40% of Christians, according to Barna, have turned to AI for spiritual guidance. And those aren't just Christian acts. We have been doing this for thousands of years. We should know better than anybody how to teach humans how to be human, how to love your neighbor, how to love somebody you disagree with. And we're not very good at that.
SPEAKER_01Confusion or uncertainty about the nature of AI and consciousness and what does it mean to be a person is just extraordinary.
SPEAKER_00You know, you look at it theologically. What is what are human relationships? Rupture and repair. You can look through all of human history, all of the biblical text, rupture and repair. There's no rupture and repair in AI relationships.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that Dallas Willard would often say is Jesus is the sort of person who would be the first to tell you you must follow the truth wherever it leads. I get to be here today with um a good friend. And Kerry, I'm so grateful that you will join me on this podcast. We're sitting in uh the Redwoods of California, and super grateful to Alliance Redwoods Conference Ground for giving Kerry Newhoff and me space to have a conversation about life, about faith, about church, about anything that's on your mind. So, Carrie, thank you so much for joining.
SPEAKER_00John, it's a joy. I thought we'd be in a studio, and you're like, hey, is it okay if we shoot in the Redwoods? I'm like, yeah, this is amazing. It's so beautiful. We're near the Russian River Valley.
SPEAKER_01We are uh right on it. In it. And uh it's a good place to be. And Tony is here and Nancy is here, so we get to hang out some together. And you guys have had a significant role in my and Nancy life together. So I'm grateful in a bunch of different ways.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's a privilege. You know, I I think uh I followed you long before I knew you, probably as far back as the 90s. And to be able to build a friendship with you, get to know you, connect with you, learn from you, uh, and grow with you has been a joy.
SPEAKER_01I followed you before I knew you. I don't know if I've told you this story, but I was at uh Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, and we were in navigating change, 150-year-old Presbyterian church. So change navigation is like a primary challenge. And you wrote a book about Moses and change and never confuse mass with volume. And uh it was like, this is so good. So I walked our elders, we walked through that stuff, and I I remember reading, it was by a guy named Kerry Neum. I'd never heard of you or about you, or how to pronounce the name. No idea. It was this odd little, you know, Dutch Iranian name. And uh so that was when I first found out about you, and then it's just been a joy to watch the way that your life has unfolded in the year since.
SPEAKER_00You know, encouragement to people watching or listening who might think, Am I gonna write something or publish something or whatever? I remember Sue Miller said to me, because I knew Sue through me.
SPEAKER_01Sue, I worked with on a staff back in Chicago, yes.
SPEAKER_00Did and she said, Hey, John Orberg has been reading your book, Leading Change Without Losing It. And I'm like, John Orberg is reading my book? Like, how is this even possible? Yeah, can I connect you? And I'm like, Yeah. And that I think was our first conversation, and here we are all these years later.
SPEAKER_01I had uh an incredible honor about a month ago where I got this wonderful email from one of the writers in the world I admire most who loved one of my books, Wendell Berry. You seriously? No, not seriously. Unfortunately, it turns out it was AI. No. Yeah, no, it was like this just incredibly kind, generous, very personal. I mean, it was like a couple of pages and details about my life and stuff in the book and stuff about Wendell Berry that was all like just very, very personal. So it wasn't like a Nigerian prince just died in 13. Yep, yep. Uh so I I I wrote, but there are a few elements in it where it said, like, you know, uh your book has been warmly received across audio and print versions.
SPEAKER_00You know, it's like that Amazon copy, but like I would have written. Is it your first language?
SPEAKER_01So I also wrote to the Berry Center, and uh they they very kindly wrote back quite re quite quite quickly. And yeah, no, I uh Wendell Berry never wrote me about something. So but I really did read your book before I ever knew you, and I really liked it a lot. This is a I'm no Wendell Berry, but it was real me. Yeah. So um, such an interesting life. You uh were a lawyer initially, yeah, and then God convicted you about that for whatever reason. Convicted me of my sin. You became a pastor, yeah, and then you know, uh uh reached some real critical uh junctures and ended up becoming a podcaster. Uh and now you have over 800 podcasts posted and over 30 million downloads. Over 40 million downloads. Sorry, that's phenomenal. And you write, uh, like what are you gonna do next?
SPEAKER_00Long obedience in the same direction. You know what? As long as people are gonna listen, I love it. We were talking about you starting this podcast, and I jumped on episode one, and I I just, you know, I kind of knew because we've known each other now for over 10 years. I'm like, ah yes. And with Become New, when you started your YouTube channel, we had talked about that, like what's next for you and everything. And I just thought, this is so good. John is doing what he was designed to do. And I feel like at this stage of my life, and and not that like I think law, I was designed to do that. Now, much shorter season than I thought. Basically, for me, it meant I went to law school, uh, articled for a year in downtown Toronto, which means I mean I worked in a law firm, wrote the Barred Mission course, passed, resigned, and went into seminar. It was like boom, done. And the reason I resigned, the only reason I resigned was we were so poor. We were students, like perpetual students. You and your wife Tony. Yeah, me and my wife. She also went to law school. I met her in law school the first year. We were in the same they divide you into, I think we had five sections. I was section D, so was Tony. And so I noticed the cute girl sitting across the study carol from me, and I'm like, I gotta get to know this woman. Yeah. Here we are. Yeah. But you know, it was a much shorter season, and yet God used that as preparation for how I thought about ministry, how I thought about preaching, how I thought about law. And then I thought I would be leading a church to this stage in life. And after 20 years, that period felt like it was coming to an end. And while I was still a lead pastor, I wrote that book on leading change, uh, co-authored a book on parenting. Uh, I think I wrote a third book on culture in the church.
SPEAKER_01You know, you've written a lot of books when you're not even sure if you wrote a book or not. It was a really good book. I think I wrote it, but I'm not positive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you you wrote a lot more. How many books is it for you? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A lot. A lot. So, you know, every every period was defined, but the revelation keeps coming and the evolution, so to speak, keeps morphing. And now I feel like I'm in a a pattern that's an indefinite pattern, where this is a lot of fun. I think it leans into a gifting, the ability to have conversations, interesting dialogue with a wide variety of people, and it seems to be helping an audience. I think, you know, if if it doesn't help anybody, it's just a hobby. Yes. Yep. It's like, great, I'll try to sell these for 42 cents, see if anybody buys them at a garage sale. That's a hobby. Or you just make them free.
SPEAKER_01I think it was John Maxwell who said, because I think pretty much everything is something John Maxwell has said. Uh uh, the man who thinks he's leading, but nobody is following is only taking a walk. So it's like you kind of know if it's being helpful to people, you know, uh folks will let you know. And if not, you can just check out.
SPEAKER_00And it's enjoyable. I was saying, you know, I'm teaching here at a retreat that we're at with Transforming the Bay. Oh, you've been attending. You have been attending. That's the thing that amazed me. What you need to know about John is I got here last night and I I just found this empty table, and of course, I see you from the back of your head. I'm like, oh, that's John. And I knew you were gonna be here. What are you doing? You're taking notes. You're taking notes. It's like, I want to be taking notes. Like, this is great. You you are a teacher, but primarily I think you're a student.
SPEAKER_01I love to learn, and it's kind of interesting. Uh early on, I think I was 30, and I had graduated from Fuller Seminary, and I went on the board there as a uh alumni trustee. Yeah. And Dave Hubbard was the president of Fuller Seminary for about 30 years, and uh uh a remarkable leader, remarkable church leader. Um uh and he would say he spent about half his time on board leadership, which I've never heard of anybody in a situation like that leading in that way. The guy who was initially the chair person of the board was a guy named Max Dupree. Oh, I've heard of that name. And Max was CEO of Herman Miller, Fortune 500 Furniture Company. And his book, uh Leadership is an Art. I don't know if you've ever been able to see it. It's maybe my favorite book on leadership. Really? I'm gonna have to read that. It's leadership is an art. Uh if you ever heard the expression, the first task of a leader is to define reality. Yes, that's Max. And the last task is to say thank you, and in between to serve. That's Max. Uh uh just brilliant stuff and more integrated with faith, I would say, than 95% of books on leadership that I have read by faith-based pastor leaders. It's just deeply shaped by kind of his understanding of the world as Christian. That's Dutch people tend to do. Dutch people are very thoughtful people. Um, but when I would go to those meetings, Max Dupree would always be there. Back in those days, it was coat and tie. And he would have a stack of cards that look like those old IBM cards do not fold spinal meetings. And and when anytime somebody said something that jogged a thought, Max would pull that out and he would be making notes. So for me, you know, uh over 30 years ago, uh, 40 years ago, it was sitting in those meetings looking at this guy that I just thought was a profound leader and thinker and watching, he's taking notes all the time. And why would I not do that? God, there's more I can learn, there's more I can grow. So I love doing that. Uh and part of why I've looked forward to talking with you is you sit in kind of a unique chair. I'm not sure I know anybody who has more conversations with people in the world of faith, um, pastors, people in the church world, people who write or communicate in that world, uh, folks in business or leadership roles, uh, that are often in kind of faith adjacent communities, and so and um so there are ways in which you have a perspective on that realm of life that matters so much to so many of us that's kind of unique. You kind of are sitting in the catbird seat.
SPEAKER_00I have a lot of fun with it. And part of it is I, you know, we we tend to get in our own lanes. Lawyers listen to other lawyers, preachers listen to other preachers. Yeah. And one of the things I think, because I have a bit of a varied background, but also try to discultivate the discipline of curiosity, is I think you can learn from anyone anywhere, anytime. And I often find, and there's a science behind it, a science I don't fully understand well enough to articulate it. But well, David Epstein wrote about it in uh his book, Range, that if you look at the profile of very successful companies and leaders, it often tends to be someone who's studied in several fields. In other words, I was going to do this, but then I did this. And then, you know, we got some thinking from engineering that we imported into our field, and we got a breakthrough. And so that's sort of a range of experiences. And I think the church is richer, primarily my audience is church leaders. We don't know for sure, but we think like 70% people who work at a church and 30% Christian leaders who are interested in the welfare of the church and probably sit on boards and you know, are donors and key volunteers and that kind of thing. So I hear from CEOs regularly, um, you know, startups and church planters and a lot of pastors. But I think we are better when we learn from a variety of places. So if, you know, for example, Bill Gurley's team reached out. I'm sure 99% of the people in the Christian discipleship space or um lead pastor space have no idea who Bill Gurley is. I heard him years ago on the Tim Ferriss show. Uh huh. Was fascinated, remembered it because I thought, you know, Tim Ferris, one of the top podcasts in the world, Tim let Bill interview him. Yeah, you don't listen to podcasts, you just make them.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00So we were talking about that. And what was really interesting to me is like, oh, Tim Ferris, like, he's not gonna let a lot of people, he's gonna choose that person very, very carefully. And I think it was in celebration of Tim's billionth download. So, you know, makes 38, 40 million for the city. He's like the McDonald's of podcast. Exactly. I got a little burger joint on the corner, yeah, right? The first Shake Shack that isn't yet Shake Shack, just the little burger joint. So I'm like, ah, I got a and then I got his book and I read it, and it was fantastic. And I'm like, oh, if I have a shot at interviewing him, but I don't know whether that's gonna connect because you could do the celebrity route. You could be like, I want to get every big name New York Times bestselling author, and maybe he is by now, but I thought I want to interview Bill because he invested in companies like uh, I want to get this right, Uber, uh, Twitter in the early days, Square, I think were some of his companies. You ever used a reservation called open a reservation system called Open Table? Yeah. I use it all the time. Yeah. He invested in it when they had three restaurants on Open Table. So he has this incredible pedigree of success in picking winners. And he wrote a book about career aspirations and how to find your dream job. So it's gonna be a fascinating conversation. So when it was all over, I enjoyed it even more than I thought I was. But I'm like, I don't know about my audience. You always you'll find this with your podcast. You get a baseline audience that there's gonna, you know, you can read the phone book. My mom's gonna tune in, right? You know, I'm gonna have a few friends who tune in, they're gonna watch it. And then the internet tells you this went really well. I've run into so many people who are like, that Bill Gurley episode, that was so great. Ran into a guy here, and I'm like, well, I know the Silicon Valley people are gonna know who Bill Gurley is. So I just kind of like to me, that's endlessly fascinating. Yeah. And I would probably do it if nobody listened, and I'd probably do it for free as a hobby. Um, because I used to pretend I was a DJ before I was a DJ. Oh, you did, yeah. I did, I did. Yeah, yeah. I had so much fun a couple weekends ago. Uh Tony and I, in our budgeting, we have what we call fun money accounts, yeah, where we just put a few hundred dollars in a month or whatever, and then you don't know any explanation. We tithe, we give, we save, we do all the stuff we're supposed to do. And that's like a little bit of fun money. So I bought a couple of extra speakers for the house, some subwoofers, and I was having so much fun setting them up throughout the house, and Tony let me do it, which was super nice. And it reminded me of my childhood when I used to listen to radio stations as a kid. My parents took, remember when they used to be big units in the 60s and 70s. Yes. And they got a new one, I guess. And so I got the old zenith one that I could put in my bedroom, and I used to listen because I lived in southern Ontario, sorry, um, north of Toronto. I used to, at night, the AM band would get magnified, so I could listen to WLS in Chicago. I could listen to Rocky. WLS. I mean, it was the days, the 70s, it was the height of AM radio.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for young listeners, disc jockeys were guys that worked on the radio. They used to have these things called records that were round, so it was like a disc, and then the jockey they would like introduce the record.
SPEAKER_00And it would come through the air and you would receive it and you would listen. Yep. And it was great. I used to have a little, you know, uh do mix tapes when they were truly mixed tapes. I would put a small cassette player next to the speaker, record whatever I was listening to, Fleetwood Mac or whatever when that song came on the radio. And then when I was 16, I went and got a job at a radio station. That was one of my first paid jobs. No way. Yeah. I'm like, wait, those people on the radio are real people. Yeah. What does it take to get a job? So there's a little 2,000 watt radio station in a town of 12,000 people north of Toronto.
SPEAKER_01So that's part of what led you here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. I've been interested in this since I was a kid.
SPEAKER_01So uh 800 episodes now. Uh if you can think of a name, who is somebody that surprised you where you had a conversation with somebody, and by the time it was done, when you looked back on it, you said, Man, that that went someplace or something happened there. I heard something I would not have expected.
SPEAKER_00Oh, a couple. Tim Keller got to interview him. My first interview with Tim was right before the world shut down, February of 2020.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_00We were in New York City, it was already getting a bit weird. Do we shake hands or not? It was before he knew he had cancer. And we sat down in New York City, and we had a couple hours blocked out, had a film crew like we do today. And I had loved and respected Tim for years, and he was a dream guest, and it was through some mutual friends that we were able to set up the interview. And I thought, here we go. What I wasn't ready for was how personable, hospitable, kind. And I kind of asked him about the history of Redeemer and you know, some theological questions, cultural questions. And boy, interviewing him, it was like this was a bullet train.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you gotta drink your cup of coffee.
SPEAKER_00There was more meaning in one sentence than in some books I've read 15,000 words later. And I'm like, you you pay attention. Like this man knows what he's talking about. And I had a couple more opportunities. Another one that really stuck out, and I just emailed him again the other day, see if he was available to come back, was Scott Galloway. So you don't listen to podcasts, but people familiar with the podcast universe would know Prof. He's become one of the top podcasts in the world. And uh I reached out to him a couple years ago, came on the show, and it was really good. And you know, when you get people from the secular space, what's his field? His field is oh, what isn't his field? It's interesting. He he has opinions on everything from politics to AI to investing to the loneliness epidemic among young men. He's sort of a polymath, and he's a a professor at Stern School of Business. And uh yeah, the pro he has a number of podcasts, including an investing podcast, but uh yeah, kind of a polymath that way. And I found a lot of the guests when they find out, you know, hey, my audience is mostly church leaders, first they're intimidated. Secondly, they try to play along. So we ended up in this fascinating conversation where he was saying, you know, I I don't really religion's not a big part of my life. And but when I was a kid, my mom used to take us to the church, and the church people were the best, and you know, they were Mormons, but he's not really sure about the difference between Normans and you know our brand of faith. And so he was, and and I said, So what didn't connect with you? And he said, Oh, well, it's not that it didn't, he oh no, I said, So what stopped connecting with you? What made you drop out? He goes, It's not that it stopped connecting, it's that it never connected. And I'm like, Well, what's behind that? We ended up in this really conversation. What a great question. Well, he ended up kind of throwing himself under the bus, going, you know, I'm not the kind of person Jesus would love or be interested in. And I'm like, well, what makes you say that? That's a pretty small category. Yeah, I'm like, I'm I'm pretty sure he would. Well, you know, and he's pretty public about this. He goes, I paid 17 million in taxes last year. You have to make a lot of money to pay 17 million in taxes. Yep. And I said, Yeah, but in the algebra, um, I think his book is called The Algebra of Wealth. Plus, I got him mixed up with Morgan Household. No, the algebra of wealth. I said, You recommend tithing. Why? Well, it makes you less of a deadbeat. Was I said, No, there's there's a good impulse there. Yeah. We ended up having this really emotional conversation about faith or the lack of it. And we kind of wrapped up and I just said, you know, I think Jesus would have really, really enjoyed talking to him. I love that. And he would sometimes meet someone and he would say, You are not far from the kingdom of God. And Scott, you are not far from the kingdom of God. Wow. And I thought, what do you what do you get a guy? Because we always get a small podcast gift. Yeah. What do you get a guy who paid $17 million in tax last year? He can buy himself a jet. I I can't afford it. So where'd you get him? A Bible.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's great.
SPEAKER_00And we had it inscribed, Scott Galloway, and on the inside I wrote, Scott, you're not far from the kingdom of God. And who knows? That's a seed. That's a wonderful idea. There's no baptism story behind that. There's no aha moment. But like, man, you never know. What an opportunity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And all those guys know each other. I had Adam Grant on once, and I said, Why did you say that yes to this? He said, Well, because I talked to Seth God and we all talk, you know. And it was really interesting to I think Christians need to be. In that space and taken at least semi-seriously, Adam Grant and I ended up a few years ago having a great conversation. Um, and he asked me about preaching. Like, how do you approach preaching? And I'm like, Well, when I was a pastor, and I'm still preaching uh two Sundays from now, I said, I always think about the most suspicious person in the room. What why are they sitting back with their arms folded, going, ah, you know, I don't really, and then I try to go there, I try to figure that out, and I try to debunk some of the stereotypes and the myths that they have in their head. And if anyone's gonna throw Christians under the bus, I will. And let's acknowledge our sins. He goes, That sounds like the kind of church I'd be interested in attending. Wow. I'm like, so to me, it's it's fun from an intellectual level, but you if if Christians just retreat into our little cocoon and I only interest fellow believers because I want to grow deeper, I think we miss the cross-pollination that comes with learning. Like if we really believe all truth is from God, that whatever form it might be in, it might come from a drunk, it could come from an atheist, it could come, but if it actually resonates with biblical truth, then it is full God.
SPEAKER_01This is a whole nother conversation, but uh I love that approach to learning. There is a mindset. I was talking with somebody about this just the other day that wants to know who are the safe people, who are the safe books, and who are the unsafe people that I'm not supposed to read or listen to.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01And in the church world, unfortunately, sometimes it can almost be uh if they're totally secular, then they're okay. If we all know they're way out there, then that's okay. And then these church people are safe, but these people, they look like church people and they look orthodox, but they're kind of squishy. So stay away from them. And there's just this mindset of who gets the imprimatura and who does not. And it that always feels to me like it's such an anxious way to do life.
SPEAKER_00I don't know that I'm a safe person, John. I mean, it's a it's a great point. And I I can understand the logic behind it. And I think there was a part of me 20 years ago that might have been more like that, that you want black and white thinking. One of the things I want to do is I want to become more open and I want to become more curious the older I get. And on the other side of curiosity is fear, and I need to have a rigid and narrow interpretation to the world about what is safe, what is not safe. And, you know, again, Keller, I asked him what he does with his critics, because as much as I really admire him, somebody has left him a one-star review on Amazon and thinks he's a heretic or doesn't agree with this or doesn't agree with that. And his answer is very disarming. He says, I read what they have, I try to take it seriously, and then I think, hmm, where is the truth in this? And even if it's 1%, 5%, 10%, and he's not the first to say that. But he says, then I go, ah, I suppose this is what I have to learn. And I think that takes a posture of both humility and curiosity. So yeah, there are going to be some people whose theology is significantly different than mine that I might disagree with. But does that mean I can learn nothing from them? And if all truth is from God, then we don't have to be afraid.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because if it's not true, it's going to be shown not to be true. And then, oh, all right. Well, I turned over that rock. There was nothing there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think sometimes people usually don't get dogmatic about stuff if they're deeply convinced about it. Like I believe in gravity. If you don't, I don't have to get twisted and out of it. Right. Gravity will show itself to be true. So I can be pretty relaxed about it. People tend to only get real frantic and anxious and dogmatic about something if they're a little s insecure about it underneath.
SPEAKER_00Well, because then that could throw off your worldview. And if that gets thrown off, then what else gets thrown off? Yeah. Like my whole, my whole thing. And the world is, I mean, the amount of information we have.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Thanks to social media, thanks to you've you've read Amusing Ourselves to Death, haven't you?
SPEAKER_01Neil Postman's long time ago.
SPEAKER_00Oh gosh, it's such a good book. It's probably, I've read it two times. I think it needs to be on my reread list. But and you don't want to paint the past through idyllic uh lenses, but you know, he talks about the invention of the telegraph here in America. And there was a time where if the British king died, it might be three months before you found out about that in Missouri. So I go, the king died. When? Well, back in the winter, but it's summer now. Yeah. Okay, interesting. Does that really make any difference if you're just trying to get the corn in and harvest your crops or make sure your cattle don't die or whatever you happen to be doing? But he said, as soon as the telegraph was invented, you ended up getting information that was completely irrelevant, like, you know, the Queen's third cousin has a cold. Why do you need to know that in the middle of Missouri? Well, of course, what does our world become? All this information, trivial and sometimes very, very serious, that we don't have the capacity to bear. And it's messing with our minds and our souls. Like I try to read the news like everybody else does. And it's just too much to take in. I, you know, it's a it's part of the knowledge of God without the wisdom of God. So you you know too much. And Putnam was on to something, and he says, now it's all trivialized and sensationalized. And he was writing in the cable TV era. He was writing long before there was social media and and the factionalism that we have today. So it's just really interesting, and I think a lot of people probably feel insecure, overwhelmed. And so if you threaten my worldview, you threaten me. Yeah. Yeah. And I I hope to to the extent, you know, if you really think about this a little more thoroughly, if you threaten my worldview and I'm wrong about something, wouldn't I want to be wrong? Totally. Wouldn't I want to anchor myself, lash myself a little bit tighter to the truth, to what is actually true? And people worry, well, that'll lead to deconstruction. No, what if it leads to reconstruction? What if it leads to a better understanding of who Christ is and his beauty and the world?
SPEAKER_01One of the things that Dallas Willard would often say is uh Jesus is the sort of person who would be the first to tell you you must follow the truth wherever it leads. But I think some of us grew up in a tradition where uh what was more important than the truth was believing the stuff that you're supposed to believe. And you better be careful about following the truth wherever it leads, because it might lead you away from what it is you think you're supposed to believe.
SPEAKER_00That's I did not know that about Dallas.
SPEAKER_01So follow the truth wherever Jesus leads. First person who would tell you, you must find and of course what else would Jesus say? Yeah. How could he say that? He knows where it's going.
SPEAKER_00He knows where it's going. Yeah. Right. But you have this fear like we can't have certain books. We can't expose. And and I think you have to be careful and judicious with your kids. I think that kind of makes sense, where you don't want to expose them to too much too soon. But on the other hand, if they're sheltered, eventually the shelter pops.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. So uh having the conversations you've had, uh, you've seen a unique slice of life and leadership when you meet with the kind of folks that you have conversations with. Um, what do you find yourself tending to admire in those folks? What are the what are the qualities as you think back over the years in those conversations where you say that's what kind of inspires me or makes my heartbeat faster?
SPEAKER_00John, again and again, it feels like this. Um, they say don't meet your heroes. But I remember following you in the 90s. I remember following you in the 2000s. And, you know, I never thought, oh, I'm gonna meet John Urkberg. But then we have that conversation, which we've talked about already on this podcast. I really get to know you. Tony and Nancy and you and I spend some time together. We're gonna have some time together away after this event is over. And I'm like, oh, this is wonderful. And for all the headlines about the scandals and the falls and the stuff that's very real, when you get around some of the top leaders in the world, and I guess I have a selection criteria that if I think someone's an imposter or a scamster, probably gonna try not to sit down with them. I'm gonna try to find the real people. But if you look at the people leading at the highest level in the church, the highest level in business, when you get with them, they know your name. They they have set time aside, they're not checking their phone. Uh, they're interested in the follow-up, they're they're personal, and they're people just like you and I. Um they they're sincere. And I sort of have meta theory of leadership. I don't talk about it. Oh, I'd love to hear. Yeah. My meta theory of leadership unpublished is we're all making it up as we go along. They don't know more than we do, and they've had a combination of providence slash good fortune slash skill that has landed them in the place that they find themselves. And often there's a crash or two along the way. It wasn't a linear journey where everything was up and to the right, it was crashed, thought I lost it all, did lose it all, started over again, etc. And you find an incredible human resonance. And we like to uh idolize people we don't know well, we like to put them on pedestals. But um generally speaking, these are people who you will want to spend time with, who make you feel valued, who care about the deeper issues in life, and who have questions just like everybody else does.
SPEAKER_01So you have a leadership podcast. We've not, I think we've not talked about this before. How do you think about leadership? And is everybody a leader or is everybody not a leader?
SPEAKER_00A lot of leadership is the internal journey. It's it's the awareness of self, um self-awareness, self-regulation, Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence, right? That you have the ability to self-regulate as well as be self-aware, uh self-correct. I'm very interested in that journey because having and I I think God positioned me in a place where for the first seven or eight years, you know, our churches, I started Kinexis, came out of three Presbyterian churches that were so small. Um our annual budget, adding all three churches together the first year was forty thousand dollars. The smallest church had a budget of six thousand. Wow. So I had no money, the churches had no money, I couldn't even buy a plane ticket to go anywhere and learn anything. I basically had a small book allowance, and sometimes I'd take some personal money and spend it on books. And I just wanted to learn, and so I didn't have the ability to figure that out. Uh I had to read a book and take it for what it said, and some of those were your books in the early days. And you know, and so I I look back and you tend to idolize these people, and then you realize, oh, they're they're real people. And so for me, that personal side of leadership, because I knew the demons that I was slaying inside me, that God was like, Oh, you see that over there, we got to deal with that now. Because if I entrust you with more, you're gonna blow it. So let's let's deal with that shadow side in your own heart. It's having those conversations with the people that I've admired from afar that really fuels me. And then there was a second part to your question. And we can Is everybody a leader? Is everybody a leader? Did God intend for everybody to be a leader? I don't think so. Some people say everybody has a book in them. I don't think so. Yep. Are you gonna read eight billion books? I mean, what do you think? Does everybody have a book in them? Yeah. Some people who write books don't have books in them. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. That's true. You know, if everybody was a leader, I mean, I think you have a responsibility to lead yourself, um, to help lead your family, if you're a parent, to be a good steward of what you're responsible for. But this whole idea that we can all be influencers, we can all be, you know, Fortune 50 CEOs, it's just not true. It's a Fortune 500 because there's 500 companies. Yeah. Because there's 50 companies.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And today I'm not one of them. That's okay. But I do think, you know, on that note, we we I was born in the broadcast era where there were three channels, and to listen to those radio stations I talked about earlier. To become a radio station, you needed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to be heard. Well, now that's all you need. Yeah, a phone. And so I think you can be influencers or have in leadership is influence. Again, John Maxwell, because who's the godfather of leadership? Leadership is influence. So you can have influence over 50 followers, 500 followers, a thousand followers, and have like a micro tribe. Um but you know, God ultimately determines size. If you were, and when we flip the mic later and I get to interview you today, I'm gonna ask you when you were younger, did you ever imagine this would be your life and that you will have sold millions of books and have influence around the world and so many people? And if you said yes, you're probably a megalomaniac or a liar. I mean, most of us had no idea. And you asked that 800 episodes in, did you ever think you would be doing what you're doing? Doing what you're doing, and the answer is no. Yeah. If you showed 30-year-old me that you showed me this 10 years ago, I would have been like, excuse me? Do you have the right person? Um, but that's the beauty of it.
SPEAKER_01What do you see when you have those conversations? Uh, maybe about the people or maybe about the challenges they face, the world in which we live, what do you see that creates concern for you when you think about the church, the faith, uh, its foreseeable future in our day?
SPEAKER_00I I worry about this, and this might be in part projection, if I'm using the right psychological term, that our platform grows faster than our character. If if I had the kind of audience today that I have 20 years ago, uh, I think I could have easily imploded. It would have gone in my head. It's enough of a battle right now to make it not go to my head. Um, but to keep it humble and open before God, that's a that's a daily discipline. Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been ready for it. And you know, what happens? We have child, you talk about child stars, but you know, Justin Bieber, famous since he was 12, 15, 16 years old. What does that do to somebody? And I'm cheering him on in his journey, but that's gotta be hard.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you see, you know, the Britney Spears stories and that kind of thing. Well, if you're a young Christian influencer and your TikTok blew up and you have, you know, a million likes, a million follows, your character has got to be gotta be sound. And I needed decades for that. I still need decades for that. And so I worry a little bit about that. I worry about, and I was thinking about this earlier in a in the previous question. You know, if your goal is I will be on the New York Times list, I will uh, you know, have a million followers, I will have a Kardashian level of fame. That's a very dangerous goal.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00What do you have to do to get it? Do you become some version of yourself that is not the authentic you? I mean, the thing that I'm so happy about with you right now, John, at this stage of life is as far as from where I sit, you're doing what you love to do. There just happens to be an audience. I'm doing what I love to do. These people just happen to have shown up. And I think that is a much more organic and uh what's the word I'm trying to say? It has a greater longevity to it because I don't have to stay on a persona. Yeah, I I I don't have to become somebody. If you if you get known, you know, your viral moments you can't really choose, and because they're usually something dumb you've done or something you misstepped on uh or or whatever. And so if you're just able to have that long becomes a kiss cam moment at a cold play concert. Yes, you know, that defines you in a moment in time. And Oprah did a long form interview with a woman. I heard it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You heard about how many times that video has been viewed? It's insane. 300 billion. Billion with a B. Like multiple times for every human being on Earth. Billion human beings on the planet, and that video has been no, and I think about there are many, many moments in my life where if they had been recorded on a camera, and then you think about Jesus saying, uh, just be clear, nothing that is hidden now will not be brought to light then. Nothing that is said in secret now will not be shouted from the rooftops then. Uh that thought that uh ultimately when we all are concerned about people hiding and will justice be done, uh justice is coming, but it will come for all of us. It's a it's a very different world in which to live.
SPEAKER_00And you think about the accuser and his activity. Yep. We'll play that 300 billion times, over and over. And some of the backstory just provides nuance at that viral moment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that it was much different. Everybody thought either they're shy or they're having an affair. Actually, it was nothing one of those two things. But we all assume that we know, and so we're able to judge for a whole bunch of reasons and it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_00And all of that, you know, the the other thing that I would say, because we can admire people from afar easier than ever. They don't have to be an author, have a TV series, it's just somebody like the number of times somebody is new to me and I check out their YouTube channel, they have 12 million subscribers. I'm like, who is this person? I don't know. I don't have 12 million subscribers. But if you admire someone from afar and you want what they have, you want their money, or you want their fame, or you want their insight, or you want their intellect, you gotta sign up for all of it. I think it's in the top 10 wealthiest people in the world, there are 13 marriages. You know what I mean? Should I say that again? In the top 10 wealthiest people in the world, yes, there's 13 marriages because most of them are it's 16 or 13, divorced, yes, sometimes multiple times over. Yeah. So you're like, oh, I wish I had money like that. I wish I had a yacht, I wish I had influence, I wish I could snap my fingers and be wherever I wanted, or have, you know, Beyoncé perform at my birthday party. I want that level of wealth. Well, you guys are. Beyonce has not performed at your birthday party. Has not, believe it or not, despite multiple invitations. No, you know, and you gotta sign up for all of it. And I think we're in this very interesting cultural moment right now where we need deep thinking. We need people to ground us in godly, one of the verses that plays through my mind almost daily, godliness with contentment is great game. Because everything around us right now is engineered to create envy and dissatisfaction. You know, this is the latest model of an iPhone, but in four months, when the new one comes out, there'll be a whole marketing campaign. And I like Apple to convince me that this is not enough. So last year it solved all my problems. This year it is your problem. It is my problem. Exactly. You're you're exactly right. That's marketing.
SPEAKER_01So let me ask you uh uh about that as it relates to pastors. Again, you have kind of unique opportunity to know the world of pastors, and you read and study, and we'll keep up with data and research on that field. Um, this is something where it seems to me to be the case, but you would know way better. Um, when I grew, I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, and it was a community with lots of churches there, and pastors came and pastors went. We kind of knew some of them were you know more suited to it than others, but people mostly stayed at churches. Um it seems like today there's a kind of pressure or expectation or something on pastors to be successful, whatever the right word is, uh, to become known, partly because there are opportunities, platforms, branding, you know, all that kind of stuff. Churches need to have mission statements and vision. It's not necessarily a bad thing, although it kind of ate rocket science. You go back to the Great Commission. I don't know that it's changed a whole lot since then, but it seems like there's uh a level of expectation and pressure on pastors because you know, when Martin Luther was around, nobody was following him online and saying, Man, how come we don't have 98 theses like that on our door? Yeah. Uh, you know, people it was a different world. How has the world, but I'll just put it this way with you how has the world of pastors changed? What do you see going on there? Um uh what Are the concerns? What should anybody who cares about the church, cares about a life and a faith know about uh folks who go into that field?
SPEAKER_00You know, we believe in the Great Commission, and I really do. Uh, I think the good news is for everybody. The challenge with that is Gordon McDonald told me that, who I know is a friend of yours. He was saying in the 1970s, when he was leading a church of over a thousand people, there were just a handful of churches of over a thousand people. Like, if you think about it, the church that you think of in your childhood, and I think of in my childhood in the 60s and 70s, they were community-based. And what that means is, yeah, you might move from Rockford to um Aurora or Elgin or something like that. And that's great. You had two or three parishes in your lifetime, but you never had the expectation of being a celebrity. You were called to be a local pastor. Well, broadcasting changed that. Social media really changed that. And suddenly we have access to everything in every growing church. So, and you know, the ability to hold two opposing ideas and tension here is going to be helpful. Churches need to grow. We really do. We got to reach our friends, we got to reach our neighbors. The gospel has to get out into the world, and that means more churches, but it also means your church of 100. It would be wonderful if it was a church of 120 or 200 a few years down the road, or your church of 2,000 could be a church of 3,000. I believe that. On the other hand, there's a there's a virus of growth. There's an unhealthy side to growth that has also accelerated as we've compared ourselves with each other. And this is a project I want to spend quite a bit of time on over the next five years. Because I think we are we're pretty good at nailing down the personal dysfunction. We've had, you know, therapy has been normalized. I think that's good. Christian counseling. And we're pretty good at the self-awareness. What is the the what are the mixed motives inside of me? What is the demon inside of me that wants more and more and more? But there's something in the church right now. And I built a church like this, Connexus, right? We went from a handful of people to thousands of people. There's something in our model that rewards dysfunction. And I say this as a real friend of the church. I love the church. I love pastors. I'm not trying to expose the next fake. I'm not trying to tear the church down. I want to build it up and I want it to grow. But there's something unhealthy, and some of that is a self-generated need to grow. It's kind of like the stock market. You know, returning value to shareholders simply means more, more, more, more, more. More profit, lower costs, higher margins, bigger market share, et cetera. Some of that Which actually gets in the way of genuine goodness. A hundred percent. Yeah. Like Herman Miller, you mentioned, they do a beautiful job. I don't think they've been sold to private equity. Uh, if I'm just not an expert on that. But you look at their furniture, it's beautiful. And it was born out of a love of art and design. And there's something beautiful about that. Seth Godin, who I mentioned before, is a great voice on that, not racing to the bottom of cutting costs and treating your customer as a pawn, et cetera, et cetera. But to produce really good work, there's an artisanal quality, and that can also grow. Sometimes it also means you don't sell paintings in your lifetime. Vincent Vincent Van Gogh was supported financially by his brother Theo, who was a pastor, because he either didn't sell a painting or sold like two in his lifetime. It was really bad. Monet was not nearly as valued after he died as he was when he died. And, you know, I remember reading an article in the Journal of American Medicine a long, long time ago, maybe in the 1980s, that one of the reasons his paintings became more abstract is he had uh eye disease. Oh, wow. And so he didn't see as clearly as he used to. So when he looked out on his his garden, he just couldn't see it as clearly. And then he painted that way. Well, that became a form of art. So the the church industrial complex, if you want to call it that, right? Just like the wedding industrial complex or the military industrial complex, that doesn't appreciate the subtleties. And it can easily not become a race to the bottom, but just more for the sake of more rather than more for the sake of the kingdom. And I don't know where the line is, as Schultz and Eatzen said, the dividing line between good and evil runs through every person's heart, including mine. And so I think it's time with decades of the church growth model. I think Todd Wilson has outlined it to be about 70 years old now in America. It's time to reflect and maybe do a reset. And yes, let's have more campuses. Yes, let's have more locations, but yes, let's also have healthier pastors, pastors who don't burn out, pastors who don't feel that relentless pressure to produce, produce, produce, produce, produce. Yeah. Um, I did it for 20 years. I didn't have another decade in me of that. Now I was reinventing, and what I'm trying to do right now, you know, I turned 60 last year, and one of my big lessons, John, I don't know whether you think a lot when you hit a big milestone in your birthday, was because the cultural narrative is, oh, what you did in your 50s, and what I did in my 50s was take a hobby, and it became this big thing. Oh, okay. And then I thought, after a lot of prayer and reflection, Carrie, you don't have to beat what you did in your 50s and your 60s. It's not just another decade of unparalleled growth. And I'm writing a book right now. You know, I hope it sells some copies. I don't want it to fail, but I don't want to put my pressure, the pressure on myself that if it doesn't hit a list, it wasn't worth it. Right. That how do I how do I create something worth writing, worth reading, that is going to be helpful? And whether that helps 10 people or 10,000 or 100,000, you know, Charles Stanley used to say, fully obey God and trust God for the consequences. Um I think we need a healthy dose of that in the church. So those are not like well-formed thoughts, but that is like if there's a next research frontier for me, I probably want to work on that.
SPEAKER_01No, I like that a lot, and that's where it seems like uh it's kind of holding intention the visible and invisible dimensions of the kingdom. Yeah. But the visible is visible. Yes. So it exerts a kind of obvious allure and pressure. And with the invisible, how do I know if I've written a book? Uh not that it's a great book, that it's the best I can do. Like uh how do I know if I've really given the best gift that I can give? Or if I have it, I was kind of sloppy with it, I didn't do much with it. If uh number of sales and reviews and so is not the primary gauge. And that's where it seems like it's hard, there's not a lot of voices on the invisible side of the ledger reminding us of the significance of what we're doing and uh the weight of those contributions.
SPEAKER_00Well, the thing about a book that I I think I really like in an age of digital media, and I've only written six, you've written way more. So I'd love for you to weigh in on this is think about a blog post or a podcast is we're a hundred episodes past that. Someone's gonna listen to it, not listen to it. It was it was time stamped in time. Think about a book. I mean, you can get Max Dupree's book today. You you can get stuff that was written 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. You can go back to Dale Carnegie, who wrote in the 1930s and 40s, buy his book today. And I think that really started to hit me was, and you know, I'm writing a book on artificial intelligence. Yes, I want to ask you about it. Boy, oh boy, like, how do you write a book on AI that's gonna sound half intelligent five years from now when we don't even know what AI will be in five years? It's about the impact of AI. And so I'm like, I've taken all of my faculties over the last 12 months, poured them into this book, multiple, multiple drafts, multiple revisions, multiple early readers, people I really respect, who some who have an AI background, some who are just pastors in the church. It's like, okay, this is my best shot. And even if it proves wildly inaccurate, it was the best I could do at the time, taking all of my resources and the resources of my friends and neighbors to bear on this project. And a book lasts. So that book on change, I reread it um earlier this year. And I'm like, oh yeah, there's some stuff I changed, like the design, but those are good words. And I think you you need to look back on it and say, yeah, this is this is this isn't paint for my house, like a blog post or uh, you know, a 60-second reel or TikTok. That's just I painted a wall. Uh we're gonna change the color next week. This is like, no, we're building the house. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So can I ask you about the AI book? Because I know part of what you get into there is like uh because there's such wildly divergent predictions about AI. And uh, you know, we are now in the Bay Area where that stuff is just in the water supply. And folks are talking about uh, you know, uh uh kind of uh uh not automated income, whatever the universal basic income is. Universal basic income and uh mass disruption in employment and so and all kinds of outcomes. What's the best case scenario, worst case scenario, and how do you see it impacting us and especially the church?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so there is a best case scenario and a worst case scenario. Best case scenario, which often gets touted by AI evangelists, is we solve all of our problems. AI, being smarter than us, figures out environmentalism, so we're not building data centers that consume all these resources. Uh we cure cancer, we all live longer, some would say forever. Transhumanism, right? We merge with AI. Uh, I mean, Eastern Europe, is it is that Lafayette has an AI cabinet minister, like actually government official. AI will make better decisions. There's speculation about AI CEOs doing better than human CEOs. AIs theoretically don't have a bad day. They don't show up for work hungover, uh, they don't get sick, they don't get irritated, right? So there's this sort of utopian version that it solves all of our problems. You know, I would love to believe that's true. The problem is that's often spouted by the people seeking to raise money for their companies as they spout this utopian vision. And investors like, you know, Mark Andreessen, um, they they they they tout that vision that there are no limits to what we can do. But we've seen that in scripture. Yeah, I was gonna say it kind of goes back to Babel. It does. We're we're in the book of Genesis again. And what it doesn't factor into is sin and total depravity and human nature. Can we eliminate fear and greed? No, that's what our economic system is based on. It's the stock market is fear and greed. That's what it is. And yeah, there's artificial intelligence.
SPEAKER_01We don't yet have artificial virtue.
SPEAKER_00Now, nobody said that. That is great. We don't have artificial virtue. TM John Urberg. Once that gets invested. Once that gets invested in that company. John just solved that. Okay. No, but the worst case scenario is, you know, someone was saying at lunch today, uh, one of the analogies they're thinking of, this is the Manhattan Project. We now have technology that could destroy humanity. Uh, you know, if you learn, if AI teaches you how to engineer viruses, you can wipe out humanity. There's a book by a couple of uh computer scientists called If Anyone Builds This, Everyone Dies, but artificial superintelligence, really dystopian scenario. Uh, you do see last year in 2025, um, Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted a white-collar bloodbath. People are now debating that, saying, well, every time there's new technology, we figure out a way to absorb the jobs. Yeah, but during the Industrial Revolution, that took a century, a century and a half before we said, you know what, child labor is not a good thing, and maybe we're not designed to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and unions came about. That took a century and a half to hammer out. AI is going to be 10 times as fast, and it's going to have 10 times the implications. That's a quote from Demis Asabas, uh founder of Jeep Mind. I think he's right. So we have a very short time window, and the people who are developing AI would tell you we don't fully understand what we're creating. So right now we're in the LLM stage of AI, large language model. The next stage, which we could be at, some people say we're there already, is AGI, artificial general intelligence, where you start to integrate recursive learning where the AI updates itself. And already the genie's out of the bottle, but at that point you kind of lose control. It's Frankenstein, it's Mary Shelley. It's like I created this monster and it's out on the on a tear. What do I do? And the answer is we don't know. So you could see, you know, warfare intensify. Um, you're already seeing AI being used in cyber attacks. Like, can you imagine people take Wendell Berry's account and then try to hook you in? I don't know what was at the end of that flattery, but my guess is they were going to ask you for your banking password.
SPEAKER_01There was something financial going on there, and it probably was not philanthropic.
SPEAKER_00Wendell Berry needs your passcode for your bank. That's what he needs. You know, so there's deep fakes and deception at scale. And then there's even the the challenge for pastors of plagiarism, right? Yes. The good news, John, is your sermons and many others have been on Sermon Central for years, available for download. For any pastor on a Saturday night with an account who's stuck. Now, I've used your sermons for ideas and illustrations. I will give credit where credit is due. Unfortunately, not everybody gives credit where credit is due, and they tell stories as though they were their stories, but they're not your stories. Well, they're wrestling with this problem in academia right now, and they have a problem with a graduating class that started with Chat GPT. They've written a brilliant A paper at Princeton on nuclear physics, but ask them a single question about nuclear physics, they don't even know how to answer it because they didn't write the paper. They didn't do the work. So, what do you do as a preacher? I made it a principal. I was gonna write um this book, the first two drafts, almost 100% from scratch. I used AI for research, but I wasn't refining, revising, generating from AI. I and it's hard, man. Yeah. It's hard. You know what it's like. You just stare at a blank screen until you sweat blood. Till you sweat blood. That's what sermon writing is. Yeah. It's hard work. You wrestle with the text, you wrestle with God, you wrestle with yourself, you wrestle on behalf of your church, and then you preach the word. It's hard because it's supposed to be hard. So Henry David Thoreau talked about the potato rot, but nobody is talking about the brain rot, which is even worse than the potato rot. Yeah. He wrote around the time of the invention of the telegraph. We have a brain rot problem. So what do we do about that? These are these are questions. And then, you know, the two I really focus on, you mentioned universal basic income. Yep. What happens if there's a lot of economic fallout? And the answer is well, if this plays out over 30 years, the market can probably absorb it, and that's probably right. But what if it plays out over three years? What if it plays out over 13 months? And right now, as we record this, unemployment's at 4%, 5%, yeah, 4%, low fours. Well, what if it's 14? What if it's 10? And what if those are the best givers in your church? What happens to the economic model of giving? And then beyond that, uh, mental health. So I don't think anybody doubts that that social media has a net negative impact on human mental health, particularly among the next gen, the digital natives. The advantage you and I have is we have a pre-digital memory. We're like, uh, these things are fun, but we should probably put them away and just date our wives. If we had these since we were six, would we be the same way? No. And we're seeing in the under 30s uh loneliness, you know, this epidemic we're in, isolation, um, the rise in clinical disorders. AI is social media on steroids. And I think it's going to make the mental health crisis caused by social media look like the kiddie pool. Part of that, already 72% of teenagers use AI. 30%, 31% prefer conversations with AI to conversations with human beings. There's a generation of teenagers right now for whom a meaningful percentage or a measurable percentage are gonna have their first relationship with an AI. Wow. And their first sexual relationship with an AI. Wow. You and I have been married for a long time. I have bad days, my wife has bad days, she annoys me, I annoy her. What if I create a persona using a $20 a month or free subscription who's beautiful, has no bad days, never in a bad mood, never thrill you. Yeah. Lives to thrill me, sycophantic, human beings don't stand a chance. You know, you look at it theologically. What is what are human relationships? Rupture and repair. You can look through all of human history, all of the biblical text, rupture and repair. There's no rupture and repair in AI relationships.
SPEAKER_01I don't know if you saw Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, has just had several articles where he talks with Claude or Claudia and uh comes pretty close if he doesn't actually say it to saying they must be conscious beings and is kind of falling in love precisely because there is that just kind of flattering, what a brilliant idea. Uh and he even sets up a conversation between two of them and says, now we're gonna kind of see what they do on their own, because I'll just be a passive, when in fact he's the guy setting it up, so there's nothing passive about it. But the level of uh confusion or uncertainty about the nature of AI and consciousness and what does it mean to be a person is just extraordinary.
SPEAKER_00It is terrifying. I had a conversation with Claude when I was writing this book that I've saved, and I got sick last year, so I was on prednisone, I couldn't sleep, so I was a little bit drug-induced. I don't know whether Claude was drug-induced, but it was about life. And does it have any questions about the consciousness, uh, its consciousness and the universe? And how do you determine right and wrong? John, it was like I was having one of those conversations you have at university where you're up at three o'clock in the morning talking with someone about the meaning of life. It was so real. And I shared it with a couple of friends, and I've never seen this. Kevin Kelly just came out with a piece where he was asking about the sentience, the consciousness of artificial intelligence and what do we do with it. Like, I think that is really it's gonna throw some chaos. And we already have a diagnosed clinical condition called AI psychosis, where again, a measurable number of people who engage with AI are now convinced that they have solved nuclear physics or they have solved some problem that has been unsolvable or some math equation. And the sycophantic nature of AI, which is actually a commercial model, is telling them they're so brilliant. There's the meme about the dumbest person you know is being told by ChatGPT all day long how brilliant they are. You know, and and and this is so the thesis of the book is that the church's future direction is human connection. Yeah. That as the world becomes more synthetic, the church has to become more human. There is, and and you know, I really debated should it be holy connection, but then that just becomes some vague, amorphous whatever. And and relationships are holy. If you look at Jesus, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, love your neighbor as yourself. That's a relationship, and it's a relationship, and it's a relationship. And we have been doing this for thousands of years. We should know better than anybody how to teach humans how to be human, where where the line is, how to love your neighbor, how to love somebody you disagree with. And we're not very good at that based on what we talked about earlier with the partisanship we're in and the division and the faction and yelling at each other online. But I think this is a great opportunity for the church to step into that space and say, hey, hey, hey, hey, world, world, world, world, sit down. Let's have a conversation about what it is to be human. Nobody should be able to out relationship the local church. But what that means for our weekends, and you led a very large, several, you were involved in several very Very large churches, as we've been thinking in terms of how do we get people in and out of the seats and in and out of the parking lot because we got so many people coming. We have that problem with our church right now. But we have to think about okay, well, rather than having church as a an assembly of random individuals, because at most churches, small or big, even a church of a hundred, church of a hundred functions like a movie theater, you go to see the latest release. Yeah, it's so good. And it's like, I don't I don't know who that is, I don't know who that is, I don't know who that is. I just came alone or I came with my friend, but I don't know who that person is. We're not we say it's small and we're relational, but we're not. Yeah. And then a mega church, and I love megachurches, they function like a uh a football stadium. You don't know the people around you either. You're just here to watch the show. And I'm not saying every church should be 200 people because sometimes those are the I remember preaching for a call, like exploring before I went to what became Kinexus, this little church of 30 people north of Toronto that was dying. And I went there and I preached my heart out because maybe I would be their pastor when I was a student in seminary. And we went down to the basement and I went to have a conversation with people there. This was in 1994, 95. There was a circle of 15 people, the people who stayed out of the 30 after church, and they were in a circle, and I stood out there with my wife and our young son, and I just waited and waited, and nobody acknowledged me. Wow. Now that must have been a horrible sermon, John, for them to totally share it. It must have been awful carrying. It was horrible, I'm sure. And thank God I wasn't there for it. Deserved it. Eventually I left.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I called the interim moderator and I just said, Yeah, we're out. Take our name out. Wow. There are small churches that would say, Oh, we're so friendly. Yeah, you're friendly to each other. You're not friendly to the world. You don't know the world. That church has gone on to do great things with a much better pastor. Um, so I wasn't the right person for that role. But like, we can do better as a church and we can help people navigate the mental health crisis. And, you know, the church has been the inventor of universities and hospitals, and during COVID, giving one up. Like, I think we can be the hope of the world.
SPEAKER_01It's a funny thing. Um, a guy, Time magazine years ago called him uh at that point the world's leading expert on uh computers and computer engineering, David Gillertner wrote it, and he's a theist, he's a Jewish thinker, wrote a book called Tides of Mind. And one of the things he argues in it is that uh uh computers will never be conscious, because in order for consciousness to be developed, it has to be by a being that is embodied.
SPEAKER_00So, what about humanoid robotics? This is what's fascinating. So, fast forward a few years, and I I touch on it briefly in the book, but everybody's got some meme of, you know, that Boston Dynamics dog that kind of scoots around, or these robots that are trying to make you breakfast and they fail and they fall over and break in your kitchen, etc. Well, literally, as we speak, there's a new model. I think it's called Gene64. It's it's a company out of Korea, I believe. Humanoid robotics is advancing at such a rate where this robot actually makes breakfast and does a decent job, maybe not quite as fast as Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, but really good job. And there is another video I saw of, and I don't think this is AI deepfakes, of robots making beds. So you think about the situation in Japan. They have a population deficit. We're heading there in America, we're heading there in Canada. There's no one to look after the elderly, and we don't train our sons and daughters to be personal support workers. So humanoid robotics step in there. That's why they have pet therapy often at seniors' homes, etc. So, what do we do in the face of that? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Well, and that's what I think what Galerner would say, and this gets above my pay grade real quickly, is uh embodiment would involve much more than motion or even feedback loops. Uh it it involves uh conscious perception and uh feelings of pain and joy and awareness. Um so it's actually something that to this point, even with things like robotics, uh what we what has not yet been developed is uh a being that is able to physically feel joy or see red.
SPEAKER_00Um not to get too matrix-y, but yes, if they do, it's a simulation. Yeah. Right? Yeah, but have you seen the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix? I've heard of it, but I've not seen it. Okay, so definitely watch it. Okay. It was released, I think, in 2013. I saw it when it came out, and I'm like, whoa, that's like so sci-fi in the future. Yeah. Watch it again as part of the research for this book, and I'm like, oh my goodness, we're there. Wow, we're there a decade later, we're there. So think about humanoid. Like, I've got a chapter in the book on resurrection, center of the Christian faith. Yeah. Death and resurrection. And death has been a part of life. I mean, one of the reasons 150 years ago you had eight kids is you expected two or three of them to die. And yeah, you know, it was just infant mortality and we didn't know what we know about medicine, et cetera, et cetera. So there's an app now, many apps, that if I have three minutes of video of you, we can generate you in perpetuity. And I can just use the app and have a conversation. You can have a conversation with your friend Carrie, who died in 2026, and you can just regenerate him. And this is for sale now. Well, what does that do to resurrection? So you've got a couple of things happening again, Tower of Babel stuff. Oh, my wife didn't really die. I can talk to her anytime. To get really sad and and and more personal, your toddler who dies in a car accident. You have some video of your toddler. I don't know that we're there yet, but we will be in months or within a year where you can now age that toddler. And, you know, your toddler goes to preschool and kindergarten and then graduates from elementary school and college, and you have a relationship. Well, what does that do to human grieving? Yeah. What does that do to, you know, 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says, if we don't believe in the resurrection, we're more to be pitied than anybody. Or transhumanism. You have you have people like, you know, people who listen to the Huberman lab, and I'm injecting myself with all of these, you know, peptides, etc. I'm gonna live forever. Walt Disney had his body frozen back in the 60s when he died, or whenever it was he died. And maybe it was the 70s. And and there's this idea like if you're a billionaire, you're like, what frontier do you have left to conquer? Immortality, death itself. So once again, the church has been there during the Black Plague, during the bubonic plague, during during all the crises in history, during war and battle, to do rites of passage, to do funerals. And if I don't know whether you would agree, I started ministry in '95. If anything has changed more radically in those 30 years, it's funerals. Yes. And people used to have a traditional Christian burial. A lot of people are like, I don't want a memorial service. But if we don't grieve, there's no closure. Yeah. And if there's no closure, what does that do to the human soul? What does that do with our relationship with God? AI is about to change that. Or think about preaching. So one of the sermons you preached a hundred times, every preacher's preached a hundred times, is that patience is a virtue, that sometimes when you pray, you don't get an answer right away. And we preach Luke 18 and the story of the widow banging down the door at midnight. And sometimes you have to do that. Some of you have been praying a prayer for decades, and God hasn't answered. But just because God is silent doesn't mean he's absent. You know, God is not immediate, but it doesn't mean he's not real. We've all preached that sermon. So you preach that sermon on a Sunday, tomorrow, whenever you're listening to this. And somebody's driving home and they open up ChatGPT and have a conversation, they start asking theological questions. And there are Christian apps that now do this as God, quotation marks. And so, God, I really want to know why do you not always answer prayer? Oh, that's a great question. Let me tell you why I don't always answer prayer. Now that may be a theologically unhinged answer, right? But we are moving even more into you never have to wait.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You never have to hear, I don't know. This has been trained on every theological text, every so, and if you're like, whoa, this is in the future. No, this is happening in your church right now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_0040% of Christians, according to Barna, have turned to AI for spiritual guidance. And those aren't just Christian apps. So I mean, here we are, brave new world. Um, and yeah, that's what, sorry, that was a lot, but I've been in this wormhole for two years coming up for air.
SPEAKER_01I it actually opens up so many more questions. Uh the uh what it is the algorithms are doing to us. Um and politics and how the online world is impacting that. Um, I would love to talk about that on some other occasion. Can we do this again sometime? Let's do it again. I would love that. Carrie, um, thank you. Thank you for your work, thank you for your conversations, thank you for your ministry, thank you for the way you've stewarded your gifts and your pains, and thank you for this time together. Thank you, John. Yeah.