Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 299 David Sunde - Homegrown Disciples: Faith Formation in the Family
What if discipleship isn’t something we outsource, but something we embody, right where we are? In this episode, I sit down with David Sunde for a grounded and hopeful conversation about raising homegrown disciples. We talk about parenting, presence, and the slow, incarnational work of forming our families in the way of Jesus. David invites us to move beyond programs and into apprenticeship, learning not by content alone, but by imitation, by presence, by love. We explore how ordinary moments, mealtimes, bedtimes, commutes, can become sacred spaces. And how the Spirit forms us not through performance, but through vulnerability, reconciliation, and belonging. The Spirit of God is already moving in our homes and formation begins not with perfection, but with presence.
David Sunde has been involved in professional non-profit and pastoral leadership for 25 years. As a native of San Francisco, California, he grew up amid a melting pot of culture, class, religion, and thoughts that shaped an unassuming if not disarming approach to people and conversation. Leveraging that experience alongside doctoral training in semiotics and culture, David is a catalyst for church renewal and developmental relationships. He's the author of Small-Batch Disciplemaking and the new release, Homegrown Disciples: Parenting Rhythms for Drawing Your Kids into Life With God. David and his wife, Laurel, have two kids, Bjorn and Annika, and live in Austin, TX.
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Joy is the thought of we're together. I can't fix it or solve it. Neither one of us are alone, and that is the incarnational presence of God. Even I don't even like to use the term following Jesus, because following implies a distance. Incarnation implies embodiment. He is with us, past, present and future.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, what if discipleship isn't something we outsource, but something we live into right where we are in this episode, I'm joined by David Sunday for a deeply honest, practical and theologically rich conversation about forming homegrown disciples, starting with their own families. David doesn't just talk about parenting strategies or church programs. He invites us to reconsider the very framework we use to talk about spiritual formation. What if the goal isn't producing Polish behavior, but cultivating a shared life of presence, vulnerability and love? What if the family table is the first sanctuary of the kingdom? What if, as David says, God's strength is made perfect in our weakness, and that becomes the starting point for leading our children not with perfection, but with incarnation. We talk about apprenticeship over information, the sacredness of the mundane and how to recover a sense of rooted identity in a culture that constantly shifts. David shares stories of walking with his kids through suffering, of modeling reconciliation, of naming what matters most in a distracted world, we explore the power of attachment and presence and how even something as simple as bedtime or a car ride can become a moment of formation. If you've ever felt inadequate as a parent or unsure how to lead your family spiritually, this episode offers more than just encouragement. It offers language, imagination and a way forward. So join us, because the Spirit of God isn't waiting for us at church. It's already in our homes, around our tables and in our everyday lives. Here's my conversation with David, Sunday. David, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on thanks for joining me. Oh, thanks,
Unknown:Joshua. I'm happy to be here and looking forward to this. I'm excited
Joshua Johnson:to really dive into homegrown disciples. Like, what does it look like to disciple our family, our children as they grow up, so that they could really follow Jesus, not just know about Jesus, but follow Jesus in a way that they could look like him, embody him, and the world could be a better place, because we're gonna be talking about family, disciples, discipleship. I'd love to see, how are you discipled as a child? What was your story growing up? And how did you say, oh, Jesus is the way. Because my family is the one that showed me Jesus is the Way. Fun.
Unknown:Great question. Little on the unique side. I live in Austin, Texas. We've been here for about 19 years. My kids are Bjorn and Annika, and my son is so Texan. He's got like, three pairs of cowboy boots, and he always has a knife on his belt, and he smokes meats, you know. But that being said, I was born and raised in San Francisco, and I was the son of immigrant parents, and I grew up in this inner city church where it was like first and second generation immigrants, and everyone was sort of blue collar. So the the model for discipleship, it wasn't spoken of, but the idea was, if you come here and raise your family here, you're gonna get the goods. You're gonna learn the Christ like life. You're gonna learn about humility and sacrifice. I mean, these were salt of the earth people who began a new life, like when my mom got here, she couldn't speak a word of English in middle school, and so, oddly enough, even though San Francisco is this major metropolitan area and highly transient. I had family, aunts and uncles on both sides of my family in the church, so every Sunday was an extended family, and it was only later that I realized there was this beautiful picture out of the Galilean countryside of the insula. Have you? Are you familiar with Hebrew tradition? So you had this insula? I like to think of the word insulation. It was a compound, like structure. So when Jesus says, In my Father's house, there are many rooms, the idea was, when you would get married, you would add on, like an upper room to the Father's house. But the picture of apprenticing was you learn the family trade. You've learned the family ethos. You learned the family beliefs. And when there was someone there was always going to be someone who was further along in parenting, in marriage, when you maybe were kind of feeling like my kids aren't listening to me. There was an older cousin, there was an uncle or an aunt. That's kind of how I grew up in this extended family of faith. Now not all of them were biologically related, but it was about three or 400 people. But man, those people really rooted me in Christian life, and my dad, oddly, was a journeyman carpenter who became a dentist, who retired at 50, sold his practice at 57 and spent the next 19 years doing medical missionary work for two months a year. That's
Joshua Johnson:pretty amazing that you were able to see that. I think you said one word that's really key, and you said apprenticeship give us a common idea of what Americans think disciple maker and discipleship is, and then contrast that with what apprenticeship is, what Jesus did as he apprenticed His disciples
Unknown:well. And I'm not the first to say this Joshua, but you know, we have started following in discipleship around the church. We've started following people sitting more at the feet of instead of in the shadow of so if you look at the Hebraic model and what Jesus did, he said, Come follow me. And that invitation really translates to you already have what it takes to be like me. And then we built out, and we started scaling these programs, kind of a one size fits all. The problem with programs, while they're helpful, we can mostly measure results. How many people signed up? How many chapters did we get through? How many leaders did we get? How many home openers? You know, all the things. But God never called us to results. He called us to fruit and and so only in a relational disciple making capacity can we measure fruit. And so I like to think of apprenticing as on the job training. You're You're shadowing and, and it's like, hey, get ready. We're not just going to take a break for summer and try and sign up again in the fall for another 16 weeks. When we're done here, there's going to be a launching. And I'm going to assume you could do this. You could train someone else when we're done, like
Joshua Johnson:it or not, this is what it is when we're discipling our family and our children that they're going to be apprenticed into something. It doesn't matter what it is, they're going to be apprentice into something, right? So they're going to start to mimic us as parents. The children are they're going to mimic our desires, right? You look talking about Renee Sure, our medic, desire, whatever we get into our desires, our children going to mimic those. So why did you say, hey, let's actually look at the family structure and how we disciple our family into the ways of Jesus through really a lens of apprenticeship. Why go into the family? I know it's important, but why are you passionate about it?
Unknown:Here's the thing, I've been a youth pastor, I've been a family pastor, I've been a senior pastor, I've done all the things. I've taken I've been a college pastor, where all the kids come away and, you know, move away from home and come to most parents do not feel equipped or confident to be a spiritual leader of their home. In fact, I think most churches would say we are, we are faithfully answering the call to make disciples. The problem is is a lot of people raised in the church and have done all of the things in church for years actually don't feel like they've ever been discipled. Well, I think family is the quintessential picture of this. In fact, I use a line in the early part of the book that says, You know what a mirror works even if your eyes are closed. And my point is this, parents, we are reproducing not only the beauty of our lives, but also the sort of shadow side of our lives. So we teach what we know, but we reproduce who we are. And so we are reproducing our priorities or lack thereof. We're reproducing maybe our cynicism, our biases, but we're also reproducing our hope, our trust. We're reproducing our compassion and generosity. Kids see all of it even without being stated. So rather than thinking about spiritual leadership as this idea that, Oh, I need to like be about content generation, I'm simply suggesting, I think, by faith, you're closer than you realize, and by nature of your influential relationship and your proximity, you can be more transformational than a church ever could you. And so parents go, oh, their kind of largest gesture of spiritual leadership is too often reduced to, I gotta find somewhere with a good, really good children's program or youth ministry and almost abdicate. And so what I'm trying to do is say, You know what, there's a way to incarnate Christ. And what if we thought about it this way, not as sort of a degreed person like for our pastor, we want him to be knowledgeable or her to be a learned person. But what if the incarnation was greater than the information? Well, that's parent. We don't have to have a Bible degree. So I wrote this book to try and give parents away, maybe some fresh language, as well as a chance to say we can animate this together, and in animating this, we might all have a growing awareness of God's presence in the everyday, in the ordinary windows of Life.
Joshua Johnson:That's pretty key, because you're looking at being aware of God's presence in the ordinary things of life. It's not being being knowledgeable about who God is, but saying God is present with us, and we're going to figure out how our relationship with him and with one another works out in relation to each other and to God, a lot of parents, as you said, say, Oh, I don't have the right information. I want to make sure that they know the right things. Free us up a little bit. Give us a way to say, Oh, it's okay. You don't need all the right information, but you do need a living, breathing relationship with a living God? Yeah.
Unknown:Well, two things I wrote the book with seven kind of incarnational rhythms when we understand that the family is the place that we learn and experience belonging. Psychology, in the last 30 years has developed what we've commonly known as attachment theory. There's been some neurotheology in that space that is really fascinating, but I would simply use the language of belonging. You walk into a room and you don't have to earn anything. You're one of us. And from belonging, we learn identity, who we are and whose we are, super formative. But here's the real kicker, is that we don't grow by obedience, like we don't form character through just disciplines. I think disciplines are great. I think the word of God is great. We grow through desire, through imitation. So with all of this thing that's happening within this relational dynamic at home, I'm going to say it this way. Before they get to 12 years old, adolescence takes on a whole mind of its own. But in those formative years, parents are the most influential. And I'm saying you've got a captive audience to shape the reality of Christ in you. Now what I do is I take the Deuteronomy six picture of what it means to just find four ordinary windows, if we're just a little bit intentional. So you know, meal times, bed times, morning times and drive times. And I try and give as much handles to hold on to, maybe conversations to host like and when my kids were I used to just say, put your phones away. Otherwise I'm going to charge you like an Uber driver. I want talk time, you know, and you know. But I tried to be really intentional. And then when I walked in the door in the evening, I tried to be off my phone and just go, okay, here I'm present now. And so there's just some disciplines like that. But those four windows happen, whether we want them or not, but those four windows each be captured as these sort of divine appointments each and every day, and that's where I tried to build some of the embodiment around it. So last thing I'll say is I think there's three kind of, what I call an ortho Trinity. We have orthodoxy that's right belief, super important. We want to teach that, but we want to live that. And that's orthopraxy, this right practice. But then there's this other area of orthopathy, which we think is right, desire and and this is where, I think, where our identity in Christ gets most formed is in this desire. And so when we're trying to instill in our kids, they see our affections, they see our fear. They see all the things. And so I'm trying to encourage people to just live ordinarily but intentionally in light of who Christ is. I think
Joshua Johnson:it's really important for us as parents to get our own desires right. If we don't get our desires correct, the incarnational way that you're talking about, our kids are going to mimic something off. That's why. Why they go, Hey, really, my desire is comfort and my desire is safety, right? And that's a pretty typical American desire, right? It's comfort and safety. And so what I want to do is, then I want to ship them off to Sunday school to get the knowledge about God, and hopefully they're going to be okay as they grow up. So what's the importance as a parent to do your own work, to figure out your own desires, to get it aligned to Jesus Himself? Well,
Unknown:you're asking the right question, because, let's just be honest, like our lives are on display, and that's not always a great thing. We're all prone to sort of these weak moments and but we have this idea that God's strength is is actually made perfect in our weakness, so we don't have to be a students before our kids. I was sitting at a small group a couple few weeks ago and a dad of four boys under the age of 10, in a very humble gesture. It was it was all men. There's probably about 10 of us, 12 of us. And he said, you know, my boys are really pushing me over the edge. Would you guys pray for patience for me? And I didn't. I didn't know him well, but what I wanted to do is say, I don't want you to come at them with perfect patience. What if you lead with vulnerability? What if you make yourself known? What if you came to the the boys and just said, This is who I think Christ is, and this is what I think he's inviting me into. I think we can lead more vulnerably and tell on ourselves. So there's a conversation I've been having for years, over 20 years, with every engaged couple I ever meet with. And the first question is, hey, tell me, and I record some of this in the book, but it's like, how was conflict handled in your home? Now, like, Well, what do you mean? I was like, well, we all throwers. Were you door Slammers? Was it silent treatment? Was it, you know, punching walls, whatever. And they're like, Oh, okay. And everyone has a model for conflict. And my point is, listen, God never intended us to see eye to eye on everything. Conflict is the most natural thing in the world. However, there is a way to disagree and, quote, unquote, stay in bounds. You know, when it gets reduced down to veiled threats and name calling and we're just hurting. The small question is fascinating is, I say, How did you see it resolved? And I've for, like, over 20 years, I've gotten a puzzled look. What do you mean? I was like, What did reconciliation look like? And they're like, What I and so I'll just offer, was it whatever happened that night got resolved behind closed doors of mom and dad's bedroom, and it was business as usual. Next day, they're like, yeah. And my point is this, we have a whole generation who has a model for conflict, and it's usually not that healthy, and we have a whole generation or society that has no model for reconciliation. And my my point is this, this is Christian identity. Christ came and made us ministers of reconciliation. I said the best legacy y'all could ever leave in your kids is how to forgive. And so in our family, we didn't just offer apologies, we started rehearsing. Will you forgive me? Because we thought consent mattered, yeah,
Joshua Johnson:as you talked earlier, a little bit of the neuroscience of attachment theory, that's what, how we get secure attachment is that we repair ruptures right away, and people who see it, it's reconciliation, it's right there. And so this is what your your children get. They get belonging in that moment. They get like, I am safe in this family, and we're oriented towards God. It is a it's a beautiful thing. But if there is rupture, there's no repair, there's no reconciliation, we don't see it, then that's when attachment gets skewed, right? There's or avoidant
Unknown:or scattered. What do you want to say that all the non stable things, and this is exactly what happens with our Heavenly Father. So I like to think of when Jesus first went out. And this is good for our kids to know, but this is great for parents to know when Jesus goes out to see John, the Baptist and the voice from above, I call that the divine affirmation, before Jesus has done anything Messiah worthy or build his resume. One person hasn't been saved, fed, healed, delivered. He gets this divine You are my child in whom I love, and with you I am well pleased, and I wish parents could walk in that truth, because if they could reproduce that hopefulness. There's another word that comes out of the Catholic tradition called anamnesis. Have you heard of this? So it's the opposite of amnesia. Amnesia is forgetting who we are. So when we come to the Lord's table and it says, Do this in remembrance. Of me, the word is anamnesis, which is, don't forget who you are. Typically, we sit there and kind of recount, sort of our weak moments, our shameful moments, our regrettable moments, and he's like, no, no, that's not who I want to remember. You're not a sinner saved by grace. You You are the righteousness of God in Christ, Jesus. That's how God sees us. I'm like, Oh my gosh. So I don't have to get it right with my kids. I just, again, I talk about I want to lead vulnerably and just the older I get, I just want to be able to be more secure in my insecurities.
Joshua Johnson:That's so good. Give me an example of what does it look like to help our children remember who they are and whose they are.
Unknown:Family is not immune from hardship, right? So we all go through particularly a dark season. I mean, when, when our daughter was in middle school, she suffered a traumatic brain injury, and it introduced all sorts of doctors appointments, and it all all sorts of behaviors that were unrecognizable. And so for a couple years, we had an older son that we're kind of parenting the same way. And then we had a younger daughter who was playing by her own set of rules. It was one of the hardest, darkest, traumatic times for all of us. And what I'm trying to do is trying to instill in us that the path of least resistance is not and never will be the center of God's will. So when we invite the kingdom of God, we understand that being a Christian doesn't mean we're just saved so we can go to heaven when we die. We understand that there's the reality of attention and even the darkness that we live in in here and now and oh, by the way, God's got a middle name. He's Emmanuel. He is with us when we get down to identity. Identity then becomes as animated it as as it is believed. So we stayed together. We walked together. In fact, I started using this phrase with my son, Barron, who's got it better than us. Nobody had, and it was such a hard season, I could get a little choked up just revisiting it. But my point was, there is a ministry of presence, and so when we think of attachment, going back to attachment theory and joyful attachment, joy isn't some emotion that I need to feel. Joy is the thought of we're together. I can't fix it or solve it, but neither one of us are alone, and that is the incarnational presence of God. Even I don't even like to use the term following Jesus, because following implies a distance. Incarnation implies embodiment. He is with us, past, present and future, yesterday, tomorrow, you know, today and forever.
Joshua Johnson:Up until 12, when, when children are small, we have identity and belonging are really key foundational attributes for our our kids. This is what we want. We want to form identity and belonging through incarnational living apprenticeship in the everyday and reminding our kids who they are and whose they are. What else in those formative years are we looking for as we disciple our children?
Unknown:So there's a major shift that's happening, both chemically, but also in terms of positionally. So as as parents, and a lot of parents are really laid on this. And the shift is, there's this apoptosis, this this changing of the chemical makeup, and as children, kind of around middle school start to go through puberty, they're not as friendly to cuddle. They'll do the pullback on that hand holder or whatever. All the things that parents go no, not that. But one of the things that parents miss is you have to shift from from leading through authority to leading through influence. Now we can flex our muscles and say, as long as you're under my house, under my rules and my pantry and my cars or whatever week. Yes, but guess what? It's like following obeying a law that you didn't vote for, and so when they're young and they're throwing a tantrum in the store, you can just pick them up and strap them in the car seat and say, Fine, we'll try this again another time. But you can't do that at 14 when they're act, you know. So that's why I like to say that shift needs to happen. Now what helps that ship, and this is why, for for as much, uh, as church is is kind of this. It's a mixed bag. We have this beauty that is the church and a struggle that is the church. A standing appointment with faith and community can make all the difference, because the question that kids are starting to ask when they enter into middle school is, it's a group identity. It's. Not just individual identity, who I am in Christ or who I am in this family. It's how would my people, however they identify my people, respond to this right now? Well, you want to talk about a shift in culture. There has been such a huge shift in in the digital revolution, and so all autonomy, like we've shifted the locus of power from institutions, government, church, family, marriage, education, media, into the individual, and now truth is relative. So if I feel it, it's real, it's it's accurate. And I'm like, Well, yeah, sure, it is, but it's also limited. Now they're trying to define life by how would all the identity politics, all the things that say, Well, I feel this way, so therefore that is my truth. And they're trying to define themselves by, how do my people, my group, respond? And that's where, if we have a faith community that we stand in solidarity to one another as salt and light, but in support and encouragement. That's where I think parents can have the most traction is when they have other voices to echo the same truth of God's unconditional love and grace and truth. So
Joshua Johnson:it's important to find that that community, the real faith community, that could then speak into your kids lives as well. And the great thing is, is you're not doing it alone. So if we're now individuals trying to seek meaning and identity and a lot of different things. We we said, Okay, I'm 14. Now my identity is found in, you know, the basketball like I am a basketball player. This is my identity. This is who I am. That ends I I'm no longer a basketball player. I'm not on a team anymore. Now, now where's my identity? It's a shifting identity. It doesn't matter what it is in but it's consistently shifting. And so what that does, I think, in adolescence and really in adulthood, is it then gives us a sense of anxiety depression, because we're not rooted. How does the family help root children in a true identity and not in an identity that shifts over time, all the time, in every direction? Oh, man,
Unknown:I Joshua, you're asking all the right hard questions. These are delicate, and I might say something that some of the parents might not agree with, and that's okay, because it's not a right or wrong. One of the things I tried to be very careful of, I mean, because my kids did all the activities, daughter was a competitive dancer, and son played multiple sports, and they were also very good students, but we did not reward them for A's. We didn't create some kind of financial incentive around A's because I didn't want to build a sense of validation and worth around their performance, as if we loved them more or now we were more proud of them because they were smarter than someone else, or they beat someone else, or they I didn't want to send that message, because that's a message, frankly, that I've had to unlearn, not necessarily from my parents, but I was just a naturally driven kid with a competitive spirit. So what we tried to speak to was their character. We tried to affirm their strength. We tried to speak into their lives about their potential and how we saw Christ in them. We wanted to talk about the character and the nature of who God is. Because, guess what? God is unchanging. He is immutable. So if we can understand the attributes of God, His specifically, His names, and then we have an encounter with that. We're rooting them in something that's absolute, not unchanging. So there's this narrative that says, well, everything's relative, or perception is reality. I'm like, Well, no, it's just limited. But when we encounter a living God as healer, as provider, as comforter, as protector. It doesn't mean the problem went away. It meant that God showed up in the most personal way, and he will always be that. And I'm trying to encourage parents to do the hard work of building their thesaurus. When we talk about worship, we're talking about intimacy with God. What's intimacy with God? Knowing the names of God, and so then, as we grow the names of God, what we're doing is this inventory of where are the times and the places and the seasons and the episodes where God met me like he met Hagar. I am the God who sees. Well, guess what? He didn't deliver her. He said, Go back to that abusive relationship with Abraham and Sarah. But he said, I see, and I'm like, if I can be just an ounce of that kind of parent to say, I see the struggle, but I also see this. I think we are setting our kids up for not just who they are as a member of this family, but who they are in Christ that can weather, whether the group identity, the maybe the the exclusion, or I didn't get invited to the party I want. I'm not getting the date that I want. Or, you know, those kinds of things.
Joshua Johnson:You know what we do see you mentioned Jesus receiving his identity from the Father, the beloved son, so he knows who he is. He's receiving his identity from the father, so he knows who's he is. And then he was sent out into the desert with a with a purpose and a mission. How important is it for families as as we disciple our children to have purpose and mission that is greater than ourselves and greater than an insular look just and just holding up in the the safety and comfort of our own family.
Unknown:Yeah, like you're talking about the thing we like maybe today, the thing we cherish most is our time and busy parents feel like a personal affront, if someone like slows them down or don't, you know how many balls I'm juggling right now? Don't you know how many emails the school sends me, whatever, and I think that there's a way to allow for the divine interruption. I'm gonna say this as simple as this, if you have a toddler, if you have a child with shorter legs than you would you please rehearse their gait and let God minister to you because their pace, their curiosity, their wonder, is part of God's revelation to parents who feel like they're all serious and all business and all responsibility, and I'm saying, let, let the grace of God just wash over you because your kid can't walk past another puppy. That's some childlike wonder. Now I will say this, we tried to be really thoughtful. We were in an affluent community, and when Jesus said, Love your neighbor. I'm convinced that was not a proxy, just a proximity statement. And here's why, the people on my block have roughly my level of education, my earning potential. We all have about the same kind of nice cars. Or, you know, there's, there's a homogeneity about it. And I'm saying, when the people of God understand that God wants to seek the peace and the prosperity of the city in which we live, because if it prospers we there's people in our city, my neighbors, that their pantry, there's some food insecurity, or there's some illiteracy, or they need some advocacy. And so we just made, I kind of created, a few statements, like, let's just go ahead and make offer awkward look effortless, like, we'll make it look awesome and and it's uncomfortable, but I would rather be uncomfortable in community than by myself. We wanted to be very intentional with crossing social divides. And so one of the mantras we have about their school is this is not normal, the level of wealth, or, you know, what kind of spring breaks that kids could afford or were taking. And so we wanted them to develop a healthy sense. And so we did, and I put this in the book we might take a week, especially when they're in elementary school, and say, let's, let's practice a new normal. So we got together with some of the other families in our faith community, and we said, you know, we came up with easy statistics to find about world poverty. And Hey, kids, do you know that a lot of the world, like maybe 60% lives on$2 a day. And why don't, for this week, we, the four of us, live on $8 per dinner. And we went shopping and and, you know, it's rice and beans or it's pasta, but no meat, and you can get a little sauce and maybe a mushroom or, you know, something like that. And then it became sort of an adventure, and we wanted to and I share verses with them, and then I'd share statistics with them at dinner, but I just wanted them to have this growing awareness that man, this is not normal, our abundance. And that was one of the ways I I defined first compassion, passion is seeing others needs is merely different than our own. And then generosity is learning to not give, to save anyone, but to save ourselves from deserving. We somehow believe God's abundance, and that required some rehearsing, some some practice, and that's something we all had to learn.
Joshua Johnson:So how do we get into a place? Of going, Hey, I'm living in this affluent neighborhood. I know that there's, there's a pain point in my community that I'm not proximate to. I'm not in incarnationally living there. How do you go in, into a place where and receive some hospitality and not just say I'm I am here to in our family is here to save this neighborhood, but we're here to actually then receive hospitality and to be with you in whatever you're going through. I'm
Unknown:going to say something that might get me a drill with some pastors, but I think service projects are a wonderful on ramp. I don't think that they are really impactful and gain enough traction. So I am a huge advocate for developing cultivating a reoccurring relationship, and part of how that happens is you have to dignify the give and the take. We'd like to be on the giving end, especially when we know that we have more means than the other person. But no one wants to be felt like, perceived as charity. And so we were very intentional with some Burmese refugees. We were very thoughtful with how we cultivated relationship with a transitional emergency foster shelter home that wasn't state run. And our kids were a part of that. And I would just say, and we did do the homeless things as well. And, you know, waking them up with a cup of coffee and some, you know, socks and ramen noodles on, you know, whatever, we did that too, and it was very impactful for our kids. But to Saint, sustain something that becomes actually reorienting, if you will, recentering in a good way, like God wants our hearts to be broken. My gravity, natural gravitational pull, is to callous up my heart, but God is trying to sensitize our hearts, and so I need to be in a place where I can experience someone whose needs are different than my own. And that just became a standing appointment for us, like at least monthly. And so I would find those outlets that tug at your heart, a title, one school, foster care, maybe after school reading program, or, you know, we have safe families here in Austin that a friend is running, and there's all different levels of involvement. But I needed it. I didn't want it just for my kids. I needed it to be reminded of and fill my heart with gratitude. So
Joshua Johnson:then, what does hospitality look like as you're opening up your own home to others as we're discipling our family and our kids, bringing others in through this rhythm of hospitality.
Unknown:Yeah, this is my code language for how we have traditionally talked about evangelism. So here's how I would define it. Hospitality, in some cases is, yes, making room for others. In other cases, it's learning to receive from others. But in both cases, we as Christians are trying to discern who God has prepared in our lives. I'm guessing we all have people that God has prepared in advance for us, that just showed us unmerited favor, kindness, Grace, hospitality, whatever. And yet we're probably that person. For someone else, it's like that you meet someone, you're like, why is there such an initial connection and you're like, it's not my winsome spirit, it's not my charm, it's not my jokes. Maybe it's Christ in me. And so where do I get that? That's just simple. Matthew 10. Luke, nine and 10, the people of peace, I'm sending you out among wolves. Take nothing with you for the journey, but find the homes or the people of peace. Those are the ones that showed them a kind of a grace, a kindness, employment or and here's where it gets real, personal, if we are not thinking about people of peace, those who don't know Christ but have given us influence, our kids won't develop a heart to see people come to faith. So the more parents begin to talk about people they're praying for to know Jesus, or people that they're inviting or including in some activity, for a meal or whatever, kids start to see, the thing that parents are praying for matters. It's a priority. So salvation matters, restoration matters, healing matters, and that's where I think it becomes the most contagious. You know, what's not contagious is probably how you and I learned evangelism. Let's go on our college campus and take some fake surveys saying we're just asking if people die today, where they'd go to heaven. You know, where I went
Joshua Johnson:to college to become a pastor, because I knew I was I was called in to do some sort of ministry i knew i. I knew it. And then I really do think it was my evangelism class, my my first semester, my freshman year in college, says I cannot do this. This is not what I'm called to. I and then it took me about 10 years to figure out what I really was called to, and it just set me off on the wrong direction. Was the way that we were called to do evangelism, and it was just like, this isn't life, like there's no life in it. It
Unknown:was draining. It wasn't like giving. But if you put me in a dinner party and you allow me to maybe turn the topic to Christ or talk about something transcendent. So in our faith community, we used to talk about, no, we need to throw parties for the sake of others. In this world today, everyone is spiritually hungry. Most people, especially in the West, are institutionally skeptical. So their first step isn't going to be into your church service or your living room Bible study, necessarily. The church is in such decline that if a church is growing. It's probably because they're getting some chance for growth. That's the demographic statistics in the United States. But we started throwing these unusual events, I'll say it that way, where we just a wanted to make faith and community accessible, and then B, we wanted a way to disciple our families. And so we would attach to the rhythms to a specific lab event. We call it churches lab and and we wanted to have these outward faces, and so I'd send out an email. Here's how to pray about this. Here's how to invite for this. Here's how to explain why we do what we do to your kids. So it was, let's let's have a lab, not just a Sunday school class or a small group. You know that I like
Joshua Johnson:that lab language a lot. I like throwing parties. And I think one of the things that we've been been kicking around at our church is we're just wondering, Where are the stage posts for seekers, like, where are these places where people who are spiritually hungry and curious, where are we making faith accessible to them? And it's, it's not the easiest thing to have a reorientation of what programmatic church has looked like, and now you know we're in a totally new era Yeah, that that's doesn't work anymore. Joshua,
Unknown:what do you think about this idea? I've just it's kind of been some I've been playing with. I'd love for you to interact with it. It's the idea that, you know, when we talk about pluralism or, and I know there's a lot of fear that people would have like, oh, the world is or the West has become, we're getting so secular. And I'm wondering is, do you feel like we're we're actually, it's just that everything's getting so sacred. Do you understand everything is the most important thing? We're dying on every hill, and so young adult brunch on Sundays is like a liturgy, and it's sacred to some people because or friends, giving is more sacred than actual Thanksgiving with family members. I mean, we have this thing where everything's becoming more it feels like I'm just kind of riffing off of what you said and thinking about the shifting culture. I
Joshua Johnson:think one because we're meaning making people like we have to make meaning out of the world and the space that we live in. So when things have shifted from this this group identity, we make meaning together through this institution, which is church. Now it's through everything else. Yes, we're trying to make meaning out of everyday rituals, of what that looks like, because we're trying to find identity and rootedness and something. It's kind of, it's a lot easier than to talk to people about Jesus through identity, language, through rootedness, through I like
Unknown:meaning, because that's i belonging looking for that who are my people? Yes, exactly. So let me ask you this If, if I think that we're in a crisis of meaning. There's lots of statistics and studies going all the way back to 1972 from an MIT study, but we're in this meta crisis of meaning. How do we make meaning? Because for me, I had a good church experience growing up, I rather liked it because my closest friends were there. How does the church make meaning today, when someone who is institutionally opposed, that's not meaningful, the
Joshua Johnson:church is not but it is. Relationships are meaningful. Relationships with people are very meaningful, and I think revolving around something that that brings about some greater purpose is meaningful that is not just a staged program. That I don't think is going to create a lot of meaning for people, but I do think that when you have a smaller group of people that are living. Authentically together, that genuinely love one another and wants to see some restoration in this world, and they do that together. That's where meaning actually takes place. And I think that's what the church is supposed to be about. And I think there's a lot of people that are actually living that these days, and that's where people are finding meaning. You,
Unknown:there is this ubiquitous, universal metaphor of a meal. We have it scripturally in the Eucharist, but you so I have this friend. He's a serial church planter with new breed church planting, and he's just dear friend. I was out in San Diego, and he said, Hey, you were hanging out with Peyton and San Diego. You know Peyton Jones, yeah, he's like, we've done some
Joshua Johnson:training together. I know Peyton, oh,
Unknown:he's fantastic. And he can't not plant a church, but he's got this core group that's been together a little longer there. He says, Come, come visit with us and do some discipleship training. And so last two Sundays ago, I was there, and it was, it was the picture was, what if churches and however you expressed, you know, church like, whether you're small group, I think is meaningful when we start trading out stages for tables and and all of a sudden, I'm seen, I'm known, I'm heard, I'm called by Name, belonging. And now you have this picture. And again, I'm not saying kill the Sunday event, but there is something accessible about that environment in all times for all people, in all cultures. And so like, I'll tell you this, we would do these regular lab events, and I'd meet with we did this one with the they're going to bring about about 12 kids that were between the ages of seven and 17, that were foster kids. And I met with them beforehand, our families and our children, and I just said, I explained the situation, and I said, You know what? Today, here's your assignment. You need to learn someone's name. Don't wait for them to host you. These people don't have a family, but you learn their name, you use their name because everyone loves to hear their name out loud. And then, thirdly, you pray for that name this week as a family. And then we played laser tag in the park, and then we all had popsicles afterward. And I broke us all up into family groups where we could all actually have. And I had five questions, you know, and it was so meaningful because it was so relational, and everyone got to hear their names spoken,
Joshua Johnson:that's beautiful. Well, David, we're coming close to the end here, so I'd love to have a few questions for you at the end. One, what? What is your hope for people that would pick up homegrown disciples, what's your hope for families that pick up your book? Well,
Unknown:here's the thing, like I started out saying, I think that most parents are just struggling with the idea of maybe feeling a little inadequate or maybe even a little hypocritical, but they lack the confidence to spiritually lead. And I'm saying you're you're probably closer than you realize, and maybe if you just adjusted, you could see your life in Christ as the syllabus, and your life together as a family as your curriculum, and trust that the Spirit is going to bring those teachable moments. I wrote this so that parents could feel like they have a little imagination, but maybe even find some language and and even some ways to animate Christ in their home together. And so there's a lot of creative conversations as well as activities. So I just I loved raising my kids, and now they're 25 and 23 and they are adulting, and I'm the one that feels like I need them more than they
Joshua Johnson:need. Oh, that's fantastic. There's so many 3540 year olds that don't know how to adult yet. So that's great. Your kids are adulting. You should teach Bjorn, or somebody should taught Bjorn how to smoke fish instead of meat. He's lost it. He's lost the Norwegian in him. He's totally Texan. He is a very
Unknown:good snow skier. We're just on a snow ski trip, and he's an amazing golfer with like, a three handicap, so he's got that going for him. But he works in renewable energy, and he sees his life as a mission. My my daughter's working as a NICU nurse, and she sees it as if we define what does it mean to be a minister is to put the divine on display. She she works the night shift. She came home at eight o'clock this morning, and she lost a baby last night, and we just got to grieve over it. And she talked about how the intercession that went on and the comfort for families, and she can't imagine doing anything else. I'm so proud of her. And thought, Annika, this is like an anointing for like, not everyone can do this. Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:so amazing. So. Treadwell, I just I hope and pray that that all the families, the parents that are listening to this, that they could see their kids grow up like that, following Jesus and then walking with him throughout their days, and that whatever they're doing, the Divine is on display. So that's beautiful. David, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give? Oh, oh,
Unknown:pretty quick. Here's the thing in my home, godliness was next to pragmatism, and so we're, you know, that blue collar sensibility, if I wish, I would have invested more in levity and and frivolity, like it was all business, all the and. And I wish I would have invested more in hobbies and leisure and just I mean, I have my things that I enjoy, but the further I went into pastoral ministry, I struggled to have a mechanism for renewal, and I felt like God was calling me into more play. I'm hyper relational, but I was always sort of the Rainmaker. So if I could go back to my 20 orders, I would say, get good at a few hobbies that bring you life. What hobby brings you life right now, my happy place as a Norwegian is on the ski slopes, but that doesn't get to happen in any kind of predictable way. But the thing that I do, I run about 20 to 25 miles a week, and I can tell when I'm not running, there's some endorphin release that doesn't happen. And that's a very prayerful time for me. I listen to podcasts like yours, and then I just I spend time in prayer, because I think prayer is not only asking God for things, it's asking God about things, and I just try and leave room to wrestle with that, out loud with the Lord.
Joshua Johnson:Well, David, anything you've been reading or watching lately you'd recommend, I'll
Unknown:be serious first. There's a wonderful movie right now on Netflix called number 24 it's about the Nazi occupation, of which my mom was there. My mom's first cousin was one of the 10 Most Wanted. He was a saboteur by the Nazis, but it was the way they told the story was so powerful, and it really captures what's happening today in a very kind of either or equation. And this man who was so heroic, and he did, he fought for something greater than himself. It was so powerful and inspiring, and almost we just lost those models. So that was powerful. And I just watched that a couple weeks ago, and I just been talking about it, and it stuck with me. But then I have some just I like some dumb humor if you have not watched dairy girls. Imagine George Costanza meets Napoleon Dynamite and comes up as four Irish teenage girls in the 90s. It is, it's, it's just, it's funny. But in terms of what I'm reading, I'm reading Leonard sweet decoding the divine. Len is just a mentor of mine. I'm doing my doctoral work through, or just finishing up my doctorate with him. I've become friends with Tish Harrison Warren, who's a genius writer prayers in the night, liturgy of the ordinary. But her book on Advent that she wrote with her husband, they knocked it. It refrained. Christmas for me and I just, I probably gave out six copies of Advent.
Joshua Johnson:David, how could people go get homegrown disciples? Anywhere else you'd like to point people to there is
Unknown:on my website. Davidsundi.com, you can go to the link and it'll take you to NAV press, but they've, I'm so thankful for nav press, but they they've allowed me to create a 30% discount on a pre order right now on my website. And so if people go to davidsondy.com but it's on all the platforms, and it would mean the world to me if there's something that resonates and people want to leave a review, but I post on social media, like with I have small batch disciple making on Instagram, and then also my own family life, where you get to see like me skin, you know, I'm doing family stuff with David. Sunday,
Joshua Johnson:Well, David, thank you for this conversation. It was a pleasure and a joy to talk to you. Thank you for helping us raise our children in such a way that they are disciples of Jesus as we walk our families through this place of being apprentices. Yeah, that our kids can be apprenticed towards Jesus that we actually live incarnationally with them. Fantastic conversation. Loved it. Thank you so much. So
Unknown:much. You're a gift, Joshua, I appreciate it. You
