0:00
(upbeat music)
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- This is "Undaunted Life" a man's podcast.
0:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
0:24
All right guys, today we've got a special guest
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on the podcast, his name is Brad Gray.
0:28
So he's a national speaker, biblical land study tour leader,
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Bible expert and author.
0:32
He's also the president and CEO of "Walking the Text,"
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which is an organization that teaches people
0:37
how to read the Bible with clarity and confidence.
0:40
And he actually does that by leading
0:41
these Bible study experiences in Israel and in Turkey.
0:45
And he's also the executive producer
0:46
of a forthcoming TV show called "The Sacred Thread,"
0:49
which will take the audience through
0:50
the ancient biblical world with exploration
0:52
of famous locations, interviews with experts,
0:55
and all this never-before-seen, cinematic visuals
0:58
of maps and historical figures and painted scenes
1:00
and all that.
1:01
But the interesting thing about this conversation today
1:04
is all that stuff is cool.
1:05
Like leading these study tours is cool.
1:07
And doing this TV show is cool.
1:08
And guys, we spent a lot of time talking
1:09
about the study tours and talking about the sacred thread.
1:12
But the whole thing that is the thread, if you will,
1:14
that goes through this entire interview,
1:16
but also all of Brad Gray's career
1:17
is this insatiable appetite for the Bible.
1:19
Because if we're gonna be honest,
1:21
and we talked about this in the podcast itself,
1:22
and I've talked about it before on my show,
1:25
is that at the end of the day, a lot of people
1:28
don't read the Bible because they're nervous.
1:32
They don't know how to.
1:33
They think they're gonna do it poorly or wrongly.
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They think you can't just read the Bible.
1:38
You have to study it.
1:39
And in order to study it,
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you need to have the amount of commentaries
1:42
and you need to know Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic
1:45
and all these different things.
1:46
And so what they end up doing is they do nothing.
1:49
They don't open up an app on their phone.
1:50
They don't open up a website.
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They don't pull the Bible off the shelf.
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They just don't do any of that.
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And so what Brad has really done
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with the majority of his career
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is try to make sure that that's not the case for people.
2:00
And for some people,
2:00
the thing that really propels them into a life,
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a Bible reading and learning through God's word,
2:05
starts with these trips that he takes these people on.
2:07
But he doesn't just do the trips.
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And like, all right, well, we spent a couple of weeks
2:10
in Israel, now go home and live the rest of your life.
2:12
It's like, no, no, no, here are some resources for you to use
2:15
that will kind of keep this momentum going
2:17
in this direction.
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And so we talk about all those different things.
2:20
We talk about these things he has coming up.
2:22
And then at the end,
2:23
we get into like a little 10-minute conversation
2:25
about masculinity inside the church.
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And he and I get the sense we come
2:28
from some different places theologically.
2:30
And we certainly come from different places
2:32
in terms of how we were raised,
2:33
but how we can all coalesce that into
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how should we approach masculinity
2:37
and manhood within the church?
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So I really enjoyed my time today with Brad.
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So without further ado, let's get into it.
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Brad Gray, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
2:46
- Hey, it's great to be on. Thank you.
2:47
- We're gonna cover a lot of ground today,
2:49
but we need to kind of find a soft place to land here
2:51
from the beginning.
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You're a Christian, so shock of all shocks.
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I invited a Christian to come on a Christian podcast,
2:56
but I guess for you, without getting into
2:58
all the gory details,
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'cause you know all the other things
3:00
we need to talk about today,
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how did you become a Christian?
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But then specifically,
3:05
why did you decide to make Christianity
3:07
the center point of your professional life as well?
3:10
Because obviously we know those two things
3:12
don't have to be connected.
3:13
- Right, exactly.
3:15
You know, I was one of those very fortunate kids
3:17
to grow up in a Christian home.
3:19
My parents were actually really young Christians.
3:22
At the time, and so faith for me
3:25
was always part of my upbringing,
3:28
but knowing that my parents were very young Christians.
3:32
There were a lot of things
3:33
that they were figuring out as well.
3:35
And it wasn't really until college for me
3:38
that faith actually became real and became my own.
3:42
I mean, I'd always been, you know, a follower of Jesus.
3:45
I never remember having one of those,
3:47
you know, conversion times, you know, moments,
3:50
but college woke me up to the reality
3:53
that either it's either true or it's not.
3:56
It's either going to influence your life
3:59
or it's not gonna be part of your life.
4:01
And for me, I started to have just some really
4:04
transformational experiences around the Bible,
4:07
about who God was, about who Jesus was,
4:10
and faith just became very, very real to me.
4:14
And even as I was going through college,
4:16
I mean, I got a business degree.
4:17
I never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing now.
4:20
I actually graduated with a business degree,
4:23
did several years of sports business
4:26
and was doing all kinds of really fun projects.
4:30
I mean, everything from helping daycare kids
4:33
better understand how their body works
4:35
and doing exercise programs all the way up to working
4:39
with our U.S. Special Forces
4:41
and helping them stay healthy
4:43
and do what they need to do well.
4:45
And in the midst of all of this,
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God just woke me up to the reality
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that I had a deeper passion,
4:52
which was to understand the Bible
4:55
and then to teach it
4:56
and to be able to help other people grow in their faith,
5:00
grow in their understanding of the Bible,
5:02
of who God is, of why following Jesus
5:05
is the greatest adventure in life.
5:07
And it was through that change in my own journey,
5:12
going to seminary, then moving to the Middle East,
5:14
living there, experiencing, you know,
5:16
firsthand all the biblical stories
5:18
that God ushered me onto a path of, you know,
5:22
what has become my life is teaching people,
5:27
you know, the biblical text.
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- Okay, so a lot there that we'll get into,
5:30
but I wanna go back to Brad and college.
5:32
And so you're at college, you're in college,
5:35
you're pursuing a business degree.
5:36
Why do you feel like it was that time period
5:38
where it seemed like you were put onto a truth journey?
5:41
Because I feel like, and maybe it's different
5:44
because of the time we're living in now,
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but I feel like kids that are going to universities right now,
5:48
everything that these universities are trying
5:50
to get them to do is to not just question truth,
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they want to question even the idea of truth,
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which is a very post-modern idea that, hey,
5:58
there's not really truth, everything's relative,
6:00
everything's through your lived experience lens.
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But for you, I guess, when you were in college,
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like, why do you think that time was so specific to you?
6:07
'Cause that's typically the time when people are screwing off
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and, you know, making a bunch of bad decisions
6:12
and all those types of things.
6:13
And that just didn't really seem to go that way for you.
6:15
- Yeah, for me, when I went to college,
6:18
I went first and foremost for basketball
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and then second for academics, you know, truthfully.
6:25
And so I ended up playing small college basketball
6:28
for a phenomenal university in West Michigan
6:31
at Cornerstone University.
6:33
And so it ended up being a Christian school.
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I wasn't looking to go to a Christian school,
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but it was a Christian school.
6:39
And in order to play basketball
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and, you know, you had to stay on the straight and narrow.
6:43
But for me, you know, when I was in high school,
6:46
I had a really fantastic Bible teacher named Mark Eckle
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who the class was called Christian Life and World Studies.
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So it was a class that really taught us
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what we believe, why we believe,
6:59
and what other people believe.
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So I had a really good foundation
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for why other people believed what they believed.
7:06
And when I say that really in college,
7:08
my faith became really real is that,
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I mean, I was a follower of Jesus.
7:13
I really loved Bible classes
7:14
when I was even going through high school.
7:17
But I had an experience in college
7:19
with a church that got started my freshman year,
7:22
Mars Hill, not Mark Driscoll, Rob Bell.
7:25
And so some people may know that journey and trajectory.
7:29
But when I started to attend Mars Hill,
7:31
my freshman year of college
7:33
and Mars started a few months after my freshman year started,
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it gave me an understanding of what I had kind of like
7:41
my first really amazing vision
7:43
of how the church could be a compelling force
7:45
for good in the world.
7:47
And so just seeing what Mars was doing,
7:50
seeing how Rob was changing the way
7:53
people were experiencing church,
7:56
the idea of going to church, the idea of faith
7:58
just took on a whole new sense of meaning,
8:02
of application, of significance, of impact.
8:07
And all of a sudden it just woke me up to,
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oh, there's not only something going on here,
8:14
but they're starting to really stir within me.
8:16
And I think God used that experience
8:18
to start helping me to understand even my own path
8:21
that I was going to be going down,
8:22
even though I was several years away
8:25
from essentially God inviting me onto that path.
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- So we may get way off into the weeds here,
9:01
but that's okay.
9:02
As you're describing that I'll bring it all back around.
9:06
So just follow me for a second.
9:08
Obviously everyone knows about Ravi Zacharias
9:10
and some of the horrific things that he did while he was alive
9:12
that weren't found out until after his death, unfortunately.
9:15
And you have these other people
9:16
that have kind of deconstructed.
9:18
You have Hillsong basically falling down
9:20
and you have Houston and what the other guy,
9:23
the super cool dude, bro guy from New York.
9:25
Carl Lynch, they all fell and the problem is,
9:27
is after that, after those falls,
9:30
people that were found Jesus at an RZIM event
9:33
or at a Hillsong conference or something like that,
9:36
they began like questioning their faith
9:37
and questioning, is this legitimate?
9:39
Like, was I just emotionally manipulated
9:41
or did I actually feel the move of the Holy Spirit?
9:44
So I say that to say saying Rob Bell is like saying a cuss word
9:47
to a lot of people in our audience
9:49
because of some of the things that he's done and said
9:51
after his North Hill days, going like full universalists,
9:54
not really down with eternity anymore.
9:56
He's more of kind of this new agey,
9:58
hey, I'm gonna go hang out with Oprah
9:59
and not really talk about Jesus kind of a thing.
10:02
What are kind of your thoughts on that?
10:03
Because here you are, you seem to have had a legitimate move
10:07
to the Holy Spirit in your life through a ministry
10:10
by a man who has kind of led some people down the wrong path
10:13
and certainly led them away from Jesus in the year since then.
10:16
Does that make sense?
10:17
- Oh, I know, I've had this conversation many times, you know,
10:22
and here's the thing is, is that God uses all kinds of people
10:27
in our lives to help us along in the journey of faith
10:34
and in the journey of life.
10:36
And just because somebody had a really moving experience
10:41
with Ravi Zacharias and then found out later on,
10:46
oh my goodness, there was this other world going on
10:49
on the backside, there was so much of what Ravi said
10:53
that was absolutely 100% true, you know?
10:56
And so one of the things that part of maturity
11:01
is being able to sift the wheat from the chaff,
11:06
from being able to figure out what is truth from air
11:10
and recognizing that someone is not always 100% right
11:13
and somebody's not always 100% wrong
11:16
and not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
11:19
And so for me and my journey,
11:22
there were so many things about that time in my life
11:26
that helped me to think through faith
11:29
and to question a lot of things,
11:31
not to the point to deconstruct my faith,
11:35
but to actually reconstruct it in a way
11:38
that was way stronger than it was before.
11:40
And there are definitely issues
11:43
and theological positions that I'm in a different place
11:48
today than where Ravi is.
11:51
But looking back on my journey,
11:53
Ravi was someone who taught me so much
11:57
about the communication process, taught me about boundaries,
12:00
talking about how family comes first
12:04
and how not to allow ministry to take out your life
12:07
because for so many people who become pastors
12:10
and I served as a pastor for over a decade,
12:13
ministry is really difficult.
12:15
And if you haven't learned boundaries,
12:17
I mean, there are none.
12:18
You get ran over.
12:20
And so just recognizing, it's like,
12:23
probably you're the same way.
12:24
I mean, you're a voracious reader.
12:26
There's lots of things you read.
12:27
You probably look at some stuff and go,
12:29
oh, I totally buy that in the book.
12:31
But then there's other things you're like, that's crap.
12:33
You know, what are they doing there?
12:35
And that's the thing for me is I feel like
12:39
the people who have helped me the most
12:41
are the ones who have challenged me the most
12:44
to be a critical thinker and to be able to sift.
12:47
There's nobody I agree with 100%.
12:50
And so I feel like, you know, whether it's Ravi,
12:53
whether it's Rob, whether it's, you know,
12:55
other people that, you know, people have had
12:57
great experiences with and then found out
12:59
maybe there was something else going on there
13:01
is just recognizing there's truth.
13:04
And there are things that were right
13:06
and how can you hold onto those
13:08
and let those other things go, you know,
13:10
and to be mature enough to make that discernment process.
13:13
- Well, Brad, before you even said,
13:14
I literally wrote down throwing out the baby
13:16
with the bath water because, you know,
13:18
one thing that I did after it was found out
13:20
that Ravi Zacharias was a sexual deviant.
13:22
We have a book list on our website
13:24
that 100 books every modern Christian man should read list.
13:26
I removed one of his books from that list,
13:28
but I'm always looking for books to remove
13:30
from that list to add different books
13:32
and it's a living list.
13:33
But I didn't think that there was enough
13:35
in that book to warrant it staying there
13:37
and warrant the questions that you would get thereafter.
13:39
But like, you know, something simple that I've used
13:41
with a lot of non-Christians before is like,
13:43
every worldview needs to answer four questions.
13:45
Origin, meaning, morality, destiny.
13:47
I learned that from Ravi Zacharias, origin.
13:49
Where do we all come from?
13:50
Meaning, why are we all here at morality?
13:52
How do we tell the difference between good and evil?
13:54
Destiny, where do you go when you die?
13:55
So am I just supposed to delete that in my brain
13:57
that this way to kind of bring people closer
13:59
to the Father or to attack some of their presuppositions
14:02
in their, I guess, worldview?
14:04
Like, no, I certainly wouldn't do that.
14:06
And I think it was, so here's the other cuss word
14:08
for some people, not for us, but Mark Driscoll.
14:10
I think that's where I learned this idea
14:11
and concept of accept, reject, redeem.
14:14
So as you're reading a book or listening to a podcast
14:17
or watching a documentary, there are things
14:19
that you just outright accept because they're true.
14:21
There are things that you have to reject
14:22
because they're nonsense.
14:23
And then there are things that can be redeemed.
14:25
So I think of someone like Jordan Peterson.
14:26
This is somebody that is a big time figure in my life
14:29
and a lot of people that listen to this podcast.
14:31
There are things that he says that are a biblical.
14:34
They just don't align with the true subscription,
14:36
but they can be redeemed because the morality
14:40
that's undergirding what he's saying is right and true.
14:43
He just hasn't drawn all the correct dots yet.
14:46
And so I think that's something that we should all really
14:48
think about is, yes, like if you were saved
14:51
at a RZIM event, you're saved.
14:52
Like just because Robbie's a horrifically terrible person,
14:55
that doesn't mean that you lost your salvation.
14:57
And so going back to something that you said earlier, Brad,
15:01
you said you kind of grew this appetite, if you will,
15:05
for the scriptures.
15:07
And even after you had kind of given yourself
15:09
over to that appetite, you still didn't know
15:11
that was gonna be like a center point for your career.
15:14
But just walk me through that process
15:16
because, and I mentioned this to you, Offair.
15:18
I think there are a lot of guys out there in my audience
15:20
if I'm being honest that are very similar to me,
15:22
where they get excited at the idea of reading the Bible,
15:26
but then something stops them because it's like,
15:29
well, you can't just read the Bible.
15:30
Like you have to study it.
15:32
And I mean, who has time to study, right?
15:34
I mean, we got, we got dogs that need to be walked.
15:36
We got kids that need to be picked up
15:37
from baseball practice.
15:38
We got to go on a date night with our wife
15:40
or our marriage is gonna fall apart.
15:41
Like there's all these things to do.
15:43
And if you look at your calendar, you're like,
15:44
I don't see time for study.
15:46
And so what we do is we don't just not study.
15:49
We don't read.
15:50
So walk me through how that worked for you,
15:52
how you got this appetite and how you walked into it.
15:55
Yeah, you know, it was part of the appetite is,
15:59
you know, when a lot of people talk about,
16:01
I always felt drawn, you know, to this thing.
16:05
In fact, I just was walking through the living room
16:07
and my wife had, you know, one of the morning shows on
16:11
and the guy that is the actor opposite
16:14
in the new Creed film that's gonna be coming out
16:17
was just talking about, you know,
16:19
I always felt drawn to acting.
16:21
Even in the drought times of my life,
16:23
like I was drawn to acting.
16:25
And we've all had these moments
16:27
where we felt drawn to something.
16:29
For me, it happened to be the scriptures
16:32
and not because, oh, because, you know,
16:34
I'm more spiritual than other people.
16:35
It was, I am a teacher at heart.
16:38
Everything that I do in my life is in some way,
16:42
shape or form, teaching, coaching, you know,
16:45
whether it is now the Bible as well as communication,
16:49
you know, I coach my kids basketball teams.
16:52
I mean, there's always been this teacher inside of me
16:55
and I was drawn to the scriptures
16:58
in a way that I don't really know how other to explain.
17:01
Other than I would wake up in the morning going,
17:04
man, there's a lot going on in the Bible
17:06
that I don't understand and I want to understand it.
17:09
In fact, I went to seminary not to become a pastor.
17:13
I mean, I was like, can I go to seminary
17:16
and not be a pastor?
17:17
I never wanted to be a pastor.
17:19
I wanted to be a teacher.
17:21
And while I was in seminary, another story,
17:24
God really formed me into a pastor's heart
17:27
and I ended up becoming a teaching pastor,
17:29
which was a really great blend of,
17:31
I got to teach for much of what I did,
17:34
but really get to walk alongside people.
17:37
But I just had a hunger to understand what was going on.
17:40
And part of what that was,
17:42
is that when I was at Mars Hill, when I was in college,
17:46
there were a lot of guest teachers that came to Mars Hill.
17:50
And one of them was a guy by the name of Ray Vanderlawn.
17:53
And Ray Vanderlawn had led over 200 hiking trips
17:57
to the Middle East.
17:59
And I got connected to Ray and started to learn
18:03
all of these things going on in the Bible
18:06
that the writers just expected their audience to know
18:10
'cause they didn't write going, oh my goodness.
18:13
Kyle and Brad are gonna be on a podcast 2,000 years from now
18:17
and they're gonna be talking about my work.
18:19
So they just left so much out.
18:21
And Ray was the first person that really started
18:23
to help me to see that there was a world going on
18:27
behind the Bible, that if we can tap into that,
18:31
we not only better understand the Bible,
18:33
but we can communicate it in a way that's more helpful
18:35
for people to want to get engaged in the Bible.
18:39
And so after seminary for me, my wife and I,
18:41
we had our eight month old, our oldest at the time,
18:44
we moved to Israel, studied in Jerusalem,
18:46
studied there for a year, gave me an education
18:50
around the context related to the Bible.
18:54
And it was from that seeing how the geography factors
18:58
into the Bible and how cultural backgrounds
19:01
and all of these different things helped me
19:04
to better understand the Bible.
19:05
And then I came back as a teaching pastor
19:08
with the mindset of how do I help other people
19:12
want to engage the Bible more.
19:14
As you mentioned, people struggle with time,
19:17
people also struggle with, what in the world am I reading?
19:20
You know, we're two to 4,000 years removed
19:23
from space and time, and there's so many things
19:26
in the Bible that are so different than our Western culture
19:29
that if you try to see the Bible first and foremost
19:32
through lenses from Western culture,
19:35
you're gonna get stuck and go, I don't get what's going on.
19:38
And out of that passion for me, the trajectory
19:42
that I've been on is how can I come alongside of people
19:46
and help them understand more about what's going on
19:50
in the Bible so that they're gonna want to engage it,
19:54
read it and understand it more
19:56
in order to live it out in their lives.
19:59
- And so what that seems to have led you to, you know,
20:01
that appetite connecting with people
20:03
that are doing these Middle Eastern trips,
20:04
living in the Middle East yourself,
20:06
is what you're doing today because you're the president
20:08
and CEO of Walking the Text.
20:11
And so give us an idea as to kind of what that is even
20:14
because if you're not familiar with that,
20:16
you need to at least tell us what that is.
20:17
And then I guess why you started to begin with.
20:20
- Yes, yeah.
20:21
So I started leading study trips two weeks,
20:25
study trips to Israel and Turkey back in 2010.
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So this has been something that I've been doing
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for a number of years.
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And as I was doing that, I was also a teaching pastor
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and about six years ago, my wife and I had this
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really crazy two week time period
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where it became abundantly clear that God was saying,
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I want you to resign and move to Nashville.
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And I was the teaching pastor
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for a very large church in West Michigan, loved my role,
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loved the team that I was working with.
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And when we moved down here, we had no idea why we were here.
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It was crystal clear that we needed to go.
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It was muddy as all get out as to why we were supposed
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to be here.
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And it took nearly a year before really things started
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to crystallize and they happened on a couple
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of different fronts, but the big front is what is now known
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as walking the text.
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So prior to that, walkingthetext.com was just a place
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where people could go to sign up for the study trips.
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But what began to happen is after moving down here,
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it was a became clear that I wanted to be able to create
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a host of resources completely free for people
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to be able to experience and engage the Bible
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in its original context.
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And basic stuff, just what's the history?
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And if I said today, in the days of 9/11
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or in the days of COVID-19 or in the days of ISIS,
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like I don't have to say anything else,
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everybody gets this.
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And the biblical writers are doing that as well.
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And the days of Caesar Augustus
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and the days of Emperor Tiberius,
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there's a whole host of assumptions
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that come around those phrases.
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And what I wanted to do is to figure out,
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okay, knowing that people struggle
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to read their Bible due to time,
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people struggle to read their Bible due to,
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ah, it's just really difficult to understand.
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And so often people get frustrated
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and just end up disengaging because they're trying
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to understand what they're trying to read, you know?
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Is to figure out what are some of the most helpful ways
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that we can reach people with resources
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to help them to understand the original context
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around the Bible.
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And so we did a host of things,
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three major things that we did.
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One was we continued to do the study trips
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and I've now brought on another study trip leader.
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So we've got a great partnership with a tour company
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in Michigan.
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And so we still lead these two week biblical study trips.
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A second thing that we did was we started a three day conference.
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So for people who had gone to the Middle East on a trip
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or couldn't ever get to the Middle East on a trip,
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there was a three day crash course experience
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that people could come to in order to get
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that learning and education.
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And every year we just choose a different subject matter.
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And so we launched that in 2017.
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And then the biggest way that people have engaged
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with walking the text is through the teaching series.
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And these are just 15 to 20 minute TED talk length
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teachings that we filmed in front of a really nice,
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high-def television screen where we can show drone footage,
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we can show images, artists, renderings, and illustrations.
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We can show people some original language,
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just basic words to be able to understand what's going on.
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And we just released our 165th and we're almost
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up to 170 episodes.
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Then we also strip the audio and use that as a podcast.
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And those teachings are available on our website
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at walkingthetext.com, on our YouTube channel.
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And everything that we create on our website
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is entirely free.
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So we have discussion questions that go along with each teaching.
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So people can do that for their own individual study,
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small group study, prison ministries using this.
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Schools use this, it's being used in over 100 countries.
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And we're entirely a crowd-funded nonprofit organization
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that just creates all of these resources for people
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to be able to engage the Bible.
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And to do it through visual media that is engaging,
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that is high, high quality.
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I mean, it's very, very high produced.
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We want people to have a 15, 20 minute experience
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where they learn things they didn't know.
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They learned some tools and strategies
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so that when they go and read the Bible,
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it's like, oh, I learned that in the teaching series,
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that's gotta be what's going on here.
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And so it allows people to engage the Bible
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with somebody guiding them.
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But my goal isn't just to help make you smarter.
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I want you to live a life that is more fulfilling.
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And so we're always giving practical steps.
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Here's how you can walk this out in your own life.
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And as you are studying the Scripture on your own time,
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be looking for these things.
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So we try to tackle that on a number of different fronts.
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- Well, so I appreciate all that detail
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'cause it gives us a very in-depth look
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as to kind of what all you're doing,
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kind of your whole panoply of offerings.
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But let's look at the study trips specifically.
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So when you say study trip,
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this is what people normally think of.
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They think of when their 10th grade class
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went to Washington DC or went to the state capital
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for whatever state they live in.
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And then they go there,
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they have to listen to some boring people talk
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about a subject matter that they certainly do not care about.
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But it's a day out of school.
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And so they're not having to sit there and do geometry.
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They're watching a state senator talk about
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how they're really important.
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And so a lot of people don't,
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even as adults, adults don't really go on study trips, right?
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That's not really something that people do.
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So I guess sell us on the idea of like,
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okay, this is a study trip in Israel and Turkey.
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And Israel, when it's not being rocketed in Turkey,
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when there's not earthquakes,
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but like, what specifically are you doing?
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What are these adults doing on the trip?
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What preparation do they have to do beforehand?
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What stuff do they have to do after?
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Give us the whole idea.
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- Yeah, well, especially for your audience,
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they're really gonna like this.
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Ours are very physically demanding trips.
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So they're not a bus tour, you know?
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We don't jump on a bus and go from site to site.
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And bus tours are great.
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I mean, they've got their own reason,
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they've got their own purpose.
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What I'm trying to do is give my participants
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an experience with the biblical story.
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And so we hike to these sites.
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You know, we wake up early in the morning,
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we maximize the time that we are there.
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And the point isn't that they're supposed to be,
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oh, physically, you know, oriented
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or we're gonna be hiking a lot.
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It's this story happened on that mountain
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and we're gonna get to the top of that mountain
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so that you never forget this story,
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that you've read all of your life
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and you have no idea where this thing took place.
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And so we do a very unique approach,
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which is people don't get an itinerary.
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They don't know where they're going.
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They don't know how long it's gonna take to get there.
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They're invited to enjoy the journey, you know?
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And that's one of the staples is that
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in the first century world, Jesus and his disciples,
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Jesus would not have woken up and said, you know,
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hey fellas, this is what we're gonna go do today.
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Here's the itinerary for the day.
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It's come follow me.
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Let's go have an experience.
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And there were certain things that Jesus wanted to do.
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There were other things that all of a sudden
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somebody in the crowd asks a question
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and we get the parable of the good Samaritan.
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I mean, we don't get the parable of good Samaritan
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if an expert in the law isn't asking
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Jesus all these questions.
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And so we build an experience around
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seeing the entire land of Israel,
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going through all of these stories
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that people have read their entire life
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and now they get to see it.
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You know, at the end of the fourth century AD,
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Saint Jerome said that the land is the fifth gospel.
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You know, he's famously quoted saying
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that when you walk the land, when you see these places,
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your faith comes alive in ways
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because you're like, oh man, this actually happened.
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Like this is logically this makes sense.
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This is the location, the geography,
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seeing the ruins going to these places.
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And so when I say a study trip,
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it's we get after it.
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I mean, we are, we are in the word,
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we are allowing God's word to govern our experience.
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You know, we're up at six o'clock in the morning.
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We're back six o'clock at night.
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You know, we're maximizing every single minute
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that we have.
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And for me, it is a training trip
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where all throughout the trip,
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as we're engaging these stories,
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as we're hiking these sites,
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as we're having dialogue and discussion
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and questions and challenges,
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I'm also throughout the trip,
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giving an entire toolkit
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for how to go back and engage the Bible differently,
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not only because of the experiences that you've had,
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but what you have learned that is going to help you
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read the Bible differently the rest of your life.
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And so yeah, so that's what I mean by a study trip
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is it's, I mean, we, there are sites we'll drive by
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and we'll come back six days later
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because the group isn't ready to engage the content
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at that site because the entire trip has been built
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like a story and chapters have to come in a certain order
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in order for people to get the entirety of the story.
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So very intentionally put together,
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that's what I mean by a study trip.
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People can show up on the trip.
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Here's the only thing I'm asking them to do to prepare.
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The big thing is is being good shape, you know,
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'cause when you get really tired,
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the first thing that goes is your mind, right?
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So we're gonna hike, it's usually between seven to nine miles
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of hiking and, you know, we say this in the land of Israel
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as well as Turkey, but definitely in Israel,
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the only thing flat is the bus.
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Everything else is up down and around.
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So I always encourage people get in as good of shape
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as possible and then I give a bunch of optional things
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for them to read, a lot of biblical stuff,
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but some other books as well,
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if they want to prepare even more for the trip.
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But for a lot of people, they get in good shape,
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they show up and then the trip becomes a launch pad.
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It doesn't become the point.
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It becomes the launch pad and once people get back,
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I provide a whole host of resources.
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Hey, here's where you go from here
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so that you don't just look back and say,
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oh, that was a really great trip I went on,
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you know, once back in the day.
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But that was the trip that catalyzed my faith,
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that changed my relationship with Jesus
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and gave me the strategies and tools that I need
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to engage the Bible in a way that I want to get into it
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on a daily basis rather than feeling like I have to.
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- Well, Brad, you're echoing something I talk about a lot,
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which is just being in shape
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because I'll have people throw at me.
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I think it was Paul, it was definitely Paul.
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I think it was in Galatians where he talked about,
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you know, basically physical training is of some value
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and then, you know, so on and so forth.
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He made his point and people would be like,
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you see, I don't need to work out Paul, he even said.
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You know, it's like, no, he said it was of some value,
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but the point was not about that.
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The point was about seeking after the face of God
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and, you know, serving his people,
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like that was the actual point.
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We have so many people in modernity that they just,
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it's an afterthought or they'll use their family
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as an excuse, I've had people say, oh yeah, you know,
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I would work out, but I got a wife and kids.
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It's like, okay, well, you're just deleting years off
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the end of your life and pretending it's virtuous
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and you're gonna pretend that you're gonna take
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15 years off of taking care of your body
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and then you're just gonna snap right back into it.
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Like that's not really how any of this works,
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but I do want to talk a little bit more
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before we get into, I definitely want to talk about
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the launch pad, what happens afterwards.
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And this may be a little bit of an ethereal question.
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I think you and I know the answer, what it means for us,
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but I guess when you're telling people,
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hey, we're gonna walk the land
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and we're gonna like literally show you the places
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where this stuff happened for a human being.
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Why does that matter?
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And I know why it would matter to me,
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but I'm just throwing the question out there
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because some people might be like,
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well, I'm comfortable sitting in my recliner here in Montana.
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Why do I need to go over to the Middle East?
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Like why do I need to do all these things to see that?
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What is that going to do to the text
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that the Holy Spirit can't already do for me?
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So speak to those people because,
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dude, I want to see it.
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Like, I remember the first time I went to Washington DC,
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which was here recently,
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and just seeing the US Capitol building was like a cool moment.
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I remember to this day, the very first time
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I saw the Coliseum in Rome, and I've seen it three times since,
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but it was like, oh my gosh, like, there it is.
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Like, I've seen the pictures, I've read it,
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but it's like, you've never been inside the Coliseum
33:04
and thought about what went on there.
33:05
You've never smelled what it smells like
33:07
inside of St. Peter's Basilica.
33:08
You've never looked up at the ceiling
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and saw the creation of Adam, like, it is different,
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but some people don't feel that way.
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Why do you think that is?
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- Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of different things
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that a trip like this does.
33:21
Just last week, my wife and I introduced our four kids
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to remember the Titans.
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You know, so we're watching this film,
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and, you know, one of the things that they do is,
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you know, towards the beginning of the film,
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Denzel Washington's character, as the coach,
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takes them on a two-week training camp.
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You know, and it's like, well, why do you do that?
33:43
You know, it's like, 'cause there are no distractions.
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You are singularly focused.
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We are working on football.
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It is two a days, it is three a days, we are bonding.
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We are investing in the very thing
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that's gonna allow us to be successful the rest of the year.
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A trip like this is like that.
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When you've signed up to go on a two-week trip,
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you are investing in a singular focus
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where you're allowing all the other distractions of life
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to just sit off to the side.
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You'll pick them back up two weeks later,
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but when you are immersed in an experience
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that is singularly focused for an extended period of time,
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your growth is exponential.
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I mean, I always say to people, listen,
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I can do more with you two weeks on a trip
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than I could have done with you two weeks or two years
34:33
on the stage as a teaching pastor.
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That when you stack up these experiences every single day,
34:40
you're picking up on things faster,
34:43
you're noticing things differently,
34:44
like you are going through a transformational change
34:48
in your own journey
34:50
because it's something that you're doing
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over the course of a two-week time period.
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There's also a sense too where we as humans
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are experiential beings.
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Like we can watch the game on television,
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but we'd rather be at that game,
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unless it's Lambo Field and it's 20 below.
35:11
It's like, "No, I'm enjoying my living room
35:13
from this vantage point."
35:15
It's the idea of actually being there,
35:17
of seeing it, of engaging all of our senses.
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We can watch something on a video.
35:25
We can look at a photo,
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but it's not like walking it out and being there.
35:30
And so for people, what it does is it creates space
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for God to meet them in ways
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that maybe they don't realize God has been trying to meet them
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back here in the States or wherever they're coming from.
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It allows people to really sit and wrestle and ponder
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and think and have the space to do that,
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whether it's on the bus rides back to the hotel at night,
35:55
sitting in their hotel room or on a hike.
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I mean, part of the joy and benefit of hiking
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is that when you're out in nature,
36:06
when you are being physical,
36:07
like your heart starts to open up in ways,
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your mind opens up in ways.
36:11
And we all know that some of the best conversations
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we've ever had with like our best guy friends
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have probably been after a workout
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or after we've gone and done something really adventurous.
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And it's just elicited other parts of who we are
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and it opens us up.
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And as I mentioned earlier too,
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when you walk where Jesus walked,
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I mean, it's Jesus lived in Capernaum.
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I mean, you can walk all of Capernaum in about two minutes.
36:37
I mean, for the archeological excavation,
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we're not talking, it's like it happened here.
36:41
There's the Sea of Galilee.
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This is where David fought Goliath.
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The valley is very clearly laid out in scripture
36:49
and there's one valley that's got that name
36:51
and it's right there.
36:52
And you have a chance to see things
36:55
and to walk it out and allow God to do something
36:59
in your own heart and in your own mind,
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in your own soul that just doing it from a distance
37:05
doesn't lend itself to the same kind of experience.
37:08
- Yeah, I would certainly agree with that.
37:10
And again, it goes back to early on in my wife
37:13
and I's marriage, we didn't buy each other
37:15
Valentine's gifts or Christmas gifts or birthday gifts.
37:17
We would put money into a travel fund
37:18
because it was things that,
37:19
that was kind of a thing in college.
37:21
We went on a trip, my junior year and my senior year.
37:24
We went to the UK for one of those trips.
37:26
One of those was in Italy and it's just like,
37:29
excuse me, I think the one thing that really blew my mind
37:33
is again, I've already mentioned the Colosseum
37:35
and the St. Peter's Basilica, but in Florence,
37:37
you have Michelangelo's David.
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And how many times have you seen a picture of the David?
37:43
It's shown on television, it's in textbooks,
37:45
things like that.
37:46
It's impossibly big.
37:48
And that's the first thing is when you turn the corner
37:50
and look to your right and you look down that long hallway
37:52
and you see it's like, oh my goodness,
37:54
this is impossibly big.
37:55
But then when you get up close to it,
37:57
it's like, oh my gosh, it's impossibly detailed.
38:00
Like I remember because I think in the David
38:01
and his left hand, he's got a stone in his left hand.
38:04
And when you like crush your hand like you're holding a stone,
38:07
you see all those wrinkles that are happening in your palm?
38:10
That's in the marble of the statue.
38:12
Like it's an astonishing, or I don't know if it's marble,
38:16
but it's an astonishing statue and kind of what you see,
38:19
but you would never see that
38:21
if you were just looking at a picture of it in a textbook.
38:23
And so, and that's just Michelangelo.
38:26
Like, you know, he's a one in a billion guy,
38:28
but he's not Jesus.
38:29
He's not the apostle Paul, he's not Moses.
38:32
And so it's just, it's a different thing.
38:33
So that's just me almost like teeing you up
38:36
to encourage guys even more to look at trips like this
38:38
and study trips like this.
38:39
But again, it's not just about the trip
38:41
'cause the trip is church camp, right?
38:43
So you get all excited at church camp,
38:45
you wanna come home and share Jesus while you're friends.
38:47
And then they're gonna invite two friends
38:48
and they're gonna all gonna invite two friends.
38:49
And then all of a sudden we have an actual revival.
38:52
But a lot of people get home,
38:53
they get back into their normal routine,
38:55
they get rid of jet lag,
38:56
they go back to work on Monday,
38:58
the washer and dryer is not working properly.
39:00
And then they just kind of lose it.
39:01
So let's talk about the launch pad
39:03
that you mentioned where it's like,
39:04
okay, we're back from our trip now.
39:06
Here are the things that I have for you
39:07
so that we can keep this momentum going.
39:10
- Yeah, yeah.
39:11
So one of the things are the resources
39:14
that we have at walking the text.
39:15
That's just becomes a library of resources
39:20
for people to be able to re-engage some of the stories
39:24
that we did in Israel.
39:25
There's a lot of stuff that we've created
39:27
that I've never done on an Israel trip or a Turkey trip.
39:29
That gives people that they can,
39:34
I mean, we've got over 160 episodes.
39:36
So they can go and watch as many as they want,
39:38
but a lot of people will engage one a week,
39:40
just as a reminder of, oh yeah,
39:42
those are the kinds of ways
39:43
in which the Bible writers are doing what they're doing.
39:46
This is going to encourage me
39:47
as I'm reading my own Bible.
39:51
So there's the resource that we do at walking the text.
39:53
I also send out a resource list
39:56
that just says, hey, as you seek to go deeper,
39:59
here's all these different subject matters.
40:00
Here's the best books that I have come across.
40:03
I mean, I've been co-lating this list for 15 years now
40:07
and helping people to go, okay, where are your interests?
40:11
What is God drawing you into?
40:13
And how can I be a resource to you?
40:16
I mean, I get trip participants.
40:18
I mean, I've done dozens and dozens and dozens of trips,
40:21
but I'll have trip participants reach out to me
40:24
on a regular basis and going,
40:25
hey, I'm at this part in my journey, what's next?
40:28
So it allows me to have a relationship with them.
40:31
I mean, that's why for my study trips,
40:34
like I usually cap it at 40,
40:36
which I know for some people they would go, wow,
40:37
that's a lot of people.
40:39
Well, it's a lot of groups that are big, big names
40:43
that they'll take 700 people,
40:45
and they'll have zero relationship with anybody.
40:48
And for me, I want to lead them and guide them
40:52
and shepherd them.
40:53
And so there's a lot,
40:55
and one of the other things that we do
40:57
and if people are interested at walking the text,
41:01
because the teaching series is a way
41:03
in which we continue to kindle that fire on a regular basis.
41:06
So we release a new episode now every other week
41:09
and we have there an ebook called The Number One Mistake.
41:14
Most everyone makes reading the Bible
41:16
and we don't read it in context.
41:19
And because you and I have talked about this offline,
41:22
there are a lot of folks that don't read their Bible
41:27
or don't have the time to read the Bible
41:29
or just frustrating reading their Bible.
41:31
And so for me, it was,
41:33
I would come back from these trips
41:35
or I would come off stage and I've spoken
41:38
at a lot of conferences and events and all that.
41:41
And people will come up to me and they'll say,
41:43
hey, I understand that reading the Bible in context
41:47
is important, how do I do that?
41:49
Like, how do I do that?
41:52
And again, not rely on you.
41:53
And so I just wrote a very simple,
41:58
it's not simplistic, but simple 30-page ebook
42:03
that people get completely for free
42:04
when they sign up at walking the text
42:06
and that allows us to send them
42:07
every time a new episode comes out.
42:09
And here's how you read the Bible in its original context.
42:13
Here are the ways regardless of where you're at in your journey.
42:15
If you are just new,
42:17
if you've never read their Bible before,
42:19
this applies to you.
42:21
And if you've been a follower of Jesus
42:22
for three decades, four decades, this is for you as well.
42:25
And not only does it provide a framework
42:28
for experience in engaging the Bible in context,
42:31
but it also lists here are the best resources
42:34
that you can get your hands on,
42:36
whether some of them are books that you buy,
42:38
some of them are websites that are completely free,
42:41
but this is a starting point for you
42:44
to be able to grow in your engagement
42:46
with the biblical story.
42:47
- And so one thing that I'm hearing through a lot of things
42:50
that you're saying, Brad, is that it's an entry point.
42:53
And what you wanna do is create as many entry points
42:55
for people as possible.
42:56
So that's kind of like something that I keep in mind
42:58
whenever I'm asked to speak live
43:00
and how I prepare my speeches, if you will,
43:02
is I try to create as many hooks as possible
43:06
because I know people are looking at me 100% of the time,
43:10
but they're hearing about 60% of the words that I'm saying.
43:13
They're actually listening to probably 10%
43:14
and they're gonna remember like 1% of the things
43:16
that I'm saying.
43:17
So I'm just trying to put as many hooks in the water
43:19
'cause I don't know if the intro's gonna get you.
43:20
I don't know if this personal story's gonna get you.
43:22
I don't know if it's a scripture
43:23
that I read through my face that's gonna get you,
43:26
but I wanna give as many ways to get you in as possible.
43:28
So a Bible study at church may not get a lot of people.
43:32
The 6 a.m. Saturday morning prayer breakfast once a month
43:35
and pretending like that's men's ministry
43:36
may not get people.
43:38
These other things, study trips may not get people.
43:40
That's just a little bit too much.
43:42
Maybe their bodies are broken down.
43:43
They can't really do something like that.
43:45
So you've done something or you're working on something
43:48
right now, which I don't even know
43:49
if I was allowed to ask you about this,
43:50
but I'm going to anyway, I'm breaking all the rules.
43:52
There's something you have to do working on now
43:54
called the sacred threat.
43:56
And what this could potentially be is a mass media,
44:00
mass marketed way of getting people interested
44:04
in the scripture, in context, but also in a way
44:07
that is not going to violate their consciences
44:12
or make them feel stupid.
44:14
And what I mean by that,
44:14
this could take a long time to set this up,
44:16
but here we go.
44:17
- No, you're doing great, man.
44:19
This is all I'm thinking on the road with me.
44:21
- Okay, sounds good.
44:22
I'll be your hype man.
44:23
But it's like there are Christian things out there,
44:26
whether documentaries or movies that are just atrocious.
44:29
They're awful.
44:31
But the thing is, is you're supposed to like it
44:33
if you're a Christian and you're supposed to support it
44:35
because it supposedly has a gospel message.
44:37
So you're supposed to sit through an hour
44:39
and 30 minutes of crap for the gospel ending
44:41
and then share it with all your friends
44:43
and buy their tickets so they can come to you
44:45
with the theaters as well.
44:46
But the thing is, is it's violating one of the presuppositions
44:49
about a Christian life is in that you should understand beauty
44:53
more than anybody else.
44:55
Because if you understand the gospel
44:57
and if you've been saved by the blood of the lamb,
44:58
you should understand beauty more than a Grammy award-winning
45:01
singer or an Academy award-winning director
45:04
or any of those types of things.
45:05
And so all that to say, the sacred thread.
45:08
This is a television show that you tell us about.
45:11
But I watched the first episode and I was floored
45:14
by how gorgeous it was, by how it flowed.
45:18
And I immediately thought,
45:20
someone is gonna accidentally click on that on Netflix
45:23
or on Amazon Prime TV or on Apple Plus
45:25
or whatever it's gonna end up being on.
45:27
And they're gonna be like, wait, what are they saying?
45:29
Bible, I don't really care about the Bible,
45:30
but man, this is gorgeous.
45:32
So I have talked for way too long.
45:34
That was basically a soliloquy.
45:36
I think that's the first time I've even said that word
45:37
on the podcast, Brad, save me.
45:40
Talk to me about the sacred thread.
45:41
- Man, I'm piggybacking you.
45:43
That was very well done.
45:45
- Yeah, no, the sacred thread is a global television series
45:50
that is in production right now
45:53
that is going to be both something that is distributed
45:57
commercially here in the United States
45:59
as well as internationally to help people
46:03
experience the Bible in its original context.
46:06
And as you witnessed, there is a level of excellence
46:11
and quality and beauty that we have sought after
46:16
in order to provide something that people will be engaged by,
46:20
not repelled by.
46:22
Our philosophy has always been that Christian media
46:27
shouldn't just meet industry standards,
46:29
not Christian media standards, but industry standards.
46:33
It shouldn't just meet them, it should exceed them
46:36
because we've got the greatest story in human history.
46:39
And so as we were thinking through,
46:42
how do we reach the masses with a different level
46:47
of engagement around the Bible?
46:48
How do we help them to experience the Bible
46:51
the way the Bible was intended to be experienced
46:54
and to do it in a way where they lean in
46:58
when they see it and not are repelled by it?
47:01
So we've actually partnered with a six-time Emmy Award-winning
47:05
production studio called Evolve Studios.
47:07
They do top programming for ESPN, National Geographic,
47:10
Discovery Channel, Netflix.
47:13
The owners, leaders are all passionate followers of Jesus
47:16
and we're actually the first Christian project
47:19
that they've taken on because they only do the best work.
47:22
And so collectively, we are creating this docuseries style
47:27
where I serve as the host and take the audience
47:30
on this worldwide adventure to uncover these pieces of context
47:35
related to the Bible in order to fit into whatever
47:39
that season's theme is.
47:40
And so season one is all in the Lord's Prayer.
47:43
It's something that everybody knows,
47:45
whether they're religious or not.
47:47
And each episode, seven episodes in season one
47:51
just goes through each phrase.
47:53
So the episode, Kyle, that you saw was just our father.
47:57
And we're taking people to Israel.
47:59
We're taking them to Egypt.
48:00
We're taking them as well as to Jordan
48:03
and the rest of the season.
48:04
And some other places around the world
48:06
to help them experience the Bible
48:09
and to be able to get themselves, what was it like
48:13
to be on the Mount of the Attitudes 2000 years ago
48:16
hearing Jesus give this prayer
48:19
that he wanted his disciples to say on a daily basis.
48:23
And so we've been working on this since COVID began.
48:28
The first episode, as you saw, is done and is available.
48:32
And we're right now, the rest of season one is written.
48:36
We're in the middle of the fundraising process
48:39
in order to get the rest of the season funded
48:42
and then God willing towards the end of 2023,
48:46
we will be filming the rest of season one
48:49
for God willing a release in 2024.
48:52
- Okay, so assuming all things go well,
48:54
that's what we're gonna look at it as.
48:55
But the very next thing that people wanna know,
48:57
because we're now in this era of everybody signed up
48:59
for every subscription service during COVID
49:01
'cause they were bored and now they're like,
49:03
okay, we're gonna get rid of this one
49:04
and I literally signed up for this to watch one show
49:06
and I've been paying 10 bucks a month for it ever since
49:08
and I haven't watched a dang thing.
49:09
So do we have an idea of where it's going to be?
49:11
Like what it's gonna be on?
49:12
Is it gonna be like a paid-of-play type thing?
49:15
Is it gonna be similar to the chosen to where it's like,
49:17
no, it's completely crowdfunded.
49:18
You just have to download the app.
49:20
Like where does it look like it's gonna land for now?
49:22
- Yeah, so well, through our relationship with Evolve,
49:26
we're already slated for Amazon Prime, Apple TV,
49:31
Google, and then we are gonna be having conversations
49:35
with some of the really big distributors.
49:37
So the US distribution side is still
49:42
a very much work in process.
49:44
The global side is actually starting to crystallize,
49:48
as you and I are having this conversation,
49:51
we're gonna be translating it into the top 15 world languages
49:56
and we've got dozens of distribution partners
49:59
who will be distributing this around the world.
50:01
So we are working on a couple of different distribution models
50:05
for the United States and as we start to get those,
50:09
more crystallized and as we get closer to releasing,
50:13
which we have some time 'cause it probably won't be
50:16
until the mid or end of 2024 before this will be available
50:21
everywhere, we'll have a better idea
50:24
of how we're gonna be distributing it.
50:26
But the goal is maximum exposure.
50:29
This is one of the things where we are
50:32
a non-profit organization.
50:34
This is not a for-profit venture.
50:37
This is non-for-profit.
50:39
We're doing all of the fundraising by ourselves.
50:43
We're not going to be striking distribution deals
50:47
where other people get creative control.
50:49
We don't want the message getting watered down.
50:52
We wanna be able to do the work of bringing
50:55
all of the funding to the table,
50:57
have all of the rights to be able to do with it.
50:59
Exactly what we feel like is gonna be able to reach
51:02
as many people.
51:03
So a commercial distribution would be along the lines
51:07
of being able to allow the commercial distributor
51:10
to also help market this in order to get the masses.
51:13
So for many people, they may look and go,
51:15
"Well, if you make it completely free,
51:16
"it'll get to more people."
51:18
Well, yes and no, depends on where we're at,
51:20
depends on the market, depends on a number of things
51:23
we're working through right now.
51:25
We're headlong in those conversations right now,
51:27
but we haven't gotten that sorted out yet.
51:28
But it will be available everywhere.
51:33
Well, Brad, what if I were to tell you
51:34
that I'm very impatient and I don't wanna wait
51:36
until 2024 to see the rest of them?
51:38
What do you gotta say to that?
51:40
We gotta shoot 'em first.
51:42
Okay, all right.
51:42
Well, as soon as they're shot,
51:44
if you need somebody to take a look at 'em
51:45
and give you some pointers or give you my many.
51:48
Yeah, shoot 'em my way.
51:49
Yeah, I know that's actually been a fun part of the process.
51:52
And this is for anybody who's done any
51:54
kind of significant media projects,
51:57
the pilot episode, which is our episode one,
52:00
in fact, based on what we have learned
52:03
from the pilot episode and what you saw,
52:05
we're gonna reshoot about 20% of it.
52:07
And that's, sometimes people reshoot the pilot,
52:09
we feel like we nailed most of it,
52:11
but based on what we're doing for the rest of the season
52:14
and what we learned going through that pilot process,
52:19
we'll be tweaking it slightly and reshooting
52:21
some of the things that we felt like
52:22
we could even make stronger.
52:25
One of the fun things about going through this process
52:28
is that you don't know what you don't know
52:30
until you get there and then you're able to sharpen that up.
52:34
And so we're really excited about that.
52:36
But for now, I mean, people, and I know that you'll be posting
52:40
this in the show notes as well,
52:41
is people can go to thesacredthread.tv or .com or .org,
52:46
we got 'em all, it's gonna take you all to the same place.
52:50
You can watch the trailer and then because we are
52:54
in the midst of conversations for the distribution,
52:57
the first episode can't be quote unquote,
53:00
totally forward facing.
53:02
So people on thesacredthread.tv put in their own email
53:06
address, they put in their own password
53:09
and they get into the private page on the site
53:11
where they can watch the episode.
53:13
There's now a vision video that's there
53:15
and it's some behind the scenes stuff
53:17
for people to get a sense for what we're doing
53:19
and how we're doing it and why we're doing it.
53:21
But people can get after the first episode right now.
53:26
- Well, and it's certainly worth your time
53:28
and for those of you with families,
53:29
I think it's important as well.
53:30
Like there are a lot of things right now
53:32
that you have to be wary of sitting down
53:34
and watching as a family or just letting your kids watch it
53:37
'cause you have no idea, oh, is there gonna be, you know,
53:39
a drag queen that what's gonna walk through the screen
53:41
or is someone gonna talk about how your kid is evil
53:43
just because of the level of melanin they were born with?
53:45
You're not gonna have to worry about that with this series.
53:47
So I really appreciate you going into all that detail
53:49
and on the sacred thread and also walking the text.
53:51
But before we get you out of here,
53:52
there's a couple of other things
53:53
that I wanna talk to you about.
53:55
And we may just end up talking about one of them
53:56
depending on time because we could have talked about
53:58
these things the entire time
53:59
but I'm just kind of tossing them here at the end.
54:01
One thing that I talk about a lot and then we talk a lot
54:03
about on this show is masculinity inside the church
54:06
or maybe more appropriately talking about the lack thereof.
54:09
And so you have seen the church
54:11
from multiple different angles, pastor, teaching pastor,
54:14
kind of a para church ministry,
54:15
which is kind of what you're doing now.
54:17
But one of the things that I've seen,
54:20
and I tell people this all the time,
54:21
'cause it always comes up when I'm interviewed on podcast,
54:23
I became a Christian as a 10th grader.
54:24
So right at the time that I'm learning what it means
54:27
to be a man, I was now trying to learn
54:29
what it means to be a Christian.
54:30
And I always saw those two things as oil and water,
54:34
that all the manly men were outside the church
54:36
doing the man stuff and all the good godly men
54:39
were inside the church, shaking each other's hands
54:41
and telling them they'd pray for them
54:43
and doing all these other different things.
54:45
But it was always this dichotomy to me
54:47
that you couldn't be masculine, you couldn't be manly,
54:50
and also be a part of the church.
54:52
And so from what you've seen,
54:54
what do you see as the overall,
54:57
I guess state of masculinity in the church as of right now?
55:01
- Yeah, it depends on where you're at.
55:05
I mean, there's obviously different churches
55:07
are doing things differently.
55:10
I'm part of a congregation where they're looking at
55:15
the gathering together on a Sunday as how do we make this?
55:21
And I don't mean this in a negative way.
55:22
How does this become as inclusive as possible?
55:25
I mean, all these different people are coming together,
55:28
young, old, wealthy, not as wealthy.
55:32
There's a whole stretch of,
55:35
hey, there's a lot of different types of people
55:37
that are showing up, how do we create an experience
55:41
that is going to be faithful to the text,
55:44
that is going to be worshipful in nature,
55:46
that's going to be done well, not as an idol of excellence,
55:50
but as a way of reflecting who we believe God is
55:55
and the privilege that we get to join in.
55:57
And how do we allow throughout a service,
56:01
and even throughout a teaching series,
56:04
how are we speaking to the various different groups
56:06
about who they are and what they should be doing
56:09
and what is biblically true?
56:11
And then outside of that,
56:12
there's a lot of other events that people are creating.
56:17
So there was recently an axe throwing event
56:19
at our church, so it was a way to get everybody together,
56:23
it's bonfires, it's a men's event,
56:26
it's an opportunity to talk about doing something fun
56:31
like that as well as talking about
56:33
what does it mean to serve well.
56:35
So I do think that it's across the spectrum
56:37
and you may actually have even a better understanding
56:41
as far as that with your audience
56:44
and the vast number of types of people
56:46
that you're running circles with.
56:48
Here's as far as for me, I'm raising,
56:51
I've got four kids, I've got three boys.
56:54
And so this idea of just masculinity, sexuality,
56:59
gender, all this stuff that is happening,
57:04
my kids go to public school.
57:06
So we're having these conversations a lot.
57:09
And one of the things that for me on my own journey
57:13
of understanding kind of Christianity
57:16
and masculinity and strength and fitness
57:19
and kind of how all this gets brought together
57:21
is my dad was actually an amazing example of this.
57:25
My dad is one of the toughest guys that I know.
57:28
I mean, he's done everything,
57:30
he's got, you know, 13 surgeries to show it and to prove it.
57:35
But one of the things that I just remember even growing up
57:38
is that my dad always said to me,
57:40
I believe that Jesus was the toughest man
57:46
that you would have ever met.
57:48
But he never used his position to benefit himself.
57:53
He always used that strength and that influence
57:58
and that voice in order to help those who needed it the most.
58:03
And so, I mean, my dad was the assistant coach
58:06
for basketball, I mean, I had just amazing coaches growing up.
58:09
And I just remember my dad saying,
58:11
I'm willing to bet that Jesus probably would have ran
58:13
through a few screens, knocked the dude on his butt
58:15
and as soon as the play ended, would have gone
58:17
and then picked him up.
58:18
But then the very next play would have probably ran him
58:20
over again, you know, and there's always this sense of,
58:23
oh, we have to be soft.
58:24
I mean, so many of our images of Jesus,
58:26
is this Western European six foot tall long blonde hair,
58:31
blue eye, pasty white, 135 pound six foot guy.
58:37
I mean, just almost like a weakling and I just,
58:41
and this is something too, is having lived
58:44
in the Middle East, living alongside of, you know,
58:48
the Jewish people and the Palestinian people
58:51
and just seeing how rough and tough everybody is.
58:55
Like it's a very different picture
58:56
of what I think Jesus would have been.
58:58
But I think that part of biblical masculinity
59:02
is living into who God has created you to be.
59:05
I mean, there's a whole other steward fitness
59:08
work outside of it that I know that, you know,
59:10
you're big with and I'm too, I mean,
59:12
I work out six times a week, I watch what I eat,
59:14
I wanna be fitting for my kids and energetic
59:17
and to be able to do everything, you know,
59:18
God invites me to do.
59:20
But for me, it's how do you live into,
59:24
who God has created you to be,
59:25
to be the best steward of what God has given you?
59:29
But then to always take the advantage that you have,
59:33
whether it is influence, whether it is leadership,
59:37
whatever that is, how do you serve well,
59:41
that the toughest people that I know
59:44
are the ones who could demand respect,
59:47
not command respect, but demand respect.
59:49
And yet they're constantly looking for ways
59:53
to make somebody else bigger.
59:55
You know, to me, that is something that we don't tell men
1:00:00
to shy away from what you have.
1:00:03
It's how are you leveraging it, not for your benefit,
1:00:08
but for the benefit of somebody else.
1:00:09
And Jesus is the ultimate example of that,
1:00:12
Paul's doing that as well.
1:00:13
I mean, that's one of the things,
1:00:15
I'll tell you one quick story then,
1:00:16
I'll let you talk now.
1:00:17
There's my full monologue for the last several minutes.
1:00:20
- There you go.
1:00:21
- Is that when I take people to Turkey,
1:00:26
we have an experience where they don't know
1:00:29
we're only gonna go one mile.
1:00:32
But we're going uphill, man.
1:00:35
I mean, it is a mountain, it is rocky.
1:00:38
You have to look every single step.
1:00:40
And on this particular hike, I move quickly.
1:00:43
I mean, people are moving.
1:00:46
They don't know how long it's gonna be.
1:00:47
Again, they don't get an itinerary.
1:00:50
And when we get to the point where we've only gone a mile
1:00:52
and they don't even know it, we stop.
1:00:55
And I start recounting Paul's missionary journeys.
1:01:00
The number of miles he walked,
1:01:02
the number of miles that he sailed,
1:01:06
and we get done, and dude, in his,
1:01:08
that we can actually track.
1:01:10
It's just under 10,000 miles that he walked
1:01:14
and that he sailed.
1:01:15
And we're walking on a Roman road path.
1:01:19
I mean, we're right next to it.
1:01:20
And I just sit and I give them the number of Paul,
1:01:24
the number of miles that we have.
1:01:26
And then I just say, you just went one mile.
1:01:29
Tell me these people weren't tough.
1:01:34
Tell me these people didn't, you know,
1:01:36
I mean, they were, they got after it,
1:01:39
but their entire life was,
1:01:42
how am I leveraging that for the benefit of someone else?
1:01:45
You know, I mean, it's the tip,
1:01:47
I don't wanna say typical because then it downplays it,
1:01:49
but it's the servant leadership.
1:01:51
I mean, it's the greatest leaders are the ones
1:01:53
who are leading for the benefit of other people.
1:01:56
And, you know, to me,
1:01:58
that conversation around faith and masculinity,
1:02:02
like that was a different experience
1:02:04
'cause I grew up with tough men.
1:02:05
I mean, and not like tough, like in the abusive sense.
1:02:08
I mean, my dad was a triathlete.
1:02:11
My dad was a college athlete.
1:02:14
He was in the fitness industry.
1:02:15
I mean, I'm around professional athletes
1:02:17
and I'm one of the best athletes in the world.
1:02:20
And yet, like I'm learning what does this mean
1:02:24
to take what God has given you
1:02:25
and use it for the benefit of others.
1:02:28
- So you're describing the dichotomy that is Jesus
1:02:31
where he is lamb and lion,
1:02:33
- Yeah.
1:02:34
- His grace and truth, he is tough and tender.
1:02:37
- Yeah.
1:02:38
- The problem is, is most modern ministries
1:02:40
and most modern churches and most modern worship songs
1:02:42
and most modern depictions of Jesus,
1:02:45
it is grace, it is lamb, and it is tender.
1:02:50
And so part of what we do is we're like,
1:02:52
hey, we always sign off with keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:02:55
And some people here to the detriment of the lamb of God,
1:02:58
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
1:02:58
You got the lamb of God, you got it.
1:03:00
Because when I go and speak to groups of men,
1:03:02
I say, raise your hand if in the last year,
1:03:04
your pastor has mentioned lamb of God,
1:03:06
every hand goes up without fail.
1:03:08
And then I say, raise your hand if they've mentioned
1:03:10
lion of Judah and it's a smattering of hands here and there.
1:03:13
There's a reason for that.
1:03:15
The lamb is easy to understand,
1:03:16
the lion is difficult to understand.
1:03:19
It's easy to understand grace,
1:03:20
but the truth kind of makes us feel icky
1:03:22
and judgmental and mean.
1:03:24
But then it also gets back to what we hear in our head
1:03:27
whenever someone says the word meek, right?
1:03:29
And I talk about this all the time,
1:03:30
but we hear meek and we think weak,
1:03:32
navel gazing, like, you know, go along and get along.
1:03:34
But meekness is when you have the full use of your power,
1:03:38
but you have it under voluntary control.
1:03:41
And in a Christian context is you have full use of your power
1:03:44
and God's gifting to his glory and for him to unleash
1:03:48
when he decides, not when you decide.
1:03:51
And so I take this all back to the church example,
1:03:53
'cause you talked about your church being inclusive
1:03:55
and I know you don't mean that in kind of the modern
1:03:57
purple head, nose ring version, but the thing about it
1:04:00
is whenever I read through the New Testament,
1:04:02
I'm certainly open to be corrected on this.
1:04:03
And I know we don't have all day
1:04:05
'cause we're winding to a close,
1:04:06
but the church is for Christians.
1:04:08
So I don't understand the seeker sensitive model
1:04:11
of churches where they try to acquiesce
1:04:13
to the lowest common denominator
1:04:15
while ignoring the people that are there
1:04:18
and will be there regardless.
1:04:19
And so it's like, we're trying to make sure
1:04:20
this is comfortable enough for that random person
1:04:23
coming off the street 'cause we don't wanna make them
1:04:25
feel uncomfortable to the detriment
1:04:26
of making the rest of your congregation feel uncomfortable
1:04:29
because you're only giving them milk.
1:04:30
Week after week, you're giving them milk
1:04:33
and it's not nourishing them anymore.
1:04:34
And sometimes the milk turns into skittles.
1:04:36
You give them their spiritual skittles
1:04:38
and they get their little high.
1:04:40
They raise their hands during the worship
1:04:41
and then they leave and they're back to their own normal life.
1:04:43
So I bring it back around to something.
1:04:45
The lion of the faith, the voting bacham,
1:04:47
he's one of my favorites.
1:04:48
He wrote a book called Family Shepherds.
1:04:50
Most people don't know about this book
1:04:51
and they haven't read it.
1:04:53
But if I were to summarize this book,
1:04:54
it would be that men are the main driving force
1:04:59
outside of God and the Triune God
1:05:01
of catechizing their family and discipling their family.
1:05:04
And so if you as a church make your church man friendly,
1:05:08
notice how I didn't say do men's ministry.
1:05:10
Notice how I didn't say do men's events.
1:05:11
Notice how I didn't say men's Bible study.
1:05:13
But if you make your church from top to bottom,
1:05:16
from the sermon content, the music to the missions,
1:05:18
man friendly, that will be to the redounding benefit
1:05:22
of all the women and all the children,
1:05:25
all the widows, all the orphans in the congregation.
1:05:29
Because if the men take discipleship seriously,
1:05:32
don't you think they're gonna take their marriages seriously?
1:05:34
Don't you think they're gonna take the catechizing
1:05:36
of their children in the ways of God seriously?
1:05:39
And so again, most churches look out
1:05:41
and they see a bunch of female and young faces
1:05:44
and they think that's my target audience.
1:05:46
Again, you and I have a sales background.
1:05:47
We understand you have to market to your audience.
1:05:49
But are we marketing to the audience that is there
1:05:52
or should we be developing programs
1:05:55
that will shift the market to be a more appropriate thing?
1:05:59
As in, there is an order to society,
1:06:01
there's an order to creation.
1:06:03
And when we start marketing to a disruption of that order,
1:06:07
that's a massive problem.
1:06:08
So I just wanna get your final thoughts on that
1:06:10
before we wrap up here.
1:06:11
- Yeah.
1:06:13
Well, here's the thing that I really appreciate
1:06:14
about what you just said there is that I'm a man,
1:06:19
so I'm just gonna speak to the men.
1:06:21
And I know that obviously that's what you are as well.
1:06:24
We are called to step up.
1:06:26
We are called to take responsibility to raise our kids
1:06:34
in a way that is honoring to what God would want
1:06:37
and to be able to not just say,
1:06:39
"Well, I'm doing the work.
1:06:41
And so therefore, if my wife is home,
1:06:44
she's kind of covering the household."
1:06:45
My wife and I, she's a part-time,
1:06:50
but I'm obviously full-time.
1:06:52
But we look at parenting our kids as a joint partnership.
1:06:56
And it's not just, "Well, honey,
1:06:57
you're kind of handling the things in the home.
1:06:59
I'm kind of handling things by way of work."
1:07:01
It's, "No, how are we working together?"
1:07:04
But my responsibility, and this is,
1:07:06
this could be another totally other theological discussion
1:07:10
at another day, is that I'm part of a church
1:07:15
that there are women leaders,
1:07:18
there are women that are allowed to be in leadership.
1:07:20
And again, that can be another discussion for another day.
1:07:23
But for me, the way I read the biblical story
1:07:27
is that my wife and I are both responsible
1:07:31
for our marriage.
1:07:31
We are both responsible for our kids.
1:07:33
We're both responsible for their development.
1:07:36
But at the end of the day, I am more responsible.
1:07:41
I am going to have to give a greater accounting
1:07:44
for what happened within my family
1:07:47
as the head of the household.
1:07:50
And the way that Paul is talking about that in Ephesians 5
1:07:52
is he's saying, "Yes, as a head of the household,
1:07:55
you should be the very first one to serve.
1:07:58
You're the very first one getting on your knee.
1:07:59
You're the very first one making sure
1:08:01
that everybody else has what they need,
1:08:03
that it's not about lordship
1:08:06
as it is about servanthood.
1:08:07
Jesus is ultimately the Lord of the house.
1:08:11
We submit to the rule and reign of Jesus in the house.
1:08:15
But the way that I understand what Paul is doing
1:08:18
in Colossians chapter three
1:08:20
and what he is doing in Ephesians chapter five
1:08:22
is that as the man of my household,
1:08:26
I have greater responsibility, it doesn't make me more important.
1:08:30
It doesn't, you know, it means that at the end of the day,
1:08:34
Jesus is going, if something did not go right in my household,
1:08:39
yes, my wife was part of it.
1:08:41
Yes, we collaborated on it.
1:08:43
I mean, we work through everything together.
1:08:46
That's part of how we run our house.
1:08:48
I am the one who's ultimately going to be more responsible.
1:08:51
And so for men to be able to recognize,
1:08:54
let's stop pawning it off.
1:08:55
Let's stop pawning it off to the church.
1:08:57
Let's stop pawning it off to, you know, our spouses.
1:09:00
Let's stop pawning off of our kids or to Christian school.
1:09:02
It's what are we doing in order to raise our kids
1:09:07
the way that we believe that we're called to do.
1:09:08
And that's one of the fascinating things about
1:09:10
even Jewish education and the world that Jesus
1:09:13
would have grown up in,
1:09:14
the responsibility was first and foremost in the home.
1:09:17
And then it went to the synagogue.
1:09:19
Then it went to, you know, the other places.
1:09:22
And so we need, we need to do that.
1:09:24
And this is one of the things that I really appreciate
1:09:26
about, you know, the church that I'm part of
1:09:29
and I serve on the teaching team
1:09:31
is that I've rarely seen a place
1:09:35
that is grace and truth as much as where we're at.
1:09:38
And where, you know, our pastor does a really great job
1:09:42
of getting down to brass tacks
1:09:44
with whatever thing we're talking about.
1:09:46
And when it's a sermon where it's specifically talking about
1:09:49
men, we need to step up.
1:09:51
Like, I mean, it is very direct.
1:09:53
And here's what we need to be doing
1:09:54
and not in a shaming way,
1:09:56
but in a, let's paint the vision of what happens
1:10:00
when this actually happens in our household.
1:10:02
What happens in our community?
1:10:03
What happens in our church?
1:10:05
When we make these changes,
1:10:07
here's the downstream effect.
1:10:09
And people are, you know, compelled into a biblical vision
1:10:14
for how we're supposed to live in order for God's will
1:10:18
and God's way to advance here on earth, you know,
1:10:21
as it is in heaven.
1:10:23
- Well, you kind of gave a little caveat
1:10:24
to using the word shame,
1:10:25
but I think shame is one of the most tremendous motivators
1:10:27
for people because I was very overweight as a kid.
1:10:30
And I remember the shame of taking my shirt off
1:10:32
at a pool party and having kids make fun of me.
1:10:34
And that, you know, you could look at that,
1:10:36
oh, you've been damaged, you've been whatever.
1:10:37
It's like, no, no, no, that is driving me
1:10:39
to a life of fitness and taking care of myself,
1:10:42
which is going to cascade into,
1:10:43
'cause I have two boys,
1:10:44
to them seeing a dad that is in shape,
1:10:46
to seeing a dad that is healthy.
1:10:48
And that will be to their benefit as well.
1:10:49
But the next time we have you on here,
1:10:51
we're going to yell at each other
1:10:52
about women serving in leadership,
1:10:54
egalitarian versus complementary.
1:10:55
And we're going to get into all the areas
1:10:56
that will get us canceled.
1:10:57
But we've covered a lot of ground today.
1:10:58
I really appreciate all your time.
1:11:00
But that's all for me.
1:11:01
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:11:03
- No, man, this has just been a great, great conversation.
1:11:05
And one of the things that I appreciate about just, you know,
1:11:08
what you do is, you know, we can have discussions.
1:11:11
We can have dialogues.
1:11:12
There's, you know, a mutual respect.
1:11:14
And this has been a really fun podcast to be able to do.
1:11:17
So appreciate it.
1:11:19
- Brad, great.
1:11:20
- Coming on Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
1:11:22
- Thank you, Kyle.
1:11:23
- There you go, guys.
1:11:24
I hope you enjoyed my time with Brad Gray.
1:11:25
But before we let you go,
1:11:26
we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
1:11:28
Add Undaunted Life, our mission is equipping men
1:11:30
to push back darkness with content
1:11:31
that forges spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
1:11:34
So the three links I've got for you today,
1:11:35
I've got a link to walking the text website,
1:11:37
the website for the sacred thread.
1:11:39
And then something we didn't talk about specifically
1:11:40
on this podcast,
1:11:41
but he does have a book out called Make Your Mark,
1:11:43
Getting Right What Samson Got Wrong.
1:11:45
So there's a link to where you can pick that up there.
1:11:47
Thank you guys for listening to this episode,
1:11:49
wherever you're listening to this,
1:11:50
please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five-star review.
1:11:53
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1:11:54
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1:11:56
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1:11:58
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1:12:01
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1:12:04
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1:12:09
And as always,
1:12:10
we want to thank the band August Burns Red
1:12:11
for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:12:13
The music on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Tides,"
1:12:16
which is off their 10th anniversary
1:12:17
recording of their album "Leveler."
1:12:19
The links are in the description.
1:12:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:12:23
Remember, keep pushing back darkness,
1:12:26
keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:12:29
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:12:32
(upbeat music)
1:12:47
♪ You'll be revived ♪
1:12:51
(upbeat music)