Episode 141 - Bill Thrall, "The Soul of a Leader"

“The number one cause of leadership failure is never a skill let down. It’s isolation.” - Bill Thrall

On this edition of Restoring the Soul, we’re featuring a conversation Michael had with Bill Thrall. If you’re a leader - in any capacity in your life - you’re going to find great connection and value in this discussion.

Bill is a co-founder of Trueface, an organization committed to helping people experience authentic, trust-filled relationships by emphasizing the importance of humility, trust & grace. His influence can also be experienced through books like The Cure, The Ascent of a Leader, Bo’s Café, and High Trust Cultures.

In this podcast, we hope you will discover:

• The number one cause of leadership failure.
• Holiness is not about the absence of sin but in the presence of love & light.
• When grace is cognitive, it’s one of our theologies. When it’s experiential it’s foundational.

Transcript

Michael John Cusick 0:12

Two questions haunt every life, writes Andy Crouch. The first, what are we meant to be? The second, why are we so far from what we're meant to be? Hello and welcome to Restoring the Soul, a podcast dedicated to helping you close the gap from what you're meant to be and what keeps you from being all that. I'm your producer Brian Beatty. Thank you for listening. On this edition of Restoring the Soul, we're featuring a conversation Michael had with Bill Thrall. If you're a leader in any capacity in your life, you're going to find great connection and value in this discussion. Bill's a co-founder of True Face, an organization committed to helping people experience authentic, trust-filled relationships by emphasizing the importance of humility, trust, and grace. His influence can also be experienced through books like The Cure, The Ascent of a Leader, Bose Cafe, and High Trust Cultures. So let's pick up the discussion where Bill describes the early days of leadership catalyst.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

And so at first, when we started working together, we were realizing three parts that we said are intricately woven together, and without all three, you can't make it. One is understanding humility, understanding relationships of trust, and creating environments of grace. If those three things, a safe place, those three things are not in sync, failure is inevitable for the leader. For the leader. And for those they influence.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

And you define humility pretty differently. I love how you define it, but not beating yourself up or deprecating yourself.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Trevor Burrus, Jr. No. I mean, one of the things that we do, I'm saying in a broad Christian sense, is that we have these virtues, Christian virtues. Humility is, quote, one of the Christian virtues. And you kind of have that uh scalp under your belt, so to speak. I got that one. And it's one of those virtues misunderstood, in which I can't talk about it because it would ruin the fact that I am, so therefore, I can only be humble in silence, whatever that means. Well, the tragedy of that is it doesn't work. So we have what we call a relational definition of humility. It's trusting God and others with me. Every act of trust is an act of humility. But it comes with incredible promise. God gives grace to the humble. Now, as evangelicals, oh, grace, you know, I understand that. That's what saves me. You know, it's a big deal. I love grace. Oh man, we know so little about the grace to live by. We know the grace that we're saved by. So that indispensable part is critical to the formation of a leader. It's it's like so many of the things Jesus teaches. They're they're like backwards to us. Sometimes we will, well, I shouldn't say sometimes, when we do a pastor's conference, I'm the one in my notes, I'm the one that gets asked these two questions. We just did this in Portland with a huge group of pastors. This is the question I ask. How many of you have excellence as a value or virtue for your church? Don't raise your hands, but you just see them trying to get their hands up. I'll say, don't raise your hands. I have another question for you. How many of you have humility as a virtue or a value for your church? Not as many hands are going to go up. Then I'll say this to them. What if God doesn't want your excellence? What if God wants your humility so he can give you his excellence? And they just look at me like, you son of a gun, what do you do to what are you doing to us? Because because we have been trapped into a mindset that God is really honored when we give him his our best. But God is really honored when he lets us give him to us his best. That's when he's really honored.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Two very different things. And you've already implied this, but it sounds to me like that's a whole new language for most pastors and leaders.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I I think that's a good point to make. I I think we're better at it now, 17 years later, 16 years later, we're better at it in terms of the um language, but uh but initially our language was so us that people couldn't figure out what you guys would make this up. But but over the years now, as we've uh like we did our workshop even today, giving people uh the the Bill Thraw one-liners, but but basically now uh saturating those one-liners with scripture and understanding. And it's taken a while. I mean, uh I I would say to you that back in the middle eighties to the early 90s, uh I don't think I had even a bit of an understanding that our perspective in grace was different than the majority. I wouldn't have known that then, because I lived in my own little world. It was only when we stepped out of our little world into the majority world that people would say to us, What are you talking about? You're talking about grace. One of the statements that we make is for many uh evangelicals, grace is one of the theologies, I believe. I have a theology of grace, I have a theology of family, I have a theology of uh relationships, I have a theology of God, and grace is one of my theologies. And we say, no, that's not a biblical perspective of grace. Grace is not one of our theologies, it is foundational to our theology. Now, if you put it in the foundation, it's a very different worldview. Extremely different.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

A very important distinction, as you said, between grace that we're saved by and grace that we live by.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you know, it says in the scripture, as you have received Christ Jesus your Lord, so walk ye in him. The as there is the same. I mean, uh we we uh we we may get terminology differences with evangelicals, but there are very few evangelicals that would not understand that in order to become a Christian I had to trust God. Very few of them would. I mean, how else would you become a Christian? So that's not a problem. Well, what am I trusting God for? I'm trusting God through the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse me of my sin and to give me eternal life. And that that would be the evangelical message of the gospel. Right. No, no, nobody's gonna, I mean, very few are gonna battle with that. But when you say one of the miracles at a place called Calvary was that Jesus died for my sin. One of the miracles at a place called Calvary is that Jesus actually took upon him my shame. One of the miracles at a place called Calvary is that Jesus made me new. Christian life is not about changing who I used to be and to who I ought to be, which is the mantra of a majority of the church that doesn't understand grace. It's not about changing who I used to be and who I ought to be. It's about living on who God says I am. That's the grace that's foundational to who we are as believers.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

I definitely want to unpack that. Before we do, I want to go back to the definition of humility of trusting God and others with me. What might that look like for your average senior pastor, CEO, or leader of influence? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Well, I'll I'll answer that, but I'll tell you a little story in great in opening it. Um sometimes I'll be asked to come alongside, as I am often, not sometimes, to come alongside a leader who, for whatever reason, his board or his team or his church board or elders or somebody's, they're kind of really concerned about this guy. He needs help. You know, let's call Bill, you know, if I'm the one they call. There's several people they can call. And I'll say to them, if they call me, I'll say, okay, I want to meet him. And uh and then I'll say to them, and if he agrees to let me, I want you to know that I will only work with him in the context of his leadership team and the board. I will not isolate him from you. Because his problems are you. And they'll go, what? Say that again in English? We want you to help him. I am helping him.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

They wish they called somebody else at that point.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

I'm saying, no, I am helping him. I'm helping him by helping him understand that unless you guys, his leadership team, whatever you call that, and and his board, understand the critical role you play in who he is becoming. So I'll say that to him. So when I meet with these leaders, and uh some of them agree, some don't. But I'll meet with them and I'll say to them, uh, hey, thanks for coming. Let's have a little couple hours this afternoon, I get to know you. But let me kind of start this with two questions for you to ponder this afternoon. First question is this Are you at a place where you're willing to let somebody help you? That's my first question. Are you at that place? Because at that place, um, you need to decide if you're willing to earn my trust. Second question is this. Are you willing to let somebody help you, but not on your terms? They'll look at me like check please. Exactly, exactly. Because I'll say to them, what we want to do in our relationship is model what I hope will happen with you and your key leaders. See, so they look at me and they go, Oh man. And it's been actually I I'm not breaking, but it's been quite successful.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

And you're so in answer to my question, you're actually inviting them into this humility of trusting you. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Exactly. In in my relationship with them.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Yeah, creating a context for it to happen.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Exactly. The guy I went quail hunting with, I told you about this week.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

He's one of those guys.

SPEAKER_02 11:27

Okay. It's got to be very messy.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

In a good way. No, it's it's very, very messy.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

As opposed to here's the formula, here's here's how to do it.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Yeah, I met with uh uh doesn't make which Christian college, but a large Christian college president was in crisis with his board and all that good stuff. And and I met with his his cabinet. And I said to them, here's some material, that's just a tool. But I have a question for you. Do you trust your board? Write it down. What what cops what what hinders you from trusting your board? Write it down. Make it personal. Okay. I looked turned, point to him, I said, You trust him? Write it down. And look, look at each other, you trust each other? What hinders it? I want you to do that. They all this went. You can just feel the freeze in the room. I mean, it was heavy freeze. And I said, Write them all down. Now put them away. We're not gonna talk about them yet. I just want to prove the point. The point is, you guys need to learn excuse me, how to build and restore trust with him. And then after we did all that, we went through some training and then I sat with him and his board. Same question. I mean, at the board level, it surprised me because the board buy-in was quicker than the cabinet's buy-in. I mean, they were all over it. So I'm saying all of that's a complicated response, but the point is that our leaders have been taught how to lead. They haven't been taught how to trust. And they haven't been taught how to be trusted. And when they don't know that, there's no way that ultimately anybody can stand with them. And if a leader doesn't learn to let somebody stand with him, he is doomed for failure. And and his failure will repeat itself everywhere he goes.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

And that brings us back to grace without grace, which is one of the in the sin of a leader, there's the picture of the ladder. One of the sides of the ladder is the environment of grace. And so without grace, trusting is foolish.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

It can't happen. Right. It can't happen because uh often we as Christians are the most schizophrenic of all people. We know Christ has something really significant in us, and we really want to be known. But because of our shame stories, we're afraid we will be. So we live in the crisis of the of the unknown. You know, in in 1 John, it we're we're invited to walk in the light. Ephesians chapter 5, we're invited to walk in the light. Well, the light is is that biblical place where nothing is hidden. You can't hide in the light. Well, uh so sometimes we read those scriptures and we we create an ought to. I ought to walk in the light. No, no, no, no, no, no. There's a reason you can walk in the light. You've been made new. You ain't who you used to be. You've been made new. You have been made righteous and holy. Throughout all of the scriptures, holiness and light are inseparable. And I'm invited of God not to work at getting into the light. I'm invited because of what Christ did in me, to be in the light with God. And in that passage in 1 John, it's it's so hard, it sounds so contradictory to many Christians. He's invited us to walk in the light, and then he tells us those who walk in the light will sin. And if you say you don't sin, you're a liar. And you go, wait, that can't be true. I mean, I'm either one or the other. No, I'm both. See, I'm both. But if I can't walk in the light, because I don't believe I should walk in the light, I will try to manage my sin so I can function in the light rather than seeing it. It's only in the place of light where I can deal with my sin. That's Mike, that's a huge, huge difference. And in my mind, it's the only thing that makes First John make sense.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Mm-hmm. And the whole sin management, you use that, Dallas Willer has used that phrase. It's something that it's a false kind of hope that we can be good enough, but it also keeps us from the very thing that we want, which is to be loved for who we are. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Exactly. It's interesting. Um when Adam and Eve first sinned, very first sin, they sewed together fig leaves. That was the first act of sin management. Man felt obligated to do something about the fact he had sinned. And a friend of ours named Tom, years ago, he said to me, you know, Bill, your fig leaves aren't covering as much as you think they are. But but you see, what happened is sin management is is a theology that is rooted in law. Because it it's a theology that says I can do something about my sin by working on it. That's a principle of law. Now, what the principle of law does is the principle of law was written by God to convince me that I am unrighteous. Working on the principle of law will never produce righteousness in me. It'll only continue to reveal the unrighteousness that I have. So sin management literally keeps me preoccupied with sin and devoid of relationship. Grace brings me into relationship so there is a basis from which I can deal with my sin. Again, it's one of those huge misunderstandings and almost contradictions in the scripture.

unknown 17:32

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

And yet it's a huge distinction. Oh, that each of those is a different path.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Aaron Powell A different path. That's why we have the book True Faced. Yeah. That's why we have the two paths.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Well, tell me about that. What's the I've read True Faced. Some of the people who would hear this may not have heard of it or read it, but what's the heart of the message of True Faced?

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Yeah. Again, I'll back up a little bit. When we were first working with this triad of humility, relationships of trust, and environments of grace, our focus was leaders. But we realized that a majority of our audience never saw themselves as leaders, even if they were in leadership positions. So we wrote a book called True Faced that we would say we've written to readers. That's anybody. Principles of Grace Written to Readers. And the whole basis for that book is this reality. Can I trust who God says I am? Can I trust that? The miracle of Calvary is that God made me new. Can I believe that? What if we as Christians actually dared to believe we're already righteous? What if Jesus, when he said, The world women are my disciples because you love one another? A new commandment I give you. What if he was teaching the theology of Jesus was teaching this? Under the law, you could not become righteous because you were unrighteous. But you can obey this commandment because you're righteous. See, Jesus never taught this, ever. Nobre in his theology are these words. The world will know you're my disciples because you sin less than they do. That's never in the theology of Jesus. He knows better.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

So righteousness is not measured by how little I sin.

SPEAKER_02 19:23

It's measured by the presence of something.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

It's by the presence of love. It's measured by the pre- the world would know you're my disciples because you love one another. So what we did in True Faced is we create an allegory in which the person in the book comes across these paths, one leading, pleasing God to the room of good intentions, and one trusting God leading to the room of grace. And we describe the behavior patterns of people who, uh, with all the good intentions in the world not understanding grace, will strive like crazy to figure out the Christian life. And we have a banner in the back of the room and it says, working on my sins so I can have an intimate relationship with God. That's in the back room. You know, and there's only a bazillion Christians doing that this moment while we're talking. In the room of grace, it says, My God standing beside me with my sin in front of us. See, so often, again, these are just subtle things, Mike, but so often we believe that we need to do something about our sin so we can be presentable to God and he becomes our last resort instead of our fourth first resort. What if I just saw him for what he says is true? I tease people when I say this to them publicly. I wonder what God meant when he said, I will never leave you or forsake you. Wonder what he meant. Everybody says, Well, he'll never leave us or forsake us, but you don't believe that. See, some of you believe that you can go sin and leave God on the curb. I want you to know he goes with you. Because he'll never leave you. See, it it it it blew the minds of the Pharisees that Jesus could go into the house of the sinners, the harlots, and the publicans. And so you say, Well, God wouldn't do that because he's holy. No, it's because he's holy, he can do it.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Say more about that. That the again, holiness, it sounds like where where you might go with that is that holiness is not about the absence of sin, but the presence of love. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Well, it's the presence of light. Think of righteousness and love, think of holiness and light. Where when Jesus would go into that place of darkness, it lit up. He didn't become dark. They had light shed on them. And when I say that, I mean sometimes I'll have young leaders because one of our audiences, our next generation leaders, they'll look at me and say, Man, I can't believe I've taken Jesus into those places. Yeah, well, it what'd he tell you? What do you think he meant? I'll never leave you. Oh, I can't believe that. Well, try believing it. It'll change when you go there if you know Jesus is with you. If it's so comfortable to leave him on the curb, I say to the guys, if you want to do a strip joint, it's so easy to imagine Jesus on the curb, it's a lot harder to imagine him sitting next to you at the bar. You just you know, I don't want to think that thought. No, that's the thought you should think.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

Yeah. Because that's where he is. Yeah, and even in even in the place, the presence of love.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Exactly. Yeah, he just it so back to true faith. So our our goal in that was to say to people, you know what? In the room of grace, our relationships were the wor the worst of you can be known, and you'll be loved more for it. In that scenario, the power of sin is always broken. The power of sin is always served in the principle of law. That's what Romans teaches us. But we don't believe my next statement, which is not mine, it's God's. But you're not under law anymore. You're under grace. The principle of s of law is no longer the principle that you serve. Because you're no longer unrighteous. Oh my gosh, what if I believed that? We sat with a Christian leader in my home, in fact, Bruce and I, and two other guys, and and he really we had the we had we were having dinner, uh uh lunch, and he was sitting uh at the end of the table, and he he he looked up with tears in his eyes. He said, Guys, do you understand if I believe that everything would change? And we said, Well, everything's been changed. You just have to believe it. Powerful message, Mike.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

It's a powerful message. Um and we both encounter people all the time, and organizations and bodies and churches filled with people that don't hear that.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

They don't hear it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah, we like I told you just last month, we were at this pastor's conference, and I'm gonna guess there were 300 pastors and families and wives, whatever, in in husbands, because this was a denomination where women were pastors, so it was husbands and wives, and we were taking them through what we call our our true-faced intensive, where we have these principles of grace that we're trying to help people understand. If you can grasp the essence of these twelve, it'll help you. And at first they're just kind of, what in the world? Who brought these guys in? But almost without exception, every time we we usually do a late afternoon, evening, and then all day the next day. Not everybody, I don't I couldn't say that, but a majority of them by the middle of the next morning are raising questions and revealing brokenness. Because this is one of the statements we teach, I know you've heard me say it many times, and that is if my theology doesn't touch my reality, it's because I don't understand grace. Grace always touches our reality. That's why there's a place called Calvary. Because at a place called Calvary, God touched my reality. I needed a savior. But I also need to be made new. And that's what he did. He touched my reality. And we and we don't believe that, then what happens is we will it's it's it's it's a natural propensity, like in the garden, for man to fill the gap until he's convinced God can. That's just that's just our natural propensity. We will fill the gap until we're convinced God can. That's it. That's the way we live. And so we have a bazillion well-meaning Christians who've got 10,000 books out there on how to do something. You know, I heard I heard a person very, very well, very, very well known in the arena of spiritual disciplines, and he stood before some of us one day and he said, Um, you know, uh, I used to lie until I disciplined my tongue and I no longer lie. And people were politely clapping, and I was getting ready to throw up, and I said, You just lied. What do you mean you no longer lie? What are you telling us? Because listen carefully. If sin could be managed apart from the cross, you don't need Jesus. If a person who was a liar could stop lying without a redemptive process, Jesus died for every sin because I cannot manage any sin.

SPEAKER_02 27:11

And we're so good at deceiving ourselves. And that's I mean, when you say you just lied, is that we deceive ourselves into really believing that there's been a change.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Oh yeah, yeah. And and and the and and there is there is change. Change does happen. Right. I mean, it does happen. We we are able. I mean, you have your life story, I have my life story. You know, AA works. It does work. I mean, people's behaviors do change. Right. But we're not talking about behavior change. He didn't he didn't die to create a behavior change in us.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

Aaron Ross Powell, What's the path that you've walked as a younger man? You're how old today? 72. You're 72. You look great. You would not have guessed that you're 72. Um you've been following Christ for decades, I presume. Yeah. You were a pastor, you're a consultant in business settings. What's the path that you've walked that's brought you to this awareness?

SPEAKER_01 28:03

Well, uh, first of all, unfortunately, it begins in brokenness. Um my family, my mother and father, were both alcoholics, pretty sick when I was a young kid. And the state of Wisconsin took us away from our parents. And I had to live with my younger brother and sister in a in a children's home. I remember vividly, my brother and I, I was about seven or eight, he was five or six. And we thought that they'd put us in jail, that we had done something wrong. We couldn't figure out what we had done. And all the time we were there, our parents never visited us. So we didn't know if we were ever coming home. In fact, I was in the hospital while I was there and nobody came to see me. I mean, it was just like this is not good. Not real smart, but this is not good. So that what happened is both of my parents, in their alcoholism, and quite honestly, I hate to say this, but in their sexuality, they were they were compulsive. And in that compulsiveness, they trained us well, and we were all compulsive children. And it just had a variety of expressions. Interesting, none of us are nine children. The older sister, younger brother had passed away, but none of the nine of us were alcoholics, but we're all compulsive. And um so what happened is I didn't know, Mike, I didn't have a clue. I was just growing up. I knew I was a lonely, miserable kid. I knew that. You know, I I used to, I love working with high school and college kids. I used to give a talk on to high school kids. I love to give this talk. I still give it once in a while. Some church will still ask me, not as much, of course. I'm in my 70s for crying out loud, but I'd say to the kids, I know you cannot wait until you're able to do whatever you want. I know you can't wait. You just can't wait for your parents to be gone. So you can do whatever you want. I said, uh, I never had a parent tell me no. I could do anything I wanted from the time I was seven years old. And I want to tell you, you have no idea what it's like to live without boundaries. You have no idea how afraid I was. You have no idea how insecure I was. You have no idea how not enough I was. Don't wish for something that'll damn you. That's what I give that to. I mean, kids just sit there going, oh, shucks. But but that beginning, um, uh and and and and I just I don't mean this to sound proud, but I was smart. So I I had an advantage over a couple of my siblings because I was smart. So what I did is I learned to navigate because of my smartness through the systems of education and social settings better than they did.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

But I was just as screwed up and dysfunctional as anybody in my family, except my sisters, I think, got the worst of it all. But but but um so so I'm I'm in Bible college. I become a Christian at 17, six weeks later I'm in Bible college. And uh I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm just back, this is way back in the 50s, and I've got duck tails and a flat top and a leather jacket, and these kids, some of them had never been away from home for more than 20 minutes. I mean, it was you talk about oh man, for them I was the weirdest person they knew so far. But anyway, and uh I don't even know how he knew this. I don't know that, except one of the older students, a guy had been in the Navy for a while. I was 17, he was 27. He came up to me one day and he said, Can I talk to you about something? Sure, what would you like to talk about? He said, Well, he said, I want to talk to you about it, but I want to give you some advice. His name was Jerry. Sure, Jerry. Well, you call me any you want, you know, what do I know? He said, Um, I've been watching you. I don't mean this to I'm not haunted, but I'm not, but I want you to know I've been watching you. He said, I'd like to recommend that you don't date anybody for a couple years. He said, I I think you have some pretty unhealthy attitudes and views of women. Oh my gosh, I just started bawling. How would anybody know that? And I was dying in that reality.

SPEAKER_02 32:26

It resonated.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Oh, I mean, to the nth degree. Because I was already at that time at Bible college, uh, I was 15. A friend of mine's dad was an entertainer and had sex books and video and uh movies that were made in Hollywood that I mean, we we could watch it. I was already addicted to pornography at 17. And it lasted way up into my marriage. That was the expression of my compulsiveness. I thought it was going to be in gambling because I was so stinging good at cards. I thought, I thought, oh man, if I'm gonna be compulsive anywhere, it's gonna be because we gamble. I know I tell people this and they laugh with me. My mother loved to play cards, but she would not play cards with us even as kids unless we played for money. Wow. Really, I would lose my paper boy route money to my mother playing cards. She said you don't play cards for fun. She said you play Monopoly for fun. You play cards for real.

SPEAKER_02 33:30

That's great.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

She taught me how to gamble. She was good.

SPEAKER_02 33:33

It's a little more socially acceptable addiction.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

So I went to college after Bible college, and Grace and I got married, and um God grace God graced me with an incredible wife whose name is Grace. And uh five years into our marriage, she um one day took me for a drive uh to tell me she was extremely unhappy in our marriage. Um been a Christian ten years, and uh I uh tell you, talk about God using somebody in your life, and she said to me, Wouldn't you like to know why I'm unhappy? And I said, Sure, of course. And she said, Bill, we can't continue to live in a relationship where only you get to love me. Why won't you let me love you? Why can't you trust me? And I had never put trust and love together. I desperately wanted I I was doing everything I could to please this girl. I thought I was the greatest husband in the world, and she was miserable, and I couldn't even figure it out.

SPEAKER_04 34:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

And that night, for the first time in my life, I trusted somebody with who I was. And I shared the whole garbage list with her. And I was so stinking self-righteous. When I got to the gross stuff, I thought to myself, if I if she were telling me this, I'd kick her out of the car. And I was the one that was screwed up. And she just kept loving me. Once in a while, she'd pause to say, Um, why do you do that? She said, That's really weird. I said, you know, thanks, and welcome to my world. But there wasn't any first time in my life, ever, I experienced what it was like to be clean. I'd never had that feeling since a child, ever. And my wife forgave me. I felt forgiven. Later I had to learn to forgive myself, and she wasn't my counselor. But that was the breaking point in the preparation of my life for the message of grace. A few years after that, we started a ministry with a bunch of hippies. I'm this right-wing Goldwater I CPA guy, and I got all these long-haired guys and mostly clothed girls hanging around. I mean, like, it wasn't unusual for me to come home from work and have people in the front yard, backyard, and every room in the house waiting for me to come home. Wow. And and Grace and I sat down on a Friday afternoon, neither one of us will ever forget it, ever. And we just started crying at our table. And we just said, it's time, isn't it? We've got to go into ministry with these kids.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Wow. Was that the start of the church?

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Well, it wasn't the start, it was the start of our outreach ministry. Okay. We didn't plan to start a church. We we were all about evangelism. And God, it was the hippie, it was the Jesus movement. I'm I I could take two hours just tell you about all that. It was wonderfully, horribly hard and great. But we weren't going to start a church because we wanted to have the fruit of our ministry go back to the churches. But the churches couldn't take the fruit of our ministry. And uh rock and roll, you know, I mean, all of that was just at that time the church had no sensitivity to so a bunch of of them, uh about 15 of them on a Sunday morning, we sent them to a big Bible church in town. And when we got to they were in the parking lot, the girls were crying and the elders wouldn't let them in. So we went to our house, Grace and I, and these 15 young adults that we had seen come to Christ, a couple of young leaders, and we said maybe we should start a church. If there's a more naive group that ever started a church, I haven't met them. And what we did is we took butcher paper and put it all over the living room walls. And the first thing we did is, what should church not be like? And we created a can't be like that. What would it be like? And we started to form an idea from the scriptures purely. I have no training in church building.

SPEAKER_02 37:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

And so we started a church. And uh it it bore the fruit of our outreach ministry, and that's where we started to nurture people, and that's where I got in touch with this is how it happened to me. My audience became my teacher. I was a communicator. I'd been talking a lot. I mean, even back then I was, you know, in my early 30s, but I'd been doing a lot of talks for Campus Crusade and a lot of talks for Christian business. So I was a communicator, but I'd never been a pastor. So we had a very unusual Sunday morning. You could talk to me while I was preaching.

unknown 38:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

You could interrupt me and ask me what it meant and what why we were studying it. And so a lot of times on a Sunday morning, I never got through a message, didn't have to. They were my message. But they taught me a lot, Mike. What they taught me was this question constantly came up. Bill, what difference does it make in the way we live from what you're teaching us? Why would we learn this if it doesn't have something to do with the way we live? And I realized that the core of my theology had no application. Like none. Wow. And and God used that audience to teach me how to make grace experiential. Because when grace is just cognitive, it's one of our theologies. When it's experiential, it's foundational. That's how it started. I mean it was just, and and I guess it trapped my gifting, and it got me going, and and we just we lived in those principles. That that was the way we lived. We came up with essentials that would guide our behaviors with each other. One of our essentials still is, is this essential? We're for, not against.

SPEAKER_02 39:17

It's so easy to be against things, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 39:19

We're we're for, not against. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

Requires grace.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

We realize that being for something, there others might be against us. But there is no anti in those days, no anti-charismatic, there's no anti-this, no anti-that. We're for something. Now that requires a very different set of learning.

SPEAKER_02 39:41

It's striking how uh the very things you talked about in that early stage of your marriage when things were hard, uh how that so closely parallels you were trying so hard to please your wife and feeling miserably in how you write about in TrueFaced, and so much of what you speak of is how we try so hard to please God. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

And all he's already pleased. So he can what? Love us. It's too it's too simple.

SPEAKER_02 40:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

But it's so profound. And and so that that little sketch of of the history of our beginning, um one one more real quick story. Um I don't remember the date. Um I don't remember, sometime late 90s, late 80s, can't remember when, but it's not important. I was asked to speak at a large missions conference in uh Brookfield, Wisconsin, Brookfield Church. I don't know, five, six hundred people. It was both an embarrassing and a wonderful experience. So I got up to teach, and when I got all done, nobody moved. Nobody said anything, nobody came up to tell me what to do next. And a man stood up in the second row, big man. Found out later he was the publisher of Multnomah Press, and he stood up and he said to me, Who are you? Where did you get this message? We've never heard this before. And I went, No kidding. You guys, I thought really it was that it was that dramatic. I went, no kidding. This is what we learned, this is what we teach, this is who we are. And he said, I'd never heard it before. Wow. Wow. So that was uh that was one of those, oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

It's uh so often the gospel that we claim is good news is a kind of gospel that isn't good news at all.

SPEAKER_01 41:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:33

And there's a there's a whole other gospel that really is good news.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:37

Um I want to come back to a topic we were talking a little bit about on the way up the elevator before this interview, and that is I want to talk about Bose Cafe. And you talked about how there was an audience that was discovered that you called the DeCurched. Talk about the dechurched.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

It's a painful audience for us to talk about, Mike, because um Bose Cafe was a book that many of our readers were asking for, and that was tell us how to live this room of grace life. And so we felt the best way to do it was with a novel. Let's do it with a story. Uh the people aren't real, but they're real. I mean, we know we know who our characters are. We've lived with these people, but nobody would know that. And uh what happened was uh the book uh through our publisher was distributed to an audience that was very familiar with the book The Shack. And that audience, millions of people, but a huge majority, more than we imagined, of that audience were D-church people, not unchurched, de-churched people, people who had been to church and found the church so lacking, often for their lives destructive. Some of them would tell you that their greatest hurts came in their church setting. And many of them started sending us emails, they were really upset with us because they were saying, How can you teach these principles of creating safe places and be church guys? You can't be church guys, you can't do both. Church is not safe. So your book is contradictory to us. And, you know, if there had been a hundred of them, I'm telling you, Mike, there are hundreds of thousands of D church people. As a pastor, my heart, I'm so concerned for them because they're without leadership. They're so vulnerable to the doctrines and nonsense of angry people. You see, angry people do not have healthy theology. And and so you so you have this huge, back to that statement of for not against, you have a huge anti-church movement in America led by angry people, which keeps people bound in their nonsense. It it's it's so troubling to us. We so our best answer to all of them is oh, okay, well if you can't start start with somebody, find somebody that's safe enough for you to be known. And that's why we have that table at Bose Cafe, as you know, that where it's safe enough for our lead character in the book and his wife to finally come to grips with his um dysfunctions and hers. Right. And um so you know, it's uh I was speaking at an international leaders' meeting a couple of weeks ago, and one of the men was from Germany, and he said, Oh, I know who you are, Bose Cafe. He said, We have it in German. I said, Really? Oh, he says, I give them out like candy. And I said, Really? That's great. I and I thought, what must Bose Cafe like be like in German with all our idioms and a little place on the wharf in California? How does that translate into German? I don't have a clue, but he's excited about it. That's great. Yeah. So Bose Cafe has proven to be a book that actually it led us after Bose Cafe, it led us into our new book, which is coming out really soon, called The Cure, in which we've taken the first part of True Faced into the rooms, the two rooms, and from that expanded it into the application of life. And uh it's called The Cure, and and um our goal each time is to say this This is our conviction. The three of us as authors, and we work very close together. This is our conviction that God is trusting us with the stewardship of uh message of grace. And our job is to figure out as as well as we can, as often as we can, in a variety of forms we can, how to let these principles of truth be known. That's our that's our that's our life mission. That's what we do. That's what we do. And it's just our conviction. I mean, that's that's what drives us, and and so everything we try to write, speak to, address is to be as consistent as we can, laying that foundation of grace so I can live out of who I am. We have a little paradigm, a little model, a little construct of two lines representing life lines. One is my life and sin issues, and the other is my trusting God with who I am. And for a majority of Christians, they want to work on their sin so they become godly. And our model is now come to grips with who you are so you can work on your sin.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

Wow. Back to the Beau's Cafe, um and we just have a couple more minutes, I know, of your time.

SPEAKER_05 46:26

Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:26

Uh I was working with a man, uh missionary overseas uh in Eastern Europe, and had some very deep brokenness in his life, and he was finally coming to terms with that. And I gave him a copy of Bose Cafe, and he came back in the next day, and his eyes were filled with tears. And um he said he was angry at me. And he was deeply, deeply moved by the book. Um he he was not dechurched by virtue of the fact that he was in ministry, but he said, This seems too good to be true. Right.

unknown 46:59

Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:59

He said, I I don't believe this exists anywhere. What would you say to the person, whether they're in ministry or just the quote normal Christian who has been burned by the church or who uh has tried to seek out even a person who's not a paid therapist? Uh what would you say to that person? How can you create or find that kind of a safe, grace-filled community?

SPEAKER_01 47:25

Yeah. Well, I think I would I think I would say a couple of things to them. One thing I would say to them is what is it you need to learn about grace so you can become the initiator? In other words, I would I would give it right back to them and I would say, what do you need to learn about grace that would free you to be someone that can be trusted? Because if you can learn that, then you will be the one that becomes safe for someone else. And once you find that person for which you can be safe, you will find that they are safe. See, so so it's it's like don't don't start a process that you yourself yet are not ready to live in.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

And it's okay. It's okay to say to them. And they'll look at me and they'll go, Oh, I don't know what you mean. I don't know what you mean. I say, well, let's go back to something real practical. In both True Faced and in Bose Cafe, we have a guide. Go back to the guide, answer the questions for you. Start with you. Invite a friend to go through the process of answering the questions together. Invite a friend. If you don't have a friend, invite a stranger. Just find somebody, and you can just say to them, I don't know where this is going to take us. In fact, we have a guy who just spoke at this pastor's conference for us. And that's how he started. He just said, He went he's got more courage than most people, but he went to some of his colleagues and he said, I don't know where this is going to take us, but would you be willing to dare?

SPEAKER_04 49:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Going through a process where we might learn trust. And three guys, four guys started with him, one guy dropped out, and it's changed all their lives. So sometimes what people do is they say, Well, I I don't have anybody, and I'll say to them, but you're the one who needs to be that somebody. You're right, you don't have anybody, but neither is anybody else. So what if you were so convicted that you became that somebody? And they'll go, Oh, that's hard. Let me give you another principle of grace. Grace is free. But to one who's giving it, it's always sacrificial. Welcome to the real world of faith.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

Yeah, it's all it's it all requires faith. Absolutely. Absolutely. Uh Bill, what is the website a central place where people can go for resources?

SPEAKER_01 49:57

It's pretty simple right now. It's trueface.com.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:00

And uh that's who we are, and that's where you can go and find out. That's our website, and go find out about us and what we do and what we don't do, and and that'll give you access. Uh, you can get on our mailing list, it'll give you access to our materials, it'll give you access to us. You can get on blog, we'll invite you to our blog. The three of us do a blog every week.

SPEAKER_05 50:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

And uh we talk through these principles together. We just do a 10 to 12 minute blog. It'll it'll give them access to the blog. Uh it'll be give them access to our Facebook and they can interact with us. John loves it. He's on it a couple hours a day. I avoid it like the plague. It's just too technical for me. I'm just thank you very much. I know you love me, but I I ain't gonna do that. But I sneak into it once in a while, I'll take a peek, but I'm not that's not who I am.

SPEAKER_02 50:48

And when you're referring to us, the three of us, it's John Lynch, it's Bruce McNichol, and you co-authored together, O's Cafe True Faced, uh, in you and Bruce, The Ascent of a Leader. Right. And together you make up leadership catalysts.

SPEAKER_01 50:59

That's right. And and our new book, The Cure.

SPEAKER_02 51:02

The Cure. That's right. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mike. It's a blessing, as always. Okay, thank you. You bet.

Michael John Cusick 51:09

So thank you for listening to another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that restoring the soul is so much more than a podcast. What we're all about is helping couples and individuals get unstuck. You know how some people go to counseling or marriage therapy for months or even years and never really get anywhere? Our intensive programs help clients get unstuck in as little as two weeks. To learn more, visit restoringtheSoul.com. That's restoring the soul.com.