Winning Your Children's Hearts, Confederate Monuments, Cultural Transmission, and Christian Education

Before the war , thomas Jonathan Jackson served as Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy , an instructor of artillery tactics , at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington , virginia . He was an odd , eccentric man who struggled to make simple conversation .

He was seen in church pew or in his professor's chair , straight back , never letting his spine touch the back of pew or chair . He would walk to and from class with his sword on his hip . Not satisfied with letting his scabbard hang at his waist , he would hold his sword from the middle as if he were prepared to draw at any moment .

He had a reputation for being the butt of the university and was generally not liked by the students . During heightened tensions between north and south , the students grew restless and were causing mischief with the Union soldiers . The university held an assembly with the aim of calming the growing animosity of the student body against the Union soldiers .

After several speeches had been made , their ensued long pause . Perhaps some reply was expected from the cadets . At last , the painful silence was broken by a cadet crying out Major Jackson . The cry was taken up by others until it became general and continuous .

Aware of Jackson's awkwardness and shyness , many may have called for him the spirit of mischief , but doubtless the majority of cadets , knowing his straightforwardness and sense of justice , desired from him some expression of approval or sympathy . Rising from his seat , he was greeted with loud applause . He waited till the noise subsided .

Then , with body erect and eyes sparkling , as they did so often afterward on the field of battle , he said with a vigor and fluency that was a surprise to all . Military men , when they make speeches , should say but few words and speak them to the point .

I admire , young gentlemen , the spirit you have shown in rushing to the defense of your comrades , but I must commend you particularly for the readiness with which you have listened to the council and obeyed the orders of your superior officer .

The time may be near at hand when your state will need your services , and if that time does come , then draw your swords and throw away the scabbards . Back at the Battle of Manassas , general B told Jackson they needed to retreat . He told Jackson that the lines could not hold . They were collapsing .

Jackson's response was unexpected Sir , we will give them the bayonet . Jackson went on the offensive . He attacked when all around him were retreating . One biographer writes what steady those soldiers was Jackson . He rode slowly back and forth along the line , moving in a shower of death , as calmly as a farmer about his farm . The blaze of his eye was unmistakable .

Fire plainly was a soul on fire , with deep feeling and the ardor of battle . A slumbering volcano clearly burned beneath the face . So calm and collected , stonewall Jackson is a beacon of masculine Christian virtue . His faith was strong and his courage is unmatched in American history .

There's men like Jackson that we must look to to recover the ethos of the New Christendom . Why then , do the great great grandchildren of Stonewall Jackson despise him ? Why was it the family of Stonewall Jackson that most adamantly fought for a statue of their great great grandfather to be removed Somewhere in their family history ?

The Jackson family lost the hearts of their children . In an open letter to the mayor of Richmond , virginia , they say the following we are native Richemunders and also the great great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson .

As two of the closest living relatives to Stonewall , we are writing today to ask for the removal of his statue , as well as the removal of all Confederate statues from Monument Avenue . They are overt symbols of racism and white supremacy , and the time is long overdue for them to depart from public display .

They continue Wongoing racial disparities in incarceration , educational attainment , police brutality , hiring practices , access to health care and , perhaps most starkly , wealth . Make it clear that these monuments do not stand somehow outside of history . Racism and white supremacy , which undoubtedly continue today , are neither natural nor inevitable .

Rather , they were created in order to justify the unjustifiable , in particular slavery . One thing that bonds our extended family , besides our common ancestor , is that many have worked , often as clergy and as educators , for justice in their communities .

While we do not pretend to speak for all of Stonewall's kin , our sense of justice leads us to believe that removing the Stonewall statue and other monuments should be part of a larger project of actively mending the racial disparities that hundreds of years of white supremacy has wrought .

We hope other descendants of Confederate generals will stand with us as cities all over the South are realizing now we are not in need of added context . We are in need of new context , one in which the statues have been taken down Respectfully William Jackson , christian Warren Edmund Christian signed the Great-Great-Grandsons of Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson .

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about with legacy in the show . This seems like the anti-type of what we're aiming at . As fathers and men , we want our sons to protect , defend and continue building monuments of the past generation . So it's got to be at the top of your list of things that we should be against right , tearing down these statues .

I can't remember where I read it , but somebody had said that was the last stand of the first Christendom was the Confederacy , and so even that monument in itself , the monument to Stonewall Jackson and to Robert E Lee is always in there . Yeah , right , but specifically to Stonewall Jackson .

Have his generations tear down the monument to the work that he did , the man that he was and the principles that he stood for .

Interesting , yeah , so , and he was dealing with the first waivers , most of whom were all , like you know , caddy Stanton , and those people were Her name was literally Caddy Caddy . That is unfortunate .

Do you see it as a form of fifth commandment violation , a form of patricide ? What is going on at the heart of that ?

There was a culture there that loved these men enough and the ideals that they stood for that they went to great expense and effort and made public monuments to them , and still do today , and so you have a failure of cultural transmission somewhere on down the generations to inculturate that same love into the current generation , at least on some level you still

have . Obviously there's a large group of people in the South who would still very much respect and honor General Lee and Stonewall Jackson . You know all that .

We're talking about fathers passing on a culture to their children that is a thick enough culture , a glorious enough culture You're welcome , trademark , glorious , thank you . And I think too that it's compelling on through the generations , which , I mean , has a lot of practical handles on it .

This topic we're thinking about , you know that means that the culture you give your children can't just be a sort of veneer of Christianity . It can't be a thin culture . It can't be like the mega church . You know sermons at the movies series . I don't even know what they call them . What do they call them At the movies sermon series ?

Mm-hmm , what are they talking about ? Like Christian culture , that Christian culture is not transmittable because it's nothing , it's cotton candy , like a small rainstorm will dissolve it entirely , right ?

So we want granite statue , cathedral culture , teach our kids to love it , and to me that cold , open story is one of the more powerful recent examples of the way that you can lose a culture and fail to transmit a culture , and I think there's some interesting points there for us to think about in terms of fatherhood .

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So we'll delve into a lot of what happened here at Refuge , why we changed , why you guys initiated the changes on those fronts . But first just defend , why are those two things , of all the things that we could start with Dan , why start with worship as a central thing and then education ?

It seems kind of redundant at that point , but right worship aligns with the right outflow of culture , and so you'll see in the culture what people worship . This isn't anything new , or ?

The families are important , where the children are important , obviously , like the doctrine and theology is important All of that . The singing is important , yeah .

They were failing at transmitting robust faith to the next generation , often huge percentages failing to do that . So we went okay , whatever model they're using , even if it's what 98% of people are doing , we should probably question it if it's producing 80% apostasy rates . You know that kind of thing .

The other thing that was failing to produce is an educated populace or an educated congregation . So children weren't just apostate , they didn't know their theology and they didn't know how to read the world properly .

And I remember a lot of the answers were no . Right , interesting , yeah , we said no , and part of it was because of the overall maturity of the men in the church . So it wasn't just children . Obviously , that's downstream of the type of men that we had in the church as well , and it was .

They were designed to be that way , right , because of the theology , philosophy ministry yeah , the discipleship , yeah , the discipleship Processes , absolutely .

He would be neglecting having children because of the extra responsibilities and it would interfere with his hobbies . There was also rampant pornography use , even recreational drug use , amongst other things . Maybe that's not the average , the average of the worst .

That was being uncharitable , probably , but that did describe a pretty significant number of men , for certain .

Yeah , the wife was convinced of that , she did the reading , she was the one interested , she was pursuing that , he wasn't . So that was a theme . So you're not seeing strong Christian men , not just like who aspire to be pastors , but just ordinarily strong Christian men Like churchmen , just churchmen .

How do you mean From music to the casualness , the low church , kind of like non-hierarchical , not emphasizing leadership structure , not emphasizing command or go and do or exhortation ? Our culture is very casual . It's very , you know , it doesn't have any kind of sense of the transcendent , like a light talk . Yeah , it's very much it's light , it's shallow .

Our culture , modern American culture , is shallow .

So when church worship itself is engineered to be an analog of that culture , but just then sprinkling in the Bible to be like , aha , but we've got them , now they're here because they weren't turned off by , like anybody wearing a suit or hierarchy talk or like you know , legalism , which means like telling people to do anything at any time for whatever you know ,

and like , oh , we're just going to take the whole service model of essentially corporate marketing , where it's like look at the services we provide for you , in exchange for your attendance , come to the church , we'll take your kids , it'll be great , you don't have to worry about them , they're not going to talk anyway , like they're so annoying , we'll just take them

away from you . Don't even worry about that Girl . You just sit down . You want a latte ? We got you a latte . Go to the Holy Ground's Cafe , we'll take care of you . You know , you've even got soy , in fact , only soy . You know you come in here you're going to hear do you like ? You like bad music ? We've got bad music just for you . We made it .

We worked really hard on it . You know , come in here like oh , you , you don't like strong men . That's kind of like I don't know they're going to be . You know , tell me what to do , like that patriarchy thing . So we've got just the guy for you . He will be dressed casually and his pants will be too tight .

He won't talk for very long and he will sound like he's from California , brian is now describing himself , if he's never been more offended , even back then . No , eric , I did not do that .

like the five things that people assume , that worship is like one of it is like education , you know , theological education , you know , and so if you think that , then you're going to form at the service a certain way , you're going to take the distractions out and you're going to have very direct teaching and you have to have notes and all that .

Mainly yeah , it was about you , the services we provide for you , you know , the music we have for you , the teaching we have for you , like it wasn't about the worship of the holy and living God . Sorry , Brian put his finger out . I'm sorry I confused you with that . No , you wanted to say something .

Because , whether we thought about it this way or not , what we were talking about is why are we transmitting a certain culture to these people and failing to transmit some culture that we want to ? Maybe we can't put our finger on exactly what it would look like strong men , strong women , like good families , holy righteous sin , repenting , like what would ?

Okay , we're failing to transmit a culture . So what do we need to do differently ? And the things that we really zeroed in on very quickly did relate to worship , the liturgy , what we were presenting in our worship , and also the way that we treated children , both in worship context , but also overall in terms of Christian education .

Okay , I get this . It's going to shape a different kind of person . If you're confessing in church , this forms a pattern for all of life . If you're singing , a singing people and you're teaching the people that they have to do the singing , then we're going to be singing at the dinner table and we're going to be singing all the time . So those things were .

I started to see how they train the affections of the heart . So for you guys , I'm wondering was it a book ? Was it talking to other pastors ? What was the spark or sparks that kind of got you thinking of family , integrated worship ? Why bringing kids into worship service ? Why is that part of this ? And liturgical worship ?

And so I read the book and that was my first memory of exposure to Douglas Wilson , but that definitely had a lot to do with it because it was in the admissions conference in 2018 .

You know it's some's good , but a lot of it's bad and we want to change it . You start looking with new eyes and you start to get a preference for something different , especially when you experience like the admissions conference in 2019 , the infamous for us , not for anybody else , probably missions conference in in Moscow , idaho .

Part of the reason it's infamous is because of the snowstorm we had to drive back .

You've been holding back on me this whole time and that's kind of what it was like , yeah .

I think what One of the things that is unique about Moscow Doug kept his kids . I went to one of their grace agenda a few years ago and it was like how to keep your kids . And so when you , when you see the outcome and you're like , well , when my kids are grown , I want them to be carrying on my work .

So then you start looking more closely , like , okay , what are the things ? I've asked a lot of people in Moscow this over the years . I was like what is the thing ?

You know , if you had to point to things that you would say like to find your culture and why it's been successful , I usually hear corporate worship , and Probably even bigger is Christian education , because they're so central .

That's kind of the case we're making , but I think there is something to this of Seeing something , recognizing the beauty and the value of it , and then you kind of go through the process of thinking about it , you know , and starting to implement it .

Yeah , a short period of time , because you're like , hey , this is what we're going to be doing . We're gonna reduce the age from 12 to 6 .

Yeah , and I think we walked in somebody's like , oh , your kids want , and I just put my hand up and I was like no , thank you , what a guy making his presence felt yeah .

If you speak to my children , it we will come to blows the principles that we that compelled us to have family integrated worship , where some arguments I'm sure from from like the Christ Church vein and Presbyterianism , but the idea that you would relegate the indoctrination , the I guess you could call it worship like Education .

You know , on a Sunday morning you remove the children from the worship . This is really important because it tells you your aim of your worship service . Is it to actually worship the true and living God ?

If it is , why would you take your kids out , yeah , and relegate that to volunteers , you know , not qualified elders , to do the edgy , you know , to teach them , to give them games , snacks I mean it's babysitting service , yeah , while you're neglecting the corporate gathering Of God's people in worship of the true and living God a huge amount of it comes back to

what are we trying to do in worship , like what is the God worship for ?

So when you , when you reject that reduction , a lot of other things follow . And the kids ministry thing , you realize pretty quickly , exists to support the worship service as a classroom a classroom or an emotional experience , yeah or a service oriented Marketing . Yeah , felt needs . Yeah like self-help , because it's hard to have kids in service .

It's much harder than having someone else to take care of them for you , obviously so that that change has been around for fully for like with three years ?

Oh , it wasn't just the kids , it was the volunteers . Mm-hmm , so you're having to remove your wife , yeah , from a worship service once a month , once every other week , in order to watch kids in the nursery , yeah , or to volunteer Sunday school teacher ?

You know some , some , some parents were gone for two months and they were teaching Sunday school , so they weren't in worship for two months .

That was oh , oh , what was it called ? It was probably really clever .

So it's not a replacement , because the worship service is something different than instruction .

But have you have you seen a change in parenting and the children and the , in the ethos and culture of the church ? It does a couple things .

You can't have completely wild and disciplined kids in the service For long before someone's like , hey , do you need some help and learning how to spank your kid ? Here's the motion . It's like it's like teaching a swing , you know no , so it does that .

But the other thing it does one of my favorite things that it does in terms of the culture development Is it protects you from the wrong people joining .

So people who are going to come to the church and treat it like daycare and Basically exchange my attendance and my tithe which is usually 1% of their income or whatever or less , for spiritual goods and services . They're usually the loudest complaining , the least contributing and the least seriously Christian people .

Right , and so all the people that left Not all of them , but a significant number of the people that left our church over this I wouldn't have them back , like I wouldn't allow them in membership without significant repentance . I just wouldn't , because they were the cause of Huge cultural issues in our church .

This is why I like to meet the earlier church model of much more restrictive thought about . We're not begging you to join our church . We're actually assessing you to see if we will allow you to join our church , which is the biblical method for assessing church membership .

It's not we're gonna beg you and market you in the doors and then do everything we can to keep you for the sake of our numbers , our attendance and our giving numbers . No , no , no , no , no , no . We , we only want you to join if you're gonna be a Christian here . Right .

So Getting rid of kids ministry immediately as a as a filter , it , it cuts out huge numbers of people who would join our church who are not Christians .

Like what they're like yeah , sermon was good , didn't really care for the style of worship but honestly , like the Methodist church down the street with a lady pastor , dude , they have like killer VBS and killer programs for the kids and I'm really a lot of times it was like Not single moms , but like spiritually single moms where they would they would bring the

kids . Dad would stay at home and drink and watch football . She would bring the kids and then they would be like she's like , I just need like two good hours to myself , yeah , but . And then you would try to explain to them like yeah , but that's not what church , oh , are your kids , orphans right , I did .

You're gonna have to take ownership for your family , yeah , you're gonna have to step up to the plate and and we're gonna hold men accountable to those things . Right , and as those conversations , it's funny . When I first got here , most of the guys were like pillars in the church right now and have been for a long time .

I would ask him questions like oh , how'd you come to refuge ? Blah , blah , blah .

Like the overwhelming majority of these cases , people that I would talk to it'd be like Well , I was basically like not doing anything and one of the pastors sat me down and told me I was a coward and needed to go , get a job and impregnate my wife and my wife and fire her from her job and I'm like , well , what so what ?

what did you do in many such cases ?

Like , yeah , my wife works , we don't Christianly educate our children . We actually started talking about these things in terms of sin . We were like , listen , you are . You are not free to give your children a Pagan education . You're sinning if you do that . So there's the principle .

No , you don't have to use our school , you don't have to use a certain curriculum , you don't have to homeschool or private school , but you do need to give your kids a Christian education . That's a principle . Here's how we get it from scripture . Here's a whole sermon on it .

Right and this is totally historically uncontroversial right , the people who will shriek and leave your church . Over that you should be cheering . You will be so much better off in six months without those people there , because those are people who are Incorrectable at exactly the points where the culture has discipled them .

So if they're not going to repent there , either they're not Christians or they're not Christians , who are going to submit to your leadership right ? So , honestly , some of the best things that have ever happened to our church are specific people leaving .

Actually , in church history you had to have a sponsor , even , yes , a member .

So we need to like , actually learn from , from those guys , even where we say we're not going to replicate every single practice down in the minutia , but they had it more generally correct about the nature of the church and the nature of what the gathering is , what the congregation is and is for because you could look at the culture it produced and say like oh

, did they cut the genitals off of children ? No did they murder babies , our Christian culture did produce that , yes , like our Christian culture , exactly so over a couple hundred years . And I'm not saying anyway Whatever , but I'm , I'm . That's a whole different big , big thing there . But back to our episode topic here , like this , is all related .

The reason that it matters so deeply that you get these things right is because your children's hearts , your future , your generations , your legacy and the , the legacy of the church , the future generations of the church , relies on Getting these things right , lest you produce a pagan culture in an apostate culture within one to three generations .

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Will also include the link in the show notes , and that and that's something that I've really thought about . We have Dan and I've been talking with Joe Garrissey Backwards planning , financial , and it's been really helpful . So basically the idea is you start with the end in mind , you say where do I want to get , and then you work backwards .

Well , in this situation it's like , okay , I envision a couple hundred years from now , god willing , that my sons are not tearing down Statutes or or just monuments or this church or the things that we build where they wouldn't be saying let's replace the cathedral , or that my parents built , with a gay strip club .

But Christian education , because I think you could get the liturgy part right , but if you didn't do robust every day throughout the year , christian education , it could be homeschooling and in our case , with the church , we said we're gonna do st Brennan's .

There's something about these two things put together that I've never had before in my life , until coming here . But I see a totally different fruit when it's like 98% of my children's week has spent during the summer working for somebody from the church .

Okay , then during the school you're learning from somebody at the church , usually a man , and you know what I'm saying and then they're worshiping with the people in the church . Like it is Robustly . I almost have to be careful because my kids go out in public and I'm like , okay , like we can't be super based everywhere all the time , full throttle .

Yeah , yeah , please so one of the things that we're talking about Inculturation of your kids and keeping their , winning their heart and just to wrap up , the liturgy side of that , the your children will love the things you love and I think that's really important , remember .

So if you walk into our church service and I'm I'm hoping that the standard male churchmen you know member of our church , they're loves the singing , they love the Psalms . They have some of the Psalms , a lot of the Psalms , memorized by now from singing them , and their children do as well .

They love singing the songs , you the Psalms , because you know that on Psalm sing the kids often Overpower the adults . On a Sunday morning you can hear the kids sing right , that's a , that's a good like canary in the coal mine kind of thing is the singing of the congregation , yeah .

But you also see the fruit in the men because of their consistency in showing up for for worship , sunday morning worship , and so their kids are being trained that . Dad loves this and I love it too .

You know Lord's prayer we sing the Lord's prayer and it's a difficult old setting of the song at the end of every sermon Kneeling in for confession of sin . It's an hour and a half service every single week .

So with my wife is doing that , by the way , with six children , ten and under , without my help , every single week that she's there because , like half the time , one of the kids is sick . So you know I'm saying , but the challenge , what it does in terms of inculturation , is that it builds a sense of achievement , a sense of belonging .

There's a richness to it . When you think of the difference between a kid who grew up basically eating candy bars and Playing video games all day versus the little house on the prairie kids going in . You know , farmer boy , he's a monza's harvesting with his dad or he's hunting with and it's .

There's a lot of challenge , there's a lot of suffering built into that life point is not to be easy . Endurance If you always do easy things and you teach people that the the goal is to make it as easy as possible . That's literally one of the goals of modern worship service is to make it as easy as possible , to remove as many barriers as possible .

And we're like no , no , no , no , no , let's actually make it hard . You know it should be difficult , we should , and what that does is it actually makes a culture , I think , worth transmitting .

Well , my boys are already like old men and they did it for a year and they they both got like 95% and up , yeah , and so now they're like Kids today are so soft . I remember back in our day we are cracking Latin but even in the like goofball ways that they do those things . It's just .

It's funny to me because I remember coming here and thinking my wife and I both we were like man , this , this curriculum based on what we were doing for homeschool , this is really intense . This is gonna be really hard for the boys , yeah , and it was . But now they look back at that with , you know , just such pride that they had to do something hard .

It made them better , yeah , and then and then , because of that , the culture grew richer . But but again to your point , brian , none of that is because we set out and we said , hey , we're gonna do what's easy , most convenient . Yeah , like none of this is those things .

Noah's Ark , where , where some volunteers spend an inordinate amount of time to basically do it for them , anyway , or by the time they're six , being able to sing the tenor part or the bass part of the soprano part on a few in an 18th , 19th century Fuging tune setting of an entire Psalm and Actually being able to participate in that and then standing in the

congregation with confidence and helping to produce the music of the church and worship to God , one of those things is satisfying . One of those things you forget within six seconds of walking out of the door , like that's the difference .

It's difficulty in pursuit of worthiness , of a worthy task , and when you do that there's a there's a note of transcendence to the culture . There's a note of beauty that that are we have a very deracinated culture that's absolutely cut off from any standard of beauty .

So architecturally , artistically , musically , culturally , on every level , kids don't grow up experiencing beauty Ever . I mean hardly ever . They go out in the woods , maybe occasionally , or they like see a postcard of Notre Dame Cathedral .

But when you build a culture that's difficult beauty that's centered around like building difficult beauty to God's glory , that culture becomes something that kids actually go . I'm a part of this church . Let me say I learned crackin Latin and I learned , you know how to . I can identify that composer .

The architecture is so bad , though , and the point is that when you happen Well , this is , this is a stretch , you know , with the Dallas connection but just when you're surrounded by ugliness , it becomes white , noise , and in a culture like that , beauty sticks out like a bright red , you know exotic bird in the middle of a bunch of pigeons .

So so when you have a church like that At the center , doing hard things , making beauty , there's also a sense of calling further up and further in , where , if you win the people to that , you've won them to something genuinely worthy and timeless and glorious , so they're much more likely to stick and want to teach their children that .

What about American culture ? Is there even to pass on to your children right now ?

Christ Church obviously is a target . It's national news .

But the number one comment I get about above every other comment is People go , there are so many kids in here , there's so many .

And so I think too , even the it was in the why man hate going to church Not Charles Murray , david Murrow , I think is the is the author but he says in there he's like if you want a vibrant church , he's like , it's like Demographically very simple , you need young men and families , because that's gonna bring kids and vitality and life .

So when I look at our church and I say we have children in worship , the thing that we have is vitality , like they are literally the future , they are life in our midst , and so that that really is something . I think that's when some do a culture of death .

When you , when you start to look at what you're aiming to do , and when your children's hearts , and in culturing them , you have to realize that any goal short of In culturing them in , in culturing them into the culture of Christ , in every part of what it means to be human , is Inadequate because it will leave some domain where they can think in a way that's

disconnected from Christ , they can reason in a way that's disconnected from Christ . You need a totalizing culture . So how can you possibly do that without education , particularly when you understand that Education is probably going to be the thing in that period of their life , the young years , they're going to be doing more by volume than any other thing .

Right , they're gonna be , you know , definitely pursuing education in most settings for more hours in the week than just about any other thing they could be doing .

So if you say like , yeah , we've got this great gravity here in the worship or in we do catechism or family worship at home , all those great things , but then they go to public school 30 plus hours a week and they're reading and they're thinking and they're learning this whole system of understanding the world and how to think about what they're , how the world

and You're gonna like expect what ? Well , I would expect from that ? For for them to treat their Christian faith and culture like an accessory to their life , not like a totalizing center . So to me , that's one of the key things In a place like Moscow , idaho , that made a culture that keeps kids and keeps people there and grows in its richness year over year .

Like I think about their hospitality , they they're like weapons grade hospitality in Moscow , idaho .

Well , a huge number of the people who are here serving in this capacity grew up , went to not only that worship , but they also grew up with a Christian education and they learned all of Christ's role of life .

So so now that the thickness of that culture is it actually has breadth and thickness and richness to it that they ended up actually not only keeping their children but winning their hearts . And now their children are like we're a part of this . We are doing , we're perpetuating this . I want my kids to participate in this .

I want them to be the fourth generation , fifth generation , here in this city , in this town , perpetuating this culture what I think that's what one of the things that was so big for me .

But again , coming here , coming into this culture , it was like for the first time in my life , all the major forces around me are pushing in the exact same direction . I am , and as a father , I I felt that feeling of like I'm gonna lose my kids , like every force was a lie against me .

And then , and then , you know , fast forward to now and it's like you know I can trust that when they're working for you know , one of the men in our church on a project , like I know the guy , I know that we're aligned missionally . When they are in school , like Kevin , and you know they're teachers , like I know that they are .

You know , usually by the time they get out of school and they're like dad , I saw your tweets today . That was hilarious . I was like , oh boy , that's okay . I gotta remember that they sometimes see those now but , but it's in the context of , like you know , their teacher is like . Their teacher is like Did you see what your dad posted out , this banger ?

But imagine , like , this is what a lot of Americans are dealing with . I talked to these guys all the time , grill Americans who are like , yeah , I don't get it , I'm conservative . I send my kids to school and they come back and they're talking to me about BLM and purple hair , like they like it , and I think , a lot of guys you know .

What I would say to them is well , this is gonna be really hard , but you have to change worship and education , mm-hmm . And this is why , again , I've been a huge proponent . Obviously , we did it . But relocation if you don't have these things , you need to have them . There's really not a substitute . There's not like .

I think a lot of people are like , well , yeah , but I listened to Jeff Durbin online . That's not gonna do that , though . You're not gonna produce what you want in your kids , and I think , again , episode central to this is we want to win our kids hearts so that they're the ones erecting new monuments , protecting the old ones .

Like sort of this , like antagonistic relationship with church , they're probably mainly gonna hear complaints from you , mm-hmm .

I was like , yeah , yeah , I love him . He's like didn't they like flee across an ocean and fight a frontier to establish a faith and a culture ? Like Moving States is too much for you . And I was like Just got called out .

Finding a new job would seem small , yeah , even if you go to a place where you're you have to pay tuition for a Christian school , that's a small cost . Those are all small costs in Hindsight .

If you lose your kids all of them small , I mean guarantee you that man who have lost the hearts of their kids , they would go back in time and they would give whatever it took In order to change the things that they did .

They're all atheists . And he started weeping on the phone and he was like he's like , don't do that , it is the worst thing in the world . Like it makes it feel like my whole life was wasted .

You don't like you're , you're at a job you probably hate , right . And then you , you look at places that where you know I would recommend people move and you're like well , real estate is just really expensive . I mean , it's just expensive to live there . That's small , that is so small .

Do you know the opportunities that there are for a hard-working man ? There are so many opportunities . Yeah , we have so many guys that are hustling , that are just like desperate for help .

But , like , in many ways , I was reading the accounts in Deuteronomy and Joshua and as we were making the transition here and it's like , yeah , but there's too many obstacles , and then you're like , how are you not just like the Israelites , oh , oh , giants in the land ?

I don't think any obstacle that I'm facing is like , I will be honest , the mortgages are trying .

What is it gonna take For me to get two things into the life of my family . Number one a church community where I am Excited to see , I would be excited to see my children buy into their vision of the worship of the living God , whole hog . And number two how can I then educate them to think about everything Christianly if you get those two things right ?

You know stuff is still hard , things can go wrong , blah , blah , blah , but you will be able to say I think I , before God , did my duty , I did what I could do , I gave my children all I had and , and I think you'll reap so , brian , I was wondering if you could speak to the method of education .

And I don't mean feminine like a glorious godly femininity , I mean the worst that led by matriarchal . Yes , it doesn't have the China cratic . Our education doesn't have the note of joy , of joyful , strong male leadership . It has the the dominating ringing note of bureaucratic Female dominated leadership .

Dolores , I'm basically yeah , but essentially that's , that's what it is , and then she , you know , gets elected a part of it at the end just perfect .

But and I say that because you'll know , you'll notice , if you get deep into the education world and you start Evaluating different systems of classical or whatever , you will find that because education so often lands in the plate of mom and dads are just Disconnected . They're not reading the books , they're not , they're not educated themselves , they're not engaged .

You will find that , and I think most of it is like very much well-meaning Moms and tend to dominate the world , the , the world of education . So if you want to Get out of that , then you have to get into a different mode of thinking and you , I think one of the most important things you can do is have , you know , male teachers .

You can have Male board members , male . So for us , a lot of the school model came back to saying we actually don't just want to replicate a Lot of what we see .

Even in the Christian Homeschooling world it still tends to be very much mom dominated and we wanted to have a model when the elders of the church or , you know , or wise and godly men of the church , were overseeing the curricular elements .

Obviously , we have a huge input from moms , like we have a huge input from Godly ladies , ladies who are passionate about education and know quite a bit as well . So like I'm not knocking that at all , we definitely read to harvest there .

But when you start to look at , I think , the kind of culture that's produced in a community that has a really good school , it's more of a redwood type of culture Instead of a scattered culture , because instead of everybody kind of doing their own thing , you have this central Gathering point where a lot of discipleship and enculturation is happening and they're all

coming together to eat the same at the same table . And I also think it adds an element when you bring in some of the male element tends to tend towards rigor .

There's more rigor in scholastic environments that are male Oriented and so , and then also when you look through a historic if you just do a historic sweep of education , especially in the classical world , you'll find that it is dominated by from the early years of . In classical education you would typically be wealthier families .

They would typically hire it would often be a slave even who would oversee and tutor children through the young years , and then they would be handed off to a retor , which would be a male Teacher , who would bring them up through a next , you know level of their education .

It was very much dominated by male teachers and male administration , and so today , I think , where you swear you find a lot of male involvement , you'll find higher levels of rigor .

99.9% of teachers were ministers , so they were the only ones with the education to get people prepped for college if they want to go to university . So when you think about it , it's like okay . Well , I wonder what the culture was like , particularly in the south , when every single higher education teacher was basically a male and well-versed in reform theology .

Well , it was because in the Great Depression we started , we rolled out high school essentially as mandatory or normative for everybody , one , partly as a way of keeping young men out of the workforce , delaying their entrance into the workforce to not compete over scarce jobs .

So during the Great Depression , this big change happened and stuck , as this often happens , you know , like we implement property taxes and they stick forever , you know , even though they were supposed to be temporary .

So we tend to think just generally about education , very differently than the education has been approached in History , and so a lot of that we tried to go to our model of education with an open mind of saying , well , instead of just replicating something that we can buy in a ready-made , let's think about the economic challenges of tuition , let's think about the

male problem of having , you know , more male influence in the classroom and in the board , and that's also an economic problem .

Our school is tripling this year roughly in student body on Tuesday , as we record , it's like it's all the end of August . We're gonna September 5th , I think Tuesday September 5th We'll be starting our next year of school with like 3x the student body and that's about the pace it'll grow for the foreseeable future .

Yeah , for at least the next couple of years , probably the next five plus years , that would be Wow , yeah , hmm . So if you are interested in learning to be a teacher at our school and you have , then Particularly if you're independently wealthy .

So make sure that you're looking at the foundational direction , the Trajectory of your enculturation , of your children as a father , asking the hard questions , doing the hard , ruthless evaluation and then saying I Either am now or I need to get to a place where I can , fest and alente , where I can make hay slowly to the right place .

But you really sometimes need to make a disjunctive decision where it's like we're gonna change the the dynamic of our life In a very disjunctive way , like we're gonna make a big switch now so that we can then plod the rest of our life one foot in front of the other and not make big . Just , you know , not make a yearly big change . That that's the goal .

So yes , fest and alente , but Really do that evaluation dance talking about in terms of the trajectory when it comes to the education and worship of your children , so that you can win them to a culture that's thick enough and beautiful enough and worth , worthy enough that a Christian culture that you could see it lasting through the generations .

Love to hear your feedback on this episode and others Joining the conversation on discord and signal as well if you are a patreon Supporter . Until next time , fest in alente . As Brian said , make haste slowly .