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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:51
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:53
Let's get into it.
0:54
All right, guys.
0:55
We've got a special guest on the podcast today.
0:57
His name is Russell Burger.
0:58
He is a former chief knowledge officer and spokesman for the fitness gym brand CrossFit.
1:03
And he was fired in 2018 for tweeting in defense of a CrossFit franchise owner that
1:07
canceled an LGBTQ pride theme to work out for religious reasons.
1:11
So in the podcast, we go into the backstory just a little bit, but the gym in question
1:15
is CrossFit infiltrate in Indianapolis.
1:18
And the gyms manager and the staff created an LGBTQ pride theme to work out.
1:23
That was going to be done during the first week of so-called pride week there in June
1:26
of 2018.
1:27
Now that was the plan until the gym owner, a guy named Brandon Lowe canceled the workout.
1:32
So he sent out a statement.
1:34
He emailed this out to all the gym members concerning the cancellation.
1:37
Here is a statement.
1:38
Our underlying goal for the staff and members at CrossFit infiltrate and our other gyms
1:43
is total health and well-being for the individual and community.
1:47
Total health involves the body, the emotions, relationships, and the spirit.
1:52
As the foundational detractor from health as we believe God sets the parameters for is
1:56
pride.
1:57
We believe that true health forever can be found within humility, not pride.
2:03
Humility is seeing oneself as they truly are and as God truly defines them to be.
2:08
As a business, we will choose to deploy our resources towards those efforts and causes
2:12
that line up with our values and beliefs.
2:15
So wouldn't you know it, shock of all shocks?
2:17
The Woke LGBTQ mob didn't like this one bit.
2:20
They came after him, it was kind of like this crazy thing that went on.
2:23
All of his trainers and managers quit basically at the same time and most of their clients
2:28
canceled their memberships and the harassment of the gym owner continued until he eventually
2:32
had to close his gym down and I think he had to close down his other gyms as well.
2:36
Now all that sounds like it was plenty dramatic and disruptive on its own.
2:40
But everything kicked off or kicked up a notch rather when CrossFit's Russell Burger, who
2:44
again is a guest today, he tweeted.
2:48
And I know we live in an era where when you tweet things, that's like currency to people
2:51
that hate you, right?
2:53
But he tweeted support for CrossFit infiltrates owner and his decision.
2:58
So here's the tweet.
2:59
As someone who personally believe celebrating pride is a sin, I'd like to personally encourage
3:03
CrossFit infiltrate for standing by their convictions and refusing to host and pride
3:09
workout essentially.
3:10
So he also tweeted that, you know, the tactics of the LGBTQ movement towards dissent, it's
3:14
a clear and existential threat to the freedom of expression.
3:19
But he deleted those tweets and we talked about some of the deleted tweets.
3:23
But then he did have this tweet that he put out later after he had deleted some and then
3:27
added some more.
3:28
He said, allow me to double down.
3:30
I believe indie pride is a celebration of sin as do most Christians.
3:34
I deleted this and reposted a different version to make sure it's clear these are my personal
3:38
beliefs, you know, since the Twitter mobs are hard at work trying to get me fired.
3:43
So again, you know, there's kind of that line, like, okay, is he tweeting on behalf of CrossFit
3:47
or is he tweeting on behalf of his own personal opinions?
3:50
But these tweets did put him in hot water with his employer CrossFit.
3:53
And within a few hours, you know, they, they went from suspending him pending an investigation
3:57
to basically coming out and firing him same day as all this stuff went down.
4:02
The CrossFit CEO at the time, Greg Glassman came out and actually called burger a zealot.
4:07
And it wasn't long.
4:08
And again, that before he was fired, it was just kind of this crazy, a dramatic thing.
4:13
Now he's one to tell you and he'll tell you in this interview today that that was a great
4:16
experience for him.
4:17
He got him out of a job that he was, you know, never going to leave and it wasn't the best
4:21
fit for him.
4:22
He went into ministry, but he didn't always start out, you know, as a Christian, you know,
4:25
he grew up as a fairly egregious atheist or, you know, combative atheist, I guess you could
4:31
say and then found his way into agnosticism and then eventually found his way to Christ
4:35
as well.
4:36
And so in this interview, we talked about an entire situation, the process of being caught
4:41
up in something like that.
4:43
Why do you even tweet?
4:45
Does he regret it?
4:46
What would he do differently if he could go back now?
4:49
What it's like whenever you're being canceled.
4:51
I mean, this is 2018.
4:52
That seems like a million years ago, but what was it like back then when you're being canceled
4:56
by these people that just hate you and also, you know, what about diversity because CrossFit
5:01
claims to be the super diverse brand, but apparently not diverse of all different types
5:05
of opinions.
5:06
And so we get into all that.
5:08
We get into his ministry work that he's doing now.
5:10
We talk a lot about, you know, masculinity inside the church and how discipleship and
5:14
true masculine discipline is going to kind of lead to masculinity within the church.
5:19
I really, really enjoyed my time with him today.
5:20
So guys, without further ado, let's get into it.
5:24
Russell Berger, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
5:27
Thanks for having me, Kyle.
5:28
I'm glad to be here.
5:30
So let's let's actually start early on in life because we talked a little bit off air,
5:34
but athleticism, activity, that's kind of been a part of who you are even as an adult,
5:40
been a part of your career.
5:41
And we'll of course get into all of that, you know, that's the stuff that I talked about
5:44
in the intro.
5:45
But let's talk about early life.
5:47
Like have you always been active?
5:48
Have you always been athletic?
5:49
Like what was what was that connection for you?
5:51
Cause like I didn't grow up in a family of athletes.
5:53
I was the only athlete.
5:55
So it wasn't like I, you know, I came by it honestly, I just kind of fell into it.
5:59
Yeah, I definitely didn't grow up in a family of athletes per se.
6:04
I grew up in the Southeast.
6:07
I bounced around a lot as a kid because my dad was in the Navy.
6:11
And everywhere we ended up living was generally pretty rural and we usually had a lot of woods
6:16
to play in.
6:17
And so my athletic background is running around in the woods, climbing trees, throwing rocks
6:22
at stuff and fighting other kids.
6:25
So surprisingly if you end up as a startling well, yeah, you can't do that stuff now.
6:29
I don't know.
6:30
Yeah, exactly.
6:31
No, I had like a real Tom Sawyer upbringing.
6:36
So that's, I mean, my athletic abilities in my backgrounds were really not sports based.
6:41
It was just real play, you know, kids doing what kids do.
6:45
So the idea of going outside without shoes on and running for two hours was just, I mean
6:50
that was just daily life.
6:52
Climbing trees pull ups.
6:53
I could always do pull ups as a kid because that's what I did every time we climb stuff.
6:57
When I was a little older, my grandfather got me into pole vaulting.
7:02
He's a pole vaulting coach.
7:04
And so every kid that comes through our family has to pull it's sort of like a rite of passage.
7:09
So I did that during the summers for a few years.
7:13
I did some, you know, some tee ball as a kid.
7:16
So a little bit of a soccer, I didn't stick with anything.
7:21
We didn't have the money for any kind of sport that required purchasing equipment.
7:24
So there were a lot of things that were off the table.
7:28
And yeah, I mean, that's really it.
7:30
I didn't really actually start doing sports in any sort of meaningful sense until high
7:36
school and even there I was inconsistent.
7:39
I didn't like to show up to practice his own time.
7:41
So it didn't work out for me, so.
7:44
So I'm getting the sense that you're a bit of a knucklehead.
7:47
But you know, and you kind of like kept that going on into adulthood, which is a good thing
7:51
and we'll get to that.
7:52
But also kind of a big part of your story, Russell, is your personal faith.
7:56
And so everyone kind of has there when I became a Christian moment or realization.
8:01
But for you, if I remember correctly, you also went to seminary if I remember correctly
8:05
from your bio.
8:06
So I know we're just going to be scraping the surface on that part of it.
8:09
But like, give me the 30,000 foot view about how you became a Christian and kind of how
8:13
like, and I guess correct the record if I was incorrect about seminary, but how that's
8:17
kind of been a central point of your entire life.
8:20
Yeah, so I attended seminary, didn't graduate, just kind of sort of collecting classes here
8:25
and there.
8:26
But I did go to Bible College rewinding many years.
8:31
So as a kid, as you could kind of pick up, I was stubborn and I was a contrarian.
8:36
So if somebody told me there's a rule here, don't do this.
8:40
That was sort of like a personal challenge to see if I could do it without getting caught
8:44
or how close to doing it, I could get away with without actually breaking the rule.
8:50
And so to be in the Bible Belt South, with that sort of character, I really, from a young
8:56
age, really very openly rejected Christianity.
9:01
So I had a lot of friends who were Christians, at least in name, one of my friends growing
9:06
up around the eight, nine years old, his dad was a pastor of a Methodist church.
9:12
And my mom at the time would kind of drag us along to small little Baptist churches on
9:17
Sunday mornings.
9:20
And she's not a Christian, but she just sort of saw this as like the cultural thing to
9:25
do in the South.
9:26
And so every step of the way I found reason to dig my heels in and say, "No, that's not
9:31
me.
9:32
I'm not a Christian.
9:33
I don't believe in God.
9:34
I don't want to be a part of that because that's just the thing that people do around
9:38
me and I've got to be different."
9:40
My dad was an atheist.
9:41
He was raised Roman Catholic and the Roman Catholic church produces a lot of good atheists
9:47
is my experience.
9:48
And so he from a very early age, he was kind of discipling me in atheism, kind of teaching
9:54
me how to be the free thinking, rational kind of atheists that can take down silly Christian
10:02
arguments and expose it as just blind faith and foolishness.
10:08
And that's the attitude I took.
10:09
And I ran with that all the way through my teenage years, got out of high school, didn't
10:15
really know what I was doing, didn't have the money for college, didn't have the aspiration
10:21
to go to college, saw a lot of my friends go into college and wasting time and doing
10:25
stupid stuff I didn't want to be a part of.
10:28
And so I joined the army, this was 2003, 2004, just a couple years after 9/11.
10:37
And so I wanted to go kill terrorists and so I joined the army.
10:41
I was selected in the first range of Italian and spent four years getting deployed every
10:49
six months to 90 day deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
10:53
I met my wife.
10:55
We got married.
10:56
I was living in Savannah, Georgia, and around this time, there's just something about living
11:01
on the edge of death, hanging out of helicopters, getting shot at, that just sort of, even
11:07
as a very stubborn atheist, it just kind of, it calibrated my senses a little bit more
11:13
towards agnostic, having to face death and the thought of death, maybe just a little
11:18
bit more open to the reality of, maybe I will meet a creator someday.
11:26
Maybe there is someone who is behind all of this, who is keeping me alive right now.
11:33
So after that, I got out, kind of had the American dream, I had a house, I had a wife,
11:38
had two little babies at home, had a good job, I was working for CrossFit.
11:45
And really at that point in my life, I was making a tremendous idol out of my job and
11:53
out of my athletic success, and those two went pretty close together because it was CrossFit.
11:59
And I put so much of my time and my effort and my talent into being the best at my job
12:04
and being the best athlete that I was really leaving my family kind of high and dry.
12:09
And at a time when my wife, with two little babies at home and she was starting to have
12:14
some health issues, she really needed me there and my kids needed me there and I was just
12:19
not there for them.
12:21
And out of nowhere, I got hit with the overwhelming conviction that I was in sin.
12:28
Which as an atheist, really didn't make sense.
12:31
Here I am an atheist, I'm captain of my own destiny.
12:35
There is no God, I am just a combination of pieces of stardust banging around in a universe
12:43
governed by time and blind chance.
12:45
And here I am feeling like there's some rule that applies to me and my behavior that I
12:50
didn't agree to, that does not comport with an atheist's worldview.
12:55
And yet I couldn't shake it.
12:56
So this is a thing that I didn't want to believe and I didn't think I believed.
13:00
And yet I had this external moral conviction that I was in sin and that I would someday
13:07
give an account for my sin and the way that I was treating my wife and my kids.
13:11
And I spent about two or three months just in this terrible state of anxiety and frustration
13:19
and just not really sure how to deal with that.
13:22
And then I actually was doing a crossfit competition, it was one of the regional competitions
13:27
to go to the crossfit games.
13:29
And I had a terrible time and I was still wallowing in this anxiety and this feeling
13:35
of moral guilt that I couldn't shake.
13:38
And I met Rich Farron, who was a multiple crossfit games champion.
13:43
At the time nobody knew who he was, he hadn't won anything yet.
13:47
And now he was a Christian and when I saw him I had a little bit of like a jealousy.
13:51
Like this guy is very similar in his desires to just be the best.
13:57
But he's not wearing it around like an idol.
14:00
I didn't know that word but I knew the difference.
14:04
He was content with what God was giving him.
14:06
He was content to win or lose and he had sort of this piece about him that I was really,
14:11
I was envious of.
14:13
And so even in my desire to kind of know God and him drawing me to himself, it was still
14:18
governed by selfish ambition.
14:20
I wanted things that would make me feel better.
14:23
It just goes to show that we're sinners through and through.
14:28
So I realized like, okay if he's got this sense of peace and he seems like the kind of guy
14:33
I want to be, maybe that would be the solution to this anxiety I'm feeling, this guilt.
14:38
And so I started reading my Bible.
14:39
And so every night when I was putting my infant son to bed I would open up the Bible by headlamp
14:45
and I would start reading.
14:47
And I read through Genesis, I read through the Old Testament, I got into the New Testament.
14:51
I didn't have anybody telling me how to read the Bible.
14:54
So I just treated it like any old book, page one, page two, page three.
14:59
And as I was reading it, I unmistakably heard God speaking to me, which I didn't expect
15:07
as an atheist either.
15:08
And I was reading it and realizing this is a different kind of book that I've ever read.
15:15
It had an authority and it had a cohesion to it that I didn't expect.
15:22
And I hadn't read the Bible.
15:23
I had a Bible on my shelf since I was a teenager, I'd never opened it up.
15:26
Despite all of my claims that I knew Christianity in and out and knew how false and foolish
15:31
it was, I never actually read my Bible.
15:33
Yeah, so when I read it, I was convicted of its truth.
15:37
I didn't really know what to make of that though because I didn't have anybody to disciple
15:40
me.
15:41
I'd never had the gospel presented to me clearly.
15:44
So as I'm reading it, I'm sort of starting to get the picture of what the gospel is.
15:48
But it still took many months of me sort of fumbling through the pages of scripture before
15:55
I heard a clear presentation of the gospel.
15:59
And so I'm not even really sure when in there I was saved, but when I was, I realized I moved
16:04
from thinking, "Okay, these things are true."
16:08
So there was at least six months where I decided Christianity was true.
16:12
But I wasn't really a Christian.
16:15
The idea that you believe it's true and that makes you a Christian is not really biblical.
16:20
James says even the demons know that God exists and they shudder.
16:26
But when I recognized that Christ had died for me and that if I trusted in him and believed
16:33
on him and put my love and affection and my trust in his person and in his work, that
16:39
all that he accomplished for sinners would be applied to me.
16:43
That's when I really changed and my life changed.
16:46
My wife could see it.
16:47
People who used to know me could see it.
16:50
And that process was slow and it was painful and I don't know exactly what had happened,
16:54
but it was over about the course of the year.
16:56
And so from there I went to Bible College.
16:58
I was still not in a healthy church.
17:00
I didn't have anybody discipling me.
17:02
So I figured, hey, I got the GI Bill, I pulled out of the secular school that I was in and
17:07
I started going to Bible College and the rest is history there.
17:12
Well, I really appreciate you going into all that detail because I know a lot of people
17:16
have been on a similar journey.
17:18
I guess you could say one quick thing and I don't want to divert too much from what
17:22
I wanted to talk about today.
17:24
But you mentioned something early on there, Russell, about Catholicism and how you know
17:28
a lot of people that are, it's almost like people that are culturally Jewish, but they
17:32
have no connection to the Jewish faith.
17:35
There's something very similar to that within Catholicism where you're raised Catholic,
17:39
but you have nothing even fathomably close to a belief in even God, much less the gospel.
17:46
And even you have people like Joe Biden that are good Catholics, but they believe in things
17:51
and advocate for things that are literally antithetical to what we see in scripture.
17:56
And just a little bit more about that because I know some truly devout Catholics, Catholics
18:01
that give me a hard time for being Protestant and I give it right back to them.
18:05
But there seemingly is a massive problem with cultural Catholicism.
18:09
Yeah.
18:10
So when we talk about Catholicism, it's important to not talk about it as a monolith as if everyone
18:18
who is Roman Catholic believes and thinks the same things or even believes and thinks
18:22
the things that the Catholic Church teaches.
18:26
So there's a lot of diversity within Roman Catholicism, much to their chagrin.
18:34
The main thing is that the gospel as taught formally by the teachings of the Roman Catholic
18:40
Church is a false gospel.
18:41
That's why we had the Protestant Reformation which split with the Catholic Church over
18:46
the distinction between God's grace being necessary for our salvation, which both Protestants
18:54
and Catholics would agree with, versus God's grace being sufficient for our salvation,
19:00
which only Protestants believe and it's what the Bible teaches.
19:03
Now having said that, I know Roman Catholics who I think are Christians who believe the
19:09
true gospel and that's not because of the teaching of the Catholic Church, that's in
19:13
spite of the Catholic Church's formal teaching.
19:17
So like I said, there's a lot of diversity within the Roman Catholic Church, but Roman
19:21
Catholicism has also for centuries been sort of at the forefront of the culturally Christian
19:28
nominalism that we now see all over the Bible Belt.
19:32
So people who call themselves Roman Catholic, what they'll often mean is that's my tribe.
19:38
That's my family.
19:39
Those are the people who I identify with.
19:41
That's how I was raised, but there is no personal saving faith or conviction.
19:47
They've perhaps never even read their Bible, which I've encountered Catholics who didn't
19:52
really know much about the Bible at all because like modern Jews, it's almost their ethnicity.
19:59
It's their tribe.
20:00
And so when you interact with Catholics, it's always good to ask them personally, what do
20:05
you believe?
20:06
What do you mean by saying you're a Catholic or you're a Christian?
20:09
I think the thing that's important as well is you need to listen earnestly and you need
20:13
to listen from almost like an intellectually neutral position to just understand kind of
20:17
where they're coming from.
20:18
Because I know within Protestantism, there are so many different denominations that say
20:21
things differently.
20:23
If you were to walk into a goodness, like maybe a more reformed Baptist type circle, and if
20:29
you were to say something like, I accepted Jesus into my heart, they would look at you
20:33
like you had a boob on the top of your head, they'd be like, what does that mean?
20:37
You accepted or you'd like the best acceptor ever?
20:40
Like when you use different language, people are going to kind of come to it a little bit
20:44
differently.
20:45
But I do want to talk a little bit more about where you introduce that you worked for CrossFit.
20:50
So you were a CrossFit athlete, you were competing in CrossFit, but you also worked there.
20:54
You're the chief knowledge officer.
20:56
But mainly the reason why people that are outside of the CrossFit community came to know your
21:01
name is because of something that happened in June of 2018.
21:05
And I'll flow on in a little bit, and then you can fill in details here and there.
21:09
But essentially, there was a CrossFit gym or box called CrossFit Infiltrate in Indianapolis.
21:15
And they were planning to do a pride themed workout again, June, June is pride month,
21:21
you know, all the things that come along with that and it gets worse and worse every year.
21:25
But the gym owner, so the person that planned it as far as I understand it was a manager
21:29
of the gym and the staff and trainers at the gym planned this pride themed workout.
21:34
But the owner of the gym, Brandon Lowe, canceled the workout, okay?
21:38
And he sent a letter or an email out to the community basically saying that we're not
21:43
going to be doing this and he gave his reasons for that.
21:46
But you came out and tweeted in support of Brandon Lowe.
21:51
And there were people like, "Wait a minute, is Russell tweeting on behalf of CrossFit?
21:56
Is he tweeting as just an individual that can have his own opinions and has free speech
22:01
to do so?"
22:02
But you publicly came out and you touched the third rail as it were and you came out in
22:08
support of somebody that was anti-not people that celebrate LGBTQ, but anti-the celebration
22:16
of pride in and of itself, specifically in that context.
22:20
So let's go back there and I've got several questions about some things that happened
22:23
in there.
22:24
But tell me about what it was like, how you found out about what CrossFit Infiltrate did,
22:30
why you decided to tweet about it and then we'll work from there.
22:33
Yeah, I don't want to disappoint.
22:36
There's not much to it.
22:37
Yeah, I got on Twitter one morning and I saw a bunch of shrill LGBTQ activists attacking
22:46
one of our CrossFit affiliates.
22:50
Not only was it my job and the company to defend our CrossFit affiliates, but I was
22:55
personally sympathetic to the owner as a Christian.
22:59
And so I tweeted that I supported him and that pride was a sin.
23:05
And this was in the heyday, the very early days of Twitter activism.
23:09
And I was one of the very first people that the LGBTQ mob, as it's come to be known, targeted
23:16
for, I don't know, they call it canceling now, they just want me fired.
23:21
And so they fired me and, well, they didn't fire me, they called for me to be fired and
23:25
the pressure was so enormous from externally that internally people buckled and started
23:32
sort of demanding the CEO fire me and it within a matter of hours he had so.
23:38
So I want to dig more into that certainly, but I want to go back to even just the thought
23:45
to tweet things because, you know, growing up, because we're about the same age, growing
23:48
up, there was no stream of consciousness to put your opinions out there.
23:53
Because if you had a thought, you left it in your brain because they're like, maybe
23:56
you had a Zenga page or something like that, but there was nowhere to kind of put that
23:59
thought.
24:00
Whereas now we have stream of consciousness Twitter where we can just, oh, I have this
24:04
thought and we can fart it out onto the internet.
24:07
But you put these tweets out there.
24:09
Obviously the mob immediately, you know, just like white blood cells attacking a virus or
24:13
something, they just they swarmed you, but you deleted your tweets, you deleted some
24:19
of them.
24:20
Another one, I guess, take me back to that time period and we'll get into the firing
24:25
and all the hubbub that happened there.
24:27
But if you could go back, would you leave up all the tweets?
24:31
Would you have even tweeted anything to begin with?
24:33
Would you have taken a different tact?
24:35
Because I think I saw somewhere where I read that you regretted tweeting it out to begin
24:39
with, but I just want to kind of get it from you.
24:42
Yeah.
24:43
Yeah.
24:44
So after I tweeted it, I did delete the tweets and I deleted them because my company asked
24:49
me to, this is prior to them threatening to fire me.
24:54
So we didn't have any policies at CrossFit for using personal social media accounts.
25:00
So there were no rules about how I couldn't tweet, whatever I wanted on social media.
25:06
But more than once, like I was saying things as a CrossFit spokesperson from my personal
25:12
accounts and that was actually encouraged.
25:15
And I would say things and there'd be feedback from other executives in the company and say,
25:21
hey, don't say it that way, say it this way, so I delete it and rewrite it.
25:25
And this was one of those instances where they thought, okay, you've kind of kicked
25:29
the hornet's nest, you need to delete that.
25:33
And because I'm talking to people who I respect as colleagues and they're saying delete it,
25:38
I was fine to delete it.
25:41
Not I know they were going to fire me, I would have kept it up.
25:44
I wasn't deleting it in any sense that I disagreed or regretted the words that I said and said
25:50
I was trying to help out my company to not basically have to put out fires that nobody
25:56
really wanted to be putting out.
25:58
Yeah, again, looking back, had I seen the writing on the wall and seen that they were
26:03
going to fire me, yeah, I definitely would have not deleted those tweets.
26:07
And then I did repeatedly say that I regretted putting my company in a position where they
26:13
felt like they had to defend and as an organization my particular views, which our process was
26:21
full of diverse political and religious views.
26:24
And so to put them in a position where they felt like they had to distance themselves
26:28
for me and explain their position on gay pride, which like what company needs a position
26:34
on gay pride.
26:35
These days you have to, but back then it was a thing like companies don't step into that
26:39
realm.
26:40
It's a company, which sounds so foreign these days, but you know, 2018 like you could still
26:46
be a company and not have a rainbow flag emoji on all your posts in June.
26:51
So yeah, I regretted putting a lot of my coworkers in that position where they were like, man,
26:56
I did not want to wake up this morning and have to tell the world how I feel about gay
27:00
stuff and you know, put out a position statement on this.
27:04
So I regretted that for their sake.
27:06
I know I regret and have never regretted my position saying pride is a sin.
27:13
Could I go back and redo it differently?
27:14
No, I wouldn't.
27:16
There are no what ifs in God's universe.
27:19
He sovereignly ordains everything that comes to pass and looking back now I can see how
27:22
he used that for tremendous good for me and my family.
27:27
It's probably one of the best things that's ever happened to me.
27:31
I didn't love that job and it was one of those jobs that was too good to quit.
27:35
I never would have quit.
27:37
And because I got fired, it really opened up an opportunity for me to do ministry, which
27:43
I'd been doing as a layover in my church and had wanted to be doing more.
27:47
And because they fired me illegally, I had severance, which I never would have gotten
27:51
otherwise.
27:53
And so I had the ability to transition into ministry in a way that it worked for my family.
27:58
Yeah, and one of the highlights of that whole thing was I got interviewed by a lot of mainstream
28:05
news sources and because I worked a lot with the media and I knew the tricks that they
28:14
employ, I was able to really pin some of them down to print some exact statements without
28:19
manipulating them.
28:20
And the Washington Post I think it was printed like a word-for-word what I said and it was
28:26
a clear proclamation of the gospel.
28:28
So there was some really good fruit that came from that despite it being an absolute mess
28:33
in some ways.
28:34
So I wouldn't change it.
28:36
Gotcha.
28:37
So I want to go back to something that you said there, Russell, about CrossFit having,
28:41
you know, a diverse type, many diversities of types of people and backgrounds and all
28:46
that that worked actually at CrossFit because the official CrossFit Twitter sent out this
28:52
tweet the day that you were fired.
28:55
CrossFit is a diverse community in every way and that's what makes us strong.
29:00
No matter who you are, how you're built, what you believe or who or how you love, we are
29:06
proud of you.
29:08
And so it seems like they have diversity for everyone except for conservative Christians
29:18
or just Christians in general.
29:20
It's a diversity of immutable characteristics and lifestyle choices, but not diversity
29:26
of thought.
29:27
So talk to me a little bit more about that because that is, that is at 645 p.m.
29:32
The day all this, you know, kerfluffle started, right?
29:36
And so like, imagine thinking that that, oh, we work in this very diverse place and then
29:42
you're literally fired because your version of diversity goes outside of what they feel
29:46
is acceptable.
29:47
Yeah.
29:48
I mean, it's not terribly surprising.
29:51
That statement wasn't terribly surprising.
29:52
I know it was, it's, it was just sort of a canned predictable PR move.
29:59
You know, somebody looked around and said, hey, what are, what are big companies doing
30:03
when somebody gets accused of being a bigot and oh, they say something like this?
30:08
And so they threw that up there to appease the mob and that's, that's the whole motivation.
30:13
Like, what does the mob want to hear?
30:15
Well, the mob wants to hear something like this.
30:16
So that's where you get that statement.
30:19
The internal inconsistency of that statement, just the utter foolishness of saying we're
30:24
such a diverse and accepting group of people that we have to fire someone who is not fitting
30:29
the mold of what we believe, but it's self-evidently absurd, it's self-contradictory and, but that's
30:36
the thing.
30:37
No one cares about whether it's self-contradictory because we're not looking for rational logical
30:44
consistency in, in this world.
30:46
We're looking for emotivism, right?
30:48
We want to say the right virtue signaling things that will appease the right group of
30:52
people and emotion dictates that not reason.
30:57
And I think the, the thing that's important for that is again, do you have someone that
31:01
went to school for PR, they went to university for PR and they're just like, okay, we need
31:06
to follow the mold because everything doesn't fall into the, you know, what Tylenol did with
31:11
the cyanide poisoning back in the day.
31:13
Like we kind of live in different times, but something that you talked about earlier, it's
31:17
just overall what, what Twitter activism became, okay?
31:23
Because again, 2018 seems like it may as well be a billion years ago because that's pre-COVID,
31:28
that's pre George Floyd, that's pre this, that's pre that.
31:31
And this was really at a time when you didn't have every single sports franchise changing
31:38
their logo on Instagram in the month of June, right?
31:43
So there's not a sport where you can get away from it, whether you're, you're watching the
31:46
NBA or F1, everybody has to show their, their woke LGBTQ bona fides during this time period.
31:53
But let's go back if we can to 2018 and the way back machine, what was it like specifically
32:00
when the LGBTQ plus mafia came after you?
32:03
Because again, today we kind of know what it looks like they, they call and try to cancel
32:07
your advertisers if you're Tucker Carlson or they'll, they'll try to get you fired from
32:11
your job or they'll just basically smear you in the media because they know that you basically
32:15
can't sue them for libel or slander.
32:18
Yeah, you know, it wasn't surprising to me, I've worked in social media for CrossFit for
32:24
a couple of years and doing some kind of, kind of novel stuff that, I mean, at the time
32:30
it was now, it's just how people use social media.
32:34
But we saw a lot of what was building up, I say we, me and my coworkers in social media
32:41
there at CrossFit, we saw a lot of the bad ways that social media was trending, in particular
32:47
like the advent of the retweet and the way you started being able to reverberate sentiments
32:56
and create these, the swarming effect around certain ideas and posts and shared posts.
33:05
What it did, what it did, and what we recognized pretty early that it was doing, is it amplifies
33:09
a very shrill minority and gives the illusion that they are the majority.
33:17
And we see this all the time now and I think few people really understand the significance
33:20
of what I'm saying and that is, you can take a hundred people that have nothing to do all
33:27
day today except share and comment and downvote and threaten related to some particular Twitter
33:35
storm and that hundred people can convince multi-million dollar companies that the world
33:40
hates them.
33:42
And yet there's thousands and thousands of people who are more reasonable have stuff
33:47
to do with their daily life, probably don't care enough to comment on issues either way
33:52
who are silently observing but those companies only see the negative interactions and so
33:57
they get the sense that everyone hates us, we have to do something.
34:01
And so the virtue signaling mafia, LGBTQ mafia like the swarm effect that they are able to
34:09
use and it's really not just them, there's, there are people who do this in every part
34:15
of the ideological spectrum with social media, it really is just a shrill minority and most
34:21
instances people would do best to just ignore them and make them go away.
34:25
And you started to see that the amplification was even more built on by the media who stopped
34:31
reporting on news and started reporting on the things on Twitter people were talking
34:38
about that that had become the news.
34:40
So rather than there being a news event, oh and by the way people here are upset about
34:43
it, the news events were the upset people on Twitter.
34:47
Right.
34:48
So you get a double effect there where now the mainstream corporate media is doubling
34:51
down on this amplification effect and really like I went out when I worked for CrossFit
34:57
and we documented some of this, we would go count, look at some of these Twitter storms
35:03
where people were getting outraged about something and look at the media's response and then
35:06
we'd go back retrospectively and we count how many original users on Twitter were actually
35:11
contributing to these things and it would be something like 100, 200, it's a handful
35:16
of people who are bringing companies to their knees and so these companies have all bowed
35:22
to the idol of social justice and LGBTQ ideology because their perception is so skewed by their
35:29
fixation on social media as the new public square and there are thousands of them, thousands
35:36
of Americans who want nothing to do with that, they stay out of that stuff that are just sort
35:40
of the silent majority as it's been called who are getting kind of ticked off of that
35:45
and I think you're starting to see some of that like with Bud Light.
35:49
It's a good example of the blowback there.
35:52
Well so Russell I literally wrote down Bud Light and I wrote down Adidas and we'll see
35:56
with Adidas but one comment to what you were saying there is a lot of these, a lot of people
36:01
in general want to be thought nice.
36:04
They want to be thought of as nice and accommodating and that leads to a whole host of negative
36:09
things.
36:10
I was even thinking the other day about how do we get this generation of people that can't
36:13
lose?
36:14
Like they literally just like if if someone tries to push against them it's the worst thing
36:18
that could possibly happen.
36:20
Well it's because well-meaning people were like well kids won't be able to develop self-esteem
36:25
if they lose and literally the exact opposite is true is you only develop self-esteem when
36:30
you accomplish something that you worked towards like I've been on teams that won zero games
36:35
and I've been on championship undefeated teams and you learn a lot from both of those circumstances
36:40
but you need both of those circumstances.
36:42
But let's talk a little bit about what's happening.
36:45
We've seen with Bud Light we've seen what happened with Dylan Mulvaney and that's still that's
36:49
going to have reverberations for months if not years within the brand of anheuser bush
36:54
and the greater brand of maybe even beer in general everyone kind of knows what happened
36:59
in that situation but conservatives said you know what screw you guys we're not we're
37:03
not playing this game like I can buy cheap beer from somebody else and you know some
37:08
people are like this isn't that big a deal why are they doing this but it was like and
37:13
I've said this for a while Russell conservatives and Christians have been pushed and pushed
37:18
and pushed and pushed and their backs are against the wall and used to it was like hey
37:21
you see you better not keep pushing me say or you'll make me angry you see and now it's
37:26
like no we're going to start pushing back and as I told you off air on Dante life is
37:29
here to equipment to push back darkness that doesn't mean you go around constantly looking
37:34
for a fight but when a fight brings itself to your front door you're ready to throw down
37:39
and so conservatives are pushing back on Bud Light and they're not buying Bud Light we'll
37:43
see how that goes Adidas they have male models that are modeling their women's swimwear so
37:50
dudes with Dixon Balls are sitting there with their big bulges inside of women's you know
37:55
swimwear and so it's like well Adidas isn't going to think about changing that unless
38:00
they lose 20% of their sales overnight unless they lose billions of dollars worth of market
38:06
valuation basically in a quarter talk to me a little bit more about what Christians and
38:11
conservatives can do because you have some people out there Russell that are like the
38:15
Benedict option people they just want they want to be completely outside of culture they don't
38:19
want to be salt and light they don't want to preserve culture they want to be outside
38:22
of it they want to you know make their own shoes and they want to do their own thing
38:26
and they don't actually want to push back in the fight inside a culture I knew I threw
38:30
a lot out there but go ahead yeah yeah I guess one of my first thoughts when we start approaching
38:38
the subject of Christians interacting with culture is is local you know you're not you're
38:45
not going to change America but you might change your your neighborhood and you might
38:49
change the attitudes of people in your local church you might get all the people in your
38:55
county to change policies at the local schools you may in fact gut your local schools and
39:00
start everybody's in Christian homeschool co-ops which would be my dream come true but
39:05
you know there's there's so much you can accomplish at the local level like I would love to make
39:10
local politics great again I would love to see a lot more autonomy and a lot more experimental
39:18
policy done at the local level I think we already see this nationally with with what's
39:23
happening in the States you know there's a huge I mean back when I was a kid you know
39:29
looking back at the politics of the United States and basically every state was kind
39:33
of the same in most ways now you have states on the extreme ends of the spectrum from Florida
39:41
and Texas and Tennessee on the right to California and New York and Washington on the left you
39:48
have some pretty wide ranges of diversity politically and then when you get down to county level
39:54
it only gets more diverse so I'm yeah I'm a big fan of focusing locally when it comes to
40:01
dealing with with big Woke companies and their their silly shenanigans you know there's I'm
40:08
not a huge fan of taking to the Twitter sphere to do the same thing that the Woke
40:13
culture warriors are doing and just haranguing people through social media I feel like that's
40:18
just spinning wheels and wasted effort I like to just encourage people to think about making
40:24
sacrifices and putting their money where their values are and it's surprising how many people
40:29
will be on paper utterly opposed to Adidas for their blending and basically their disdain
40:38
for God's design for gender and yet they'll go out and buy Adidas shoes for their kids
40:44
the next day you know they just you really do have to start making small sacrifices and
40:50
taking stands on the small things before you're going to see any effect in any big way I mean
40:57
I can't tell you how many Christians I know that have Disney+ subscriptions and it's freedom
41:02
of the conscience I'm not going to tell them they're wrong for that but me personally I
41:07
think Disney's vile enough that I'm okay not watching even some awesome Star Wars stuff
41:12
so I'm told you know I'm willing to give that up and as long as we're more interested in
41:18
being entertained then we are you know basically voting with our wallets I don't see Disney
41:24
going anywhere or changing a whole lot so so you know I tend to think of like the every
41:29
man kind of approach I don't have any big grand schemes for overthrowing the hedge money
41:35
of the pagan sexual cult that seems to be running our country but like every day things
41:42
that we can do like every man can do are spend your money in the right ways where your values
41:48
are get involved in local politics and school your children in a way that you want them
41:52
school and disciple I think it's important with that as well people will say things like
41:58
well I can't put Bud Light out of business so I'm just going to buy Bud Light it's like
42:03
you're right you individually cannot put Bud Light out of business but you get to choose
42:07
where you spend your dollars you get to choose where you point your attention you get to
42:11
choose how you influence your children and so years ago when I found out that Starbucks
42:16
was a massive donor to Planned Parenthood it's like I don't even drink coffee but it
42:21
was like in our household we will not support Starbucks and people are like well that's
42:25
crazy like you know this organization does it too and this organization does it too and
42:28
it's like look I'm going to be held responsible for what I know about not what I don't know
42:33
about and whenever there is a brand out there that I did know support something that I think
42:37
is heinous and egregious that's another opportunity for me to say hey we're not going to spend
42:43
our money there we're not going to support that and everything there there is a threshold
42:47
with everything you have to do things within reason if you're in a town that only has a
42:51
target and you need medicine for your kid and you know that type of scenario okay ignore
42:56
the chest binders as you walk by to get your your kids some medicine there is a greater
43:00
good here but you're absolutely right that the inconsistency the people that want to
43:05
just rail on the woke mob and oh they're coming after our kids but it's like you're
43:08
funding them coming after your kids that's the difference it's kind of like the Great
43:14
Commission you know every Christian is told essentially by Jesus through his words in
43:21
Matthew 28 go and make disciples of all nations teaching them to obey all that I've commanded
43:25
you baptizing them in the name of the Father Son and the Holy Spirit how are you doing
43:29
at that well not everyone needs to be a missionary to unreached peoples in Papua New Guinea
43:35
but day to day are you putting your resources your time your town your treasure into a church
43:42
that is supporting that are you taking opportunities to share the gospel with people who you know
43:49
in daily life art Christians you know what are those little things that you can do just
43:54
to be faithful where you are that's the same principle I think is just take what you've
43:59
been given be faithful where you can and leave it to God to fulfill the bigger picture through
44:05
people like you right and you you say that on a local level you you talked about things
44:10
being local because again we focus on national politics but we don't know what the name of
44:14
our mayor is like that's kind of the consistency or the the I guess environment that we live
44:19
in now yes but let's let's talk a little bit about ministry a little bit more about ministry
44:23
because yes you can have a tremendous impact in your house in your neighborhood in your
44:28
small group in your church in your local community as opposed to you know changing how politics
44:33
is done in Washington DC so after CrossFit you know you go through all that everything
44:38
kind of chills out for a little bit then you get more into ministry and you've kind of
44:42
kept that momentum going through even to today so you've been doing that for the last you
44:46
know five-ish years or so talk to me about ministry talk to me about the stuff that you're
44:50
working on now yeah so I was I mean I was a as I said my testimony I was a Christian
44:55
for a while before I had any real discipleship I bounced around the country working for CrossFit
45:02
ended up in some different churches of varying degrees of health really never in a healthy
45:08
church meaning there were churches I was hearing the gospel but they they really were not being
45:17
faithful to scripture in regards to like church membership helping people to apply the gospel
45:24
to their lives that you know the one another commands throughout the New Testament even
45:29
even in some of the the secondary issues of the faith things that are gospel imperatives
45:35
but some theological things that come from just being a church they just weren't encouraging
45:40
us to think through that some of the some of those things were wrong so I finally bounced
45:45
around enough in churches to realize okay there's got to be more to what God has instituted
45:53
this local church than showing up in sitting in a dark room to watch a rock band perform
46:00
and then hearing a 30 minute Ted talk that seems more about therapeutic use of the gospel
46:06
than what the Bible is actually saying and so that's when I started trying to learn what
46:12
the church is I met a really solid brother who's now my senior pastor at Sixth Avenue
46:17
Sean DeMars we actually met doing some so I was doing some ministry outside of our local
46:22
abortion clinic and we met on the sidewalk out there he knew of me from CrossFit and
46:28
so we hit it off pretty quickly and he kind of gave me some resources to help me think
46:33
through biblically what should a church look like how can a church be faithful to scripture
46:39
and not just be there to entertain and please itching years and he ended up coming back
46:44
after doing an internship in DC he came back and started past during a church in Decatur
46:49
and I joined as one of the early members there and served as a lay elder for few years this
46:55
was this is around the time I got fired from CrossFit and then I went off from there to
47:02
do the same internship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC so I lived on Capitol Hill like
47:07
inside of the Supreme Court in the Capitol building for about nine months and came back
47:14
to Huntsville, Alabama around the time COVID started which was an enormous blessing from
47:20
God because I would have been arrested in DC within a month of the COVID lockdowns and
47:27
so we were in pretty laid back Alabama where I would just not wear a mask and people would
47:32
give me mean looks and I would just laugh and no one cared so you know we in this environment
47:39
at this time my wife had some pretty serious health issues she was on a list for intestinal
47:43
transplant she had multi organ failure she was then moved under like palliative care sort
47:49
of a sort of a step before hospice where you're basically just saying this person is going
47:53
to die how can we make them comfortable and so I was her I was her caregiver full time
47:59
I didn't work really for a while because I couldn't and then in the Lord's kindness
48:04
we had some pretty big breakthroughs she she had an immunologist diagnosed her with a sort
48:10
of a source of her organs being killed it was this thing called angioedemas it's kind
48:14
of in the family of allergic reactions but it's not the same and they got her this crazy
48:19
expensive drug that took like three months to get approved through insurance that she
48:25
just injected and once a week and it kind of kept her symptoms a day so she went into
48:30
remission she's in the last year she's got her driver's license back she's got quality
48:36
of life back she's doing pretty well despite not having any organs she's still dependent
48:41
on TPN like she has no digestive tract really so she's dependent on her nutrition coming
48:46
through a line that goes right near her heart so she's frail she's got a lot of health issues
48:50
but she's way more independent than she was and so I've been free to to work again and
48:56
so I did some secular work for about a year just because I needed a job it it basically
49:02
became untenable and everybody I knew was like yeah you really should be a ministry
49:07
that's why you're miserable and so in in God's providence the church had an opportunity and
49:12
the funding and the need to hire me and so I've been working as an assistant pastor at
49:18
Sixth Avenue Church for like a week now and prior to that it was a pastoral assistant
49:24
until the church had voted to our gandy okay very good well I'm glad to hear that things
49:29
are going better for your wife obviously that's I mean we could talk a whole lot more about
49:33
that but that seems absolutely terrifying when you also have kids and you know you have
49:37
to you know you like to eat food and live indoors like that's a lot of stress to have but let's
49:43
talk a little bit more about church and about ministry yeah because one thing that's I guess
49:47
you could call it a calling card of undaunted life is we will call out cowardice and a femininity
49:55
inside of churches inside of ministries inside of individual men and we want to there's kind
50:02
of this clanging bell of men's ministries that like everything they do is about let's
50:09
see me let's go sleep on the ground let's go do all that and it's like that stuff's fine
50:14
like I'm I'm all for a lot of that stuff but they're not getting the buy-in from the men
50:19
of their churches and then you have churches that if they do quote unquote men's ministry
50:24
at all what they mean by that is once a year we're gonna do a cookout and we're gonna do
50:30
a chili cookoff and we're gonna bring in an ex football player to come in and talk about
50:34
how he used to you know snort coke off a stripper's bottoms and and now he doesn't do that anymore
50:39
because of Jesus right like that's that's kind of what men's ministry is but then they
50:44
go the other 364 days of running a church and the church itself is not man friendly and
50:50
so when churches talk to me and ask me about you know how do we get our men engaged and
50:53
how we do all this I'm like well first of all don't pretend like you have a men's ministry
50:57
you don't second of all don't even try to build a men's ministry because it's not going to
51:01
work build a man friendly church from top to bottom from the man on stage the senior pastor
51:09
with the microphone attached to his face to the music that is sung the lyrics in those
51:15
songs the key that they are sung in maybe make it a key that a man can actually hit and that
51:22
is like really having an impact on churches to where they're like for the first time ever
51:27
they're like oh my gosh I've never even considered the fact that the lyrics to this song sound
51:31
homo erotic to a guy that's why he doesn't know why but he just sits there with his hands
51:36
in his pockets because the song is making him deeply uncomfortable but talk to me a little
51:41
bit about just really the state of manhood inside of Christ church you know I guess we'll
51:46
keep it specifically to America yeah oh wow that's that's a broad subject so just some
51:53
thoughts right off the top of my head yeah I think evangelical churches tend to fall into
51:59
some common tropes you know you see it every Mother's Day a church will make a huge ordeal
52:07
out of Mother's Day just fawning over the sacrifice of Mother's how important they are
52:13
this and that which is I think I think good but then you see them do the same thing on
52:19
Father's Day and Father's Day is admonishing fathers for never doing enough and not being
52:24
there enough you know there's this kind of this this sentiment this posture towards man
52:30
that I think is more reflective of the culture we live in than it is of anything biblical
52:37
and I've seen that from time to time within evangelical churches you know I also think
52:44
I know what you're talking about with some of the ephemeracy you know there's so many
52:50
churches are their philosophy of ministry is how many people can we get in a building
52:56
if we can get a bunch of people in this building it will be a successful church and we measure
52:59
the health of our church by how many people are showing up on a Sunday morning well there's
53:03
a lot of stuff you can do to get people to show up in a building that's not biblical that's
53:08
not faithful to God that doesn't convict anyone of sin that doesn't save anyone it just gets
53:14
people to show up and one of the things people love is just sort of feel good therapeutic
53:19
emotionalism you can get a lot of people in a building for that but a lot of the people
53:24
you get in the building won't be your typical men who don't thrive on therapeutic feel good
53:30
emotionalism so I think some of what we're seeing is that it's not that the church is
53:35
necessarily making men a feminist or not you know not considering more masculine men it's
53:43
just it's that they've their philosophy of ministry is so work that those men just aren't
53:47
interested in what they're giving and so I think one of the solutions just to go back
53:51
to sort of what I talked about earlier is just making churches healthier so if you have
53:56
a church that is not offering feel good therapeutic entertaining versions of the gospel and that
54:03
just preaches God's word that starts with telling men who they are in God's sight both
54:09
as image bearers of God created distinctly from women with God given masculine roles and
54:16
God given masculine attributes God given masculine strength and God given masculine weaknesses
54:23
that we are you know a very strong complementarian theology is going to make both women and
54:31
men want to hear more from God's word about what it means to be male and female and then
54:37
on top of that telling men that their sinners as God sees them you know they're in need
54:41
of a savior in need of a sacrifice to atone for their sin and in need of the righteousness
54:48
of Christ that is across all of humanity a truth that applies to every man and when those
54:56
things are missing or you are you water that down and make it more of an individual therapeutic
55:02
sort of expression of what the message of the gospel is you're not going to have things
55:08
that that men want and I think I think you can even see that even if the church is trying
55:14
really hard to have like a type a super macho masculine men's ministry you know hey guys
55:20
we're going to go out and we're going to lift some weights and we're going to go on a hike
55:23
and then we're going to shoot some guns and then we're going to sit around and we're going
55:27
to talk about this this parable Jesus top we're going to completely miss the point of the parable
55:31
and we're going to make it this emotionalistic therapeutic application that's really not what's
55:38
there in scripture you're not going to fix the problem that way and the reason for that
55:42
is because I think the church and we see even as people who see the problem we look around
55:49
and we see churches that are dominated by women that are they're more feminine in their
55:55
leadership and in the men that are there we see that and we think okay the solution is
56:01
we need masculine stuff we need to lift weights and we need to eat meat and we need to hike
56:07
in the woods and shoot guns and change car tires but none of that is inherently masculine
56:13
what the Bible says about being a man does not include those particular skillsets and
56:19
activities what the Bible says being a man is is rooted in Genesis the man protects the
56:26
man cultivates the man is head over the family the man represents the man takes responsibility
56:33
and blame and all of those things when when those are theologically applied to us as men
56:40
well guess what skills we develop to be good at those we learn to provide for our family
56:44
by hunting we learn to provide for our family by doing the dirty difficult jobs that were
56:49
hardwired to do like changing car tires and changing the oil in the car and fixing things
56:54
we're going to go out and put ourselves in harm's way because that's how God has wired
56:59
us as men and so if you if you put the car before the horse you pursue these masculine
57:03
activities without having to theological grounding to understand why men are drawn to that stuff
57:09
you're probably not going to fix your issue in the church.
57:12
I think as well with what the stuff that you're talking about like I think the way that I've
57:16
heard it said is moral therapeutic deism that's what we get from these Ted talk churches is
57:20
just this therapeutic deism that makes you feel decent about your sin maybe you'll make
57:25
some adjustments so that your business can thrive more in the next couple of quarters
57:29
but you're not really going to make any substantive life change and you mentioned there if you
57:32
know pastors and churches needing to teach men that they're sinners part of the thing
57:36
is they need to teach women the same thing one of the things I feel like when we worship
57:39
at the altar of women during motherhood is we're making them feel that yeah your depre
57:44
your depravity is different than men's because men's depravity is louder typically it's a
57:49
little bit more bombastic it's the same thing like whenever I talk about abortion at churches
57:53
it's like you can tell women that have had abortions that they are murderers and at
57:57
the same time not condemn that condemn them in that exact moment you're revealing to them
58:02
the depravity and the level of depravity of their sin so much so that they need a savior
58:07
to overcome that but one thing I jotted down as you were talking is I guess the main problem
58:12
that most churches have is there is no discipleship you mentioned that that how long were you
58:17
a Christian before you were discipled you know I've gone basically my entire Christian career
58:23
as it were not being discipled by other people now that could be a you problem certainly the
58:28
you the collective you but that can also be a church problem to where it's like okay our
58:32
men aren't volunteering our men aren't going on missions our men are doing this they're
58:37
not doing that it's like well are you discipling them to where they would even want to do those
58:42
things or are you producing a product as it were that may as well be a blinking neon sign
58:47
that says we don't have you in mind we don't need you because you know this just like I
58:51
do men that don't feel desired and needed will go somewhere where they feel desired and needed
58:57
whether that's into the arms of another woman whether that's to a new job if on Sunday morning
59:01
they don't feel like they have a place and guess what they're going to feel as opposed to being
59:05
a church they're going to go to the golf they're shooting range they're going to go to the driving
59:09
range they're going to go somewhere else they're going to hit the jujitsu mats they're going to go
59:13
do something else what is I guess for in a micro sense what is your church doing to make sure that
59:18
men are not falling through the cracks on discipleship and I guess what would your
59:22
greater advice be to the pastors listening to this of which there are several um to hey let's make
59:27
sure that we're discipling men so that everything else kind of falls into place oh yes step one
59:33
the primary discipling tool of God's church is the pulpit so if you're in a church that's not
59:38
preaching expositionally and if you don't know what that means you're probably in a church that's
59:42
not preaching expositionally you need to find a church that does so and preaching expositionally
59:47
just means that the pastor is going to be going through every line of scripture throughout a book
59:54
of the bible or or one of the you know one of the gospels one of the epistles one of the prophets
59:59
and explaining what the text means verse by verse and then applying that to the hearers to the
1:00:07
congregation and so an easy way to think about it is expositional preaching the point of the
1:00:12
sermon is the point of the text right so God is setting the curriculum God's word is setting
1:00:18
the curriculum of the sermons and of that congregational discipleship the alternative to that is you
1:00:23
get a guy who wants to get up and talk about something and he just uses scripture as a way to sort of
1:00:28
prop up what he's interested in talking about this you tend to think of it as the topical sermons
1:00:34
and topical sermons aren't wrong but if that's the primary diet of your church there's a really high
1:00:40
risk that you're not applying God's word in any meaningful way to some huge portion of your
1:00:45
congregation uh you're only you're only going to be teaching the congregation what the pastor
1:00:50
who's preaching wants to talk about and what that pastor thinks whereas if you have expositional
1:00:56
preaching then all of the counsel of God's word which is perfect and applies to men and women
1:01:01
as we need from God then that's going to be fed to them so that's number one number two
1:01:06
individual discipleship I mean it's not a program I see a lot of people say like yeah we need
1:01:14
discipleship so they come up with this 12 week structured book reading thing where that's not
1:01:20
that's not necessarily discipleship discipleship just means helping people learn to follow Jesus
1:01:24
better like so in our church we intentionally grab young guys and we grab lunch with them
1:01:32
and spend time with them and and when we do we don't waste time talking about foolish stuff
1:01:38
of the world we say hey uh how are you doing spiritually do you want to do you want to grab
1:01:43
a book and read it together and so we have a short list of books that are really easy to read
1:01:47
that help people develop and grow in godliness and in maturity and in understanding the gospel
1:01:53
and so we'll read that along with them grab lunch together again talk through it and in that since
1:01:59
you're opening the door to talk through all sorts of other things as well and we found that that's
1:02:04
to be a really effective thing to build a culture of godly men who are who aren't shy about reaching
1:02:12
out and then starting those same discipleship relationships with other men that are coming to
1:02:16
the church doing the same thing that some of some of the older men did with them um and so yeah we
1:02:21
we emphasize that culture of discipleship a lot it's not a program it is a culture so with that
1:02:28
culture there will be things that you should encouragement to do outside the church one thing
1:02:33
that i've encouraged men to do for years and years and years and tons of guys have i guess
1:02:37
converted to this is doing jujitsu when i talk about jujitsu because you know i'm a purple belt
1:02:42
i've been training for about six years it's one of those things i've never had a single thing in
1:02:47
my life that as as is as difficult and as addictive as jujitsu because is it physical yes is it mental
1:02:57
yes and that's the thing where you have some people that can dominate physically but if you're
1:03:02
not good mentally you will not be good at jujitsu there are people that can dominate mentally but
1:03:06
if you're not good physically you will not be good at jujitsu but we talk about resilience all the time
1:03:11
the thing about jujitsu is it's it's not the going that's the problem it's the coming back
1:03:16
right because there's a lot of guys that got their white belt and have one stripe on it right
1:03:20
but then they never got their blue belt or they got their blue belt and then they stopped going
1:03:24
they just they just got to a certain point they're like i'm good i feel decently dangerous enough
1:03:29
but the real question is or the real answer is not that they got busy with work it's not that
1:03:34
their family life got out of control it's that they wussed out they they stopped because this is
1:03:39
too hard it's too difficult like i can't see the light at the end of the tunnel and so i tell guys
1:03:44
like jujitsu if you're able-bodied like we have a guy that's in his 50s that just started at our
1:03:49
gym about six months ago like if your body works there's nothing better than i know of on this
1:03:55
planet to teach you how to be physically and mentally resilient and perhaps even spiritually
1:03:59
resilient than jujitsu you're a fellow jujitsu practitioner talk to me a little bit about that
1:04:05
like i try not to be romantic but about jujitsu but it's really hard not to be
1:04:09
yeah no i i love it uh i'm a brown belt i got a brown belt in 2019 uh my senior casters shawn
1:04:17
just got his brown belt um i i think it's fantastic um i think crossfit does something similar
1:04:25
um i like i like to use both of those i encourage people to do both of those so so shawn my senior
1:04:32
caster has a two car garage that's a dedicated crossfit gym and every member of the church is
1:04:37
is welcome to come to group workouts all the time and we have a lot of people in the church that do
1:04:41
we have jujitsu mats in the upper story of our church building that we we bring guys in who are
1:04:48
from the jujitsu school who are maybe they think they're christians maybe they know they're not a
1:04:53
christian but we just bring them in what we drill with on monday it's just to uh just to get more
1:04:57
time with them and start to try and provoke spiritual conversation so we use it as an evangelism tool
1:05:01
but we also use it as a tool for for men and women in the church uh crossfit and jujitsu uh because
1:05:09
a lot of people miss this but kind of what you said like there is an element of the physical
1:05:16
that overlaps with the spiritual in a really significant way and i've seen people who struggled
1:05:22
spiritually with anxiety and a fear of uh assurance like she's not having an assurance that that
1:05:29
god really was saving them that they you know their sins were were truly paid for and just doubting
1:05:35
themselves and you can spiritually counsel somebody like that to death and and just not get anywhere
1:05:42
suddenly they clean up their diet and they start lifting weights and they're like wow i feel good
1:05:45
now i i trust god and so there is an interesting spiritual and physical connection where the more
1:05:52
physically we're pushing ourselves and gaining confidence and capacity in something like grappling
1:05:58
fighting or or crossfit uh i love the quote from fight club like fight club uh just turns the
1:06:05
volume down on the rest of the world there's a very similar effect to training and difficult
1:06:11
physical context that suddenly all the other problems that are assailing you just seem a little
1:06:16
quieter and less of a big deal um and and there's something to be said for that in terms of spiritual
1:06:22
health you know the the darkest times i've ever had spiritually is when i couldn't make it to the
1:06:27
gym and stopped taking care of my body it stopped eating well um and is that is that a one-to-one
1:06:33
like i was spiritually suffering because i wasn't working out probably not but there's definitely a
1:06:37
connection so there's a contextualization as well with so whenever i lift and do my workouts and my
1:06:43
workouts are fairly insane and when i do jujitsu it's typically early in the morning so we have a 545
1:06:50
jujitsu where we roll first so we're rolling four or five rounds first and then we drill right so
1:06:55
it's kind of opposite of how most classes are or i'm lifting you know squat deadlift you know
1:07:00
bench presses you know pull it's like that that's kind of what i'm doing and then the rest of the day
1:07:05
regardless of what i have to deal with with the family with the business with the podcast it just
1:07:09
seems easier because i've checked the most difficult boxes even this morning russell this morning i
1:07:15
needed a squat and i'm about to have surgery and so it's like okay i need i need to knock this out
1:07:20
and it was one of those moments where i just sat on my bench and looked at my squat shoes my lifting
1:07:24
shoes and i was like no i just know i just i can't i can't today and you know what i did i put them
1:07:30
on and i squat it okay and i was just making that's a daily deposit in the resilience piggy bank to
1:07:37
where it's like one of these days i'm going to need to you know take some money out of the account
1:07:41
and there better be some there and so that's what i tell guys all the times it's like if you're
1:07:46
life if the hardest thing you do in life is carry your bucket of balls to the driving range
1:07:51
man like i i hate to see when things were to fall apart and i don't mean like global collapse
1:07:57
you know a civilization but it's like if you need to be resilient if your wife is so sick that
1:08:04
you're you're trying to consider what life would be like without her and you haven't made those
1:08:08
daily multiple times a day deposits in that resilience uh bank and that's one of the one of the easiest
1:08:14
ways to do that is to exercise really really really hard not going for a jog not doing a little
1:08:19
light lift or stretch in here and there but really really getting after it and man i feel like you
1:08:24
and i could continue talking for the rest of the day today but i've taken up enough of your time i
1:08:28
got to give some time back to your family you got stuff you need to be doing but that's all for me
1:08:32
is there anything else you want to get off your chest yeah i would just say one last thought is
1:08:37
that this is this is probably kind of unique but there's another ditch you can fall into with pursuing
1:08:43
masculine endeavors and that's kind of going all the way back to where i was before i was a
1:08:48
christian which was fitter than i've ever been like constantly lifting weights successful in my job
1:08:54
uh i just got out of the army i mean i i can hike and shoot and jump out of planes do everything i was
1:08:59
i was as masculine as i could be and by god's definition i was not i was profoundly not masculine
1:09:07
because i was uh making my whole life about me and i wasn't providing for and and leading my family
1:09:15
spiritually or really in any way and and so again like don't put the car before the horse you both
1:09:21
of those things in order to really thrive as a man i think that's a great uh a great word as well
1:09:27
because we're we're in this kind of we're not in a masculine obsessed culture we're in the exact
1:09:32
opposite but for those that are focused on it it can't become an obsession and you want to make
1:09:37
sure that you're obsessing over the right foundations and not the wrong one so that's a great word to
1:09:42
leave it all russell burger thank you for coming on dawn to life a man's podcast thanks god there you
1:09:47
go guys i hope you enjoyed my time with russell burger but before i let you go we are gonna do a
1:09:51
quick resilience boost add on dawn to life our mission is equipping men to push back darkness
1:09:55
with content that forges spiritual mental and physical resilience so i've got a couple links for
1:09:59
you today i've got a link to a faith wire article that came out around the time that he was being
1:10:02
canceled and then also i've got a link to his podcast he has a podcast called defend and confirm now
1:10:07
this has been dormant for a little bit but as i understand that he's going to be resurrecting this
1:10:11
here before too long so before that happens and before they relaunch it you can go back and listen
1:10:16
to the old episodes thank you guys for listening to this episode wherever you're listening to this
1:10:20
please subscribe rate and leave us a positive five star review if you want to come speak live
1:10:24
at your event or on your podcast you shoot me an email to info at undonton.life that's i-n-f-o
1:10:30
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everything else including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way just go to
1:10:37
www.undonton.life and as always we want to thank the band augustburns red for allowing us to use
1:10:42
their music for our content the music on this podcast is our song cutting the tides which is
1:10:46
off their tenth anniversary re-recording of their album leveler the links are in the description
1:10:51
i'm your host kyle tomsen remember keep pushing back darkness keep forging spiritual mental and
1:10:58
physical resilience keep seeking the lion of juda
1:11:28
you