New Waters S2 | Episode 1

On the Horizon

Welcome back to Season 2 of the New Waters podcast! We’re kicking off a new season looking at navigating faith and the future in a sea of change. Our hope is that this initial conversation will help you become aware of how your own vantage point when it comes to the future, and be inspired to grow in a helpful way. Listen in as topics range from the hopeful, Jetsons-inspired optimism of childhood, to questions of what it means to be successful as followers of Jesus, to a deep discussion around what it means to become people of character.

Show notes and a full transcript of the episode are available below!

+ Show Notes and Resources

• Nasim Taalib, statistician, scholar and former trader and risk analyist
• N.T. Wright, New Testament scholar
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey
• NPR podcast "How I Built This" with Guy Raz
• New Waters on Instagram
• New Waters on Twitter
• New Waters on Facebook

+ Full Episode Transcript

NATHAN WESELAKE: Hey, welcome everybody to The New Waters Podcast, Season 2. My name's Nathan Weselake. I'm the lead pastor at Prairie Alliance Church in Manitoba. If you listened to season one, I'm a familiar voice. We've also got one other familiar voice here with us, but the other four are new. So let's make sure we know everybody and go around the table before we get into it.

DOM RUSO: It's great to be back. I'm Dom Ruso and I also had a chance to be on season one. I'm the lead pastor, Church Planter of the180, a church plant in Greater Montreal area. Just great to have some new friends around the table to talk about some really important issues.

NATHAN: All the metrics show that Dom was the most popular cast member of Season One-

DOM: Yes.

NATHAN: So it's kind of gone to his head a little bit, you'll probably notice a bit of that as we go on.

DOM: That's awesome. Thanks Nate.

NATHAN: No problem. Welcome Rob.

ROB CHARTRAND: Hey, I'm Rob Chartrand. I am the lead pastor of Church Planter, of Crosspoint Church, Edmonton Alberta and this is my rookie year and I'm so glad to be here.

MILISSA EWING: I am Milissa Ewing. I am the family pastor at Tenth Church in the heart of Vancouver, British Columbia and I am also glad to be here.

LYDIA STOESZ: I'm Lydia Stoesz. I am the pastor of Educational Ministries for Prairie Alliance Church. I'm also the principal at West Park School, which is a Christian school K-12, located in Portage La Prairie Manitoba.

RAJA STONE: Hi, I'm Raja Stone. I'm the church planter, lead pastor of Uptown Community Church in Waterloo, Ontario and I'm a newb. So, it is good to be here for Season Two.

NATHAN: That is all of us. What's a “newb?”

DOM: Newbie.

NATHAN: Oh, newbie? Is that like a video game thing?

RAJA: I am the fresh smelling podcaster.

NATHAN: I noticed that.

DOM: Newbie is too long to say. So you got to shorten it to newb, just in case the rapture happens.

NATHAN: That's something that'll resonate with our demographic? Newb is going to resonate?

DOM: You got to catch that.

NATHAN: Speaking of our demographic, thank you to all of you who listened for Season One and gave us comments and feedback. It was cool to hear from you. If you were part of our Season One listeners, you know the gist of what we're doing. We're talking about where culture and church intersect and coming from all over the country, bringing different perspectives. In our last season we talked about the present, these new waters that we're in. There's some shifting things happening and we try to discuss that and get a bit of a handle on that in a helpful way. This season though, we're looking to the future about some of the things that we might see on the horizon, because there will be new things on the horizon. There have been in each of our lives, things like the Internet for somebody as old as well... who's the oldest here?

DOM: Rob. I'm kidding. I don't know.

ROB: Stop.

NATHAN: Maybe something like it.

ROB: No, we're both 40s.

NATHAN: Did you have microwaves? Did you guys have microwaves when you were kids?

RAJA: Yeah. Everybody was terrified of them. They thought they were going to have like two heads if you used it.

ROB: That's how I dried my poodle.

NATHAN: But now we accept it.

ROB: Absolutely, and everyone has two heads.

NATHAN: That's like a revolution. What we're looking for is revolutions that are coming, like the spiritual equivalent of the microwave. So, to get us going, let's reflect a little bit about, what are these changes that you've seen in your lifetime that surprised you? When you're 10, 15, and you're imagining the future, what you maybe thought was going to happen, and things that have come and blindsided you. What comes to your mind?

DOM: I think about the future and it's such a paradoxical idea because one, it requires imagination. When you think about your kids and imagining new things. The other thing, the future can be fearful and scary. So, I was talking to someone even just this week about autonomous driving vehicles. Our lives... Most of us here and people who are listening, their lives are going to be changed forever in the next few years, not far away, where we're just going to see cars driving themselves, and I think that's a great idea. Having less mistakes, less error, less accidents, less traffic. So that's going to be a big shift. That's going to... the future, not too far into the future.

NATHAN: Did you see it coming, when you were 15-year-old Dom, just kind of chasing a hoop down the street with your stick?

DOM: Yeah.

NATHAN: Did you imagine that there'd be driving cars?

DOM: I'd love to hear what you guys are thinking. You hear about that stuff, but now that it's here, I don't think I saw it coming, but I'm part of a generation that welcome things like that. What do you think Rob?

ROB: Yeah, I think we've been pretty open to that. When I was a kid I had a Commodore 64. I mean 3K of RAM, 3K of ROM. I couldn't ever imagine that I would actually have megabytes in my computer.

DOM: In your pocket.

ROB: Yeah. My first laptop-

DOM: Gigabytes.

ROB: ...I got 40 megabytes, and now it's a terabyte on my computer.

DOM: Yeah. You think of some leaders listening, I mean they didn't have computers. So, even that's a major future issue...

NATHAN: Do you remember the Commodore 64 ads? You remember singing some jingles?

ROB: I adore my Commodore 64.

DOM: I don't know any of them.

NATHAN: Cook with it, eat with it-

ROB: Sing with it something.

NATHAN: ... educate your team with it when you took it to a softball game.

ROB: Wave with it, create with it, tele-communicate with it.

RAJA: It wasn't the Commodore that really ushered it in, it was the Atari. It was the video games. That was what ushered in technology. It was the entertainment tied to technology.

NATHAN: Pong.

RAJA: Pong, yeah. Yars' Revenge. Right? It was video games that really kind of... For me was really interesting is that how much the future is disruptive, right? You try to imagine the future, but what you're imagining is really data points of the past, and you're trying to extrapolate that, project that into the future and no one ever seems to get it. I remember listening to this one futurist talk and he said that, we futurists have this sense of our own magnificence, but he said, "Nobody predicted the Internet." I thought that was such an interesting phrase that like, these are people who sit around and think of what the future could look like and a couple of decades ago, nobody predicted the Internet and yet that is one of the most disruptive forces that we have in our culture right now.

DOM: Lydia, you remember the Commodore 64?

LYDIA: Barely.

DOM: Yeah.

LYDIA: Yeah.

DOM: Video games. A lot of video games. I'm just thinking as a principal, you're in that space. You're often with, the leaders of the future.

LYDIA: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DOM: They're going to push the boundaries in such creative ways.

LYDIA: Yup. The question for us is how do you teach kids to be able to use them and not be used by them? So, you think about a kid with a cell phone and now you can limit their WiFi access, but now that's not a big deal because they have data on their phones and so they can access anything.

NATHAN: I remember playing Commodore games on my Commodore 64. I worked on a radish farm for two weeks to save money to buy a Commodore 64, me and a bunch of Mexican immigrants. It was-

ROB: A floppy drive or?

NATHAN: ...a floppy drive, five and a quarter inch. Yeah. I bought it used.

ROB: Did you buy your games or did you hack them?

NATHAN: No, I didn't hack them, but I bought them used. So, yeah, it was kind of a sketchy guy in a basement. That bootlegged Commodore 64s to needy guys like me.

ROB: I used to hack them and bootleg them, yeah.

NATHAN: Really?

ROB: Yeah, thankful for the statute of limitations.

NATHAN: Is that before Christ or after Christ?

ROB: Before, yeah.

NATHAN: Before, I would think.

ROB: I did a lot before-

NATHAN: Okay, well that's good. So we've really gotten to know a lot about Rob early, which is good.

DOM: I want to hear about Milissa.

NATHAN: Me too.

MILISSA: My two favourite shows when I was a kid...

NATHAN: Oh, can we guess? Let's guess.

MILISSA: Let's guess. Okay.

NATHAN: Sweet Valley High?

MILISSA: No.

NATHAN: No, Babysitter's Club.

MILISSA: No, those are books. Shows.

NATHAN: No, I meant the Sweet Valley High twins ones.

MILISSA: The Babysitter's Club was my favourite book series.

DOM: I don't know any of this stuff, what are you guys talking about?

MILISSA: Sweet Valley Twins, actually I did have that series as well.

DOM: So, shows, help us out.

MILISSA: The shows. My favourite shows.

RAJA: Full House?

MILISSA: I'm thinking younger, when I was younger, has to do with the future.

NATHAN: Jetsons?

MILISSA: The Jetsons and the Flintstones. So, looking back and looking forward.

NATHAN: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MILISSA: They were aired back-to-back. I could not wait for the day when I would have, by the push of a button, my clothes laid out. I could just go through a conveyor belt and be dressed and be ready for the day and press another button and get my coffee in my hand and have my food made for me, hop in my flying car, that was the future for me. But I had a big imagination.

DOM: It's funny that when you watch those shows as a kid, you're not afraid.

MILISSA: No.

DOM: The future is not scary. You're like, "Wow." And yet I think one of the things we're going to have to weigh in on some of these episodes is that when we think about the future as adults, we don't feel that imagination, that hope, that wonder, that excitement. It's more like this fearful framework quickly emerges.

NATHAN: Speak for yourself now.

DOM: At least from you, I was thinking about you the most.

NATHAN: I'm excited about the future. I want my coffee popping out of a...

ROB: So, just to think of a non-technological change, I can remember growing up and playing outside, hide-and-go-seek, kick the can, until it was a certain hour-

DOM: My kids still do that.

ROB: ... dark at night and then come out. Well, in a lot of neighborhoods you don't.

DOM: No, you don't think so?

ROB: There's a fear factor in our neighborhood. You got kids out-

DOM: It's too dangerous?

RAJA: The world has gotten dangerous. Because there's no parental guidance there.

ROB: Well, that's just it, right? Yeah. So there's been changing parenting values that have changed a lot since when I was a kid.

MILISSA: Safety.

NATHAN: You guys are getting all heavy again. Let's just go back to talking about stuff like the Jetsons. Lydia, what about you?

DOM: Lydia, you watched the Jetsons?

LYDIA: No, we didn't watch TV when I was a kid.

NATHAN: Not allowed to watch TV. Half an hour of black and white.

ROB: Were Smurfs and demonic?

NATHAN: That was my home. Smurfs were demonic.

DOM: That can't be on the podcast guys. Want to see a whole generations just... like what are we listening to here? People's like, healing crisis counseling episodes? I couldn't watch Smurfs? Okay.

NATHAN: Alright. Give us something really punchy, Lydia.

LYDIA: I do remember being in high school and we had like a computer that had the dial-up Internet, so it had that like noise that it would make whenever you got on it, like take half an hour in order for you to send one email or something like that. And every year my mom and dad would buy me the encyclopedia that would have six CD-ROMs that you'd stick into the computer and then you'd like be able to see these little videos that would come up really chunky.

DOM: So, that was kind of edgy at that time.

LYDIA: Yeah. That was how you did research for high school papers and stuff like that, and then just slowly over the years of going to school in post-secondary, by the end of it, then you're looking at Google and you're looking at all the different things online that you can find, and trying to find the right database so you can find information, then figure out whether or not it's trustworthy. Whereas before, you had it in your hand on these little disks that you knew that someone had actually edited it for real and you're not having to discern whether something is real or true or not.

DOM: That's like shifts in learning, right?

LYDIA: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DOM: I think of how even just I think about the future... how relationships, how people connect and relationships have changed, right? Dating, finding the right person to marry. There is a shift in how people process getting to know someone better.

RAJA: Do you remember when you used to call a friend on the phone and say you're going to meet here at such and such a time and you hung up the phone and there was no way to alter the plans?

LYDIA: They didn't know it was you that was calling?

RAJA: Yeah.

LYDIA: The phone would ring in you’re like, "Who is it?”

NATHAN: That always worked in my favour actually. The call display thing. I had less friends as soon as there was call display.

DOM: Aw, you’re a good guy, Nate.

RAJA: Let the healing begin.

DOM: Okay everybody, we're going to hug Nathan. Give a second so we can hug Nathan.

[Musical interlude.]

11:26 NATHAN: We've been starting to look back at the past instead of wonder about the future, sort of distilling stories of woe about when we were children, but what did you marvel at and what are you still holding and wonder like maybe this will happen? Something that comes to my mind that I assumed would be the case, when I was eight years old and my grandfather died of cancer, I just assumed this would be something I'd get to stop worrying about in a couple of decades. I thought two decades in, this is just not going to an issue for people.

ROB: You were going to fix it or something.

NATHAN: How can you not? Look at everything that's happening. Things are exponentially growing in technological ways. Why not this?

ROB: Yeah. I grew up in the 80s and the 80s was an era of great anticipation and belief in a positive future. There's that song, "My future's so bright, I got to wear shades." Do you remember that song? Movies were out like Weird Science, right? All the things we could do with technology and all that. Of course, once we got into the 90s we realized that that wasn't necessarily so, and we became a little bit more jaded. I think the time I grew up in was at the time of supreme optimism in my life. So, science could do anything. I think that was one of the big mantras in that day and age.

DOM: Yeah. I grew up. My parents moved to Canada from Italy when they were young. So, I think even from being in the home with their worldview of just hopeful. I just think of my parents coming to Canada from Italy and for them just, they gave my brother and I, a sense of hopefulness about the exciting things that were possible. I remember my dad buying his first car and thinking, "This is going to be exciting and great." So, I think there's a lot of moments that we take for granted now, but there was a sense of optimism about not just science, but just how our lives were just going to be better and improved.

MILISSA: We used to live in a small town, Squamish just north of Vancouver, and we would travel into Vancouver about once a month. And that was the future. That was exciting and the stores... we were so excited, we get to go to White Spot, which if you're not from BC, you might not know White Spot is what we get this kid's pack in a pirate ship... and it's very exciting. We got to go to McDonald's, which we didn't have a McDonald's. It was just... for me the future was about possibility, choice.

DOM: Yeah. And there is a fascinating thing about how that intersects with entertainment. So, it has that shadow side, right? You have to always be entertained into the future. I just find it as fascinating. Yeah.

NATHAN: So, the other place that I think is a good spot to pivot into what I want to talk about in this episode which is, the important thing I think to do before we spend the next few episodes looking at the future, is thinking about what vantage point we each look at the future from. If you have, for example, a story about optimism about cancer and it hasn't been fulfilled, at some point you get a little jaded about the future. If you'd been a successful futurist and you'd banked on some things... then you're, then you're going to have a different perspective. So, I think it's important for us to think first about ourselves in this episode before we move into discussing specific things that we're anticipating and how the church itself might anticipate those things. Before we get into that though, we're changing the format a little bit this year. Previously, we've had all the voices at the table in Season One. What we're going to do is we're just going to keep a few voices at the table for each episode and we're going to have two people that’ll be quiet for the episode just observing. Then they're going to come back around and share some of their reflections on the episode afterwards. So, in this first episode we're going to have Rob and Lydia go into the cone of silence.

DOM: Wow, off the island.

NATHAN: Off they go. Not going to silence. They're going to be in the sensory deprivation booth and then come back and give their thoughts.

[Musical interlude.]

15:25 NATHAN: We're going to get a Rob and Lydia to just sit on the sidelines for a while and take some notes and observe, and then they'll come back with some of their thoughts in a little bit. So off you go. Skedaddle, crazy kids and have fun.

DOM: Edit, edit, edit, cut, edit. Beats. We're back in.

NATHAN: Those of us who are left at the table, let me frame another question for us that I think will help our listeners and help us as we chat. So, let's talk about the vantage point that we are each at as we look at the future, and I'll give you a simple 1-10 grid to self-identify on. One, being you think it's really important, you're optimistic about the future, it's critically important for Christians to think about things like trends, generational demographics, so that we can shift how we relate to the world around us and be poised for kingdom growth. That would be number 1. Then we'll go all the way to 10—and these are extreme positions—a 10 would be that it's actually detrimental that if you think too much about the future, maybe you miss the moment. If you decide what the future is going to be like, you are focused in the wrong direction when it happens. Out of that self-identification, we can move into some dissection of the future.

DOM: I don't know what you guys think, it's a great question. I think, I would say I tend to personally live close to the 8 mark. Like I live lots, no, sorry, more of a 2, meaning like I believe that I'm optimistic about the future oftentimes, so rather than fearful. I think it just depends on the season of life you're in. Your question really made me think of the hat I wear as a leader sometimes. Maybe listeners have a role where they provide leadership for a team or for an organization or church like some of us and that requires something else. There's the internal clock of things I'm fearful about or overwhelmed about, but as a team leader, I sometimes have to call people... but I tend to be a two.

NATHAN: What about you Milissa?

MILISSA: Sorry, can you reframe? I think I misunderstood the question.

DOM: 1 is you tend to be optimistic, you live in that space.

NATHAN: Yeah. You, you live in the demographic studies and you try and shift your ministries to fit what you're learning, but most importantly you're like, you have this attitude like, if we could just get what's going to happen tomorrow, then we would really be able to do this like we've never done before. So on this grid about your perspective on the future, we'll start with number 1, which is like it’s your priority. It's a dominant thought. It's, it really provides a rubric for your decision making as you're constantly thinking about the future, and 10 it's not even on the radar. You don't think about it at all. You don't think it's worth thinking about.

MILISSA: I'm unlike Dom. I'm probably a 2, sometimes I'm a 1. I think about the future. I live in my head a lot. I have spent most of my career working with children and you have to think about the future, because you're not going to actually see the fruit of what you do for another 10, 20 years. So if you're not trying to predict what's going to happen or thinking about what I'm doing now is going to make a difference in the future, it's pretty easy to lose hope.

DOM: That's interesting. Yeah. So, the future provides a sense of hope that way.

MILISSA: Yeah.

NATHAN: Yeah. So, you're thinking about the future in the sense of where these people going to be, but do you think about it in terms of trends and demographics and trying to assess different characteristics of people that like the difference between a 15-year-old and a 45-year-old?

MILISSA: I do. I know at times it’s a spiritual discipline for me to live in the present. I've been told that many times by many wise pastors and friends in my life. But I love reading trends, demographics, thinking about how that relates in the church and what that saying about what's coming up the pipe. Especially when it comes to the future of the church, leadership development, who we've got coming up, future pastors, future preachers, future leaders preparing our kids to stay connected to God, to faith, to church and community.

NATHAN: So we've got two 2s around the table. What about you Raja?

DOM: Yeah, and I'm curious, Raja, on what you have to say. I'm just going to make a quick point, maybe I'll break it up a bit. I just think even in the church context sometimes we have language of the Spirit moving, there's a new move of the Spirit. There is a sense that even that language pushes you to this sense of expectation. So, anyway Raja, you can add your thoughts there.

RAJA: Yeah. So I’m really enjoying listening to the different perspectives. I'm going to have to respond by saying I'm a 5. I don't want to be a cop-out to that, because part of me is a future pessimist in the sense that sometimes we've anticipated and made decisions, but we've been incorrect. Because of that, we have either invested our resources or our trajectories leadership-wise in a way that is unwise. So, part of me wants to see the future unfold a little bit more before I jump into it, but also two, and this is kind of an interesting thing as a pastor, every Sunday as pastors we stand up and we teach an ancient document, but then it's also saying, okay, how do we translate that into what we're dealing with now? So I'm a 5. I think about the future, but I don't react to it too much because I'm not exactly sure how to anticipate what the proper decision might be.

DOM: Yeah. I think our positions would probably be reflective of some of the listeners, right? Like who feel, depending on where they're at in their season, that they have times when they are leading in the 2 mode or 1 mode. Milissa constantly, church planters definitely feel that a lot. Part of even the training is be contextual: Where are you going to plant the church? Who there you know? What are the demographics? So, you kind of do it naturally, but then other times, the wisdom of just slowing down is also a really important thing.

RAJA: Actually, so something else we can pick up on that too, we talk about the cultural context though. So, one of the things I think in the future is we are seeing more and more fragmentation in regard to culture. Some people use the word tribal, right? We can't use the word tribal, that tribalism, in the sense of like everybody has a narrative way of looking at culture. The problem with that is you can anticipate the future or you try to see the future, but you may be anticipating the future for this demographic.

DOM: Only, yeah.

RAJA: You might be missing out on everything else. So, when we try to anticipate and react accordingly, I'm fearful that we may be overcompensating for something that's not quite materialized.

DOM: But I'm curious, Nate. Was your question primarily, maybe you want to add to that, about anticipation?

NATHAN: Yeah, well. Raja's getting to the heart of it, which because I think the heart of it speaks to what we're going to be talking about in these episodes. He's introducing some of the reasons why I would make myself an 8 or a 9. Sort of skeptical about the whole thing.

MILISSA: Other side of the spectrum.

DOM: Milissa, these guys don't know what they’re talking about. Why are you guys on the podcast?

NATHAN: Maybe it's because in some sense the context I'm in isn't as diverse. I feel like early on in my life, the whole game was to just figure this thing out.

DOM: That's the pressure you felt?

NATHAN: Yeah. If we just figure out what people really want and then we could shape the gospel to fit that, then, uniquely they would fit our church. Some of the things that we're skeptical about that the church did in the past, I think it fit exactly that.

DOM: Okay. Can you give me an example?

NATHAN: So like seeker sensitivity. So that's basically saying, where's this all going? What are the big cultural moves? Well, in 10 years, nobody's going to want this. They're going to want drama. So let's get a drama team. Well, they're going to need to hear about parenting. So we're going to shape it all, we look back at some of the fruit of that and you can appreciate the heart behind it, but nobody really in the current...

RAJA: That's a great point because again, that's where a generation of pastors or leaders kind of invested so heavily into an aspect of whether it's seeker. I was thinking as you were talking about that to all these church growth seminars, conferences, I went to, where somebody would stand up and say, "Our church grew from 5 people to 5,000 and here's your four steps that you need to enact. Then therefore you will then experience what we experienced.” It's like, okay, so maybe that works in your context from wherever you're from, but is that going to translate into where we are?

NATHAN: Why were we so hungry for it and why are we still so hungry for it is curious to me. We are looking for solutions that we want to bring the gospel to, is obviously where part of that hunger comes. There's two terms that I want to introduce that I think we represent two different vantage points, when you look at the future. There's the exile and the heir. They sort of have enough biblical resonance that I felt like they might have some weight that they-

DOM: Do you want to explain them just quickly?

NATHAN: Yeah. So, the exile is characterized by a desire for simple explanations. This is a relatively new thought to me. It comes out of a Lebanese immigrant Nasim Taalib, who did a just a self-survey every time he came across people that had been displaced. He was amazed at how simple the narrative of their displacement was.

DOM: So, how they interpreted their own exiles.

NATHAN: So, there'd be like 40 years of geopolitical turmoil in their country, but according to them it was just because they elected the wrong mayor. If we could just get rid of this one thing, if there is just like this one solution, then we could go back to Lebanon. So, he had people in his story living in Paris for 12 years, never buying a home, never putting down roots because they're always just that one thing away. I see that in, in evangelical Christianity as we looked at the future, we're looking for simple narratives all the time, and that's a characteristic of an exile.

DOM: And so the other side would be?

NATHAN: The heir is always just anticipating that they're going to end up in the Promised Land inevitably, that God's prepared for them. Right? So I'm getting some interesting looks around the table cause you're thinking I'm saying exile versus air like oxygen, but I'm saying “heir” like heir-inheritance, right, and I like these two terms because, there's not one that's right and there's not one that's wrong. I don't think either one's preferable, I just think they're a helpful rubric to think through how you look about the future. So, I just took your number that seemed kind of innocent and then gave it-

DOM: Gave it category!

NATHAN: ... category.

MILISSA: I reject your category.

NATHAN: You reject it.

MILISSA: I was just kidding.

RAJA: Reject that. So, what I heard is that I was right.

NATHAN: Yeah. Way to go Raja, you're super helpful to be a 5.

DOM: What do you think Milissa? You feel that sense of-

MILISSA: Well, we're speaking as an heir, us as 2s would be thinking as exiles, is what you're saying?

NATHAN: Yeah.

MILISSA: Okay. So I think that the one thing that, when I hear you say this, that I think, "I'm not sure about that" is the simple explanation. I think when I think about the future, it's not a simple solution. It's a complex looking back, looking forward, what happened, where did we go wrong, where do we go right, course corrections, many course corrections all the time. Hopefully heading to the same place, but it's kind of a zigzag pattern and hopefully we're going to get somewhere.

DOM: Yeah, that the world is more complicated than what you think.

RAJA: Yeah, or maybe we can put it this way, right? So, the exile and the heir seem to be obviously two ends of the spectrum, but one of the... as you're talking about it, the exiles want to put a lot of effort to create their future while the heir just expects the future to happen for them.

DOM: Okay, yeah. There are some people maybe who are exiles that way, but those who are I think leading and living and paying attention to the world realize that the world is more complicated than that. So, I think you can be a 2 and be careful not to be a 2 or an exile in the way you said, like a straight line. I often think for myself of just, we probably would not be here or the church the way, no matter your preference for church, the denomination, be here, if Jesus did not tell his disciples at his Ascension that they're going to go into the whole world and preach the gospel, right? We could agree on that. So everything really stems from that. Jesus in that statement is preparing them for the future. Like they don't even know what the world is. They're going to have to trust Jesus for a framework of the future. How you're going to get there requires working through the complexities of linguistic changes, cultural changes, a world that's changing around them, an empire that they have yet to understand. So maybe again, those categories if we're not careful, can be too simplistic.

RAJA: So just to recap, I chose 5.

[Musical interlude]

28:00 DOM: Yeah, I just think of the listeners and hopefully some of this is helping them to position themselves as they think about the future, as they wrestle with issues in church and leadership and business. We've used numbers like a number grid, whether you're 1 or whether you're 10, and that's sometimes it's helpful for people in need. You gave us some words that are biblical that can be helpful for some people. But if I could just add maybe another biblical idea that might help, is the word “expectant,” to be in a posture of expectation. I think it's a helpful word because it both reminds us that God is at work doing new things as we step into the future. It's God's world. That's God's future. He orients how time unfolds. So I think that might also be another biblical word that gives us a posture about how we think about the future. Maybe for you, that idea, it was different for you growing up or how you thought about those words.

NATHAN: Early on in ministry when I was getting started, I remember the first book, first leadership book I bought, and it was really like, if you could just understand postmodern people-

DOM: You'd be in.

NATHAN: ...you're going to do it. So, it’s this volume of the who's who at the time from all the different seminaries. So, I kind of read over the thing. Maybe I carried it around to look impressive at like 20 years old.

DOM: You are impressive.

NATHAN: Basically, what came out of it was, yes, there's going to be new challenges, unique challenges to this and be a little bit wary of it because we've never seen something like this before. You're not going to be to control it, but that's okay because Jesus is there. I remember people using terms like he's the man from the future, so we don't have to worry about the future, Jesus is already there.

RAJA: That's a neat image. I like that.

NATHAN: Yeah. So, you're imagining them there and you're not imagining, you're knowing he's your friend, he's your brother, and so he's going to help you get ready for it. If you walk in sync him, you'll know what's coming.

DOM: That was helpful for you in that way, or overwhelming and scary?

NATHAN: It was, let's just call it neutral for now because I'm still reflecting on what it has meant for me that's good and what isn't so good, and maybe that's where I'm hoping our discussion goes. I think in my story there's going to be some of the things that we're thankful for that shaped us early about how we see the future and some of the things where we're maybe rethinking. This was more of a hubristic pride about the future. Like that if we're smart enough and part of us being smart enough is Jesus giving us insider information—there's always this insider trading information narrative, right? Like you've got somebody on the inside who knows stuff that you don't and he's going to tell you what it is. Once you figure it out with him and invest in that, you're going to reap all sorts of fruits. So, that's whether that's exile or air or a one or a 10. I'm not so sure-

DOM: Those are the feelings you're living with, yeah.

NATHAN: That's what I'm processing. How helpful is that?

DOM: Do you guys think that we are inheriting kind of a world that's changing actually so much quicker now, that we're less likely to believe that approach? For me, I think, I wasn't a leader or I didn't grow up in church early on in my life, so I don't think I had that feeling as much of like if I get this one book that's going to unlock the patterns of, you know, some code or how to reach more people, how to grow a big church. Although, I was learning about culture. So, I'm just curious, like, did any of you feel some of the same tensions that Nathan talked about in your own context?

RAJA: Yeah. Well, I think different writers within culture, especially within Christianity, have tried to quantify what will take place. The unfortunate track record of these individuals has been very dismal. Well, the one that comes to mind obviously is prophecy.

DOM: That genre.

RAJA: Yeah, absolutely, right? So this is what's going to happen. This is the prediction of the future based upon what God telling us it, but obviously it was completely awry. So it's one of those things where... and again, it's one of the reasons why I chose 5 is because, on the one hand, we know that the future's coming in and we have to be prepared for it. On the other hand too, we don't know exactly what the outcome is going to be. We don't know what's going to take place or how it's going to actually affect us as human beings and as a culture.

DOM: So, maybe one of the things that might be really helpful as we go through these episodes is to think of the future, either through a lens of certainty versus the future through a lens of expectation. Certainty is we're thinking about the future and we need to find the certain way to understand it. To win or to get ahead of the game or to make a lot of money if you're in business, where expectation is we have a posture of expecting something new with a hopeful trust that God is going to teach us as we go. Is that something that's helped you Milissa?

MILISSA: I think that what we need to hang onto is that any work in somebody’s life is a work of the Holy Spirit. Our job is to remove as many barriers as possible to allow the Spirit to work in somebody's life and to allow them to come to Christ. So, if I'm looking at the future and I'm thinking, okay, kids now are learning something different in school, or the way that they're learning in school is different than the way they used to learn in school 10 years ago-

DOM: The way we learned in school?

MILISSA: ... or the way that we learned in school.

DOM: Sure.

MILISSA: Totally different.

DOM: Yeah.

MILISSA: So, then I can start to think, okay, if I'm presenting the gospel the way that it was presented 10 years ago, I'm not sure that it's actually going to speak to the kids now or even to the kids in the future, and I'm thinking 10, 15, 20 years down the road because I don't actually know what's going to work actually. We're just trying our best.

DOM: Yeah, and that's a helpful switch. Nathan's angst, and I think we might feel this and some of the listeners might, has to do with the future and anticipation related to being a leader. Where Milissa’s switching it to the place of being an evangelist or a witness.

NATHAN: I'm trying to put my hand finger on a subtlety. Like you're a church planter and the assumption is if you had more money now, your future would be brighter. But you don't know that.

DOM: No, because you could to have more money and you could still be very-

NATHAN: Yeah. So, there's something that poises you to be ready for the future that would let you use what comes. If lots of money comes, you're ready, If it doesn't come-

DOM: It’s a like a stance.

NATHAN: ... yeah. So, you sort of reduce it to, “If only I had this...”

RAJA: Yeah. Maybe it's not certainty versus expectation, maybe it's certainty versus humility. Certainty has this idea that I know what's going to happen, therefore this is what's going to happen. Humility is Lord show me, Spirit, speak to me, guide me.

DOM: Teach me to listen.

RAJA: Right. We have a posture of his servant that we're not here to alter or to change because we don't really have that capability. Instead we're here to serve whatever God brings our way. Whatever the reality that the Lord knows. Nathan, I love what you said there, that, Jesus is the man from the future. So, it helps me to kind of say, "Yeah, you know what, whatever we experienced, whatever culture shifts, the Lord's already been there." So, not that he's going to give me insider trading, but in a posture of a servant I'm just going to wash the person’s feet that are in front of me, rather than look for the person’s feet that aren't there or anticipate the future context of foot washing or whatever it would be. Just humility.

DOM: I think a better biblical word for what we're trying to wrap our head around, is the word assurance. Assurance is this real trusting God's faithfulness no matter what it awaits. Where certainty is a very modern word. It has to do with scientific precision, the feeling that there's a sense of control here. We see things always objectively, which we know is not true. So I think that's some of the things that every episode that we work through... we're going to have to pay attention to, because we probably all have the tendency to do that.

MILISSA: I think realistically, who of us here has been given a map of our lives? None of us. To my knowledge, I don't know anybody been given a map? Most often it's okay, I take one step. I kind of have this sort of idea of where I want to go or where I want this ministry or where I feel like the Lord is leading us, and it's one step. Then something happens that surprises us. I think we mentioned before, who anticipated the Internet? We didn't know the Internet was coming. We don't know what's going to happen with our phones. I remember when I was a teenager, my parents... I have a sister and we're the same age and so they got a teen line, a second landline. So we had our own phone number and we thought that we were so cutting edge because we had this teen line and we would actually talk about, could you imagine if everybody had their own personal phone? It would be amazing. We could talk to our friends all the time.

RAJA: That's such an interesting insight, that's really neat.

MILISSA: Yeah. So I think that we have no idea what's coming down the pipe.

DOM: What you said, Milissa, made me think of just that so much of the thoughts about having a map really reminds me that many people view the Bible that way. Like the Bible's a book with certain ideas of exactly what God wants us to do, rather than this gift of him speaking to us by his Spirit where these words come alive for every generation. So they have to be reinterpreted and reworked out, right? The image I often think about is the Bible as this manual for all the steps, versus a compass that orients our direction.

RAJA: Yeah, road map versus compass. Road map is more like, here's point A, I'm going to go to point B and this is the path I need to take. That's not what the Bible does, but compass absolutely.

DOM: It orients in the right direction, but you're not really always sure what that's going to look like. So, probably this again pushes against some of these assumptions we have about how certainty works, how we understand the Bible, how we lead in confusing times. So, I think it’s a big conversation we have to keep having.

RAJA: So, as a youth pastor for many years, I'd have students come to me towards the end of the high school career and have two options or two universities or two things they need to do. And of course the question was, "Pastor, which one should I do?" And the thing I always tried to impart to them, the thing I tried to help them understand, is that there is no wrong decision. That whatever decision-

DOM: As long as none of them are sketchy, you can pick either one.

RAJA: Right. That it's not about where you go, it's about whether you take Jesus with you. So whether you go to University of Waterloo or whether you go to McMaster, both are good schools, both those get you where you need to go, but will you take Jesus with you wherever you go?

DOM: Why do you think that's so hard for people to receive that?

RAJA: Well, I think because certainty is so alluring. Certainty is, this is the right decision, thus saith the Lord and no matter... I think too, when we make these decisions, people are saying, "Well then no harm will befall me."

DOM: Or if it falls apart, it’s God's fault.

RAJA: Right. So, I think certainty is a part of like saying, "If I make this decision, then everything's going to go my way. I'm going to go to school, I'm going to find a spouse, I'm going to get a job and all will go well." But sometimes decisions you make, even when God is within it is like, “I'm going to go through hard times and to go through discomfort. I'm going to go through a deep valleys of sorrow and God is in that as well too.”

MILISSA: And then I meet with a 25-year-olds who are having a bit of a quarter life crisis and they're saying to me, "I didn't think I was going to be here." I thought that I would have the spouse and the job and the career or whatever. So, that thinking ahead actually got them into a bit of trouble. They're not where they thought they should be. So, what does it look like to rest and trust and listen and faithfully take one step, even if you're not sure where the next step is going to be.

DOM: That's a great point. Yeah, it's a real spiritual discipline to practice. All of us, I think, I've felt that in our lives.

NATHAN: The anticipation that we want to have about the future can perhaps turn into certainty that this is what's going to happen. So then you are locked in to some extent. Like you said, Raja, people want that certainty and it's hard as a young leader to not want to give it to people, the certainty. Then if you get a couple of good feedback loops going around that, then you begin to maybe believe that this is how it works and you can start to talk about what's to be anticipated, and then you risk not being adaptable. I remember when I was a kid and I figured out what my birthday present was. We didn't have a lot of money back then. My dad was in between jobs and so I was going to get one present and I don't know if you guys remember Pogo balls?

MILISSA: I absolutely do.

NATHAN: It had a platform around it. So, I had a song in my head and I was going to do these tricks off the deck and it was just going to be amazing. I'm anticipating this, right? I had seen it in the closet, so it wasn't just anticipation. I knew it was coming and I open it up and it's like this misshapen football, like it wasn't even a football. It was a misshapen football and like the cheapest football money you could buy. I was so aware that that my parents were in a hard spot because this was basically what they could do at this stage. So, wanting to adapt right for the pressure of the situation, but being so locked on this idea that I couldn't do it. Processing my childhood is not up to me but there is still... still anticipating something that you might miss what's in front of you and what might be good about it.

MILISSA: That comes back to the character traits then that allow people to navigate through life when they're disappointed. It didn't turn out the way that they thought it was going to be. If you're not humble or you don't have that deep character and that rootedness, then when something comes that you didn't anticipate, it's going to be a lot harder.

DOM: It's for sure. And I think part of the themes that I've wrestled with often is, how the success in character formation is such a part of this future conversation, not only in the church, but even in culture, in business. Nathan, you mentioned stock market, who's going to predict the next big boom? We have venture capitalists that are investing millions of dollars trying to figure out the next big thing. Often the prayer of my heart has been like, God may I never be more successful than my character can handle. Almost protect me from a weird kind of success that might look nice on the outside, but my character's never really gone there or been formed enough to even receive that well.

RAJA: Yeah, I used to teach my youth to pray this prayer towards the end of whatever they would pray. I used to ask them to say thank the Lord for everything you have and thank the Lord for everything you don't have. In the giving and also the withholding or taking away, God's provisions is in both.

DOM: Something's being shaped in your life.

RAJA: Yeah, that humility, right? So somebody who's humble takes whatever it would be and receives it and still is faithful. Those who are certain, when they receive what they don't expect, become irate and become disheartened.

DOM: I love this because we started kind of the conversation by just talking about a big idea, which is the future, but you can see very quickly if that doesn't get corrected or weaved properly into our lives, the practical disorientation of this question is huge for leadership.

NATHAN: Right. It's turning out to be a question about character.

[Musical interlude]

43:25 RAJA: As we're speaking in this podcast, we realize that we'll have pastors listening and maybe church leaders. And the cult of success has so infiltrated the church that we've come to the point now where we're not creating disciples. We're not creating people who are actually longing for the character and the image of Jesus to be revealed in them, but we're creating people who are addicted to success... external success, not an internal transformation.

DOM: The word shortcuts I think is a biggie there. Like just shortcut culture is everywhere.

RAJA: For those who work in the church, it's even more insidious, because your self-worth is based upon how many people are sitting in front of you.

DOM: It doesn't have to be.

RAJA: I know that and ideally it shouldn't be. I'm just saying that most pastors have a deep sense of insecurity because the size of their church or the size of the ministry or the size or influence of the size their scope, whatever it would be.

DOM: If I'm going to push back, I think I felt this in a different way over the past little while because I think I felt that early on when I was a younger leader. Then when you plant a church, you kind of have to get over that because the church is going to be small and you're going to have to start with a few people. One of the things I feel more than ever is that as a team develops around you, you feel that a church getting healthy in a church growing in a proper way. People learning to worship with their resources and their giving and helping stabilize a community, is not a sign of real success, but it's wanting to be able to take care of a staff person. I think if people on our staff with kids and are growing as a family... I don't even think of success anymore, I was like, I hope our church gets bigger. But it's like how do we just create a healthy place where these people feel that they're cared for as they lead with us? I think that's important and that gets lost when we're like, "You just want a big church because you want to be popular." I'm like, "Not really." I think I feel the, not even the success issue, but just being a good leader for different reasons differently now.

RAJA: Maybe the psychology might be different for you and I who are church planters, but for someone else, it's different, right? If a church planner is... I don't know if a venture capitalist might be the accurate term, but entrepreneurial for sure. You start with an idea, you start with an unknown and you proceed from there, right? So, for you and I, because of what we've decided to do, it might be different, but the established church, the church that's existing before that, I think might be a little different.

NATHAN: We've talked about success as church leaders, as Christians, followers of Jesus. What does that look like in the future?

MILISSA: My husband is a pastor at Tenth Church as well. His name is Jay and he's a trained spiritual director. He's also our Pastor of Spiritual Formation. So, I'd like to claim this idea as my own, but it's actually his and it's something that he's lived by his whole life since I've known him for 19 years. Somebody told him when he was called into ministry as a teenager, to think about the man that he wanted to be at the end of his life. So, he has this picture of somebody who is wise, someone who people will look at and say, "That's a man who walked with God." That is somebody who's had a deep friendship with Jesus. That is somebody who will listen long and pray with me and impart wisdom. So, he's had this image in his mind. He consciously makes a decision every day to do the things that will bring him closer to being that person. So whether it's through success or failure or different changes in our lives, which have been many, we've moved around quite a bit as a couple, there are certain rhythms and practices that never change. One of those things I think is the skill of listening. He's an excellent listener. He listens well to people. He listens well to our church community and he listens well to God.

DOM: I think one of the things we're going to have to work through as we think about success in the future is that there's private ways that we define success or personal stories like this, Milissa, but there is are also the crisis of... is something successful nobody recognizes it as successful? In our culture, something's successful when there is a lot of people there. I've heard a grown up like, you're only really a leader if you turn around and people are following you. Well, what if success has to do with just being obedient whether people understand that or not

MILISSA: Who's your audience?

DOM: Part of that too. I think we're stuck in the idea that say, you know something’s successful when it's working. You can't say I built this and it's really successful. I look at it and it's like, well, none of this works. I think there is a cop-out around the word success. There's a lot of people who are like, "I'm a successful singer." You're like, "No, you're not." You can't say. So we can believe our own lies about success because we just feel like, I have a word. I've defined success for myself. Then there's also, how does a community help us understand what success is? So, I think the word that I tend to over time start to move towards as I think about the future, and I think this word is going to permeate a lot of questions, is obedience. In the end, God's... how I've lived my life is going to be whether I was obedient and that's really what success is going to have to look like for me.

RAJA: That's interesting. I think that really resonates. For me, I think that what success has been looking like for me a little bit more, as someone who's been a pastor and then in church leadership for a number of years is this concept of discipleship, right? Discipleship is taking the mantle of Jesus, like taking up the cross, right? Taking up the yoke, or however you want to phrase it, whatever metaphor you want to use for it. Success for me now has been this idea of, how do I create an environment where discipleship and disciples thrive.

DOM: So Raja, if you don't make many disciples, would you have been a failure?

RAJA: See, that's actually where I want to push back on that. I'm not actually talking about me making disciples cause my capacity as a pastor is limited.

DOM: So when you say that, maybe clarify for people. When you say discipleship, I often think, go and make disciples. So, it's easy to go back at the numbers.

RAJA: So I still want to be making disciples, but I can't disciple my entire church.

DOM: So is it to make five disciples before you die?

RAJA: I don't know if I want to quantify it, but I do want to place... I want to create a community where discipleship is elevated and this seen as something intentional. Stephen Covey and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People says, "Begin with the end in mind." So, discipleship is beginning with the end in mind. What's the end? Jesus.

DOM: Maybe I would add to this, but I did have a point. I would maybe say if obedience is the image, then part of it is that one day God is going to ask each of us how we were obedient in our making of disciples. And maybe my responsibility it was to have made 1,000 disciples and Nathan's was to have made 100 disciples. So, I think at some point he's going to say, "I gave you these gifts," and there's parables for this, but we're not going to get into it. "I gave you these gifts and this was what I had called you to. You weren't obedient.”

RAJA: You're kind of running in circles in the sense of saying like, a disciple is obedient and a disciple is somebody who listens. I don't want to pull out a particular case...

MILISSA: So you’re saying disciple is an encompassing word?

RAJA: Right, but because that's what Jesus leads with us.

NATHAN: So Raja, you've put a super helpful spin on the insider trading narrative in that Jesus doesn't give us information. He gives us himself.

RAJA: Yeah.

NATHAN: So, you're future-proof when you become like Christ. Character is future-proof. Whether we're talking about the future when we do that or whether we're just talking about the power of what's timeless, there's never going to be an age in history where people don't need Jesus. So, you need to keep that front and centre, but that's helpful that he doesn't give us insider information. He gives us himself.

DOM: Yeah, that's a powerful thing in Christianity. I think we've said this before, I live by this idea that in Christianity the truth is first a person, not a doctrinal idea, not the frame. The truth is a person and that changes Christianity from every other religion.

NATHAN: The inner assurance that comes your way when you stop guessing about the future, and you are growing and character and strength because you're becoming like Jesus. You notice these things internally.

RAJA: Yeah, that's the compass point, the true North is Jesus. Whether the two compass takes you over hills or in a valley, the direction is Jesus.

NATHAN: Right. So, success is?

RAJA: Jesus.

NATHAN: We've covered a lot of grounds to arrive at a Sunday School answer but of course over all the rest of the episodes we'll be discovering just how complex and rich that answer actually is. Before we finish up this episode, let's invite Rob and Lydia back to share with us some of the things that they've been processing.

DOM: They've been patiently listening. Can't wait to hear from them.

[Musical interlude]

51:55 NATHAN: Rob and Lydia, welcome back. Out of the corner of my eye, I've been seeing you scribbling notes. I'm curious to know how you processed what we were talking about.

DOM: Which one of you is going to say that I was right most of the time could speak first?

NATHAN: Which of you is going to point out that Dom's church will grow when he grows in character...

DOM: Holy Ghost. That is so... Amen!

ROB: ...or may not grow, so that he can grow in character.

DOM: Yes. I'm writing that down, Rob. Say that again.

ROB: Lydia and I were chatting about lots of stuff there on the sidelines and she made this great, great parallel to something that I think you said NT Wright had once spoken to you about, is that-

LYDIA: Yeah personally. Me and him we had a chat.

DOM: Can you get him on episode?

ROB: No, I think you had this great framework.

LYDIA: Yeah. In thinking about the ideas between the two kind of extremes that you guys were talking about. I was thinking about how NT Wright does talk about the idea of the four-part drama. He talks about if we lost this four-part... like we lost one of the acts of a Shakespeare play, how would we do that? That we're in this improvisation point in history where we know the past and we can look in the Bible and we can see the things that have happened with creation and fall and redemption. We know the future, that restoration is coming. So, we do kind of know the future. We do know that in the end all things are restored and Jesus wins and all things are set right. But then in this moment, in our moment in history, we are improvising and what does that actually look like? I guess one of the questions that was running around in my mind is do these details of what's going to happen next matter or do we think of it as being a broader framework when we look at the future? Obviously, we have hope and obviously we have an expectancy that Jesus is going to make all things right. When we look at the future, does it matter really what those details are, if we're going to have, how do we think Christianly about chips being implanted into our brains versus how do we set the next generation up to be able to think and process these things Christianly and be able to improvise whatever comes their way. I think when we look in the past, Christians didn't necessarily anticipate all of the things that we have to now navigate. So looking to the future and looking through say the kids that are coming into kindergarten and my school, when they get to be my age, what are they going to have to navigate? I have no idea.

DOM: But will they say that you helped them prepare well?

LYDIA: How do I help them? How do I help them galvanize their faith in such a way that they can discern and they can navigate.

NATHAN: You are not giving them a script. You’re not giving them the lines to recite.

MILISSA: I remember being at a teacher conference and the speaker who was not a Christian was talking about spirituality being one of the most important things that a child should have growing up. Some idea of the great unknown, something beyond them. He talked about something, and I keep coming back to this about providing kids with a container that is big enough to hold God, to hold the doubts and to hold the changes that are going to come. Our job, alongside the work of the Spirit, is to help construct this container so that when these things happen, they're ready. The container isn't going to break, that Jesus is going to hold them.

DOM: One of the things I think to Lydia's point, Rob, I'm sure you're going to have think that as well, is the idea that one of the things you're going to give the kids is you and your character. They're going to see a person who's also doing that in this time and that will help them in some ways, right? More than tips sometimes.

LYDIA: Right. More than that script. That’s super black and white.

ROB: I go back earlier on in the conversation where we heard a lot in this conversation about anticipating future, anticipating the future. We look to the future and we can respond to it, but I guess the question that raised in my mind was, what is our role, not just in anticipating the future, but as leaders, what is our role in creating the future? Right? We're going to be diving into that. Along that stream of thought, as a church planter, we're constantly thinking about creating. You don't start with a blank slate, but you almost feel like you start with a blank slate when you're building a church. So, you're dreaming, you're thinking, you're planning. In my nine years of doing church planning, never once could I put a pin in it, something on the map and say, "Yeah, this is where I wanted to go." Yeah. We got exactly there. Never, never has it ever happened. It's interesting if you listened to a podcast by NPR. It's called, “How I Built This,” with a guy named Guy Raz. Researchers, all of these entrepreneurs and he asks them to tell their story and they tell their story from the beginning to end and how they built this technology or built this great company or whatnot. At the end of every single episode, he asks them this one question he says, "I want you to tell me, do you think where you got today is the result of luck or was the result of hard work and you making it happen?" Without a doubt, every single person there says, well, a great deal of it was luck. In other words, I was in the right time at the right place in that right moment, but I was postured with readiness to respond to it. They said, "No doubt we worked hard. We worked our butts off." It's interesting you hear the stories of these super churches, these things that we would applaud as success. In so many of their stories, there is this defining moment that happened that they had absolutely no control over. It's completely systemic. It was something beyond them and it just entered into their world and that's what happened. I just think about that and in terms of how we think about the future.

DOM: I'm a church planter, in my context. So I think about that a lot. I think one of the crises I feel around that is if it's just about luck than we can never teach anyone to do this. This has got to fit. Just good luck. Just hope it works out. There's something about the Christian story that's like, no, you're going to have to teach people to use their gifts to be leaders. So, the gifts are part of that. So I think, I like the idea that luck finds the those who are working and listening to the Spirit, right?

MILISSA: That’s the readiness piece.

NATHAN: It's surprising to me that these entrepreneurs actually admit that it was luck. My experience in a lot of church circles is that, people explain the narrative of what has happened to them as if it's something that they intended to have happen. So, they're teaching you, they could teach you, this is what happened so you can just legitimately learn from it. But the character piece is when they're able to say, "A lot of it was accident." So my question in that is in church circles, do you think there's more of a tendency to take credit for something that just happened?

ROB: I think if you have bad character, and that's where the character piece comes back in. You can have that tendency to do that. In the word that I heard earlier on, again, on the table here was humility and the importance of humility as we talk about the future and we create the future, we anticipate the future, all of it—we hold everything loosely. We understand God is sovereign, God's in control. The best laid plans, we try and make them happen. I coach church planters all the time and one of the things I teach to church planters, is this excellent book called “Getting To Plan B.” All of us are always thinking about getting the Plan A. We have our A Plan, this is the game and whatnot, and says, "Yeah, write your A Plan. That's fantastic." Plan and work towards that plan. I always realize you're always getting towards Plan B. It turns out God has a plan B and that's ultimately where you're going to end up, and be okay with that. So again, it's about humility. It's about readiness. It's a different type of posture.

NATHAN: In some sense you guys are representative of the people listening to this in their cars who've had some time to process and aren't going to just kind of be happy about everything or agree with everything. Anything that we said that you thought, okay, I don't know about that or I need some clarity there.

DOM: Or that was dumb.

LYDIA: One of the things that I think is just a bit of a question, you talking about outcomes and what does success actually look like? So, one of my questions would be is, is there an overarching thing that you can say this is a successful leader, this is a successful future forward-facing leader. Then the second thing that I've been wondering about is, where's the role of community in this? Because if it's just God and me and he's got a wonderful plan for my life and it's to have 50,000 disciples following me in a church of this size, and if I'm not faithful to him and all of those other things, but how do I discern that? How do I test that? How do I see that? How do I listen for that, and then how do I make that work within my community? How do I do that? I think one of the biggest issues that we can face as leaders is that we get smaller and smaller and smaller communities of true, authentic community because we have to continue to have this idea, that we are the perfect successful leader. Then all of a sudden the community that God calls us to is gone.

DOM: Well, in a lot of ways, the idea and the word even discipleship has been hijacked to like an a modern view of individualized, I have coffee with my friend, I'm making disciples. I think the Bible gives us a picture that it's impossible to make a disciple without the church. It's just impossible. Jesus invites you to follow 11 other guys. It's like, "Hey, we're going to do this together, right?" So I think we have to find a way to bring it back to that and that's a great point, Lydia. How do we weave those things together as we think about the future because people I think are dying for authentic Christian community as they think about these kinds of questions.

ROB: I guess one of the pushbacks I would want to hear your feedback on is, we hear that this idea of well, I want to know the future so that I can grow this ministry and then it can become bigger and whatnot. I guess the question I have is, can you have virtuous reasons for wanting to know the future and can you have virtuous reasons for wanting to lead a large church? What I was feeling a lot was, if it's a large church, you got to have bad motivation to want to lead a large church. That's not necessarily so, there can be, obviously there can be an idolatry of that. Of course there can also be an idolatry in leading a small church for different reasons, right? So there's a motivation, but can there be virtuous reasons for wanting to know the future? Can there be virtuous reasons for wanting to build something and create something great for Jesus' sake?

DOM: Yeah, that's a good question. We know that God has created us in some ways to limit our ability to have that. Maybe because we can't be trusted with that kind of knowledge to predict the numbers or to use it in always the most generous way, to want that. So I think that's part of it. I keep thinking about maybe it's a little bit of a new idea that even as we think about the future, the way we've talked about the present, the past and the future is such a real Western modern way of understanding time. Many cultures who believe in reincarnation don't talk this way at all, because there is no past, present or future. It's like the future becomes the past and it becomes again. So I think some of these ideas are even shaped by our own culture and our own framework that we need to be careful about.

NATHAN: Well, it connected with something Lydia said, about the virtuous ambition, what does your community say about what they smell on you? So I love your line Dom, about, God, don't let my character or my-

DOM: My success outpace my character.

NATHAN: ... influence outpace my character and I got that from Dallas Willard years ago. I used to say that to my congregation, right? This is one of my prayers. A lot of them would be going, "Well no wonder, your influences so small." Right? This wasn't a surprise to them that we were where we were based on who I was. Out of that community, the lack of virtue was chipped away. It's one of the blessings of my home church having been there 15 years, is that they put up with me for so long and it continues to happen that way. So yes, I think it is, but how would you know unless you had all these people around you?

ROB: So, that's really important if you are in that type of role that you are surrounded with some microcosm of community who can call you to it, and when you're accountable and you're transparent, et cetera. That's really important.

NATHAN: Even outside of the pastoral setting and your lives, you're looking for your truth tellers, who actually will help me with this stuff. Who can tell me about me? Most people can tell a lot about you in 30 seconds.

DOM: The Bible points us to profound moments of people had incredible spiritual leadership, right? Like David who God has to almost trick into hearing the truth, because the guy's a psychopath at some point in his life, right? Nathan has to go with a story and tiptoe around the story and then say it's kind of you, right? So even that, when God picks us and gives us the gifts to lead, we really have to be intentional about saying, where are the Nathans in my life? Where the people who I really listened to like Nathan.

MILISSA: Which would come back to back to Lydia's question about community—that you can't actually lead in isolation. You need the community. You're not a leader if you don't have community around you.

DOM: This is a question about the future, because the future I think will definitely move people to thinking they could pretend to be someone with the use of technology that nobody knows. I think this is one of the things that the church will really have to flex its muscles on to say, you can watch somebody on a screen or listen someone on a podcast like now and never have met them. They could be people never live up to anything virtuous or character-shaping or Jesus-worshiping any of that, and more and more I think the blessings of technology will also make people hungry to say, "I need to know some people for real. I need to know like, are you really living any of this stuff or is just this likes and clicks on some website?" That might be something we're going to return to in a beautiful way.

NATHAN: The future, if it's about character and about community, then your future hinges on what you do in some of the most humbling and vulnerable moments of your life. If you're able to receive what you get in those moments, then your character grows in the future. You're poised for it. So to the question, can you be virtuously ambitious when you come out of a moment where you’ve been refined somewhat poignantly by people around you and you've embraced what they've said and taken it inside yourself as the Spirit's work in your life. Part of that is you emerge out of that space more ambitious and excited about the future, again, that's absolutely. So, that's an interesting way to shape it because we tend to think a bit of both, it's a triumphalist sort of perspective. I know what's going to happen, but what if your future is most powerfully created by who you are when nobody's watching and was just a small group of people taking you aside and saying, "This is going to stink." Character is formed in that community and it's forged in those moments that don't look anything really or probably like you're shaping the future. That's when you're shaping the future.

[Musical interlude.]

REGAN: The New Waters Podcast is brought to you by New Ventures, a ministry of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada. Today's episode was produced and edited by me, Regan Neudorf, and our theme music was created by Dad versus Son. If you'd like to continue the conversation with us, follow @newwaterscanada, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or check out newwaters.ca for additional resources, collective learnings, and info about upcoming live events. Thanks for listening and joining Jesus at work in Canada as we love the church and learn to think differently with curiosity, hope and wonder.