Today publication for church leaders. He is also the author of Your Future Self Will Thank You: Secrets to Self-Control from the Bible and Brain Science (Moody, 2019). You can check out Drew’s website here: https://www.drewdyck.com You can follow Drew on Twitter: @drewdyck Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. Hey, if you are an avid listener to Theology in the Raw, a regular listener or a new listener or an old listener, would you consider supporting the show through Patreon? Patreon is a platform that allows artists, I guess I'm an artist, am I an artist? No, I'm a podcaster, allows artists and podcasters, apparently, to get supported by their fans so we don't have to advertise and do commercially stuff and all that stuff. So if you want to support the show for as little as $5 a month, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. That's patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. You can support the show for as little as $5 a month.

And you get stuff in return, like once a month, Patreon only podcasts. If you support the show for $10 a month, you get a monthly podcast and a monthly blog that only my Patreon supporters can view and listen to for $25 a month, you can get two Patreon only podcasts and, um, and the blog. And, and it just goes up and up from there. If you support it $100 a month, then I'll name my next biological kid after you. How's that? If you don't want to support the show, that's totally awesome. This is a free show, so listen up for free. That's awesome.

But if you want to support, that's patreon.com forward slash theology in a row. Okay, let's stop. My guest on the show is Drew Dick. That's D-Y-C-K. And yes, I did get clarity on the pronunciation of his name. It is pronounced Dick. That's D-Y-C-K. And yes, I did get clarity on the pronunciation of his name. It is pronounced Dick. And with a name like Preston Sprinkle, I'm allowed to clarify names because, yeah, I'm often having to explain how in the world I ended up with a name like Preston Sprinkle. Drew Dick is an editor at Moody Publishers, former managing editor at Leadership Journal. His work has been featured in USA Today, the Huffington Post, Christianity

Today, and CNN. Drew is the author of Generation X Christian, which is a fantastic book. I read that a few years ago. That's how I first got a hold of Drew's work. And Yawning at Tigers, a book I haven't read, but just the title alone makes me want to read it. He lives with his wife, Grace and her three children near Portland, Oregon. You can connect with drew at drew dick.com or follow him on Twitter at, at,

at not at, at, but just at, at sign drew dick. Drew has recently released a book called your future self. Well, thank you secrets to self-control from the Bible and brain science, which is a fast. I haven't read the whole thing. I've read

parts of it. It truly is remarkable. If you are one who wants to aim, like flourish as a human, you want to improve your living. You want to break bad habits and construct new habits. You want to get closer to Jesus and become more holy and sanctified and less self-righteous, whatever. You want to become a better person by the power of the Spirit, by the blood of the cross, but also you want to incorporate good habits in your life to help you become more like Jesus, then this book is a fantastic read. So please welcome to the show for the first time, Drew Dick. All right, and we are here with Drew Dick. Drew Dick is, well, you already know who he is because I talked about him in the intro that I haven't recorded yet.

So why don't we just jump into it? Drew, how are you doing, man? I'm doing good. I'm in the Northwest, as you know, and it's actually sunny right now. Really? We don't have sun. Yeah, that's a big deal. Wow. That's a big deal here.

So we soak it up. Why don't we jump in? Why don't we just start with the book, man? Because this, so I got to let you know, I got this book in the mail. And the title is Your Future Self Will Thank You. Subtitle, Secrets to Self-Control from the Bible and Brain Science. I had been thinking about this for about six months before I think your publicist sent me a free copy of your book. Wow.

Because – and here's – and maybe we can just kind of get into it. But I've been doing just a little bit of study. I mean just paying attention to kind of the developments in neuroscience and how certain habits will rewire your brain. And you can create like neurocircuit pathways. I don't know if that's the right phrase but you can correct me you know like if you do something over and over and over in particular like addictions or things that release certain endorphins whatever like you can almost rewire your brain to where you're not a robot you still have a will but that will is i mean being countered by this force if will, that's just outside of your raw will.

And it's how we understand addiction much better now. Now, when I look at the Bible, I see sins that are just blatantly committed and you should stop it. Like, don't do that. But then there's language of like being enslaved to sin, you know, where it's almost like you have this outside force that you're enslaved to. And I remember noticing just those things. And I'm not one to say like, oh, the first century writers knew more about neuroscience than we do. But it is fascinating that there seems to be some really interesting resonance between how the Bible talks about human nature and what we now know from brain science. That's the extent of my knowledge.

So I don't know if I'm completely out to lunch. But anyway, when I saw your book, I'm like, wow, somebody actually pursued this. This is so cool. So that's your softball. Go ahead and take a swing at it. Yeah, I think you're right on. And it is interesting. Like when it comes to sin, too, a lot of people think of sin as just a volitional thing, right?

Yeah. You sit there and you have two options in front of you. You have the proverbial devil and angel on your shoulder, and you listen to the devil and you do the sin. And actually, I think that's maybe how sin is to begin with. But then, like James talks about the progression, right? When sin is full grown, it gives birth to death. So there is a point at which it moves from being volitional to becoming enslavement, right?

After a while, you don't have a choice. And it is interesting to me, at least, as you look at the literature on habits, about how behavior becomes less volitional as it becomes ingrained in a habit. And so a big takeaway for me, you know, when I was reading some of the literature on habits and neuroscience, and when it comes to behavior, was just how powerful habits were. And it was a little bit difficult for me, because I'm a theology nerd, you know, I am big on knowledge of God, I think it I still think, obviously, it's incredibly important, it's foundational, what we believe about God and what we believe about ourselves. But at the same time, the truth is often we have a hard time translating what we know

about biblical truth into the action in our lives. And often I think we underestimate how powerful those habits are, whether they're good or bad. So we have this belief in our heads, and we're even maybe inspired to live the christian life a certain way but then on monday morning we go to do it and it falls apart apart often because we default to old habits yeah so that's yeah and and as you probably know jamie smith and others have talked a lot about this yeah um how important it is to pay attention to the habits and and the ways we're being conditioned not only um by spiritual disciplines but by the culture at large. And so I did a lot of reading in those areas and found it very beneficial for my own. I was going to ask you, how is your work or, you know, the driving this book related?

I was going to say Jamie Smith's work and also Jonathan Haidt. I know you cited his work, The Elephant and the Rider, which when I understood that paradigm, it just revolutionized the way I think about behavior, why people hold to the views they do, even how we approach like in as much as it's good for me to change somebody's mind or persuade somebody toward what I see as the truth, like how to go about that. The whole elephant rider paradigm just like – well, in a sense, it validated how I was intuitively already going about things. I realized that people, they just – they will believe what they want to believe and kind of analytically fill in the gaps later. And that's almost exactly what he showed on a psychological ground. But anyway, for those who are not familiar with Jamie Smith and maybe Jonathan Haidt and others who are saying the same thing, can you give us of, of, uh, what Jamie Smith's talking about, what Hayt and others are saying. Yeah, sure. With, you know, my apologies to them for, uh, oversimplifying their ideas, I'm sure. But yeah. So Jamie Smith talks in his book, you are what you love. I'm going to forget the subtitle. Uh, but yeah, he talks about the

spiritual importance of habit basically. And he addresses what I was just talking about. And that is this idea that we were kind of, um, going backartes we have this view of the human as sort of just this giant brain right and and i think therefore i am was of course his uh famous dictum and it it kind of but it shows this idea that we over emphasize at least in jamie smith's view yeah the value of what we think right and and when it comes down to, we're often formed by what we do and our loves, which are things that have to be conditioned and trained. And this is going back to Augustine, right? We have to pay attention to those.

And it is sobering because really when you look at the pattern of your life, I mean, you can say, okay, Jesus is Lord, I believe this, you know, and just check off all the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. But here's where the rubber meets the road, right? It's when you look at your life, you know, how are you living? Are you serving others? Are you, are you loving God and, you know, in concrete ways? And so it's, it was a sobering read for me. Jonathan Haidt, I think you're talking about his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. That's right, yeah. That one and then The Righteous Mind.

And The Righteous Mind. Yeah, and The Righteous Mind, I just actually finished reading that. I don't get into that in the book, but brilliant observation. He says we're all basically, we're not rational creatures. We rationalize things, right? We have these beliefs for the most part. And then what we do is we use our incredible minds and our logic to justify ourselves. And I thought that's such an important insight. And really what we're driven by is the desire to belong rather than seek for truth. And that's

fascinating to me because in ministry circles, we always talk about, oh, we need to reach seekers and people are out there searching for truth. No, they're not. It's garbage. No, I'm serious. I mean, once in a while, there's someone who's like super rational and they're like, I'm just after the truth. But most people that stumble into the church, if they even do, right? They're looking to belong.

They're looking for friendship. They're looking for meaning in their lives. They're not on some sort of purely intellectual quest to find some holy grail of truth. Anyway, then when it comes to his metaphor, which I love about the elephant and the rider, to really oversimplify things, he's saying your rational mind is like a rider, a human, on top of an elephant. The elephant are your habits, right? And so you can

help your habits a little bit, kind of like a rider on an elephant can tug on the ear of an elephant and make him go laughter, right? But for the most part, the elephant does the hard work. It just keeps lumbering along, right? And that's how habits often are in our life. Because by definition, a habit is something that is unconscious, right? We just do it without thinking. And so we need to pay more attention. We paid a lot of attention to the rider. We probably need to pay a little more attention to the elephant, to those habits that we just kind of operate. I mean, this is a silly example, but I was at a restaurant recently and the waiter's going around the table, coming to me. And I honestly was like, okay, I'm going to order a salad.

I'm going to order the salad, balsamic vinaigrette dressing. Came to me, I ordered a bacon cheeseburger. Like I was like, what? I was honestly surprised myself. Hold the lettuce, no lettuce, get the tomato, no lettuce, no tomato yeah i don't even want any semblance of a salad on the scene um and the reason is i've been to that restaurant many times and i always order a burger or something unhealthy right it's incredible how powerful habits are in shaping our behavior so how yeah so what um how do people get out of that? Like, so they're in that moment, and I could absolutely resonate with that.

I don't know how many times I had this just planned, yeah, eat healthy or, you know, burger, no fries, side salad. And it's like, burger, extra fries, can you bring me some ranch, you know? Guys, the fries need more, you know, saturated fat. But, yeah, so in that, is is it just because you're not saying there's no volition involved is it just our volition our will is just so captured by the habits that we have you know they kind of lead up to that moment or what can you like maybe unpack a little bit what's going on in our brains and what's going on there well and it probably demands talking about a related concept and that is willpower right willpower uh simply

defined as just the emotional energy that you need to do hard things to resist temptation you know even to make decisions actually um and one of the big takeaways i got from the research on willpower going back to some studies that were done 20 years ago, is simply this willpower is a finite resource. You only have so much of it, we might like to think we can like hold out against temptation indefinitely, or continue to do a very difficult thing for a long period of time. But we actually get weaker as we go. And it makes a lot of sense out of your experience, I think, at least mine, you know, why after a hard day of work, I might be more likely to snap at my kids, or to like eat poorly, or whatever, right? Because you've got this limited reserve of willpower, and it's drained. Well, when you're in that state, and it's depleted,

and you don't have a healthy habit in place, man, you're in trouble, right? That's when you're very vulnerable to temptation. And so it depends. I mean, because I think some people, like if you're in trouble, right? That's when you're very vulnerable to temptation. And so it depends. I mean, because I think some people, like if you're faced with an unhealthy eating option, say first thing in the morning when you're fresh, often you can resist it, right? But later in the day when your willpower is low,

and especially if you don't have a habit of eating well, I'm probably harping too much on the eating, but we keep coming back to that. Then you're going to default to bad habits in that moment is that why i mean so late night snacking you know or even like you know watching too much tv or let's just get real i mean you're probably more likely to look at porn um or drink too much at night i mean for one because you're at least one reason might be because you have you'd have very little to no willpower to resist these urges. Is that? Exactly. Yeah. No. And I mean, I was talking to a group of pastors recently,

and one of them talked about how he was part of this like accountability group of other pastors. And one of them confessed that when he falls prey to lust, he has, he's found it's right after he's been at a conference where he's been speaking. And he was so perplexed by this because he's like, my goodness, like I'm supposed to be at my most spiritual basically. And I come back and fall prey to the sin. And then one by one, all of them were like, yeah, me too. Same experience. Well, and I'm not excusing that behavior, but at the same time, if you understand it in terms of willpower, you're putting out a lot when you're at a conference, right? You're exhausting that limited willpower supply.

And then you come back from that, man, you're vulnerable to temptation. I think we see it in Scripture with Elijah, right? After defeating the prophets of Baal, he goes and cries in a cave. And that's often, yeah, anyway, that's when you're vulnerable. So here's the important thing, though, about willpower. If you're just relying on your willpower to do the right thing in any given situation, you're probably not going to do it. And I love the way John Ortberg puts this.

He says, habits eat willpower for breakfast. In other words, there are two people going into a situation. One's relying on his willpower, and the other one has healthy habits in place to help him respond in the right way. The habits guy, I bet on him every time, essentially, because habits are powerful. So no matter how much willpower, and the good news about willpower is it can grow. It can strengthen. It's like a muscle.

Really? So when you do the right thing, it actually increases, which is good news because I think I have naturally low willpower. So that's good news. But it's never enough. You'll always run out. You need to pay attention to your habits as well. Does sleep affect that? Is that why like is your willpower tank filled up when you get a good healthy uninterrupted night of sleep? That's a huge part of it. It's funny because in the book, like, I don't say this in the book, but I've said it since. All these tips, all these tricks, some of them are tricks.

Some of them are just kind of fundamental wisdom. I think don't work without sleep. Right. And I remember talking to the sociologist, Bradley Wright. And he said, if I wanted to decimate your willpower, Drew, I would a make you get in a fight with your wife. Cause interpersonal conflict completes willpower. I'd make sure you got three hours of sleep the night before and i'd make sure you're hungry and i was like oh man i'm

not inviting him to my house but anyway um yeah that's true yes we're finite creatures man and all of that takes its toll and so just being aware of when you're in those those states and make sure you're not making decisions make sure you're not you're not going into temptation right yeah um that that's crucial let's do let's deal with a couple specific examples and i'd love for you to kind of coach us on how to get out of that so let's just go straight for the porn masturbation whatever like somebody listening to this i mean let's just be honest 60 of the people listening to this podcast are habitually using porn, if not, you know, addicted to it. I would say probably 90 plus percent of them don't want to be like, they're like, I don't like this about myself. So they're probably would be like, okay, how can I get out of this cycle that I'm in? Yeah, that's a big question. There's a lot to it. I'll try to touch on a couple points that I think are relevant. One is to take precautions against the behavior. So, I mean, if you're addicted to porn, you better have some software on your computer that's blocking it for you.

Don't sit there and rely on your willpower, right? You've got to have, and I'm forgetting some of the names, but there's like Net Nanny or Angel Eyes. Covenant Eyes is the one we have covenant eyes that's the one sorry um and some people go well that's legalism man i should i just you know count on god uh no god's giving you a brain uh it's not legalism it's just wisdom uh to take those kind of um kind of preventative steps from falling prey in an area you know you're fundamentally weak. So that's the first thing. Second, make sure you have accountability. Maybe that's obvious,

right? And here's the key with accountability. You don't want people that are super saints that have never fallen prey to the sin that you deal with, because then you're just going to feel like crap about yourself. Nor do you want people that are just like, ah, yeah, I do that all the time. It's not a big deal, right? Because then they're going to drag you down. It's sort of like if you're an alcoholic, you want to hang out with people in AA, but you don't want to hang out with the dude who's going on a bender every weekend, right? So you want to find fellow strugglers that are making progress, that are finding victory, and that can keep you accountable, that can inspire you, that can encourage you. And then back to the habits thing, I don't want to beat this to death, but you got to pay close

attention to your habits because they're often cues. A habit has three parts, right? A cue, the thing that triggers the behavior, the behavior itself, and then there's a reward. So what you want to do is be very sensitive to those cues. It may be when you're discouraged, right? Oh man, I get really discouraged or there's a person who kind of triggers me and I get into this bad place. And then the way I kind of like medicate that is jump online and look at form. So if you're doing that, you've got to find ways to short circuit that. You kind of perform surgery on the habit loop and you say, okay, whenever that happens, when I hit that cue, instead of going to this,

I'm going to read my Bible or I'm going to pray for this person, have something very concrete that you can replace that behavior with. And that's not just so that we, well, you're, you're in replace it with a habit, not just a momentary, Oh, I want to look at porn. So I'm going to read Romans instead. Like it has to be more of a habit that in those moments when you're most likely to look at it, you already have a habit you've been putting in place. Right. Um, but that, so it sounds like a catch-22 a little bit, like in order to establish a habit, that takes willpower, right? Right.

At the end of the day, there is just some raw, like I want to do the right thing. I'm going to start this habit. You know, I mean, nobody can make you do it. Yeah, and here's the thing about habits. It's almost impossible to create them out of the blue just from scratch. Everything I've read indicates that the best way to create a new healthy habit is to replace an old one that is unhealthy, which is great, right?

So you think of someone who every time they go outside, they want to smoke a cigarette. Or if they go outside in the morning, they just, oh, man, I want to smoke a cigarette. Well, instead, start running. Maybe that's your new thing. And then the reward used to be nicotine in your bloodstream. Now it's endorphins that you get when you run. So that's the way to think of these things. Now you're right. When you start a habit, you're expending willpower. And that's why it's really crucial that you're very incremental in your goal for what you're trying to do. You're not trying to go out, for instance, run 10 miles the first day if you haven't run before. And that you only start one habit at a time. This is why New Year's

resolutions fail, right? People try like five different major behavioral changes to institute them all at once. And they got this limited reserve of willpower and it's gone um anyway so yeah but you're right you know and habits aren't like life hacks they're not like tricks they're hard because they take 30 to 66 days depending on what you read um to cement into place yeah and for those that first month or two man you're you're uh using a lot of willpower it's unfamiliar it's novel it's difficult uh but if you can stick it out, it gets easier as you go. Yeah, I remember reading what you said about New Year's resolutions, plural. You said those are going to fail. Do a New Year's resolution.

I think I had 11 New Year's resolutions this year, and I'm pretty sure I didn't keep any of them. Some of them were not like concrete. There are more just generalities, you know, and so so we can argue whether I'm doing OK in some of those areas. But, yeah, I read that. I was like, oh, crap. I wish I talked to Drew before I did something. Eleven, man. That'd be a record even for me.

I'd even go five or six. I've never done them. In fact, I labeled them raw resolutions. Like, don't hold me to this. I'm just saying there's some general things I would maybe like to kind of pursue at the times, right? Which is like, I'm just setting myself up for failure. All right. So we did.

So the porn thing. Yeah, I think we covered it. Let's do another one. Let's do alcoholism. Somebody is maybe drinking too much. Maybe they're enslaved to it whatever they're out getting drunk whatever um and i think there's a difference between drunkenness and being enslaved to it like you can be enslaved to alcohol and never get drunk you can get drunk

periodically and not actually be enslaved to it just hey you know once a month you like to throw back a few you know right how uh if some if somebody does have unhealthy habits in terms of alcohol addiction what would your advice be to them would it be i mean very similar to the porn thing i mean yeah it would you know and i should say this kind of a qualifier or caveat you know if you have um major addictive behaviors in your life right even if it is porn and it's not like kind of like this thing like oh man i i look at it once in a while, and I really want to get away from that. Or if it's like, you're an alcoholic, and you cannot cope without it. There may be things that go beyond the purview of this conversation that you need to get a therapist, right? Maybe you have some childhood issues

that need to be discussed, which takes at least the conversation well beyond my expertise. But at the same time, I just think there are a lot of good things you can do. And one of the things I did actually when I was researching for the book was look at addiction recovery programs. So I'm fascinated by it because here are these people basically whose self-control has been obliterated, right? If you're an addict, right, that's almost the definition of addiction is that your volition's gone at that point, right? If you're an addict, right, that's almost the definition of addiction is that you just, your volition's gone at that point, right? It's not like you're sitting there making bad choices.

You're just enslaved to a certain substance or behavior that, and then you really need outside help. And I looked at AA in particular, and I thought it was so fascinating because the first thing they do is confess their helplessness against the addiction right and i'm so countercultural i think because and of course it was written a long time ago the the steps because today i think we'd say the first thing you need to do is admit how powerful you are and that you have everything within you to defeat this right you'd give yourself some sort of like, I don't know, Dr. Phil pep talk or something to psych yourself up to conquer this addiction.

But the first thing they do is go, I'm powerless against this. And then the second thing they do is confess their dependence on a higher power, right? Which is so powerful again. And of course, they're talking in a general way about God. And then, of course, they find a community of fellow strugglers, right? And I talked to one guy, I remember he'd been clean, I don't know, 20 years or so. And yet every week, he's going into this basement in the gym and pulling out a metal chair and saying, I'm Bob, I'm an alcoholic, right? Because they acknowledge that

they're never strong enough to face this temptation on their own. So anyway, that's obviously great advice. And that's the most successful program for alcoholics. But it applies to virtually any behavior you're dealing with, any destructive habit in your life, if you can kind of walk through some of those steps. And I think they're very biblical, right? Your dependence on God, your helplessness, community, all of that. biblical, right? You're trusting your dependence on God, your helplessness, community, all of that. Let's, can we leave behind the book? Because I, well, not, let's go to a different book you've written. The one that I first encountered to you was through Generation X Christian.

Oh, yeah, sure. I was doing research for a book on discipleship that I wrote. I think about 14 people have read it. It's called Go. Maybe now I might make one more sale. It's actually one of my favorites. It's like my manifesto to what church can and should be. Yeah. And I feel like nobody even knows that I wrote it. But through that book, I read a lot of stuff by, I mean, you and Kinnaman and, oh, who's that? Church Refugees. Probably all the same stuff you read for that book or, you know with, just how people are just, especially younger people, are in unprecedented ways leaving the church.

Can you give a quick overview of that phenomenon? Is this something new? Is it any different than every generation where young people kind of go and come back? Why are they leaving? Are there certain things the church is doing or not doing that is causing, you know, 20-somethings to say, yeah, just not really into this anymore. Yeah, help us diagnose this problem. Well, as far as your question about is this, well, A, are they leaving? Yes. B, is this something that just happens in every generation? In part, yes.

So if you're going to disengage from the church, it's not going to happen probably when you're 50 or when you're five, right? You don't have a choice at that point. It's probably going to happen when you're a young adult, right? When you get out from your parents' house of rules, and then you have a choice, do I attend church? And often because young people are so transient, they disengage from the church. But by and large, in past generations, they have come back. The unique thing about this generation, younger generation, is we're now seeing like the millennials who are getting into their 30s now, they're not coming back. They're not automatically returning to the church as some people thought they would in mass. And part of what we've seen is reflected in the rise of the nuns. I'm not

talking about the Catholic nuns, but N O N E S people claiming to have no religion whatsoever. When I wrote my book, which is a few years old now, I remember the, the number of nuns in the younger set was 22%, 22% of people claim to have no religion. That was astounding at the time because it had risen like from 20 years before it was at 11%. So it had risen like from 20 years before it was at 11%. So it like doubled. And I remember some people saying, you know what, that's just a fluke of statistics. It'll kind of float back down to that number. Well, the most recent studies I've

seen is among the younger generation today, it's at about 34 to 36% now. So it has gotten much worse since I wrote my book. And so yeah, that's, that's astounding. And these are people not just presumably that are disengaged from the church, but claim to have no belief in any religion or God whatsoever. What's the cause? So why? Is there a clear diagnosis? Or is it complex? I mean, right, and it's different in every case, right? When you break it down and look at the reasons that, that some of these people claim to have no religion, the biggest group within that 36% are people that I call drifters. It's not that they're angry atheists or even agnostics. They just kind of drifted away from it. And for all

intents and purposes, God's just not part of their life anymore. Right. So I think that's the majority. I think we tend to think of those angry atheists, right. That read Dawkins books and go online and write angry screeds against God or whatever, but they, they, they get more visibility. But yeah. And then there are a lot of macro trends, I would guess that are driving this just kind of the secularizationization of the west in general yeah i mean we're nowhere near europe but we're certainly kind of inching down that post-christian path um and so that's part of it

i think in the past there was a lot of social pressure like to identify as a christian just because it was considered the good thing to do if you're a good person of course you're a christian yeah all right i'm a christian my grandma was baptist or you know whatever yeah um whereas today especially the place i live the northwest or you go to the northeast or any of the coasts man it's just not an assumption in fact there's a there's a stigma often attached to identifying as a christian yeah yeah and see yeah so anyway i think that's part of it too a lot of people who a generation ago may have just said yeah i, I'm a Christian. I'm an American. Yeah, whatever. Today, they're being a little more honest about where they're at. How do I say it? I'll put it in a fancy way to make myself sound smart. An ecclesiological unattractiveness that used to work back in the 80s and 90s and pulpit, or let's just say church service-centered

ecclesiology, where at the end of the day, most of the energy is put on Sunday morning. Right. Let's be honest. Yeah. And in the 80s and 90s, that may have worked. You can actually build and sustain a really big crowd that's given lots of money. If you pull off a really good service, a great worship team, a good preacher, whether it's attractional or just clear or passionate, whatever. And if you have a good children's program, then, you know, it's just, you know, win all around. But I feel like those types of ecclesiologies don't guarantee community. And I feel like if anecdotal, and I would say sociological evidence means anything, many Christians don't have a real deep, deep, addictive sense of belonging in their ecclesiological community. That's been my experience across the board. So

what would keep them? I don't think a good, polished church service is going to keep them, especially in an internet generation, when if you want to hear a good talk message teaching it's not like well we will have to wait till sunday morning it's like well no i can hear a thousand better talks and sermons just on my you know phone right now if i want to make you listen to this podcast yeah and yeah totally i've had people email me and say that this podcast is kind of their community. I'm like, thank you, but ah, no. Yes, that's great. No, it's not. It's important.

Talk about a mixed compliment. I know, right? But I get it. I get it. Anyway, so do you think that the church is doing – and that's a generalization, but the church, broadly speaking, has a way of going about church that may have attracted and kept's a generalization, but the church, broadly speaking, has a way of going about church that may have attracted and kept people in the past, but now it's just not going to work in a

post-internet, post-Trump, post-9-11 kind of world. It's just almost completely different than, you know, the early 1990s. Yeah, definitely. I mean, first of all, there's kind of a macro trend of younger generation being incredibly disillusioned with and suspicious of institutions in general, right? So whether it's government, I don't know, education, the corporate world, I mean, there's just, I think, unprecedented levels of distrust towards anything institutional. And there's not much, I mean, the church is pretty institutional in the minds of most young people, right? So there's that kind of barrier already. And then I think you're right, too, like when the, with the whole church growth movement that launched

out of Fuller in the 80s, I guess, 70s, 80s, and saw expressions with Bill Hybels at Willow Creek and Rick Warren, great ministries. But there was a high premium placed not only on Sunday morning, but on excellence in terms of production. And I think it worked. I think it, and I don't bash on that. I think it was a sort of contextualization that worked for the baby boomer generation. And, but like one person said, I forget who, this isn't original to me,

but they said when an older generation walks into a church service that is slick and produced and excellent, they go, wow, they must be doing something right here. Younger person walks in and sees that same thing and they go, there's corruption here. That is so true. Right? How are they doing this? Why, you know, who's paying for this? And they're asking good, hard questions about this. Right. Who's being excluded? Right. And so, yeah, tough because we're one generation saw excellence. Another one sees enough inauthenticity. Is that a word? Inauthenticity. Right. So so it's definitely a challenge. And I don't know. I don't have all the answers for sure. But I'll tell you what, when I the people that I interviewed that had walked away, not only from the church, but the faith, for the most part, despite the intellectual objections and hurdles, what was really going on in my estimation was the break often came in the

context of relationship. Yeah. That a bad experience of the youth pastor or a parent or whatever. And they walked away from the faith. And so if they're going to come back, it's going to have to happen in the context of relationship. Yeah. Right.

And it's not going to be that you put on a hot enough service. They're going to walk through the doors of a church in my area of the country here man people just will not darken the door of a church no way they don't wake up thinking like oh where am I going to go to church it's not even on their radar so they have to have people that get into their world and connect with them and it's kind of a slow

process to bring them into Christian community Drew we're going to have to wrap things up the book, the main book we've been talking about is his most recent book. Wait, is it out yet? I didn't check that. It is. It is. Yeah, no, it's been out for like, uh, Oh, almost January. Oh, okay. Okay. I think I got a copy of the pre-release copy last, last fall.

Um, so yeah, it's your future self. Well, thank you. Secrets to self-control from the Bible and, uh, brain science. And I would highly encourage you, uh you to read Generation X Christian as well. I haven't yet read Yawning at Tigers. Was that your first one? That was actually my second one. I love that title. I don't even know what it means, but I love it.

The best part about that book, let me tell you, I got all this weird tiger-themed paraphernalia. I got tiger socks, a tiger painting it was awesome it has nothing to do with tigers by the way but because of the title i i can i can kind of sense where you're gonna go and i've been wanting to read that for a while now so uh yeah you've nudged me even further so uh where can people find you your writings are you on social media you got a website yeah you bet um i probably spend too much time on Twitter, so drop by there. I'm always logging on to that place. And just my name, Drew Dick.

And then I have a website too. Again, my name, DrewDick, D-Y-C-K dot com. Or if you're in the Northwest, stop by. We'll grab a coffee. We'll go to Powell's. Oh, yeah. Hang out. You got the good coffee and craft beer out there. We got the yeah hang out you got the good coffee you got the good coffee and

craft beer out there and we got the good coffee we got the good beer we've got nature yeah we got a lot of rain yeah we got the coast it's a pretty cool place true thanks so much for being on the show we'll have to do this again sometime absolutely thanks so much it's been a fun conversation conversation.