Episode 4 - Bill Thrall Part 2, "The Journey of Trust"

Part 2 of a conversation with Bill Thrall, Vice Chair and co-author with Truefaced-Leadership Catalyst.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:04

Don't start a process that you yourself yet are not ready to live in. 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. So sometimes what people do is they say, Well, 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?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

You're listening to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Welcome to Restoring the Soul. I'm Michael John Kusick. Today is the second of a two-part conversation with Bill Thrall, who we've been talking with. Bill is a pastor, author, thought leader, and leader of True Faced Ministries. Some of the books he's written include the influential The Ascent of a Leader, True Faced, Bose Cafe, and The Cure. Today as we jump into the conversation, you can look forward to hearing the path that Bill Thrall walked as a younger man that brought him to some of the awareness of grace and how God works as we learn to trust who God says we are. Bill shares the journey of his life and story, including the importance of trust and love and what it means to have a clean heart. So without any further delay, let's jump into part two of our conversation with Bill Thrumall on restoring the soul. 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_05 2:36

Well, uh, first of all, uh, 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 going 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. Heartbreak. 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 uh 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 that 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 for 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. I that's what I give that talk. Kids just sit there going, oh shucks. But but that beginning, um, uh 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_01 5:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 5:27

But I was just as screwed up and dysfunctional as anybody in my family, except my sisters, I think, got 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 I mean back this is way back in the 50s, and I've got ducktails 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 would you talk about culture show. 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? I 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, how many you want? You know, what do I know? He said, Um, I've been watching you. I don't mean this to I'm 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 of 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. It resonated 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. You said you play Monopoly for fun. You play cards for real.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

That's great.

SPEAKER_05 8:03

She taught me how to gamble. She was good.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

That's a little more socially acceptable addiction.

SPEAKER_05 8:09

So I went to college after Bible college, and uh, 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 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 to. 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_02 9:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 9:05

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 had paused to say, Um, why do you do that? She said, That's really weird. I said, I 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 IT 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, 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 gotta go into mastery with these kids.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Wow. Was that the start of the church?

SPEAKER_05 10:37

Well, it wasn't the start, it was starting 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 to 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 and so a bunch of them, on uh about 15 of them on a Sunday morning, we sent them to a big Bible church in town. And when we got to there, 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. 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 had no, I have no training in church building. Wow. 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 12:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 12:34

You could interrupt me and ask me what it meant and what what I we were studying it, and 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 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_01 13:50

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

SPEAKER_05 13:52

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

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Requires grace.

SPEAKER_05 13:55

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_01 14:53

It's striking how 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 IntrueFaced and so much of what you speak of is how we try so hard to please God. Exactly.

SPEAKER_05 15:11

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

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 15:17

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. I mean late 80s. I 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 uh 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, 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 a that was one of those, oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

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. Yeah, and there's a there's a whole other gospel that really is good news.

SPEAKER_05 16:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

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. Yeah. And you talked about how there was an audience that was discovered that you called the DeCurched. Talk about the dechurched.

SPEAKER_05 17:04

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 de-churched people, not unchurched, de-church 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. The church is not safe. So your book is contradictory to us. And you know, if there'd have been a hundred of them, I'm telling you, Mike, there are hundreds of thousands of D church people. As as a pastor, my heart, I I'm so concerned for them because they're without leadership. They're they're so vulnerable to the doctrines and nonsense of angry people. See, angry 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 um Bose Cafe has proven to be a book that actually it led us um, 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. Uh 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 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_01 21:33

Wow. Uh back to the Bose Cafe. Um and we just have a couple more minutes, I know, of your time. Right. 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 de church by virtue of the fact that he was in ministry, but he said, This seems too good to be true. Right. Right. He said, 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_05 22:39

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_03 23:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 23:27

And and 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_03 24:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 24:19

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 the one who's giving it, it's always sacrificial. Welcome to the real world of faith.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

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_05 25:11

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

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 25:14

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 lists, 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_02 25:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 25:34

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_01 26:02

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

SPEAKER_05 26:14

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

SPEAKER_01 26:16

The Cure, that's right. Thank you for your time. It's a blessing because you've been listening to another episode of Restoring the Soul.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Learn more about how we cultivate freedom and wholeness of heart at restoring the soul.com.