Episode 354 - Robby Angle, "The Path of Trust: Rethinking Discipleship and Grace"

Welcome back to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. In today’s episode, Michael welcomes friend and fellow leader Robby Angle for an engaging conversation about Robby’s new book, The Path: What if the Way of Jesus is Different Than You Thought?—a collaborative work designed to help the next generation rediscover grace, true identity, and the heart of discipleship.

Together, Michael and Robby dive into how our cultural assumptions about Jesus and our spiritual journey might be missing the mark. The discussion explores why so many of us, especially young adults, get stuck striving for God’s approval or sliding into spiritual passivity, and how learning to trust and receive God’s love changes everything. They reflect on the importance of authentic community, the dangers of approaching spiritual disciplines as a “how-to-get-better” manual, and how a shift from outside-in to inside-out spiritual growth can lead to real transformation.

As they unpack themes from Robby’s book and his work with Trueface, you’ll also hear their thoughts on the deeper mystery of encountering God, why relationships are foundational for lasting change, and how churches can cultivate environments that foster true discipleship.

Transcript

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Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Restoring the Soul. I'm Michael and today my friend Robbie Engel is on the podcast. Hi, Robbie. What's up, Michael? Good to be here. We're initially going to talk about your book, but I know, since I know you so well, that we'll very quickly delve from the book into all the deeper ideas about the book. But I'm holding it up. It is called the Path and I always take a moment to talk about the subtitles because subtitles are underrated. The Path. What if the way of Jesus is different than you thought? First of all, congratulations for you and your team in completing this important book which you called a prequel to the book the Cure. Yeah. When I took over from Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall six years ago, the board was like, figure out how to get this message of grace and identity to the next generation before they spend 20, 30 years trying to earn God's love and earn God's favor. Right. And so this, this was a difficult but exciting task to go. What would a 25 year old, what do I wish I knew at 25 about grace and identity and 25 year olds, are they going to read a book? If so, what kind of book would they read and how do we make it compelling? And it's. It's been a labor of love for a couple years, Michael, so it's good to have it in hand. Get out in the wild. I got a copy of the book through all of you who sent it special delivery overnight. It was in a beautiful box that looked like the. The book cover, which is a. A beautiful hardback pleather with golden embossed on it. It looks like one of the first editions of the Lord of the Rings with a forest looking the same way. I just want to do a shout out to you and the other authors. There's four authors and I love how you and Trueface has always done this. No one person takes credit because there's such a community of thinking. Robbie Engel, Brittany Colson, Ben Crawshaw and Bruce McNichol. So the book is beautiful looking it, beautiful content. But will you just for a moment unpack the title? What if the Way of Jesus is different than you thought? What are you trying to communicate, especially to the 25 year old, about what people thought about Jesus and what's actually different? Yeah, I think a lot of us are stuck because of a wrong view of God or wrong view of ourselves. And so it alludes to what if he is? What if we are different than we assume different than we thought. And that posture really follows throughout the entire book. It's a primarily allegorical book, so don't think as boring as Pilgrim's Progress, but don't think as easy to read as Chronicles of Narnia, where you're like, did that mean something? We kind of find. We tried to find a way in the middle and do some teaching of the truce at the end. But even the allegory, so. So chapter one, the City. The subtitle of that in. In the chapter. In the. In the chapter is what are you searching for? And then the leap. What if it wasn't all on you? Chapter three, the table. What if you already are who you wish you were? So the. There's an allegory coupled with a question that gets to story, gets to curiosity, which typically bypasses our head and goes to our heart, which is our hope for readers reading this. And it's been really fun hearing the feedback so far. And I love the allegory aspect of it. It really drew me in. It didn't feel like it was teaching. But then at the end of each chapter, the questions that were there, posing the questions is so important, right? Because who was it that said, the problem with Christians is that they have the answers, but they've not lived the questions? And in some ways you were redefining the questions always back to who is God and who are you? So the book is about this different way of seeing God. It's actually an old way of seeing God. So you're not presenting anything new, but you're stripping back a lot of the cultural veneer. And this relates to really the question of what does it mean to follow Jesus? And who is this Jesus that you're following? And an old fashioned word for that is discipleship. A lot of us now talk about spiritual formation, but this idea of encountering him, which we often think of as salvation, coming to him, but then following him and staying with the book theme for a minute. And then you can riff beyond that. You talk about the rock face and the field. And the rock face is striving and the field is passivity. So two ends of the continuum about how people typically live. I could certainly identify with the rock face of I've got to work harder and harder and climb stronger and stronger in order for God to love me, to think highly of me. And then passivity was when I started to get to the end of that and there was no language and there was no space to live in the different way of grace. I just kind of gave up on spiritual discipline, spiritual practices. So talk about that tension for a moment, and then let's launch into your great passion, which is helping people understand and have a pathway for discipleship to follow Jesus. Yeah. So chapter four, the cave. The tagline of that one that you're alluding to is, what if all God wanted from you was to trust him? So Tal the story leaves the table, this celebration of presence, of salvation and new identity. And Tal enters a journey, and on the journey comes to the. The field settlers with a rock face next to it. So imagine this field of people next to this major cliff. They're trying to figure out what this way of following Jesus looks like. And there's. There's the group that scales the rock face, the scalers. They're like, jesus has asked us to accomplish something, do more, achieve. And. And yeah, you and I both fall in that camp for most of our lives as a high drive, high achiever, firstborn son, 8 enneagram. I've been like a scaler most of my life. Like, let's go. Jesus needs me. My greatest fear is not living a life of purpose. And so you overlay a spiritual component to that. And I've been an awesome Christian, Michael, for a lot of my life. Like missionary in Pakistan, young life student staff in college seminary. I got all the gold stars, and I missed what I was longing for, which was love, like peace, freedom. And that's because God was like, robbie, I love you. I know I made you, but I'm good. Like, you can't earn my love. And that's the rock face of striving, trying to get to the top. But that is that. I think that's rooted in pride. I define pride simply as I can. Pride is I can. And there's two sides of the coin of pride. The one side is earning striving. I can make my life count, obey, know enough, do enough to earn God's love. That's. That errs on the side of scaling. But the field settlers, even the name of the set, Settle, Settle. And settlers is like, no, I'm good, God's good, we're good. Grace. You know, that's the. That's the other side of the coin of pride, which says, I can control my outcomes by lowering my expectations and settling into passivity. That is easy. And that is. That is just lowering expectations. Abdication of trusting Jesus. And trusting is the middle way. Trust is a posture of humility which I define as I can't. And therefore he is and he does and who. And he did so trust is so stinking difficult and a lot of people cloak it as either like trust God and do awesome stuff, scale, trust God and like you're good, you're good, we're good. But trusting man, that's the cave. It's dark. It takes faith, it takes surrender. One step at a time of the dark, led by Him. And so that's the allegorical backdrop to that book. And a lot of my life has a scaler and a lot of friends and I've gone through seasons of lowering those expectations and becoming a field settler. So yeah, each chapter has that allegorical bent to it, hopefully that all of us can read our own story and to the principles of the chapters. The middle ground there between the settlers in the field and the scalars is really mysticism. And you can't have trust without mysticism because you're trusting in someone and it is a someone, not a force in the universe who's invisible and who we can't see. And that is a mystical process that ultimately leads us to our inner experience. See, you get weird with us using words like mysticism, but you're so right. Like unpack for me. How do you define mysticism for the normal Christian who says, oh, that's for Michael Cusicks of the world and spiritual directors? Well, first of all, Jesus talked a lot about the mystery of the kingdom that followers of Jesus had been given the keys to the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom. And that secret is something has been kept hidden. And so a mystery is something that initially appears unknowable, but it's something that is actually infinitely knowable that we have to keep moving into. And just like you used the analogy in the book, the path about marriage when you were talking about friendship and spending time together is important with our couples and for couples and laughing and building memories together and that it's a long term thing, not just a one time shot. That similarly the emphasis on relationship is something that it deepens and deepens and deepens and there's an unraveling. But I define a mystic as somebody that's living for inner experience with God to develop an interiority of their faith. And it's more about the inside than doing things externally. God is not up there. God is within, which is all throughout Scripture, including the Old Testament. If you look at Psalm 139, you know, you created my inmost being. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from youm presence? It was Pierre Tilard Deschardin. I'm butchering that name because I don't speak French. Who said that? That in the future we'll all either be mystics or we will be nothing at all. And he wrote that in the 1960s. And I think, as he wrote that, he was aware of the weariness of people with the striving of religion and the insecurity of religion, of I have to continue to be good enough. And as he saw the world changing, in particular, as he gazed upon the west, because he was a philosopher, theologian that wrote from Europe, I think he saw the longing for more. For more inner experience, which was not a new idea, but something that went back millennia to the early church. I was listening to somebody a couple days ago talking about the relationship with God. This isn't a religion, it's a relationship. And I said that like I was FCA president in high school, and I literally gave a talk. It's not about a religion, it's about a relationship. But that was such a crap. Like, I. I had no idea what I was talking about because, like, most of my life has, if you really look at my quote, unquote, air quote, relationship with Jesus. It's a religious framework of scaffolding and understanding and how I should live my life and. And earn that. It is. It is a mystery to experience God, who is unseen and unheard, at least for me. I don't hear him audibly, I don't see him visually. But it's been the past couple, the past season, where I have realized how much it was a religion to me. And the. The mystery of relationship is such a good word underpinning that mystic way of the. The. The kingdom. And it is. So it's so much cooler to show up and go, okay, God, like, you have more that is possible. What is this way of Jesus where I experience your love not cerebrally, but, like, really experience it. That's it. Let us all be mystics. Cusick. Yeah. And so back to the book and the chapter on gifts. The question was, what if the greatest spiritual practice is letting Jesus love you? And as I've said words like that or sentences like that, even on Friday, as I was working with a delightful group of therapists in Kansas, presenting those ideas and them saying, well, how does that happen? Right? So if I say to a husband or wife, what if the most important thing in your marriage is just letting your spouse love you, they'd go, what? That doesn't really address anything right now. It doesn't address my pain. It doesn't address my struggle or the unfair balance of the mental load in our relationship. So letting Jesus love you is mysterious, but it's not mysterious if our focus is on, well, you need to love Jesus more because we all have a sense of that means I need to read my Bible or I need to serve the poor more, or I need to stand up for justice, or I need to spend more time praying or go to more true faced, restoring the soul conferences, listen to more podcasts, et cetera. But it kind of brings us down to the lowest common denominator of we're just humans and we really can't do anything to earn his love except to be in it and to let him love us. So that's why it's a mystery that's. Right to trust and receive. And Jesus is like, hey, guys, this is pretty simple. Back to my passion, which is helping stuck Christians and stuck churches experience the fullness of what Jesus has made possible, which is peace and freedom. And Jesus is like, this is it. Love God and love others. By this they'll know that you're my disciples, by the way, you love one another. And then a couple chapters later, in John 15, he says, this is it, guys. Spiritual formation, discipleship, maturity, all the different words you use for the principle of growing into who you are. It's abide, remain in me. Which means trust and receive. Back to that greatest gift is this, this way of following Jesus, which is so simple and so difficult every day, because I wake up every day, Michael, as Robbie, Robbie, Robbie, rooted. I need to earn scale or I need to, like, I'm good, lower my expectations so I don't need God to show up. But I want to rely on myself every day, which is rooted in my pride of what I can do, because it keeps me in control. And that is the safest, easiest place to be. Even if that control looks like doing awesome stuff for Jesus. And the gifts, spiritual disciplines. It is such a gift to Remember on a 24 hour basis, because every 24 hours I forget everything we're talking about on this podcast and I wake up, Robbie, Robbie, Robbie, right? And then what are the gifts? What are spiritual disciplines? I think of spiritual disciplines as gifts of just practices that Jesus modeled and we've learned from Christians over the past couple thousand years of rhythms, of gifts, of ways of creating space to remember that it's Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, not Robbie, Robbie, Robbie. And that takes time. Like I, I have a hard time remembering he is God unless I'm still. And he's like, hey, be still and know that I'm God. Oh, yeah. Because with if I'm not still, I go back to Robbie, Robbie, Robbie and what I can do, rooted in my pride. And I miss out on all the goodness that he has for me of peace and freedom and light yoke and experiencing and receiving his love through trusting that love, which gifts, disciplines, are simply rhythms to help me slow down, be still, and remember that it's Jesus, Jesus, Jesus every day all over again. What a gift. It's such a different paradigm, though, than what I had function out of. After I read Celebration of discipline at 20 as a high drive Christian, and I was like, got it. Here's the playbook to get my crap together in order for God to be better with me. I love, I love Foster and Celebration of Discipline. But inside out versus outside in is a fundamentally different dynamic. That is in. Here's the segue statement, which is directly and indirectly indicated in our discipleship environments in our churches, in our studies, in our resources. There's a. There's a very subtle but very significant shift of a philosophy of how people grow embedded into our discipleship environments, which is, yeah, inside out versus outside in. And we can unpack that, but I'm getting a little fired up. Sorry, Cusick. No, that's all right. So let's unpack that. But back to Celebration of Discipline. I remember when the book came out, Richard Foster, who came from a Quaker background, he taught at Friends University. He was also a pastor, and he taught there before. Friends University now has the Apprentice Gathering and Jim Smith. But Jim Smith, who's been on this podcast many times, and Richard were close colleagues. And I think Jim would say that Richard Foster and others profoundly influenced him as they worked together. So I remember hearing about Celebration of Discipline while I was painting a house. Shortly after, before I was married, my life blew up with an addiction and it was going to become very public. And I remember hearing on a moody Bible station radio station in Cleveland, Ohio, this flagship radio station, on the afternoon kind of drive time show, Richard Foster was being interviewed. And I remember back then it was so radical that here's this book about spiritual disciplines where we can really change. And I too had that reaction. Oh, my gosh, these are the things that I'm going to do because that will become the key that will change me. And if I'm changed, then God will be acceptable. I'll be acceptable to God. Somehow even I knew that I was saved by grace. There was this thing of, but I'm not fully acceptable to him. And I guess the point I want to make is, you're 42, I'm 60. It almost feels like that book and books in the genre of spiritual disciplines, when you're young, you read it and it becomes this kind of scaling the wall. I'm going to get to the top. But you read the book 10, 15, 20 years later, after you've been beaten up a little bit, and you realize that doesn't take you where you need to go. And there's like a whole new lens. I'm taking my glasses off and putting them back on. And you read it the second time around. It's like, oh, this is what he's talking about. It wasn't to get God to like you. Yeah. It's actually to begin to shape something inside of you so that you can be more open to receive his love and more open for that love to pour out. Yep, it is. It's similar to the therefore principle in Romans

12: 20:47

1. So like Richard Foster, when I read, went back and read it after really understanding grace in a new way. The first couple pages, the beginning, he was like, hey, guys, this is not a playbook. To earn God's love. He like, gave the disclaimer. I breezed through that disclaimer when I was 20. I'm like, Ah, whatever. You know,

it's like Romans 12: 21:06

1. Paul spends the first 11 chapters like, hey, Robbie, you're a son of the king. You're adopted. You're dead to sin, alive to Christ. You're imparted, you know, with. With righteousness. Now you have a new heart. And then in verse

12: 21:25

1, he's like, okay, you got it, Robbie. You got going off. Your body is living sacrifice and pleasing. I jumped straight to 12 1. And I'm like, okay, whatever, whatever. Okay, what do I do? How do I do it? And he's like, ah, you foolish Robby, you foolish Galatian who bewitch. You started out, you know, in faith and went back to works because it keeps us in control. And that's the natural pull that I wake up with every day. But that same principle. Yeah, as we get older, we spend a little bit more time on that intro of Foster. And he's like, hey, guys, these are gifts. Even I loved his heart of, like, celebration of discipline. Like, these are beautiful things not earning, striving. But yeah, I passed that till later. And then Willard wrote spirit of the disciplines, and that took that word even farther. Like, there's a spirit about this, not the letter of the law, that the Spirit, not just the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit, as in a spirit of Joy or something like that. So let's come back to this broader sense of discipleship and your thoughts and thinking, what you've been discovering about the church at a broader level and what's happening with people following Jesus. Yeah, this is where a lot of our time right now as a ministry is going. I was a licensed professional counselor. I was a business guy, then aid worker, then professional counselor, and then worked in small groups at a big church. And so. And then I've been a true face for about six years. But my passion is for stuck Christians to experience what Jesus has made possible to them. And as a church, as a capital C church in the west, you go to any conference right now, any topic, it's like discipleship. Discipleship, really? Since COVID it feels like it got a magnifying glass on it of like, we are missing out on discipleship. And so first of all, what does that mean? Like, I think we need to specify what are we actually talking about, because it's this nebulous broad word as to what is broken in the west, in the church. And a couple years ago, a friend of mine, Brian Mosley, he has a passion to see churches come, you know, have a thriving culture of discipleship at right now media, and we have a passion to see come alongside and serve churches at trueface. So he said, what would you do, Robbie, you're a nerd about small groups, community groups, life groups, how churches gather people to grow, what works or doesn't work. And so what would you do? And I spent most of the past couple years building out Discipleship Framework, which is a resource to help churches think differently about how people grow and then equip them with the tools to build a customized approach to creating environments of relational discipleship that actually work. Because if you ask 10 churches and 10 church leaders, are you confident that you have an effective plan for discipling the adults in your church? Most say no. I do not have confidence in our discipleship initiatives. So what are churches doing? They're showing up on Sunday for 60 to 90 to 93 hours, 90 minutes or three hours. You show up on a Sunday service and then you do stuff outside of that for adults to help them grow. Discipleship. D groups, life groups, cell groups, Sunday school, all the things outside of Sunday morning. Now, is that leading to formation, discipleship, spiritual growth as a norm or as an exception? That is a big stinking question. And so we have built some resources to think differently and then build it. And I want to start, Michael, with let's get some language around discipleship. Yes, yes. Overly simplified. I define discipleship as the process of growing in love of God and others. So maturity, formation, discipleship, all those words, depending on the last book you read, you have a preference, right? In the general way, how do you mature, grow spiritually, form into likeness Christ, that. That is referring to the process of growing in love of God and others. Jesus said, love God and love others. By this they'll know that you're my disciples. By the way, you love one another. And what does love look like? Love looks a lot like joy, peace, patience, kindness. Good. Right. And so how do we grow? So disciple making is intentionally walking with someone else to help them grow in love of God and others. So an outcome of a thriving culture of discipleship is that people are loving others in a noticeably different way. Wives are saying, what happened to my husband? Husbands are going, my wife is loving me differently. After engaging in your church's X, y or Z environment, discipleship, dgroup, life group, cell group, small group, whatever. As a result of that environment, they are loving me, our kids, our community, others in a noticeably different way. That is why the church exists. That's why God has designed us to grow through the context of relationships with each other as the body, the ekklesia, the gathering of Jesus followers. So local churches all around our country, all of us listening. If we're going to a local church, we're trying to get into some kind of environment. And rightly churches will gather people relationally to grow spiritually if we align with the assumption that we grow through the context of relationships. So churches rightly gather people to connect relationally in environments that are conducive for relational connection and growth. Which is small groups. Right? Small is just a descriptive term of a smaller group life, groups, l, group, whatever. We gather together in smaller groups in order to hopefully grow spiritually. So why we have a big opportunity, right? Because most of us have been in small groups of some sort at our church, some kind of environment outside of Sunday, and they're lame, they're not working. And so if that's the master plan for discipleship of the Western church, like get into a group and you're going to grow. Hold on. This is not resulting in growth as a norm, more as an exception. So how do we think differently and then build a strategy so that our church can say, yes, we have an effective plan for discipling the adults in our church, and people are connecting relationally and growing spiritually as a norm? I get pretty fired up about that because, Yeah, I had 800 small groups at my last church. And if that's where growth happens, then whether or not our church was a thriving culture was contingent more on me than the lead pastor. And most of those small groups I would not recommend you to get into, Michael. So that's a big opportunity in local churches. And so I want to do a shout out. You wrote a book called the Cure for Groups, and there's a number of books, as I said earlier, that the true faced authors share the title, but this is one because of your therapy background and your extensive experience with groups. It's a book, the Cure for Groups, that I want to recommend as well as all the other resources I love. In the back of the book, the Path, there's pages and pages of resources for books, small group studies that involve healing of relationships, building community, et cetera. Thanks for that. If you wouldn't recommend that I get in one of those groups, what is it that you recommend as you're offering these customized programs to churches? What are the big threads that run through? Well, I'll show two principles here. I want to provide a mental model for us to think about our philosophy for how people grow. So we start there with churches and leadership teams to double click on beliefs and philosophies. Here's what I mean. We focus on outcomes. We want people to grow. We want people to love others in a noticeably different way. We want to feel confident that people are growing in our discipleship environments. That's an outcome. Are people loving others in a noticeably different way? That is why we need to define discipleship in a way that we can really evaluate. Is this working or not? Are people maturing, growing spiritually? Now what we do is we go. We want better outcomes. So you take a step back and the next concentric circle back is, we need better environments. Church leaders, those of us listening that go to church, go. We need a better environment, which is a ministry environment is made up of the structure. Are we open, closed, men's, women's, couples, groups? Are we semester based, sermon based? Do we use right now media? What is the structure of the life group, cell, group D group, Sunday school and the culture. What are the spoken and unspoken rules that permeate that environment? That as a secret shopper, I would describe that environment as structure and culture makes up ministry environments. Now in the discipleship space, we go to conferences, read books on the way to fix small groups, the way to fix discipleship. Learn this model, do this model, shift this structure, change that culture. We focus 80% of our time on the ministry environment. Small groups don't work. We need the new thing, but that is 20% of the outcome. That's because our environments are informed by, impacted by the next concentric circle, which is our philosophy, our change theory, how we think people grow, and it's our philosophy. One more fourth concentric circle back is shaped by, informed by our beliefs of who is God and who, who am I. So we spend so little time talking about beliefs and philosophies, how we view discipleship, and we spend too much time focusing on how we do discipleship in environments and outcomes. But most of the impact has to do with changing our beliefs and philosophies on how people grow. The problem is ministry leaders do not think they have a problem with beliefs and philosophies. They think every other pastor in town does, but they've got it. They're just saying, robbie, tell us the environment, the tips, the tricks, the symptoms, right to fix the environment. But it's the source that needs addressing in the Western church. And yeah, so tell me, what are the assumptions about change and the philosophy underneath this that you most often hear that people are getting wrong? So that is what is such a paradigm shifter for church leaders, if they. First of all, they have very rarely focused on philosophy. Think about it in a counseling environment. It's your philosophy for why people are stuck. For example, if you think people are stuck because of early childhood memories, you might have a philosophy that's more psychoanalytic. That's why your environment as a counselor, you do the Freudian thing. You lay on a couch for 55 weeks in a row and talk about early childhood memories. If you're a family systems philosophy person or a cbt, you do a different environment. We try to change the environment without evaluating our philosophy as ministry leaders, and that's what's off. We can't articulate what our philosophy is. And so first of all, just leaning into that and go, how do people really grow? Like, what does Jesus's example teach us and show us about what growth really looks like? And if you start double clicking on that, then you realize the spoken and unspoken assumptions in your philosophy that permeates your environments, and that is the source that's off, that results in bad symptoms of people stagnant, not growing. So one of the massive assumptions that I think is in the west and in the church, and we've had conversations about this, is that people just need more information about God. So better sermons, more focus on having the correct beliefs, accurate beliefs, deep enough beliefs, meaning that your convictions are more and more certain, which eliminates trust. But information doesn't equal transformation. That's right, cusick. That is. I mean, it is such a subtle but such a significant difference. So the way we have been teaching beliefs and philosophies, focusing on beliefs and philosophies, beliefs are rooted. And as a therapist, right, like you can peel back all the layers of the onion, the core usually goes down to wrong view of God, wrong view of self, wrong. So if I see myself as a sinner striving to be a saint, that's an identity word. I'm a sinner. Then I see God as a low grade, disappointed dad waiting for me to what? In order to make right what I broke in relationship. So I knew I was a sinner at a young age. Sin is anything that breaks relationships. Sin broke relationship with God just like it did Adam and Eve. Now I'm a sinner. Okay, What I did is I went to church and I said, what do I do? And this is what I directly and indirectly picked up for most of my life. Robby, thank you. You are a sinner. Pray the prayer. Now what you do is know more and do better. Knowledge plus behavior equals growth for the math people out there. So read your Bible every week. And when I, you know, read it every day, no more show up to church 2.5 times a month, at least read your Bible and do better. Stop sinning, looking at porn, and start giving, serving, loving, doing the things right. Then you will grow. Well, fast forward 20 years of being an awesome Christian, like I alluded to earlier. And being a missionary in Pakistan, I was like, okay, seminary missionary in Pakistan. I got all the gold stars. Why am I so broken inside, disconnected, dry. If that equation doesn't work, that's because that's not the gospel. The gospel is I'm a saint. So Jesus is the one that redeemed what was broken. And so if I see myself as a saint, this is so subtle, but so significant, then I see him as delighted in father. Nothing more or less I could do to earn any more of his love. If that is the case, how do I mature or grow? So if my belief is I'm a saint who still sins, not a sinner striving to be a saint. And then I see God as a delighted in father, like Jesus described in the parable of the Prodigal Son, not a disappointed dad. That's belief that informs philosophy. Because the new equation for growth out of a lens, of an identity lens, as a saint is trusting and receiving equals how you grow. So if trusting and receiving is the if this, then I will want to know more and do better. I'm not saying those things are bad. I love scripture. But if I know more and do better, then I will not experience trusting and receiving and therefore peace and freedom. But it's a if this, then that that goes one way, not the other. And that philosophy, difference, know more and do better knowledge plus behavior or trusting and receiving, rooted in an identity as a saint, not a sinner, changes everything about how we see God, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with others. And that philosophy of trusting and receiving, which looks a lot to me like what Jesus described and modeled in John 15, which is, hey guys, you can't do anything apart from me. Abide the fruit of the Spirit, which is grace upon grace, is love, joy, peace, patience. So remain in me and the outcome of that will be what I will do through you. If trusting and receiving is how we grow, then that informs our environments, our structure and our culture of how we do groups. So the number one attribute of a thriving group is the leader. That's 65% of the equation. Now, what differentiates an amazing leader from a lame leader, a group leader that I would beg to be in their group versus one that I don't want to be in their group? It's a rootedness in their identity which informs their philosophy that they know trusting and receiving is how they grow. That's inside out growth, not outside in growth. And then that leads them to lead differently where they walk with, ask questions, model a way that looks a lot like the model of Jesus and is 12. And so thinking differently about discipleship is the thing that's off. And if we get the foundation right of our beliefs and philosophies, those impact our doing of structure and culture, of our environments, which we can help churches do that easily. Build customized plans through the discipleship framework, roadmap and all that stuff. But getting the foundation right is beliefs and philosophies. And then you can build a custom house on that. Not in a prescriptive way of do this model group. No, help them build something that fits their people and their culture. So we're trying to serve 10,000 churches, Michael, to get to a tipping point, to get to the source of what's often discipleship. And I'm going to give the next 10 years of my life to it. Come on. Wow. I love that. I love it. So when you talked about the beliefs, let's say that you get a senior pastor because they've Got to sign off on this. Right. Or a lead pastor, they might have a group pastor or a pastor of community or spiritual formation or something that might actually be rolling this out. But when you say beliefs and turning away from a primacy on people change because of information. There's a sense in which the leader who's owning this has to actually have experienced it themselves. Yes. They can say, oh, well, I believe that. But if you haven't gotten a leader who has actually experienced it themselves, that's problematic. You use the phrase in the gathering chapter about we can only be loved to the degree that we are known. And that made me think of Todd Hall's book Relational Spirituality and his phrase that I use all the time, that we are loved into loving. Yes. How is it that you and your ministry are reaching those leaders that would like to see this be unleashed in their church, but they've not yet experienced it in their own life. And I dealt with this in sacred attachment. Right. Leaders who are going, I've got all the success, but I don't feel like I really know God experientially. Yeah, I think that is a big bottleneck because it is well and just to give grace and honor. Ministry leaders, we have put them in such a difficult position upstream because of their natural gifting of teaching. We have overweighted teaching and built their job description, outcomes, measurables and Sunday environments around teaching, which directly and indirectly often tells us and pushes us towards know more and do better in order to grow spiritually. And again, I love knowledge and good teaching and I'm so thankful for that. But it puts them in a hard position because we can only transfer what we've experienced. And if we can only be loved to the degree that we're known, that is, that is getting to one of the principles, which is why relationships are such a critical foundational element to how we mature and grow as disciples. We're designed to grow through the context of relationships. And pastors, lead pastors, staff on churches. If they're not in authentic community, then they're limited in how they experience love to the degree that they're limited in being known by others. And that is a ceiling. And so our hope is that every pastor is fully known by a few and has a change in view, understanding how their beliefs and philosophy could be subtly but significantly shifted. I think those are the two equations. And right now those are impossible. Right? Those are okay, God, but we're praying that they connect with each other. So we're going to start launching cohorts probably later this year, next year, for pastors to process these truths in authentic community. And if you're listening, listening to this and you're not on ministry leadership, I would recommend you befriending and hanging out with your pastor and modeling vulnerability and welcoming them into authentic community. And if you're a lead pastor, who are you fully known by? If we do not experience that, then we are missing out and stuck in our own journey. So that's a real tension and a hope and a prayer. You know, whenever I'm working with a pastor, specifically if they're a lead pastor, senior pastor, where there's that pressure to look good and the job description to look good and to not struggle, that's the question I always ask is who is at least one person who fully knows you? And it's very, very rare where somebody says, oh, I've got this one person, much less two. Here's somebody that knows 80% of everything. And there's two friends that I meet with on a regular basis. And over the weekend we actually, one of them said, we've got to go back to a weekly meeting and how about this time? And my initial reaction was, ooh, the time that works for you two doesn't really work for me. So I think I'm out, at least internally. I thought that they're going to listen to this and go, oh, geez, we didn't know that. And then I thought, no, I need to rearrange my schedule for that because that's, that's an important piece. Yeah. Even though everything is going well right now, I need that in my life, man. Tell me what your hope for is with the book, the path. What if the way of Jesus is different than you thought? Yeah, our, our hope is that it sells 1.5 million copies. Cusick. And also in doing. Just kidding. Book sales, any other I got. That was a bad joke. But my hope is that a lot of it plants seeds with my kids. I wrote this with my kids in mind. Like, if there was one book that I wish they. If I die tomorrow, I am so thankful I captured the truth, the beauty, the mystery of this way of following Jesus in a way that could get to the next generation. And so if I've got some incredible feedback from 60 and 70 year olds who have read this book, but if you know somebody, any, anyone from 15 to 30, and you wish you understood these principles of grace before you spent decades of earning striving in a readable, beautiful book, gift this to somebody in your life. That. That's my hope that that people get unstuck and experience this stuff that Jesus says is possible to us like peace and freedom quicker and sooner because that is the kingdom of God that's available to us. And the mystery back to that word of what growth looks like, which is figuring one day at a time experiencing more and more of his love. And I hope this book helps people do that. I do too. And I'm going to be telling everybody I know about it. And even if you give it to someone that never reads it, once again, it's just an absolutely beautiful book. It's a hardback, gold embossed. It's the kind of book that in my office I have it sitting out and people walk by and go, oh, that looks. That's a cool looking book. So I appreciate you and your team putting in so much work and creativity with that brother. It's always good to talk with you. Will you talk for a moment about the Trueface conference where I'm going to be speaking at your conference along with Dr. Jim Wilder, which I consider a great honor just to let our listeners know about that. Yeah. October 17th to the 19th in Denver, Colorado. We are hanging out and Cusick, Jim Wilder, myself, some others tbd. It's going to be an amazing Friday to Sunday. It's an experience that you don't have to be a part of Trueface. You could just want to come here, Cusick speak and you would gather together with like minded men and women to yeah, create a space to connect with God and process what this attachment thing looks like. And so yeah, show up. You can go to trueface.org, click under Experiences. You should be able to sign up but it's going to be awesome. Fantastic. I'm looking forward to that. And thanks so much for your time this morning, friend. Until October. I can't wait to see you then. See you, man.