A statistically improbable success story reveals how a difficult childhood and corporate rejections became stepping stones to purpose. Former Meta global faith partnerships leader Nona Jones shares how entrepreneurs can transform rejection from pain into powerful opportunity. Through candid stories about comparison, identity, and divine redirection, she shows how faith-driven entrepreneurs can build from calling rather than ambition.

Justin Forman: As welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It is a gift, as always. It is to be with you and it’s fun to see. This is a time when the movement gathers from far and wide and it is just a gift to see how God works. I think I was saying recently that sometimes I felt like growing up that the Holy Spirit was kind of this retired author. And yet I’ve come to realize that he’s writing bestsellers every day in the way that he works, the way that he connects. It’s just a very, very beautiful thing. And so friend of the movement, partner in the movement in different places and different ways that we’re going to hear about. Nona Jones is here to join us. Nona, welcome to the podcast.

Nona Jones: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here.

Justin Forman: Yeah, it’s such a gift. We’ve heard from so many different friends of the movement and different people from Ubers and other things, and we’ve heard about the books and we’re going to talk a little bit more about that later. But we love hearing a little bit of a sliver and a slice between just kind of how God works, what’s the winding moments and those turns in the journey. So who are you and where do you come from.

Nona Jones: Man? Okay, so let me start with the way that I describe myself is I am a statistically improbable product of God’s grace. If you’ve ever heard of, there’s an assessment in the social sciences called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Assessment. And what it does is it takes a child’s experience of trauma and it gives the probability that that child will have adverse outcomes in life things like premature death, incarceration, drug addiction, system dependency, etc.. And it’s on a scale of 0 to 10, and a child who scores a three is considered very high risk for adverse outcomes. Well, when I took the assessment, I scored an eight.

And so when I think about the life that I’ve been allowed to live and afforded by God, I am truly a product of his Grace had a pretty tumultuous childhood, a lot of abuse and dysfunction. My father passed away shortly before my second birthday and was raised by a mom who had some mental illness. And despite that, you know, God truly rescued me. I was about the age of 11 when I was first introduced to church and the very first sermon I ever heard the pastor preach that God is a father to the fatherless. And so that kind of changed the trajectory of my life, because before that time, I had been acting out in school. You know, the things that were happening to me at home just made me an angry kid. But after really discovering who I was in Christ, I just kind of changed my behavior because I wanted to make God pleased with me, frankly.

So ended up doing really well in school, graduated from college, entered into corporate America, and within about a year, I was appointed to an executive leadership role with a really large for profit corporation. But it’s a national corporation. And I was about 23, and I think that kind of placed me on a trajectory of corporate leadership because from that point I was either recruited to other organizations to lead various teams, and ultimately I ended up at the company formerly known as Facebook, now known as Metta. I was leading the global faith Partnerships team there, and I was with the company for about, I don’t know, almost six years when I really just got to a place that I wanted to bring everything I had done, everything I had learned, everything I had built, I wanted to bring it to ministry.

And so I reached out to a friend of mine who is the CEO of YouVersion, which makes the Bible app and just kind of said, Hey, if there’s some way that I can serve the mission, listen, I’m all in. I’d love to do it. And so I was able to be on that team for about a year in a leadership role there. The Lord just kind of called me away from that because simultaneously I’ve been, you know, speaking. I travel around the world, I get to speak about business and leadership, and I also talk about my faith pretty openly. And that just got to a place where it was kind of a fork in the road, You know, it’s like I was full time speaking and full time leading a team and you kind of can’t do both and be a wife and a mom.

And so I’m very fortunate. I still get to serve the mission of YouVersion as global ambassador. And right now, I’m actually I think we were just talking about this before hopping on here I am building a new company called Inside Out Leadership, which is going to be focused on helping high capacity women of faith in the marketplace live their life both on purpose and healed. And so I’m really excited about the trajectory my life has taken because now I get to bring everything I am and everything I’ve done to the work of helping women leaders live in purpose.

Justin Forman: I love that. I love how we were talking earlier just about how like seeing the Spirit, seeing Holy Spirit working in our lives and the little winks and those turns in those twist. How have you learned to look for those? Because, I mean, you talk about the jumps in the moments that you’ve had in that journey right there. How have you looked through it and what do you feel like you was saying to you in this last turn?

Nona Jones: Wow. You know, it’s it’s hard to notice what you’re not looking for. And I want to start there. Her because I think sometimes we can get so heads down in the work of building a business or, you know, scaling a team or whatever we’re doing that we can actually miss the working of God in our lives because we’re not looking for it. We’re so focused on what’s immediately in front of us that we may not see, you know, the ram in the bush over there to the left, right.

And so I think that it’s really important to just have a posture of sensitivity to the spirit. One of the things I do every morning is part of my prayer is, Lord, make me aware of your voice and your presence. Like, make me aware of that. And so there will be times where I’ll be in a conversation with somebody about something and they’ll they’ll say something that will cause my spirit to leap inside of me. And I’m like, I need to listen to what they said and I need to be like, very sensitive to what they’re saying. And it has happened that the very thing that they said became a seed that caused me to make a decision that ended up being a blessing. And so I think it’s about just having that posture to really expect the working of the Lord in your day to day. And then you can become sensitive to that. But I think you have to start with that expectation.

Justin Forman: So, man, what a powerful place. I mean, looking for it because entrepreneurs were trained to look for things, right? Were trained in so much else of our life that we’re looking we’re on the hunt. We’re looking for opportunities where we’re keen and we looking for things are broken so that we can fix them. Yes. But why is it that we aren’t looking there? Is it We’re running too fast. Is it we’re looking to achieve and other things? Where do you think that is? That we get off track, that we don’t look there?

Nona Jones: So as you said that what came to me is I think a lot of it is fear, because we become afraid that if we miss an opportunity, that that may be the only opportunity or we have a fear that if we don’t move this fast, that somehow somebody is going to overtake us. And I think we have to remember that the Kingdom of God does not operate by fear. It operates by faith. What does faith mean? Faith means that I place my resources. I place my time, my energy, my talents in the hand of God. And I trust that his omniscience is going to produce what I never could in my own intellect.

And so I do think that we have to counter fear. Whenever that fear rises in you and you start to think, I have to do this thing, because if I don’t, something will happen, right? We have to ask ourselves, do we truly believe that God owns everything? Because if it is true that God owns everything, then we have to remember that we serve the God who spoke into nothing and created everything. And so if you live a life that is defined by fear and is led by fear, you will always miss the voice of God and you will always miss the move of God because you’ll be so focused on what you’re afraid of instead of being able to simply rest in the fact that God is your provider and he’s not going to let you fail. Why? Because you are literally his representative to the earth. And so when you succeed, when you prosper, you actually bring him glory. And so I think you have to just rest in that and have faith in God’s provision.

Justin Forman: And so true. We were in South Africa, a friend that we were talking about, the entrepreneurial wounds that we’re carrying, and just how often times where, you know, they often say, are you running to something or are you running from something else? And I mean, it’s that tension in the entrepreneur. If we cut ourselves open and kind of looked at the day like, I think we would see that oftentimes that like, we’re missing it because we’re so quickly running, running, running, running, that we aren’t seeing what’s right there in front of us. So, I mean, that really drives into this. And you have such a unique perspective of this because God’s opened doors and given you some unique experiences. Is it possible kind of in all of that to really be, you know, knocking down doors, breaking through the force fields, pursuing those things as an entrepreneur and kind of have that balance of being like rooted in your identity? I think in like in the faith and work conversation, like oftentimes people as entrepreneurs, they’ll say this conversation of work life balance makes sense for like people on staff in a company. But man, when you’re blazing trails as an entrepreneur, it’s maybe rhythms, it’s maybe circles, it’s not as neat and is even so, we know it’s possible. But what does it look like to really kind of walk in a place of confidence but also be fueled to kind of chase big things, go after things. What does that balance look like to you?

Nona Jones: Well, I think this gets back to really being able to discern the voice of God, because when you know that God is calling you to something. And let me also make a distinction. You can either be called or you can be driven. Those are two very different orientations when you are called. There is a grace that. It actually enables you to do something that other people probably wouldn’t be able to do. There’s a grace that will sustain you so you’re not going to get burned out. You’re not going to have anxiety. You’re not going to be depressed, like I can tell you.

It’s taking a lot of work to to build my company at the same time. There’s so much grace on it that it’s it’s like I heard it said once that vision is not something that happens while you sleep. It’s something that keeps sleep from you. So when God gives you vision, he’s going to give you the grace to pursue the vision so that you don’t lose everything in the process. And I need to be really clear. Sometimes what’ll happen is we will be so driven that we will sacrifice what really matters in the long term for what’s important in the short term. And then we get overwhelmed. We’re anxious, we’re depressed, we’re discouraged.

But I think about success this way. Success does not have a period and only has commas. So no matter how much you achieve, there’s always going to be someone who’s achieved more. No matter what you do, there’s always going to be someone who has done more. If you win, let’s just say you’re a musician and you win the Grammys this year. Okay, great. You got a Grammy. Guess what? The Grammys are happening next year. And so there’s never going to be a moment where it’s like, my gosh, I can finally rest. So you have to surrender to what you’re called to and what you’re called to. Maybe in the opposite direction from what you’re applauded for.

This is a really hard concept for an entrepreneur to grasp because we tend to go after the thing that we think will give us validation and affirmation. The thing that will make people be like, my gosh, they’re amazing. But it could be that the thing that you’re called to is something that people don’t really care about. So it’s like, Yeah, it’s cool that you’re doing that thing over there, but it’s not bright and shiny. The question is, are you graced to do that? Are you okay with not getting the applause, not getting the celebration, but knowing that you did what God called you to do and you’re making the impact God calls you to make? I think if we don’t get that balance right, we will end up being driven in our identity will become secured to what we’re driven to as opposed to the God who called us. And I think that’s where we start to have some identity challenges.

Justin Forman: So one of the things we’re hitting in is some of the stuff from your book of about comparison. And like, you know, I think we’re all susceptible to that. We’re all, you know, whether whatever the social platform is that you’re on, you’re always looking at something and the gift of connection and the gift of technology. The downside there is that comparison element. But in some ways you look at entrepreneurs from the outside and you say, they’re so confident. They’re so driven, they’ve got this, you know. But they’re always saying something to somebody and it masks that. Do you think like, what’s the key for this entrepreneurial breaking of that comparison? What’s the detox move, if you will? Like what’s that like detox move to kind of get us away from it.

Nona Jones: So in order to share that, let me first be vulnerable. And vulnerability is actually my ministry. Like, I love to really help people understand that you’re not alone in this, because sometimes what keeps us in bondage to comparison is that we’re not even honest about the fact that we do it.

So back in 2020, you know, I had two books that we’re going to be releasing that year. I had a full calendar of speaking engagements, and then the pandemic happened and I started to see events get postponed and canceled. And I remember one day I was about to log on to a video conference for work, and usually in the morning I would go on Instagram. I would kind of respond to comments before I got started with my day. I would never really look at my newsfeed because that’s like that’s just like a rabbit hole that’s going to just suck you in.

So I wouldn’t usually look at it, but that morning I caught a glimpse of my newsfeed and I saw a friend of mine making a post about her being so excited because she was going to be speaking at this virtual women’s conference that normally met in person, but it was going online because of the pandemic. And she was like, It could be tens of thousands of women watching. You got to get registered. And I remember looking at the post and I was like, that’s like really cool. You know? My first thought was, Wow, that sounds like a really great event. Well, I scroll down some more. And another friend of mine made the exact same post. Like she was so excited because she was going to be speaking at it too, and encouraging women to get registered going to be so huge.

And I saw and I was just like, okay, that’s that’s cool. I scroll down a little more and there was another friend making the same post, and then there was another and another and another. And it got to the point that I realized I knew all of the speakers and I knew the event host like all of these people, I knew them. And so I started to click on people’s profiles because I was wondering, I was like, Well, why wasn’t I invited to speak? You know, like the host knows I’m a speaker, like these are my peers. Why wasn’t I invited? So I started clicking on their profiles and I was trying to figure out how many followers do they have in comparison to me. Then I started to click on their websites, you know, Well, where else were they speaking in comparison to me?

And I started to do just all of this, what I call a. Paris and calculus to try to figure out, you know, why her, not me? What did they have that I didn’t have? Why was I not left out? Why wasn’t I chosen? And then in the midst of me asking all of those y questions, I heard the Holy Spirit say, No, no. Why does it matter? And that was a question that, you know, we’ve all had those moments where we’re like, gosh, why wasn’t I chosen? I was. And I selected and I never asked, Why does it matter?

So when the Holy Spirit asked me that, my answer was, well, it matters because this is a huge event and I won’t be speaking at it. And there’s like these tens of thousands of women who will be watching it and I won’t be speaking. And the Holy Spirit said, No, no. Do you only think you matter based on the speaking invitations you receive? And I was like, well, no, you know, like I know I’m fearfully and wonderfully made. I’m a royal priesthood, peculiar people. I start to like, rattle off all the scriptures, you know, before I was formed in the womb, this whole thing. And the Holy Spirit said, No, no, your problem is not what you know in your head. Your problem is what you believe in your heart. And because you do not believe in your heart. What I have said about you, you are insecure.

And that was such a profound revelation for me, because if you would have said to me in 2020, none of your insecure, I would have said, you are lying. Like, look at all I have, look what I’ve done. But in that moment, what I had realized is I was insecure. Because when you think about what it means to be insecure, it means that your identity is secured to an insecure foundation. And I think as leaders, as entrepreneurs, as people who are building things that other people may deem worthy or valuable, we have to be really, really careful that we don’t allow our identity to get secured to their approval or their opinions because people’s opinions change like the current of the sea. And so I think as as entrepreneurs, we just have to know that because we have been called to whatever it is that we’re building, our identity has to be secured to the one who called us. What does he say about us? What does he think about what we’re building? About what we’re doing? Because when you secure your identity to the unchanging evaluation and assessment of God, the same God who said that when you were my enemy, you were worth dying for. Like that. Become such an anchor for our identity that I think the detox is when you really know who you are and you see somebody else who appears to be more successful than you. Instead of taking that as an indictment on my worth, I just celebrate them. Let’s ask them what God is doing for you. That doesn’t take anything for me. Your win is not my loss, your successes, not my failure. Because I’m in my own lane and God has called me to my lane.

Justin Forman: Now, I love the thing when you talk about like the celebration, like because I think whether it’s a detox move or it’s a creative resistance to that, it’s like a force field that if you put it up a little bit, it allows you to just not entertain that rabbit hole of negativity. I think that like celebrating and championing we’re great at a kid’s sports, We’re not great at it when we get older, but like, if we can really find ways to celebrate what God’s doing there, it keeps that stuff from creeping in. So I love one of the things of what you’ve often talked about is and I think that what you’re saying is like, you know, there’s two particular things in content in books that you’ve written about the comparison side, but then this idea of a gift that most entrepreneurs would probably never see it as a gift at first, maybe ten years later, maybe 20 years later. Hindsight gives us some lenses to see it. But this idea of a gift of rejection, what did that mean for you.

Nona Jones: Man? So let me just say that I share the sentiment of everybody. Like, how can you say rejection is a gift? This was not something that I just pulled out of thin air. This was truly a revelation God gave me. And I’ll give you just some of the theological grounding for this. I was in the book of First Samuel chapter 16 one day, and I was just reading and I’ve read it many times. This is like, you know, David and I was reading about David and Goliath. This is actually first Samuel 17, and David said something really interesting, and for some reason it just caught my attention.

So he tells Saul, Hey, you know, let nobody lose heart on account of this uncircumcised Philistine. I’ll go fight him. And Saul is basically like, You can’t fight him. You know, he’s been a warrior since his youth. You’re nothing but a young man. Like there’s no way. And David makes a statement. He says, I have been keeping my father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear would come and take one away, I would attack it. I would kill it, and I would rescue the sheep from its mouth. And then he said it was the hand of the Lord who protected me from the poor, the lion in the poor bear, and the Lord will protect me against this Philistine. Like he will be like one of them, basically.

And when I read that, I thought that was interesting. I was like, So he felt like he could defeat Goliath because he was fighting off lions and bears by himself. But then you go back one chapter, go to first Daniel, 16, and you find that the Prophet Samuel told David’s dad, Jesse, to bring all of his sons to a sacrifice because God told Samuel that he had chosen one of Jesse sons to be the next king. Well, Jesse brings seven of his sons to Samuel. He brings seven and Samuel looks at them and he’s like, The Lord hasn’t chosen any of these. Are these all the sons you have? And then Jesse is like, they’re still the youngest. He’s out in the field tending sheep.

And it was funny because it was like, Well, Samuel said, Bring all of your sons. Seven Got the memo when you were asked, Where was the other one? You knew exactly where he was. So it wasn’t that he wasn’t there because you didn’t know where he was. It’s because he wasn’t invited. And it just so happened that that youngest son was David. And so when I kind of tied the ends together of the story, what I realized was David had been left out in a field by himself, the ten sheep. But that became the training ground for him to ultimately defeat Goliath. And so as I was reading that, I heard the Lord say that rejection is a gift and that you have to change the way that you look at it, because the pain is not a gift, Right? But the pain is just wrapping paper. There’s a gift on the inside. There are lessons that every rejection can teach you about yourself, about others, about God that can ultimately serve your purpose. And so I wrote the book because I just wanted to equip people on how to open the gift so that it ultimately serves your purpose and helps you build the character and resilience that you need to live the purpose for which God created you.

Justin Forman: I love it. I love the tie to like I mean, when I sit here and I think about, you know, being early 40s and you sit there and you think you’re 20s, you’re, you know, you’re charging the gates, you’re just knocking down things, you’re just in fiercely throws. You probably don’t realize the hurt you’re causing yourself or maybe the people around you. And then you get in the 40s and like, I was having this conversation with our men’s group here earlier this week, it’s like at some level, like somewhere life slows down a little bit to just be able to see the thing behind the thing. I think that I’m like, for me personally, just getting to that place now where you’re seeing that thing behind the thing. And I think that at some level it’s like it ties back to that idea of like hearing God whisper earlier. Like when I think about like my 20s, the Holy Spirit was a retired author. Like there’s something in those 20s, the late 20s, where you’re just running so fast that as you said earlier, you needed to look for. It wasn’t looking for things. You start looking, you still doing some things for you. You kind of get into this moment here that I think it comes back to the very thing. And what you’re saying is like if we realized earlier what we know now and that God was speaking to us, he’s always been speaking to us, He’s been in the whispers, He’s been in the big things, the small things, and see the thing behind the thing. It’s just it’s so interesting in the pace of the entrepreneur, those early stages, we’re just running so fast, it’s hard to see it. It’s hard to listen to it.

Nona Jones: Yeah. And I’ve been there. Like you can get so focused again. You get so focused on what’s right in front of you that you can miss what God is doing around you. And so even in the seasons where you do, you move fast, you move quick, we have to make space and it’s something we have to do intentionally. We have to make space for the Lord to show us what is he doing. And that’s also one of the things that I am really trying to do through this idea of the gift of rejection is I’m trying to equip people with a framework that they can use in the middle of rejection.

Like I think many of us can look back on rejection experiences and we can see now that it ultimately served us right. But when you’re in the middle of it, you’re like, why is this happening? I have just really quickly story. So the reason why I’m even a speaker today is because of rejection. I was working for a global company and I wasn’t hired as a spokesperson, but I was doing an internal presentation one day and the communications team saw me give the presentation and they were like, you know, we get invited to do conferences and events all the time. You’re a great speaker. Would you be willing to, you know, become one of the speakers for the company? And I said, you know, sure, I’m happy to help.

Well, I start going out and speaking at conferences and events, and I guess I did a good job because they sent me out to more and more. Well, performance review season comes around and my manager, she said to me, she said, You know, this is not really part of your core work. I need you to focus on your core work. You’re not doing any of the speaking anymore. And I was like, Well, is there something I’m not doing that you need me to do? Because I got an exceeds evaluation. And she was like, No, no, I just need to kind of shut that down so you can focus on your core work.

So I go to the communications director and I’m like, You know, what’s going on? And she said, Well, your manager came to me and said that she wants to be the one speaking for the company, not you. So I was like, I remember being so disheartened by that. I mean, I really was because I had never thought of myself as a spokesperson, but I started to love what I was doing. And so the thing is, though, because I was going out and speaking so much, people were emailing me, inviting me to speak at more events, and I told them, Hey, I can’t speak for the company anymore, but I forward this to the communications team. And they said, No, we want you like, can you just speak as you? And I was like, I don’t think so. I said, But let me ask.

And so I asked my communications colleague and he was like, well, if you don’t use your. Company title or the company name. You can do what you want to do that’s on your own time. And the thing is, when I was speaking on behalf of the company, I couldn’t get paid. So suddenly I’m now speaking as known as Jones, Inc. and I can get paid. And I got to the place where I was making as much in speaking fees as my corporate salary, all because of a door that she closed. That was so painful to me in the moment. But I can look back on it now and I can see how God’s grace and favor actually used that as a redirection into a purpose for me. Because if she hadn’t done that, I would still be speaking for the company today, most likely, you know. But God has used even that to position me for purpose. And that’s one of the gifts I talk about in the book is the gift of rejection. It positions you for purpose, but you have to have eyes to see what God is doing in this situation instead of taking it personally.

Justin Forman: I love that we love a good framework and love that idea of like the position for purpose that the rejection in that position for purpose. I love that. So most people I mean, when you would look at something being a part of you version, being a part of the great work of that, I love the language that you’re sharing is we before we came on, just about how God called you into that and just kind of that analogy. Can you share that with everybody here? Because I think that’s beautiful because sometimes we think like with a human mind and just as you said that like it, surely he’s not call me from here to there. But I love how God was speaking to you in that moment.

Nona Jones: Man. So I was in leadership at the company formerly known as Facebook for about five years. All my fifth anniversary. I went before God and I prayed. I was like, Lord, you know, because the average tenure at what’s now met is like eight months. And so me being there for five years, I was like, you know, o.g basically of there longer than 99% of the company. And I just got to a place where I was like, you know, I’ve done a lot. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve built a lot because I started to feel like unsettled. I did. I felt unsettled. And I said, Lord, whatever you have for me next, I really want it to be ministry. Like, I want to bring everything I’ve done and built and learn to your kingdom explicitly.

Now, I was doing that in kind of an adjacent way, like in a peripheral way, like I would consult with churches and speak at church conferences and all of that. But I was like, No, I really want to do this in explicit way. And so I remember, you know, fast forward, that was August of 2022. Fast forward to November of 2022. Mark sent an email to and I didn’t email, but he sent a calendar invite to all of the executives at the company and invited us to a random meeting. Just it just said meeting with Mark. Like that’s all they said.

And so we’re in the meeting and he says, you know, tomorrow you’re all going to receive an email telling you who on your team is being laid off and had absolutely no idea that that was coming at all. I had not been asked who on my team I would let go like none of that. And so I felt in that meeting, though, I felt a release like I felt in that meeting that God was like, Your time is up here. Because I couldn’t even imagine. I was like, What am I going to tell these people? Because I didn’t know this was coming.

So the next day I spent maybe, gosh, 15, 16 hours just on the phone talking to people. And it was truly one of the worst days of my life. And I’ve had some pretty bad days, but also one of the worst ones because there was no explanation. But that same day I reached out to Bobby at YouVersion and I, I knew because I already knew that I was going to transition away like I knew that. But I was like, okay, if there’s a way for me to serve the U.S. mission, like, let me know whatever that looks like. I’m happy to do it because I believe in what you’re building. And so, yeah, I was very fortunate to get called into that team to be able to support the mission and bring some of the thinking from, you know, big Tech to you version, which was amazing.

And then about, I don’t know, ten months into that role, I was in prayer one day and the Lord, he said, I’ve called you to be a light and dark places. And frankly, my corporate background, I was always bringing Jesus. I was always bringing the gospel into those dark places. And so it’s like a full circle moment where now he’s sending me back into the corporate space. But by equipping women leaders in the corporate space to live out their faith and live on purpose and heal. So it’s been a blessing.

Justin Forman: I love that analogy. There was a conference that we did a couple of years ago with Faith Driven Investor, and they’re a friend of ours. So Jorma that talked about this idea of like, yes, the power of a light in a dark room versus a power of a light in a bright room, a room that’s already bright. And that’s not to say that I mean, it’s a beautiful body of Christ that God calls us, and that different places and different ministries and different things. But I love the visual of that because that visual is very much what every Faith Driven Entrepreneur is doing out there. They’re bringing light to dark rooms. We bounce from room to room. Some are darker than others, but the light that we’re bringing might be oftentimes the only light that is being invited into those spaces anymore. I mean, these days, the business. People are some of the few people still being invited into this room. And we’re not turning to the church’s society and culture in the way that we had in the past. And that visual of bringing light to dark places is a really powerful thing.

Nona Jones: Well, you know what’s happened over this last year. So I’m, you know, serving as a global ambassador, you virgin. So I still get to support the mission in that way. And God has been calling me into spaces that have been quite surprising even to me. So there’s a magazine, national magazine called Black Enterprise, and it’s really for entrepreneurs and C-level executives, predominantly black companies and or black executives. And they invited me to speak at a summit that they have. And they told me they were like, you know, you’re the first preacher that we’ve invited to speak in this space.

And so here I am in this room of like 4000 women executives, and I’m talking about Jesus in a very like a very clear way. You know, I was not couching anything. I was I was talking about Jesus. And then I got invited also to deliver a keynote to a very large national bank. And, you know, in the conversation, I’m talking about Jesus, you know, And so people were coming up to me afterward, even people who are not Christian, but they appreciated what I said because it wasn’t proselytizing, but it was just being honest about my faith. And so I thank God for those moments because you’re able to take the light of Jesus, the light of the Word of God into places where his name isn’t normally mentioned. And to do it in a way that doesn’t offend people. But it plants a seed. And that’s really, I think, the blessing.

Justin Forman: Yeah, I love what you’re saying there. The honesty, the authenticity that you’re bringing when you’re speaking authentically about Jesus. It breaks through. It is that light, the grace. You and I love how you started things off earlier and you said, Hey, before I talk about fear of rejection or the blessing of rejection, like the silver lining that let me confess and be authentic about where I was coming from and what a powerful thing that is in today’s kind of polished world. So as we kind of come to a finish here and love for everybody to know a little bit more about what you’re up to. And I think part of it is because it’s something that we’re going through when we think about Faith driven entrepreneurs ship is oftentimes we’ll see a video that’s very inspirational. We’ll hear something, we’ll see the grit, the story, we’ll get in a group and we’ll go through a course or a study like a Faith Driven Entrepreneur course. But I think one of the things that we’re appreciating is as you go through those journeys, oftentimes you need a good framework and you need this idea of thinking about a coaching and a process to kind of really kind of make this stuff stick. So tell everybody about what you feel like that God’s leading you to next.

Nona Jones: Thank you so much. First of all, this has been such a blessing and a highlight of my day. Right now I am building an organization called Inside Out Leadership. I’ve been a coach for women leaders for many years, but it’s been kind of, I would say, more like ad hoc. But I’m actually building an organization that the explicit mission is to help high capacity women live on purpose and healed. And those two pieces are important because what I have found is that a lot of times executive coaching is really all about how do you do the thing? But I believe we have to get to the place of why do you do the thing before we get to hell.

So, for example, I gave the example earlier about, you know, time management, like we tend to as women leaders, we’re always trying to maximize our time and we’re trying to figure out what’s the system that we use to get the most out of our day. But the question is not how do you manage your time? The question is why do you say yes to things that you know you don’t have the capacity for? What is it that is making you believe that if you say no, that something will go wrong? Like, let’s deal with that because there are some heart and some mind implications. It’s not just about the strategy of time management. It’s also about helping you heal from perfectionism, like helping you heal from the idea that if I don’t say yes, people won’t like me. So that’s what I’m building with Inside Out leadership. I’m just so excited about it. To be able to come alongside of women at all levels. So not even just executive women, but independent contributors, you know, women who just want to get more out of life and they know there’s more potential that they have than they’re living in. So I’m excited about that. And then being able to bring that framework into corporations, which is another kind of extension of this idea of being light and dark places to serve women within businesses and how they can grow both on purpose and healed.

Justin Forman: I love that, ma’am. So beautiful. We still are wrestling with this with the Faith Driven Entrepreneur side of things as a ministries. You know, oftentimes when we talk about discipleship, we talk about clear cut principles of stewardship versus ownership called to create all these different things. And yet we know that the entrepreneurial journey is full of adversity. And people are saying, man, I’m struggling with with cash flow, I’m struggling with my pipeline, I’m struggling with whatever it might be. And I think that we can’t ignore the fact that you said they go hand in hand because when you get about. Two inches deep underneath some of those questions, there is still some other underlying questions of do you trust me? Are you really seeking my approval or are you seeking somebody else’s approval? What that balance is and and I think it’s a bullivant like we’ve got to, as you said, we’ve got to treat the inside. We got to treat the outside. But we have to recognize the relationship between the two of those. And one of them oftentimes is just an entry point into the other conversation.

Nona Jones: That’s absolutely right. Yeah, I think we spend a lot of time on the things that are urgent, but the thing that’s most important is our emotional, mental, spiritual, psychological well-being. And for whatever reason, that’s the part that we say, I’ll get to that later. But that’s the foundation. Like if you are not well inside, if you’re not well inside, it honestly doesn’t matter what you accumulate around you. If there’s a deficit within you, like it becomes a vacuum. And so I believe that when Christ said that I’ve come that you would have life and have it more abundantly. He meant that we would live a life that is fulfilling, that is exciting. And so I feel so bad when I find entrepreneurs who just are constantly discouraged and feeling like a failure. And I’m like, That’s not God’s will for your life. And so my hope is that people will experience the healing that is in, number one, knowing who you are in Christ, but number two, living on purpose. And to me, I think that’s the goal for all of us.

Justin Forman: That’s awesome. Well, one of the traditions we have here that’s going to sound like a softball question about you version, but it’s really a question that we ask all guests is what is a particular verse? Is there a particular passage? Is there a piece of scripture that is coming uniquely alive to you, speaking to you in the season as you start this new venture? Is there something that is really speaking to you?

Nona Jones: I would say Philippians four and six, you know, be anxious for nothing but an everything by prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God. And then verse seven says, And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. God helps me to focus on one word in verse six that I had kind of sped over for years because we say like, well, don’t be anxious, just pray. What it says is pray and supplication with Thanksgiving. So what that means is we have to continuously take inventory of the goodness of God in our lives because anxiety is worry about a future that we don’t control. That’s what anxiety is. But Thanksgiving, what Thanksgiving does is it forces you to remember the goodness of God in the past, in the present. And so when you remember the goodness of God, the faithfulness of God in the past and the present, it makes the future worry small. Because you remember that God has been faithful, God has been faithful. And so that’s what activates the peace of God is Thanksgiving. And that’s what I’m focusing on now.

Justin Forman: Gosh, I love that. One of the things we said earlier, it’s a detox move. It’s a resistance. It’s a one of those things that keeps it at bay. And I love it. And gosh, there’s probably 2 or 3 more podcast episodes in that. But we’re going to we’re going to lay in the plain here. But I have a feeling that we’ll do some more of these down the road, but not I So grateful for you, grateful for the way that you are leading, the way that you’re challenging. Just grateful to be on this larger mission together. It’s a gift to have you join us here today.

Nona Jones: This was such a blessing. I’m grateful for you. I’m grateful for the ministry that you have and just the people whose lives are being impacted by the encouragement that’s offered on this platform. So I’m just honored to be a part. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you. With content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur dot org.

What happens when a medical device salesman gets fed up with his undershirt? For Tommy John founder Tom Patterson, it sparked a revolution in the men’s comfort wear industry. From a $7,000 trade show investment during the 2008 financial crisis to a multimillion-dollar brand, Patterson’s journey showcases how faith, persistence, and authenticity can transform a simple solution into an industry-changing success story.

Justin Forman: All right, guys, welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It is always a joy to be with you. It is a joy to reconnect with family every week here on this podcast, in a movement that stretches far and wide for so many different countries, so many different places, so many different industries and stories, and always fun to have these family reunions once a week here. And speaking of family reunions, it is super great to have just a wonderful co-host. You’re back on the podcast with us, welcoming back one of the OGs from the beginning. William Norvell, great to have you back here on the podcast.

William Norvell: It’s good to be here, brother. It’s good to be here. Always a gift. I wonder if Alabama to seven or no, if I would have have been extended the invite to come back. But I’ll take it. We lose Devante, I get a call. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, but, you know, we’ll just chalk it up to You wanted to see me again?

Justin Forman: You know, there’s conspiracy theories floating all around, and so maybe that’s one believe it or believe a.com or whatever it is with the website that you might use to disprove your theories. We’ll leave that up to another day. But, man, so good to have you back. It’s good to be here. I know that you’ve been on the entrepreneurial journey yourself. It’s been fun to hear the updates, been fun to follow from a distance, but I can give a really quick update what life has been like for you and the journey that you’ve been on.

William Norvell: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been so much fun, actually. Speaking of family reunions, my co-founder just called me this morning on the way back from the high tech prayer breakfast in D.C. and Henry was the keynote. So we’re everywhere now, which is really fun, he said. Henry gave an amazing talk, as usual, about trying to follow the Lord on these journeys, which is what we love to talk about. And so for me, yeah, it’s been super fun. We are over three years into Forte, if anyone’s listening, you remember when we started this company over three years ago and I’ll tell the God story because that’s what we’re here for. It’s amazing where God is taking us. So we’re still together. We’re still going. Probably the coolest thing, Justin, that has come up and we get to partner together on this conference here February 20th. So we’ll name drop the pastor Entrepreneur conference. But we have been pulled into serving the church, which we did not start out planning to do. And so there’s a story of verticals that you don’t see coming is the macro story, right? We started out and we’ve been serving schools and frontline workforces, really high burnout industries for a long time with our soul care product. If you don’t know what we do, we build the training program, we train people, we call them guides. We come alongside people in their life and give them a sacred space to talk about life, work and everything in between. And we also produce content. And so we started attacking some of these high burnout industries, health care, education and frontline workers. I think Jersey Mike’s, Chick-Fil-A, two Planet Fitness and the vertical that came out of nowhere about a year ago, a frequent podcast guest as well, Peter Greer from Hope International.

William Norvell (continued): We started a conversation in a conference and he said, Hey man, I’d love to give this a shot. I think our people could use it. And over 12 months, I’ll say it publicly because I’ve told Peter privately we make very little money on Peter’s contract, we’ll put it that way. And so it was a great signal to the market that the Christian nonprofit space was a great opportunity. And then a church planner friend of mine as well came along and said, Hey, I’ve got 50 church plans going on. Would you be able to come alongside them? They’re lonely and they’re burned out. And we said, Sure, not really what we do, but we will. And it’s gone amazing. And so now, 12 months later, fast forward, we were serving over 5 or 600 churches now and Christian nonprofits and coming alongside given them and their whole staff and their spouses and their families and their elder board, in some cases, a chance to have a place to process all the God’s doing in their life. So it’s a journey, as we always say. It’s a journey. I’m gifted at people like you and people on the podcast along because you just never know where God’s going to take you and you got to be ready to jump on.

Justin Forman: Yeah, those God winks or sliding door moments of life. They’re fun to see and just fun to see innovation that’s happening, the thinking, bringing new intentionality of how do we care for people and love that, like the heartbeat of being there for people and all those different industries in the vertical, as you said, the winding path and journey that brings us together. It’s always fun when we get a taste of that also on the podcast. And so as we introduce today’s guests, fun to see how Brad will make a great friend in the movement in the ministry for so many years in the work that what he’s done has connected us to a new friend and want to welcome to the podcast, Tom Patterson. Welcome to the show.

Tom Patterson: Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Excited to be here.

Justin Forman: Yeah, well, it’s great to have you here. The booming Metropolis City, Country Nation, whatever. We’re referring to Austin these days, as fast as it’s growing fun to see just what God’s doing in your story and to get a little glimpse of that. And, you know, for those listening to the first time, some of these podcast episodes are discussion oriented and some of these kind of focus a little bit more on the story, and I think we’re going to do a little bit of both today. But one of the things we love to do is just to hear some of the winding journey that God kind of takes us on and just kind of how ideas origination kind of starts and some of those unexpected moments. So, Tom, one of the ways that we kind of frame things up is kind of who are you? Where do you come from? What’s your story? So give us a little bit of an insight on kind of how this journey started for you.

Tom Patterson: Yeah, so. William, you mentioned. Are you an Alabama alumni?

William Norvell: I am.

Tom Patterson: Well, maybe it’s a story for another day, but I grew up in a small town, Melbourne, South Dakota. 3000 people grew up on 312 South fourth Street. Fun fact is, coach Caleb de Boer grew up at 301 South Fourth Street. It’s become a great friend of mine. So small world for sure. But you know, I grew up in small town sports. My family ran a fourth generation funeral home business, funeral home furniture store, ambulance service, and just kind of down to earth, real nice mannered, genuine, honest people, really that small town you think about when you watch movies and TV shows like Friday Night Lights or even Six Feet Under or My Girl.

So grew up in an environment just where hard work was expected, middle class life. You know, a lot of people say middle class is the toughest class to get out of. I would say maybe we are a lower or upper middle class during different times of my childhood, but I had businesses in the summer. I had snow blowing and shovel sidewalks before school and after school. We were really just finding different ways to make money, knocking on doors in the springtime, asking people if they needed some of the mother lawn or let me do a test mow to see if it’s worthy of what I would charge them. And, you know, little did I know I was learning a lot of sales skills, communication, selling my services that really I think were kind of foundational things to where I ended up going later in life.

After high school, I went to Arizona State, graduated in four years, which is very unusual school like that. And then I got into corporate transportation sales at DHL, which was formerly Airborne Express. So hard business to business sales, which led to medical device sales. Think of Will Smith in the Pursuit of Happiness. I wasn’t selling bone scanners, but I was selling pulse oximeters. These sensors that go on your fingers, ears, nose, forehead, measure, measure your oxygen saturation and heart rate and was really foundational in a lot of ways which led to underwear and undershirts, which we’ll get to next. But the skills I learned translated really well into the world of underwear, which a lot of people wouldn’t think, but it was selling a product and a concept. So I would say to anybody, sales experience only accelerates and helps you wherever you go. And like nothing in this world starts without a sale, you know? And I’ve always been interested in it, enjoyed it.

Justin Forman: Love that perspective. I mean, when we start talking about faith driven students, we talked about next generation. I love what you’re unpacking. There is in this highly digital world, we talk about A.I., we talk about machine learning. You talk about some of the core fundamentals of life experiences that you can find all around you that can lead you into such great things. So taking some of those first steps, and when we think about first steps, I think oftentimes we think that there’s like this massive, beautiful, wonderful yellow brick road that leads us to this moment of innovation. But for you, I love this idea that, you know, there really never was a perfect time to start a business. But in the scale of things, you also kind of had this idea and this origination. It started in a uniquely inverse season of kind of when you guys started this venture.

Tom Patterson: Yeah, that’s right. You know, back in 2007, there was a show called The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch on MSNBC. It was almost what Shark Tank has become now. And they had entrepreneurs and inventors come on the show who had created things like magnetic collar stays that keep your collar from flipping up or, you know, Spanx, which has become a very big brand. And I thought, well, what’s a problem that I can solve that’s authentic and genuine to me? So I get up every day and I think like, is it a cell phone cover? Is it a wine glass? It could have been anything else that stretches. And one day I got out of my car and my dress shirts were being tailored and my suits were fitted, but my undershirts were baggy and boxy, and they’d stretch out and come untucked. And I thought, Man, why doesn’t anyone make an undershirt that’s longer, doesn’t shrink, the collar doesn’t get stretched out, it stays tucked in, it doesn’t yellow as quickly?

I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I thought, well, I’ll go buy some fabric in downtown Los Angeles in the garment district, 100 bucks, take it to a tailor at a dry cleaners, 50 bucks, see if the concept works. And I remember bringing it in. I’m like, Man, I have this unique idea. Is she going to steal it? And she, the seamstress at the dry cleaner’s first thing she says, she’s like, Why would you want to make a men’s undershirt that looks like a dress? It goes past your butt. It’s so long. Who’s going to wear something like that? I’m like, probably just me.

And, you know, I just wanted to see if the idea worked. It stayed tucked in. It’s hidden. Nobody’s going to see it. But I wanted something functionally that was more comfortable, which led to me being more confident and more put together. So it wasn’t like we had a huge business plan, hired these technical designers that had all these specific mathematical ratios. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. But my wife had started a business called Organic Kids selling household cleaners, organic skin care products. I saw her, Aaron, build a website and just observing that, it really inspired me to think, Well, I want to do something. What’s my idea going to be? So she in a lot of ways gave me the confidence and I think ambition to get going there.

Tom Patterson (continued): But, you know, I think a lot of people think it has to be done a perfect way or you have to know the right people or have the right network or the right experience. And I think a lot of times in times of rapid change, especially like we’re going through today, experience can be your biggest enemy. And, you know, not knowing what we didn’t know, we didn’t have bias for what we were about to get into, you know, the next 16 plus years.

Long story short, I made the undershirt. I did everything I thought it would do. Seven out of ten guys who I trust are really close friends, I said, Hey, I’m sending you something. Let me know what you think. And they all called back a week later and they’re like, Dude, if you make more of these, I’ll buy like 5 or 10 of them. So I thought, All right, I’m on to something, at least with my friends, because these guys would say like, Hey, this is a bad idea, or, Hey, get going. So I went up to downtown Los Angeles, found a manufacturer who could make a couple hundred of them and spent all day with them learning how to make patterns and technical design for the sizes small to extra large. And built a two page PayPal checkout website in spring of 2008. You know, I wish Shopify existed back then, but it didn’t. Did the modeling on a roof of my friend’s apartment in San Diego. And you know, I look at those pictures today and it literally looks like the iPod one. If we’re on the iPhone six or just like things evolve over time and get better. But, you know, that was really how we started. So there wasn’t you know, I would say so many people spend time, it’s got to be 100%, 70% perfect, just get going and things will evolve. It never ends up being exactly what you think about at that moment in time. And that mindset has really replicated itself along our journey.

Justin Forman: I love that. I love that there was a book I read probably around some LA times. I read Seth Godin book, I think it was talking about shipping it and talking about this concept of like, get it to that point, ship it, let the market give you that feedback and do it. I love that element. I love the grassroots nature. I love what you said about just how we didn’t have the bias of experience kind of working against you. So oftentimes we think that we need it to work for us, but there’s a reality that it can work against us if we kind of have too much thought that we kind of get locked up into it. So when does this point become when does it tip? So you go from a people we’ve talked about I mean, I think you’re talking about 27, 28. I mean, that’s a crazy time. What’s happening in the country? What was the thing that kind of pushed you over the edge?

Tom Patterson: Yeah, I mean, I remember vividly, you know, we launched our website in April 2008. In October of 2008, I got laid off my medical sales job. The company didn’t get an FDA approval. They had to lay off some of their sales force. And I had already started Tommy John on the side on the weekends and doing it during not my full time job. And I read an article that said the best time to start a company is during a recession. And it’s a witness. Remember in the fall of 2008, that’s when the financial crisis began, the housing market crashed and the retail recession followed. And I thought, like, man, I have this product I think everybody needs, but they don’t know they need it yet. And I don’t want to be this could have would have should a guy. I’m not married. I don’t have kids. I don’t own a home. If I lose everything, I can always go back and get another job in medical sales. I liked it. I was good at it. But man, I just wanted to take a big swing in life and see where I could go and where I could take an idea.

And we ended up getting launched into – I got a meeting with a buyer at Neiman Marcus. I went down and presented and they decided to put us in 15 stores later in 2009, and we sold through 60% of our inventory in the first 30 days. We ended up going into all their stores and I went to Nordstrom a month later and said, Let me prove to you we can replicate this formula. And we went from 5 to 109 Nordstrom stores over the next nine months and it was just flying by the seat of our pants in a lot of ways, to be honest. Like we didn’t even have a technical design for our products like I was, for the most part, the dimensions of a fit model which worked to our benefit, like literally try them on in our factory, be like, They look pretty good. Yeah, I don’t think there’s any issues.

So we were in these great retailers and we had not done so many different things. And I think about that. I’m like, Was that just luck or was that really faith? You know, like, why do those things happen? You know, I don’t really believe in coincidences. The longer we’ve been in business, there’s just these moments where things align. And I think there’s so many times in life where things align that people don’t connect the dots. And I think for whatever reason, we were able to connect the dots and continue to grow and grow and grow and learn and be curious and ask questions.

Tom Patterson (continued): And improve and evolve as we went on in business and product design and refining things. But a lot of it came back to, I think, the conviction and the vision I had for the business when communicating to buyers, talking to people in stores, and they just bought into what the product did. They love this story, but it delivered. Like we walked the talk with our products and our claims that are not related to the baseball pitcher. I played baseball growing up. My middle name’s John. That’s how we got the name Tommy John.

But one of the things that we did early and I’ve talked about this before to stand out is women bought most men’s underwear back in 2008. And women look for three things. They look for the brand that their husband’s been wearing because guys don’t like to change, usually stay with what works. They see a brand that’s advertised everywhere, or they look for a good looking guy on the outside of the package. So they’re like, if the baseball pitcher started a brand. But we did a survey and we found the majority of the women like two things: Tiffany’s jewelry and chocolate. And at the time, the packaging in retail stores was, for the most part, black and white packaging. So we chose the Tiffany Blue and chocolate color palette with a good looking guy and a box that opened up differently to make it easy to get in touch and feel the fabric.

So it’s like you have a standout product. But we tried to find little additional ways to stand out by doing research, and it allowed us to kind of fire like a diamond and pop in a retail store. And then on top of that, it brought people into the product. And then the story behind it and then the product actually delivered. There’s so many things that go into it getting in to like really the big leagues. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were these big brands like Calvin Klein and Jockey and Under Armor. It’s like, Who’s this guy? So we had to go the extra decimal points to really give our business a chance to succeed.

And I would say, like a lot of what I find a lot of entrepreneurs do and why maybe you can relate to this is they sell the product in like, Man, I hope it sells. I’ll send them a few documents to learn about the product and hopefully they talk about it the right way. But I went to 90 stores in a year and a half, spending 14 hours a day on my feet, talking to salespeople, talking to customers, learning ways to refine the way I position the product, get them to do it, to try end up buying.

Tom Patterson (continued): So a lot goes into selling in, but even more goes into selling through. I would say what didn’t exist back then is the direct to consumer business had none of all, the landscape was a very different as a traditional brick and mortar wholesale environment 2008 through 2012. So that’s really where we learned the business, where now today a lot of brands go online first and direct to consumer. And so I think the way businesses have evolved has changed a little bit since we started.

William Norvell: That’s fascinating. I’m just hearing your story thinking you’re making this sound pretty easy. You know, you’re wandering around and then you’re like, I’ll just go buy some fabric and then this business is going to take off. Now, I know that’s not true. But while the way you tell this story of just having those entrepreneurial instincts and taking those next steps, I mean, that’s something that you said you could use this podcast in our pre taping, like I could use these stories. I grew up in a small town in Alabama, as we just mentioned, and we’ll talk about Kalinda more often later. I’m not going to bore the listeners, but I don’t feel like I heard these stories right. I don’t feel like I had a vision for. You can just do it. So I have two questions. One. Did you have that somewhere? Somewhere in your life? Somewhere in your family where. Yeah, this was just like DNA, right? I mean, like, you see a good idea out there. You start going and then two, as you were growing the business, I’ve heard you talk about this on other podcast that you felt you had this urgency to go faster and grow, but you have this great quote of being patiently impatient. And so I want to hear like, how did you have that instinct to go? And then also how did you pair that with this concept of being patiently impatient as the business was taking off?

Tom Patterson: Yeah, you know, a month before I got laid off my medical sales job, we did this show called The Magic Show in Las Vegas. And that’s where all the buyers come in and you present your products and the biggest brands are there. And it was $5,000 to enter the show. It’s probably $1,000 in samples. We had to buy mannequins, we had to drive hotel flights, whatever. And I think it was around 7 or $8000, all in my savings just to get in there and see what happens. And we did $1,200 in sales. I remember driving back from Vegas to San Diego, the whole drive there, mannequin samples, it was like deflating. I was like, Man, why isn’t this working? We have an amazing product. I know every guy that tries it will buy it and they won’t buy one. They’ll buy five. What is not connecting?

And that was really when I think about a moment where I think a lot of people would have just quit and gone back into the comfort of a job, a safe paycheck. And I just wasn’t ready to quit because I knew something inside me. I knew there was a way to get this thing off the ground. And your second question, I think a lot of it for me is I played a lot of sports growing up, football, basketball track. I would say sports and school did not come easy to me. I had to really work and there was a lot of failures along the way, a lot of challenges I had to overcome to get playing time or make the team. So I think I was used to failing and I was used to having challenges to overcome. And I think in hindsight, the behavior and the character traits I learned prepare me for these moments of having tough times in the business, especially getting it off the ground, not selling. I mean, having no said more than a two year old about your product. I mean, it’s humbling.

Tom Patterson (continued): But I think so many people get so close to having that pop and getting through the door in their business, having a moment of like taking off. And that’s when they throw in the towel. And I think back, like, I don’t know, it’s just like never really had to give up. There’s only one option. There’s ten different ways to make a play. And I think that was really the mindset that got me into it. And then I think the one thing is like, I think in business and in life, you have to be patient with things too, like set up and get into motion, but also like it takes forever if there’s not some level of impatience, right? And I think if you can remove distractions and save time and do it 70% perfect versus 100% perfect, you’re going to get going and refine it and you’re six months ahead of everybody else.

You know, when I think about like ways in school, I learned really quickly whether I study 20 hours or 2 hours, I was going to get the same 85%, 82% on a test. I was A, B minus to B student. So like, why spend 80 more hours studying for something that I’m pretty sure I’m going to get the same grade? So these things you learn along the way, like you figure out how to become impatient and save time because you know how quickly things can be done. And I think along the business, people don’t want to make mistakes. People by nature want to do things correctly. And I think that’s what really separates entrepreneurs is they’re okay with the discomfort of uncertainty, not doing it 100% perfect and just getting going. And once it gets going, like everything takes longer. I mean, this whole journey is taken twice as long and it’s been ten times harder than I thought. When I think about it in hindsight to where we are today. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these things were kind of ingrained in my childhood.

William Norvell: I love that. I love that. I think it’s so good. And I think that concept, just as you were talking about being on the edge of the breakthrough, I just couldn’t stop thinking of the woman who was chasing Jesus, who knew that all she had to do was touch you. And I sometimes when I see that story for someone who maybe took a long time to be entrepreneurial, I think of all the people standing around who were waiting for their moment who said, Well, maybe hope pass by here, right? Or maybe I’ll be able to get a meeting with them later. Because I know Peter and I used to be on the boat with them, Right. But she knew, like, this is the time and I have to, like, take this chance, right? This could be the chance that could change everything.

William Norvell (continued): And I’m not going to let the moment pass. And I just hear that in your story of, yes, most people would have quit. I think it would have been like, hey, that was a fun side project. It didn’t work. Let’s go. Right. And I think those are the people in the audience. And I want to ask you that like 16 years, maybe just give you a bit of an open platter for like, how did your faith sustain you through that? What parts were there? Were there stories like that that you held on to? I know it sounds trite, but gosh, I just know those things go so far. Those moments, those stories when God speaks through the Scripture that we read the same verse a thousand times. Just curious your journey there.

Tom Patterson: Yeah, I mean, so I grew up going to church, Lutheran Church as a kid, and I got in a lot of trouble. I would say my first six, seven years of life, just bad kid acting out for probably a lot of reasons. And one time I was riding in a hearse with a nun for a funeral. My parents maybe couldn’t find a babysitter or whatever, and I started drawing on her with a pen and drawing Sharpie and markers. And the weekend before, I learned all these swear words from a cousin that was visiting that had probably picked them up from a neighbor, a kid. And I was just like acting out. And you would think, like, what is in this kid? And sure, my parents were just thrown off guard and embarrassed, couldn’t believe it.

And over the next year, when they would run into these nuns, there was a convent connected to a hospital in our town. They would all ask “How’s Tom doing?” And like, you know, he’s improving, you know, so sorry for what happened. They’re like, “Well, we just want to let you know that we’ve been praying for him.” And I think there’s this power of prayer. You know, there’s this vibrational frequency that protects you from sin. It protects you from spirits.

Tom Patterson (continued): And it’s funny along the way, childhood early adult, there’s been people that for no reason made me a couple of times, like, “Hey, you’ve been in our prayers” and I think it’s protected us. It’s protected our family and our business – the power of prayer. And it took me a long time to figure out, I think, you know, like where we are today in our faith versus, you know, starting out. It’s like at a different level in depth. When I think back to the tough times, like we did have protection from a higher power. You know, we believe that’s God, you know, and the power of Jesus. And, you know, there’s been moments that just are unexplainable with our business. The fact that we’ve survived so many tough times from, you know, investors wanting us to sell to product defects where it’s just like, why is this happening now? And it’s like, well, it’s happening for you, not to you.

There’s certain, I think, mindset you have to really believe in and just trust that his plan is the right plan. And that’s really where faith gets you through things. And I think where we would be without that is probably would not be on this podcast with you guys sharing the story. But it’s been huge. And then just on top of that, the people it’s connected us to personally in our business that have found the brand that we find are wearing the product. You talk about faith. I mean, not that it matters, but it’s the biggest of the biggest in the Christian world, the athletic world, the Hollywood world. So it’s been really cool to see that and fall under our – it’s hard to see, but to learn about that. And when that’s explained, I mean, I get a lot of underwear pictures you probably…

William Norvell: You do bro. You know.

Tom Patterson: Hey, you know, my dog was a friend of mine and John’s like, “Tom, you need to think about you guys have all figleaves into underwear and boxer briefs and what it is today. Like, think about that evolution from Adam and Eve.” And I was like, Man, I’ve never really thought about that way. You know, it’s true in a lot of ways. But yeah, I mean, it’s been huge. And, you know, even our cultural values as a business and the way we treat people and our brand values, I think in a lot of ways people would say they’re biblical values or things that we believe in, the way we run our company and the way we treat people.

So I don’t believe in the word coincidence. I don’t think coincidences are coincidences in the world that we believe in. But I would say to your point about the woman touching Jesus walking through, I would just watch that recently in The Chosen that scene. A lot of people can pray and hope, but those prayers oftentimes aren’t answered without action, like turning water into wine. Yeah, it’s a great idea, but people got to go take the barrels down to the river, fill it up with water, bring them back. You got to get that prayer into action to actually see the outcome. I think that’s one thing I continue to see is prayer and hope is great, but it also takes action.

And I think about the times where we didn’t take action. Things took longer. So I think you really have to be intentional with a lot of the things you do in your business. And for anybody that’s listening, I think if you have a faith man, there’s no better time to be an entrepreneur and a Christian. With the amount of information out there from podcasts to YouTube. There’s so much more out there and so many people’s stories. You can hear about how faith impacted their journey and the setbacks and the challenges they overcame that I think you can literally skip years in where you want your business to be.

William Norvell: I’m going to turn it back over just because I got chills when you talked about the nuns praying for you like that just stopped me in my tracks and I’ve been the beneficiary of things like that. Don’t let it be wasted.

Justin Forman: Don’t want to be wasted. I love what we’re talking about here, is this idea of our entrepreneurs born or made. And I think, you know, you’re seeing really this idea that they’re made and it happens a lot earlier than we think. And it happens in unsuspecting moments of life and the twists and turns in the process. So I think the same is true when we talk about faith through an entrepreneurship, and maybe it’s because of the obvious nature of Faith Driven Entrepreneur step of saying like, we’re all on the spiritual journey, we’re all in this process. We’re not like born and arrived in that moment. We’re always going through that refinement and in the same ways you can then draw that back to our journey as entrepreneurs as saying whether we might be born or have some traits or some things earlier on in our journey. It is always a process.

So I love hearing how God spoke through prayer, through sliding door moments. What does that look like for you today when you think about like, how are you being made as a Faith Driven Entrepreneur today? Bring us forward to today as you’re hearing this podcast, as you’re hearing other people’s stories. What’s the tension spots? What’s the things that you’re wrestling through, whether that’s at home in the office, where does God have you in that journey right now?

Tom Patterson: Yeah. You know, I talked to a really good friend of mine about this, and I think the world, especially the last four years, we’re not a political brand, Tommy John’s not a social brand. We’re not an activist brand. Comfort doesn’t take sides. And I think the world wants brands to take sides or take stances. And I think the thing that we’ve continue to come back to our center is like Jesus loved everybody. He saw the best in everybody. Is there things that we could have done differently in our culture along the way? Of course, like, nobody’s perfect, you know, we’re all works in progress.

But, you know, I think when things come from a place of love and authenticity and honesty and truth, that’s really where you need to stay. I think the world we live in today has so many distractions from mainstream media to social media. The scariest thing is AI and what people think is being said and it’s not, but it’s a really kind of confusing time to live and let alone run a business. And there’s so many things that take you away from your purpose. When I think about why we started, I was like, I just want a better fitting undershirt that stays tucked in. And then I was like, I just want underwear that doesn’t ride up, waistband that doesn’t roll down, a fly that’s more functional and all the other things I think you have to deal with.

It’s kind of like college being a college coach. And I think a lot of coaches have left college sports because of NIL. So you either leave or you stay with during that evolution with where college football is going to be or where running a business is going to be, or even another filter down where running a fashion brand is going to be in New York City. So there’s a lot of different dynamics that play into it. But man, just treating people like Jesus is something that has helped us in so many ways. And it’s just it’s really simple. You know, I just love him. Pray for him. You know, not agreeing on everything. Like, that’s actually good. I’ve never really wanted the people around us… I love different opinions, different perspectives. And that’s where I’m hopeful we’ll get back to some day as a society. But I think you have to lead by example. And, you know, the hard road is not always the easy road, that’s for sure. And, you know, I think we’ve been down that road a lot over the years.

Justin Forman: I love what you’re talking about. You started earlier when you were talking about how the business started. It was like trying to find something of an authentic truth or simplicity, a problem that people like authentically had, not something you felt like you’re pushing on. And to see that tie into your faith journey and to see that overlay there, that’s really powerful because oftentimes we think of the business model separate from maybe our faith side. But to see the authentic integration of that, it’s really you coming through in that. When I look at this and when you look at the conversation of this and you look at kind of everywhere kind of God’s been building you and you talk about this journey and you talk about this thing and what’s the thing you wish you knew then that you do now. When you think about the price of entrepreneurship, there’s so many prices that we pay. There’s so much tough parts of the journey. When you think back about this and if you’re speaking to your younger you, what would be the advice that you would give that you know now that you’re wishing you knew then?

Tom Patterson: It’s going to be harder than you thought. It’s going to take longer than you thought, but it will be the most rewarding thing you ever do. And I think, you know, if entrepreneurship is truly what you want to do, I think life’s too short to do things you don’t enjoy doing. Like underwear got us out of bed every day. Excited. Passionate. It means the last thing I thought I’d ever be doing. I was so embarrassed in my own underwear and homework class in my freshman year of high school. Like there’s no destiny for me too, you know, coming from small town South Dakota. But I think God has big plans for everybody in their life.

Tom Patterson (continued): And I think for me, the last 4 or 5 years, we were very intentional about trying to take our identity away from the business. It’s not Tom Patterson’s Tommy John, So it’s my name, kind of, but not fully. And I think, you know, so many people’s identity is tied to what they do or who they know. And I think it really comes down to like, putting Jesus first and putting your faith first and having your identity being known through him versus everything else, because it’s so easy to get caught up in the success and the awards and speaking at events and the people you get to know.

But once that goes aside, man, it’s just you get to this place of peace, you know, in a lot of ways with life, putting that as the center. And, you know, I ended up getting baptized a year and a half ago and man, it just it really reset everything to a whole new depth for me. My wife ended up getting baptized and my daughter and two other friends that were unplanned. And marriage is one of those special things. When you take a public stance with who you’re going to put first in your life and you know, whether you’re 43 when you do it, which I was or you do it at 60, is never too late to make that declaration and put him first.

So for me, that was a really big thing to really level set. And now it’s like, you know, whatever we go through and it’s just easier. It helps you get through the tough times. Having a faith in something bigger than us and knowing there’s an eternal life. And this life is so short. But man, you’re here to make impact. Don’t waste your skill. Don’t waste your potential. Go all out. You know, like there’s nothing worse than having stuff left in the tank at the end of the day. Now it’s like you got to figure out where you use your tank of gas, right? With kids and activities and work. It’s more complicated in some ways, and you start adding, you know, little bodies into the place.Tom Patterson (continued): But yeah, just be intentional. I don’t think God put anybody on this earth without a purpose. And I think once you realize it got to find your purpose, you know, and I think a lot of people that if everything’s easy, I think you guys like it sounds so easy, you know, like, man, the people that have had it the easiest, in my opinion, struggle with adversity the worst. They’re not prepared. So I think we’ve embodied this mindset is when challenges come or adversity comes, it’s preparation for something bigger you’re going to have in your life. And you know, Tommy John will be here forever. It’ll be here beyond us. But I don’t want it to define everything we do. I think there’s plans for Aaron and I, whatever that next chapter is and just trusting it. It’s continuing to be Tommy John over the next 20 years or it’s something else. Yeah. I just don’t sit back and wait. Life’s fast.

William Norvell: I love that. I love that. I love that intentionality. And I think you you see that in God’s gracious God. So if we wait a little bit, he’ll jar us, right? You know, he’ll be like, All right. Jonah. Good work there, brother. Go on. I’ll get you back. And so it’s fun to know we have a gracious God. So if you feel like you’ve missed an opportunity, you haven’t right? Like God is still there with you. In this conversation. This podcast may be your invitation to go forward for that thing that’s been in your heart for a long time that you feel like you missed five years ago, that you feel like is in a notion file hidden somewhere. So one thing I do just want to say is like, God loves you. He has not forgotten you and he will get you back. Right? And you have not, like missed his path for you. And I know you didn’t say that. I’m not saying you did, but that’s something I felt before. And so I want to make sure if there’s anybody like me out there, it’s not too late. Right? God still with you and he’s still walking with you.

Tom Patterson: Yeah, well said.

William Norvell: And the last thing you just mentioned it. I want to say real quick, we got about five minutes. We didn’t hit on this. You hit about it really briefly. You started this business with your wife and we haven’t really gotten a chance to dive into that. So we may have to invite you back to go deeper. But there’s husband and wife teams. We know that. Listen, we’ve had, you know, different ones on. And I just think it’s a fascinating topic. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey, starting with your wife and how that’s been?

Tom Patterson: Man. I don’t know any different. We’ve always worked together. You know, we’ve been together since day one with the business, the idea we weren’t married at the time, but man, I mean. There should be no bigger cheerleader, no one you trust more, no one you can confide in more than your spouse. Right. The good, the bad, everything in the middle. And I think when you understand that and you also understand like it’s not always going to be smooth, there are going to be challenges.

I think, you know, for us, it was little things like, man, we could talk about business till midnight, but like, you know, 9:00 rolls around. Like I don’t want my cortisol and adrenaline to get running into two in the morning. So you have to pick and choose when you bring up maybe topics that are just going to be challenging. But you know, like when there’s alignment together as a couple, what the bigger picture and where you want to go and the type of life you want to create, which was the situation for us. Yeah, I mean, it’s just worked and it’s been one of the coolest things to do is to build this business together.

Tom Patterson (continued): And we also had opposite skill sets in the early days. Anything in a spreadsheet, customer service, operational was Aaron. Anything marketing, brand, product design, buyer relations was me, so we could divide and conquer. And I think it really helped kind of define where the brand went. But a lot of the ways the brand was us. It was the personality, the sense of humor. You see no edgy guarantee, things like that, right? That’s kind of how I speak as a guy. I verbalize thoughts that we all have when we’re wearing uncomfortable underwear and it’s authentic. And so there’s fun things that happen. And I know there’s probably some guys readjusting driving down the road. Listen to this podcast. I said that there’s an answer. There’s cure, there’s Tommy John.

But yeah, on top of that, I think, you know, managing a team and managing people like in a lot of ways, you turn from like college kids to young adults to parents, and you begin parenting people older than you that come into your company. And I think it probably made us better, more patient parents, to be honest, managing and building a company and then having kids later and everybody’s journey is different. But yeah, I think for us, like me and I, I couldn’t imagine running a business without her as part of it. It just, it would be weird.

So when people ask, you know, why did it work the way it did? We were so aligned with our vision, our faith, what we wanted in life, you know, staying together. No matter what happens, we’re going to ride this through. If at all fails, we’ll serve each other. And then fortunately, I found somebody that was willing to take the risks with me, that was comfortable with uncertainty, you know, cause I was a broke guy without a job for that first year and a half. And she had a job that helped, you know, kind of pay the basics for us. And, you know, she believed in it. So, yeah, again, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. You know, I think that was things life for us.

Speaker 4: Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you with content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur or talk.

In this episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Podcast, Justin Forman and Lara Casey Isaacson discuss the launch of Faith-Driven Students, an initiative aimed at empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs through faith. They explore Lara’s entrepreneurial journey, the importance of pruning in business, and the significance of storytelling and imagination in shaping young minds. The conversation emphasizes the need for a supportive community and the role of parents in guiding their children towards their calling. They also highlight the changing landscape of entrepreneurship and the trust placed in business leaders by the younger generation.

• Faith-driven entrepreneurship is about aligning business with God’s purpose.

• Pruning is essential for growth in both business and personal life.

• Building a supportive team is crucial for new initiatives.

• Empowering students to discover their gifts is a key focus.

• Imagination plays a vital role in learning and growth.

• Storytelling can inspire and change lives.

• Parents have a significant role in guiding their children’s faith journey.

• The younger generation is increasingly interested in entrepreneurship.

• Trust in entrepreneurs is higher than in politicians or churches.

• Planting seeds of faith can lead to significant impact over time

If you’d like to hear more about the Faith Driven Students, go to faithdrivenstudents.org

Justin Forman: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It’s Justin, great to be with you guys. You know, this is a fun and special episode that has been in the works for so long that we probably can’t keep track or remember exactly when it started. You have heard little moments of different things about us talking about this new initiative and this new idea of what’s been brewing here in Faith Driven Entrepreneur.

If you’ve been around the Faith Driven Entrepreneur team for a little bit, you know that oftentimes we will talk about an idea on a Friday and think, well, why not? Let’s just ready, aim, fire and get started on Monday or maybe even Friday afternoon. And one of the things that has been a joy for us is to be operating a little bit in this stealth mode on kind of a new project. We’ve given some winks about it and God given us some winks back along the journey about this new thing, faith driven students. And it is a joy to be thinking about that. But it is also a joy to be doing this in partnership with not just a person, but really a whole team that this person has been building and so thrilled to announce that Lara Casey has joined the Faith Driven Entrepreneur team and faith driven students team to give leadership to this new initiative.

Lara Casey Isaacson: It is a joy to be here. Wow. I have chills everywhere. Justin, I’m so thrilled. Obviously, you and I have had many conversations, but this one feels very significant to finally invite so many of you listening into the conversation.

Justin Forman: Amen. Amen. It does indeed. It is one of those kind of God winks that, you know, I have—gosh, I probably said this on the show before, but I feel like the Holy Spirit in my home growing up was like this retired author that wasn’t speaking, that has spoken. And yet over the past few years, it’s just been undeniable to see how he speaks and how he moves and the way he winks and the way he’s done that. And part of that was just the way that both we connected and even got a chance to reconnect just in one of those kind of God timing moments. And so I’d love to start there. We first connected when I’d seen a story that Mike shared, I think it produced through C12, and told a little bit just about kind of the journey that you are in, the kind of the crossroad moments there. And I’d love for everybody listening to hear a little bit more about that entrepreneurial journey that you’ve been on.

Lara Casey Isaacson: Yes, I have been an entrepreneur for over 20 years now, maybe a lot longer than that if I count lemonade stands and all the things—I do count them! Two of the most meaningful things that the Lord allowed me to be a part of was building Southern Weddings magazine truly from the ground up in a very scrappy way. I had no background in publishing or journalism, but God said, “You need to tell the stories of meaningful beginnings to married life.” And to this day, it chokes me up talking about it just to be a part of that and so many couples’ launching pads.

That led to our work then in Cultivate What Matters, which was helping women not just in a marrying stage of life, but in every stage of life to truly do just that, which is to grow the things that matter most little by little through our e-commerce business of intentional tools to help them do that. And so part of that journey for me was joining a C12 group. I’m really grateful to sit around that table with other entrepreneurs and share struggles and triumphs and mostly share faith driven entrepreneurship with them and what it looks like to live that out.

In that journey, through conversations around the table, I realized that I had a few too many things growing in one little garden plot. And so Mike and his team produced a story about how God led us to let go of Southern weddings to make room for what we couldn’t yet see, which was the growth potential with cultivate what matters and the impacts potential. It’s a different kind of math in God’s world.

Justin Forman: Yeah, what a powerful clip. You know, I think we underestimate how emotional and how painful that pruning is, but letting go of something—you know, these ventures, they’re like children. And maybe I’m speaking about this as the parent of teenagers that know at some point we’re going to have to let go. And you’re kind of anticipating that. But I think that’s one of the things that struck me earlier. For Faith Driven Entrepreneurs who have been with us from the beginning, you’ve probably seen that story that we promoted on the website in some of the lessons. And you heard Lara speak about it at a conference years ago. So how was that process in the pruning, in the letting go? Like maybe if I were to phrase it this way, what do you know now that’s not in that video? What are some of the things? As you look back on that, even in recently also couple of years ago in exiting Cultivate What Matters, what are some of the things you’ve learned post that?

Lara Casey Isaacson: Well first of all, when God says go, you go. And so what was it like? The answer is it’s excruciatingly painful and probably the biggest blessing ever to be obedient to God’s plans. It often does not feel good in the moment. Our human brain cannot possibly fathom what’s ahead when we step out in faith, especially with business. Because as entrepreneurs, we’re faced with facts, we’re faced with numbers, we see, this is doing really well. Like, how in the world could you give this up? Or how could you prune this?

You know, Henry Cloud calls it necessary endings, and there are necessary endings for other things to grow and to bloom. And so for me, in that season, God was just saying this needs to grow, but it needs to grow in somebody else’s hands and you need to make room for what’s next. I had no idea what would be next. I mean, truly just Justin, just sitting here having this conversation—and I’m sure a lot of you listening, you’re like, “Lara, what? Didn’t see this curveball coming!” And yet it’s so right. It’s so God’s plan. So I continue to learn that God’s plans are always better than mine, that good things grow out of hard things and that little by little, he prepares us for what’s next for his glory and for the good of other people.

Justin Forman: Yeah, well, if that’s not a parenting lesson or a life lesson for all of us, I don’t know what is. It is a fun story how God reconnected us just after a couple of years of doing some things together in the season that God was taking you through and then how he brought us together again. As we talked about it months ago, we released kind of a teaser video sharing a little bit of some of the ideas and some of the things that we’re working on. But it’s really fun to see how he has reconnected the dots. And, you know, I’d love for you just to speak to maybe a little bit of the season that the team is in because again, different from some of the things what we’ve done at Faith Driven, where we’ve had maybe one person go blaze a trail and find the seed, you’ve been building a team for this new initiative. Can you tell us a little bit about just kind of the team that’s come together?

Lara Casey Isaacson: Yeah, I am so grateful. First of all, to you, Justin, you have really given me such trust and that is a gift because this mission matters so very much to me and I know to so many who are listening. And you may be sitting there thinking, “I don’t even know what y’all are doing with Faith Driven Students, but yes, I’m in.” And that’s how I felt, you know. But then when you learn what we’re creating to help teenagers and preteens answer their call to create and help them do it right, help them understand their gifts and their talents and be able to step into their next faithful steps—nothing gets me more fired up.

And I got to do it alongside people who share that. And so we’re so, so grateful and blessed to be working alongside a team who is totally solely dedicated to this. Not to steal your thunder, Justin, but I do think that this is one of the most important things that the movement has ever done. I know Henry and I were having this dialog a few days ago at our leadership meeting in Texas recently about how when we equip this next generation of students, it’s almost like they get this wide runway of proverbial compounding interests, right? It’s like the potential for them to grow good things in their lives, in the lives of others, is so much greater than, say, some of us who had zig zag stories and came in to faith driven work later on in life.

Justin Forman: Yeah, I think that’s a great place for us to put in a little bit more when we talk about the page turning moment. When we say about that, there’s always an enthusiasm anytime something launches, whether that’s faith driven or any entrepreneurial venture, you can get excited and have that recency bias to it. But, you know, I think it is important for us to recognize in the movement the conversation. Much of the last 20 years has been super encouraging. I mean, let’s face it, faith in work has become somewhat of a normative conversation in the church. It’s not uncommon for a pastor to have a message about the workplace, to talk about it.

Now there’s room for it to grow, to go from the one-too-many messages to specifically saying, what does that look like differently for a teacher versus an entrepreneur? And when you get into the areas of work like the application or it changes. And yet if we specifically look at faith in work as a whole, for the last 20 years, we’ve been having to sort through and make sense of a mass that either we heard differently or we received differently from the church, from the Christian school, that we went to, the business school that we went to, what our parents modeled. There was something broken about that.

Justin Forman: And I think that we have to recognize not only has it been broken, but it’s been exhausting. I mean, it’s been exhausting because, you know, if you think about it, maybe in an analogy of much of the 20 years we’ve been like operating emergency room clinics and you can’t last in that clinic in that high intensity for very long because it’s a high exhaustion. And so what we’ve been doing, the movement, I think you could equate it to that.

We’ve been operating that emergency room clinic. But now when we shift, it’s not that we’re just turning the dials to a different age number. It’s we’re going from this moment of hospitals and E.R. rooms to what is healthy look like? What is healthy look like from the beginning? What does it look like to have your vitamins, to be healthy, to be training, to be working out from the very beginning? And as you said, I think what a moment. I mean, we’re both parents. We’re sitting here with teenagers. We’re seeing our kids, and we’re sitting there saying, and what a moment for our kiddos, our generation and the next generation to be able to learn from that, where they can start with a clear eyed view. They don’t have to sort through the mess.

Lara Casey Isaacson: Well first of all when God says go you go. And my kids think I have the coolest job now because they think I work with Lecrae! But praise the Lord for people like Lecrae, who are using their gifts for God’s glory and showing us what it looks like to really live on mission. You don’t have to be a rap artist to live out God’s call for you. But you could, you know, you could. And God will use the hardest parts of our stories to make beautiful things in the end. So I’m really grateful for that.

Justin Forman: There’s a couple of things that as we come to a close here that I’d love to unpack a couple of the stats because I think there’s something here that if you’re a parent listening to this, you might be thinking, “Man, well, this is just Faith Driven Entrepreneurs wanting to think about Faith Driven Entrepreneurship for kids.” I think we’re missing it. There’s a generational pendulum swing moment that’s happening, and some of us are seeing it, some of us we’re so busy that maybe we’re missing it and sometimes we feel it. But data has a way of convincing us of it.

You know, there’s a couple of things that that was brought out in that video. One, the days of going to college undecided and trying to figure it out in college are getting a whole lot more expensive, if not out of reach—like you could use to go to college, spend the first 18 months kind of thinking, what do I want to do? Now the run rate, the meter is going so fast that you need to probably go in with a little bit more of a framework.

Justin Forman: And here’s the other thing that Lara just mentioned—I think that the younger generations’ view of what it looks like to live out their faith is changing. And entrepreneurship, whether we want to call it the Shark Tank effect or whatever it is—in our home, you know, there are certain things you could watch on media, but you could watch Shark Tank because it was somewhat pretty family friendly and it sparked their imagination and generations are growing up on that.

I love the statistic that our team pulled that when they surveyed a thousand Gen Zers ages 18 to 25, they show that 84% of them selected entrepreneurship as the most exciting of 12 career paths that were presented and 75% ultimately want to become entrepreneurs. You know, when I think about maybe growing up, there was a lot of us that dreamed of being the next Michael Jordan. There was probably the phase where that continued to be the next massive LeBron, Serena, whoever it was. But now they’ve seen people like Musk and Bezos and other people that are shaping undeniably our society.

Lara Casey Isaacson: Yes, I think about Steven Felling at a recent conference I was a part of said, you know, hurting people aren’t going to church anymore. They’re going to work. And so there’s so much possibility based on the statistic we see interest as well. But also there’s so much redemptive possibility now because the people that we would have reached in our proverbial mission field in the pews here are now in their cubicles. And so for not just teens, obviously everyone, but for teens especially, to have their eyes open to the hurting and the possibilities there and the beautiful, redemptive possibilities there, that’s pretty exciting. There’s some problems to solve.

Justin Forman: I think that you’re hitting on something there that—may we not miss that? There is a statistic that you’ve heard us at Faith Driven Entrepreneur talk about, and it dovetails right into what Lara and Steven are saying: a Gallup survey showed recently that levels of trust, as we look at the political cycle that we’re in, we all know that the trust is low. The typical heroes that we’ve turned to have changed. In the past, the hero that we may have turned to would be the celebrity, may have been the politician. And yet we’re finding statistics from Gallup which show that the level of trust in entrepreneurs and business leaders is nine times higher than politicians, is two times higher than church.

Lara Casey Isaacson: Full stop. That’s crazy, right?

Justin Forman: Wild, isn’t it? Like we’re talking about this last week at another event—imagine if you could present this. I mean, let’s face it: As parents, we want our kids to be self-sustaining and off the payroll at some point. And so there’s an element we can’t ignore that. But what parent doesn’t also want to make sure that their kids are flourishing and enjoying what they’re doing and seeing God work and alive in their life?

And when you think about that, we can’t miss this moment that says the trust is there. And if you think about it from a ministry standpoint, imagine if you could say that you could grow the resources, the staff of whatever missions agency, church or whatever you’re thinking about 20x. And imagine if those new people that you could deliver were twice as trusted as the churches that we grew up in. Imagine if you could say that those would be funded by the sales of their products. Like you think about God’s redemptive plan, you think about the exponential of that. And that is what we’re talking about. That’s what’s possible.

Lara Casey Isaacson: Yes, I want my kids to be a part of that. That’s huge.

Justin Forman: It is. Well, it has been a wonderful conversation. When you think about Faith Driven Students, you’re going to hear about that on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur website. But if you go to faithdrivenstudents.org, you of course can learn about the course. Give everybody some focus and some ideas in terms of timeline. Lara, what can we expect as we start to think about kind of when they can put their hands on this?

Lara Casey Isaacson: Yeah, so very soon you will get some things in your inbox. Number one, sign up for our newsletter. Be a part of this with us. We want to have conversations with you as we build this. So go to faithdrivenstudents.org. Put your name in there. We’d love to have you as a part of this family, even if you don’t have teenagers in your house. We want you as a part of this. There’s so many ways to get involved.

But timeline wise, starting around the first of the year, we are going to start putting some info out there for you to grab on to about our core course that will launch in April of 2025. And that core course is going to walk teens and pre-teens through this process of discernment and opening their eyes and then giving them the tools that they need and hopefully in the future, soon, some physical products and tools that they can use to continue their next steps of faith.

Justin Forman: And man, it’s an exciting time indeed. So grateful for you, Lara. I want to finish just with one question that we ask every guest here on the podcast, and that is really where does God have you in this season? Where does God have you in His word? What is something a part of scripture or a piece of scripture that is coming alive and speaking to you as you think about maybe this season as a parent or the season of the journey of Faith Driven Students? Is there a part of God’s word that’s coming alive in a new way to you?

Lara Casey Isaacson: It certainly is, yes. Many of you who know me well are not going to be surprised by this, but Psalm 90:12: “teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” That call to us says that our lives are short and they’re meaningful. Our gifts are also meaningful. The lives of our children are so very meaningful. And I know we all feel that way. We feel that as parents especially.

But it is coming alive to me in new ways to think of this mission and think of the weight of this mission and the excitement of this mission that we get to plant seeds of faith that we do not know how they’re going to grow over time. But we can trust in a very big God that when we plant these seeds of faith and open children’s eyes to the possibilities that good things are going to grow from this. So, yes, God, please teach us to remember our days and give us a heart of wisdom as all of us collectively come alongside our students and help show them the way.

Justin Forman: Amen. Amen. Lara, it’s a gift to do this with you. I’m grateful for it, the way it’s brought us together. It’s a lot of fun. All right, guys. Great being with you. We’ll see you next episode.

Speaker 4: Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you with content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur talk.

In this episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, hosts Justin Forman and Dan Owolabi are joined by Chip Ingram to discuss the transformative intersection of pastoral ministry and entrepreneurship. Coming off their experiences at the recent Lausanne Conference in Seoul, they explore how the church landscape is changing and the unique opportunity this presents for deeper collaboration between pastors and entrepreneurs.

Key Topics Covered:

• The shift in church dynamics post-COVID and the need for new models

• Why traditional metrics of church success need to be reconsidered

• Recent Barna research showing 91% of entrepreneurs feel purposeful in their work

• The importance of long-term commitment in ministry and business

• How pastors can better engage and empower entrepreneurs in their congregations

• Practical steps for entrepreneurs to build bridges with their pastors

• Discussion of the upcoming Pastors & Entrepreneurs Conference (February 20th)

If you’d like to hear more about the Faith Driven Entrepreneur community groups, go to faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/groups.

Justin Forman Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It is great to be back home after many weeks on the road over this fall and of summer. It’s always good to travel and see what God’s doing around the world. And you know, there’s fun sliding door moments of life that you experience. And today is one of those fun moments where we get to connect a couple of those. I often say that conferences can be catalytic experiences. And you know, one of those for me, some great friend of the Christian Economic Forum. Just a great event. Or leaders gather every year just to talk about some of the world’s greatest problems and what can we do as believers to step into those moments and to tackle those. And so a couple of years ago, I had a chance to to be a part of it. And one of the things I love that Chuck Bentley does is puts people in smaller groups, in smaller groups where conversations can go deeper. And it’s not just exchanging business cards and quick updates, but you really get a chance to really speak into each other’s lives. And on that time, I got a chance to connect with Dan. And Dan has just had just incredible experience of of connecting what entrepreneurs are doing and serving as a part of this movement. And thrilled to have him here as a co-host with us for the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast Sudan. And as we say often on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, who are you? Where do you come from? Tell everybody a little bit about your story and how these dots connect.

Dan Owolabi Sure, sure. Yeah. Neal It’s good to be on here. Yeah. Justin, I remember the first time we met at Beaver Creek. You know, one of the most impactful things you said it was that of all the things you’re doing in the world you were coaching, I think it was the Pixie Chicks, your daughters ball team, which was absolutely impressive. So I just can’t forget it.

Justin Forman You know, it’s a fierce team, Fierce team. You know, I don’t coordinate the wardrobe. I just coach the sidelines. But man, yeah, some fun moments with the kids.

Dan Owolabi It’s been fun to just listen to how they’ve done over the years, so. But yeah, know about me. So I lead an organization called Branches Worldwide. We work with Christian entrepreneurs, executives and CEOs around the world helping build businesses designed to bless and benefit their communities. So a lot of ways we’re we’re a consulting company in a lot of ways. We’re a community or really try to bring people along and help them sort of go further, faster. One big element of what we do is we work with our nonprofit arm. We work with 30 entrepreneurs in 30 countries. Then we work with them from 30 years. It’s like a long term partnership. We really help them go deep in their communities so they can bring about long term kingdom transformation. So it’s a lot of fun. As the nonprofit for profit arm, we do a lot of consulting on that side to get a wife and two kids, two little girls, my wife another married for 17 years, which is a lot of fun, and she still kicks my butt at Ping-Pong. And that’s one of the reasons why I love her, because she does not ever let me win. So there you go. It’s a ton of fun.

Justin Forman All right. So where’s the coaching career in your future are we have a little Pixie six team forming and we got basketball. What are we going after?

Dan Owolabi Maybe. Yes. So I am I am literally like probably one year away from finishing a doctor. So I am I’m pushing hard towards that. But when that’s done, I’m going to go into full time, well, part time coaching for my girls and maybe do a little bit basketball for them. A little bit of soccer. Looking forward to it. Sure. Yeah.

Justin Forman Well, thrilled to have Dan, you’re going to be helping cohost a couple of different episodes in the months to come. And so just really loving that perspective. I think one of the things that I’ve always appreciated most about your perspective, Dan, and just kind of you outlined it right, there is a long term commitment. I mean, that’s not something that’s common in this movement and conversation is to really roll up the sleeves and think, man, how do we work with a defined group of people for a long period of time? But we can see that in Scripture. We can see that model played out. We can see so much of what that’s like. And I love, love, love, love that long term vision that you have. For that, I want to introduce our guest here for today and talking about sliding to her moments of life for me 20 years ago had an incredible experience to go around the world in about 40 days and just see God at work. And I turned that experience into a video series that ended up being a curriculum. And one of the pastors and teachers that was a part of that was Chip Chip Ingram. And so has just been a joy my life. I just over the last 20 years getting to know Chip more and just seeing just the faithfulness and the journey. So Chip, welcome back to the podcast. I think this might be the second or third time, but great having you back with us.

Chip Ingram Thanks. Good to be with you. Justin and Dan Love what you’re doing. It’s great to meet you.

Justin Forman Well, you know, one of the things that we all had in common is we all three of us had a chance to be a part of listen. And there is a deep, rich history, just an event and a conference there that has brought together. I think this year was probably all it was 204 different countries there, about 5400 different leaders around the world that had a chance to come together in Seoul, Korea, and really both encourage one another but challenge each other about what is happening in the church. And so I’d love to start there. Maybe we’ll start with Chip. What were some of the things that you took away from that? What were some of the things as spending the week there in Seoul that you took away from the experience?

Chip Ingram 2 or 3 things are top of mind. One compared to least the lesson of eight years ago. I wasn’t there, but I kind of read the research. The number of workplace leaders was astronomically greater. I mean, it was a focus. It was like a huge group instead of, you know, pastors and leaders. Let’s get together and we’ll look at the world. And and by the way, yeah, there’s some things happening in the workplace. It was a. It was an acknowledgment that the great Commission will be accomplished. It’s not going to happen just through the ministries of local churches. It’ll be through the ministries of expanded the members of local churches. It’s God’s people. And that perhaps, you know, in the words of Billy Graham, that the next great movement is going to happen through the workplace. So that was really encouraging to see that. The second encouraging thing was the youth, you know, 40 and under 35 and under from all around the world. You know, you hear so many God’s raising up people. That was encouraging. And honestly, this may sound negative, but the fact that at the end of the one in South Africa, the number one need in the world, the number one need, you know, all this research was discipleship. Eight years later, the number one need in the world. So I think it’s positive for organizations to actually own. Guess what? The ball has not moved. We’re not doing well. You can’t make positive growth unless you have a benchmark, unless you’re honest. And to me, it was positive that it wasn’t glossed over, that it was like, you know what? We learned a lot because getting people to come to a weekend service, spiritual programs, spiritual activities, they all may have a place, but none of those translate into Christians living like Christians and being all in where they go to work, realizing I’m God’s ambassador. Yeah, I live in the Silicon Valley. Many, many people that are in my world are like, I am the only believer I know of in the top floor of Adobe or this entire section of Google or over here at Apple. And God’s doing some really exciting things. And I think that was encouraging because you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

Justin Forman I mean, there’s so much there, Chip, and I think we’re gonna get to unpacking some of that. I love what you’re talking about. It’s like we have to have the responsibility to admit the moment and to admit what’s happened and what hasn’t happened. I think David Platt has talked about this thing of one of the early losses on events when he talks about unreached people groups and how big of a thing was. And here we are decades later, still talking about some of those same things. And I think you’re talking about a core of discipleship that together it’s not just on the pastor, the whole church, our strategy, our effectiveness of some of this, it’s lost some of it. What stops us from admitting that? What stops us from admitting the broken you?

Chip Ingram I think part of it is I’m sure entrepreneurs never struggle with this, but being a pastor for not quite 40 years, when your identity is wrapped around the paradigm that you believed in and developed and you find out that what how you measure success is literally the ladder on the wrong wall is that, you know, Covid ripped away. And I think it was like watching the roof come off of a building. But except it was the whole church and God and the spirit of God look down upon all of these local expressions. And we were measuring how many people showed up, whether we had a building or not, and how much money came in. And we made those are little checkmarks we can always verbalize. It’s much more important. It’s about life change, it’s about discipleship, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when you took that away, what you saw was by and large and I know I don’t want to sound negative, but by and large it was whether you open the church or didn’t open the church, whether you wore a mask or didn’t wear a mask, whether you were blue state or red state, and whether you would take the vaccine or not take the vaccine, those four things were more important than Jesus, more important than mission and more important and what we’re called to do. And so it’s broken. And so I think I think we’re seeing a lot of pastors see that some are trying to rebuild what they had and they’re finding it’s not going well. There’s a reason why people aren’t coming back to church. Others have seen, you know what, this is the greatest opportunity in the last hundred years. And disruption provides an opportunity for new paradigms, new growth. In fact, you know, all of our VC friends, what are they? What are their all about? They’re looking for the idea that the disruption is going to break out. We have that opportunity right now, and I think one of the paradigm shifts will be that may come through the workforce way faster than it does the church. The problem, you know, you said, why don’t we change if you keep funding something and if you keep the structures moving, there’s not a lot of motivation to change. That’s changing. Now, churches, I don’t know how many thousand it is a month that are shutting down. I read 1500 pastors a week or a month. They’re leaving the ministry. There’s all these little dots that we don’t see and we’re going to have, you know, sort of that Hemingway experience where they ask anymore, you know, how did how did you go broke? And he said very, very, very slowly that all I want the little ones. And I think we’re going to we’re seeing that in the church. But simultaneously, I think it’s like, you know, if you want to how do you want to look at the glass? Is God still on the throne? Have his purposes changed? Are the longings and the power of the spirit as available now as they’ve ever been? The key is going to be leadership, and I think that is allowing young leaders to have the freedom. And I think for some of us that are older is building bridges to some of the institutional places to say, hey, guys, can we just own. You know, rather, we all want to protect our image, our reputation we just own on our watch. A lot of not good things happened. And why don’t we be a part of what God wants to do in the future? And some of it is, you know, it’s not so much a willful thing if you believe I mean, I live this world. I mean. Probably until 20 years ago as a pastor, If a lot of people showed up on the weekend, I was a happy guy. Not very many people showed up. I was not a very happy guy. Yeah. And if it wasn’t for the discipleship focus that I had way before I went to seminary, I mean, the whole system is aligned to produce and to train for something that’s not necessarily the outcome that God wants. And as Dan said, that’s a big generational thing. But you can either get discouraged by that or realize, hey. You know what? Things are going to change. Yeah. Now which ideology is going to win and who captures the heart of the next generation and my experiences. You know, as long as you keep faking it and making excuses, people write you off. The moment you can say, look. We’re going to own it. We messed up. This was the problem. It’s still the problem. And we’re not going to keep doing the same old thing to get the same old results. So I think it’s I think there’s a lot of potential, but I don’t think it’s going to be an easy, easy run. And I’m not sure, you know, we’re going to run the same offense, if you will, for the church as we’ve run in the past. I think there’s a reason Faith driven entrepreneurs has blown up that there’s been such a movement again. Some guy just e-mailed me last week. I think he thinks I’m I got to write a chapter two for Henry’s book. So he somehow thinks I’m way more on the inside than ever. I just know you guys. I don’t know anything about that. I’m a pastor, right? And he writes me and thanks me goes. I just joined my first group. I just went through the first three times. I’ve been lonely. I’ve been out there. Old shit. Thank you so very much. I think it Well heard that. Thanks. You know, I really had almost nothing to do with it, But what you’re seeing is new paradigm, new focused. What? What do you do? You get him in community. You’re helping Dan? I mean, that’s what you’re doing. You’re coaching them to understand the integrated life and the calling of God and using your gifts to make a huge difference.

Dan Owolabi Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s fantastic. Yep. I mean, I love your optimism. You’re going to enjoy it. It’s fantastic. And I think which is what you’re saying is that oftentimes when there’s a crisis, everybody knows that we’re in a crisis. Like, you know, Justin, you’re saying people don’t often admit 100% true. But I think in the back of everybody’s minds, we’ve been talking about the decline of the church, especially in America, for like 30 years, you know, the long time. And it just keeps happening. But I think the next generation, they see that as an opportunity. You know, they realize there’s nobody that they have the weight on. They don’t win on permission. They can just make things happen. Because clearly the old plays, like you said, those aren’t working. So now we can step up and just write the next generation of place. So I think there’s a lot of optimism, a lot of hope. And I think the integration between what you’re seeing in the church and then the opportunity that Faith driven entrepreneurs presented is it’s really giving people for you, Christians and love making new things out of nothing. It’s giving them all it’s giving them an opportunity. It said, Hey, look, the future is unwritten. God is really sort of leaning into people who want to make things happen as opposed to sort of, you know, running the old place. So I think that’s a great opportunity for everybody right now. I love the energy behind.

Chip Ingram And just so what I’d say is I think, you know, as a pastor with an old paradigm, when you read and, you know, I take all these statistics with a, you know, plus or -5 or 10% or a professor who knows what true, you know, 41% knows. And boy, yeah, you know, like, yeah, who knows? But I think the thing is when you hear all these people are going to a local expression of the church, please don’t hear these people aren’t walking with God anymore. These people don’t care about God anymore. Is it a salad bar approach? And I might listen to this person online or that person online. What it’s saying, as much as anything is, is the current expression, it’s 85% and there’s wonderful exceptions. Okay. This is not bashing church. I mean, I’m a pastor. There’s wonderful exceptions. But if you just drove by and saw all ten buildings, 8.5 of them are not going in a good direction. They’re not life giving. They’re not making progress. They’re not something that the average young person wants to come to. But when you look at the number of people who voted with their feet, what they’re saying is, I want to walk with God. Many of them. Yes, there’s some deconstructing and there’s some playing a lot more golf than they used to, granted. But there’s a whole lot of people that are saying, you know what, I’m looking for a place that I can connect. I’m looking for a place where this is real, that we’re doing something and I want God to give me direction, purpose and use my life. Yeah, If I can find 3 or 4 other couples to do that, if I could find a group of single people that were committed to doing that is not going to show up on the charts. But that’s where the real life change is happening in America, and especially Southeast Asia. The people that I partnered with, I’ve got a friend who has 240,000 routes out of their local church because he focused on discipleship early on, and now they’re all around the world. His biggest problem is how do I transcend my culture? Because because they’re all the same ethnic background that it’s happening. And that’s. Yeah. I see that as the future.

Dan Owolabi That’s what I think.

Justin Forman I think he’s really fascinating. We talk about scarcity as the mother of all invention and we talk about just the innovation. We talk about the appetite that there Dan’s talked about. You’ve got a people group. You’re ready primed for this moment. We heard about this in the conference here is David Platt was talking about just it just so happens in this moment there is a people primed ready for this. And I think that, you know, one of the things that was new to me was just flipping the curse of like we what we often talk about incremental growth and I think established models, oftentimes when we talk about it, it’s like, yeah, can you get 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%? You tweak, can you fight off a little bit of a decrease? But when you flip it, there’s just as moment we’re just incredible invention innovation. A curve just opens up. And you know I was talking to a pastor and just off the cuff, we’re just thinking, man, I was like, what if I could tell you that you could, you know, grow your church staff and the impact kind of like a church staff caliber level leader text. And what if I could tell you that the people that would be joining your team would be rock stars of the city? They’re already entrenched. Their place. They’re all over there. They’re in the fabric of your community. And they have twice as much trust or they’re being looked to twice as much as maybe the churches. And by the way, all that’s funded. Think when you think about it that way and you think about that moment. It is, as you said, threatening to scoreboards and structures and models, but it’s so in line with the mission. Then what does it take for us to, like, flip that scoreboard? Because, like, these are hard things to measure, but like, how do we flip the scoreboard to measure the right things so that because when you do that, like all of a sudden the method, the older method or the method of what we’ve been using and counting cars in a parking lot, I mean, that starts to change really fast. How do we get to a new scoreboard?

Chip Ingram Well, you have to change, first of all, your metric, right? You always get what you celebrate, right? I mean, you know, if you just every business. What what do you measure? You know? And I think what business has the great gift of is that, you know, you don’t have the ability to not make a profit and not be successful with your customers for years and years and years. And the business keep going on. The church has done it. And I think to flip the script for us, because we work with pastors and some business leaders, but not like you all in the business world at that level. But what we’ve done with pastors that help them say, you know what? Success is not how many people come to the weekend service. Ephesians four says your goal is to equip people when they walk out of the service. So stop measuring or being so focused on how many. They start asking what kind. So we walk with them and say, here’s here’s a profile biblically of the what kind of person you want to develop, and let’s come up with very specific strategies to help people become that kind of a follower of Christ. Then let’s give them a simple, reproducible pathway that they become self feeders and they get from other people and discover what their mission is. Part of the challenge of the Church of flipping the script is kind of, I would say, though, being a pastor and I’m an entrepreneur. And so what what I got finally and I learned this from my time in the Silicon Valley was where I’ve gone. The churches have grown very, very large and they’ve had a lot of impact. It’s not because I mean, I have some communication gift. I know that I’ve got some leadership gift, but that’s not it. We flipped the script and said, I told our staff, no one gets big stars on the fridge rater for how many people come to your group? The the people here are smarter than us. They have a context better than us. They have leadership better than us. We’re going to help all the people in the church figure out what God gave them and where their passions are. And we’re going to help them be successful in launching their ministries, in their companies, their neighborhoods, their sports teams, their business. And as we did that, well, what do I do? Producers do? I mean, if they didn’t have enough money for the for the big business deal, one guy did a breakfast once a month. What he paid for it. He got other people to if they didn’t have enough volunteers, they recruited people for it. What we finally did said, we said instead of trying to get people to come and you as the pastor were, you helped me build my kingdom. We helped me fulfill this vision that I have inside of my head. And I need you to come so often and volunteer so often and give you time and give your money. And then we and we measure success by, we got a bowling alley and a climbing wall and everyone uses Christian toothpaste. I’m being mildly facetious. Instead of saying, wait a second, whether we had space or building or whatever. All we really need is we need a place to meet to help you develop. We need people to coordinate, to meet all around the city. And we need to help you discover how God made you who you really are in Christ. And He’s giving you a purpose and a mission that no one in the world has quite like you. Our dream, our hope is to make you successful when you. That’s the flipping of the script. But it’s actually an old script. And the old script is he gave some of the policies, some that prompted some of the evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the believers of the saints to build up in the body of Christ until we all go to big meetings and discuss Jesus. But until we are conformed to the image of the Son of God, Christ likeness. That’s that’s the goal. Now, I had a boss, a mom, a dad, a friend, a supervisor, fellow worker. That’s a lot like Jesus. And does that change the world?

Justin Forman Yeah. I love that. I love the experience that God’s giving you, Chip in terms of especially in the Valley, just talking about people that if you had put the box too tight, if you had made the program a check box, they would have said no. But you have to give them space because that’s what attracts entrepreneurs. It’s not better. It’s just different. And I think that that’s one of the things kind of coming back to our conversations of being it was on that I appreciate is the past 20 years there was this urging of trying to give the faith and work conversation a place, a seat at the table, and now there’s a seat at the table. But the conversation has to go deeper. It has to make sure that there’s a difference between the person that’s working in the corner office and maybe something the cubicle not better, to be clear, not better, just different. The application that we’re being called to is different. And I want to turn to Dan to speak to some of this, but before I do, I want to just kind of inject some statistics because, you know, Tip is talking about stats and everything, but one of the fun things that we’ve been able to do is spend some time with Barna, David Kinnaman and some guys researching what are the differences between pastor and entrepreneur and people in the pew of the church. There’s three different perspectives and some early statistics that we’re coming back to us that we’re going to share in some upcoming events. But some of these are fascinating. 91% of entrepreneurs feel purposeful in their work. The 4% say their work uses their gifts. When we talk about that, when we talk about entrepreneurs, we’re talking about two different people, because oftentimes I think we’re guilty of getting up there on Sunday.

Dan Owolabi Morning.

Justin Forman And giving a sermon that says all your work’s terrible. I know, but love through it in Jesus name. But yet there is a segment of people inside of that that feel incredibly called, incredibly intentional and exactly for the place that they’re supposed to be. So, Dan, in your experiences, you’ve been working with these 30 entrepreneurs to speak to that. What are we missing? What’s the church missing as we’re calling out the differences between these entrepreneurs and everybody in the church? How are they different from everybody else?

Dan Owolabi Yeah. You know, I love that you’re bringing that statistic to the table, Justin, because I think when you think about entrepreneurs, you think about people who who love to surgery, love chaos, love things that are undefined. They love, you know, pioneering. We love going out in the wilderness and sort of chopping down the tree to create their own house. They love that feeling of hard work to just push the dream. And with that comes that sense of purpose. Like I am doing something that’s never been done before, of the gifts that God has given me and a sense of joy waking up every Monday morning to head to work. I think when you talk about people who have that self-directed life with the feeling that God is giving them something to do and they can chart their course in God has giving them a lot of freedom, kind of decide, Hey, how is the future going to look? And they really are painful to him, but also clear about the vision that kind of person can do. And then in the church, I think what happens is oftentimes and you’re getting this from a pastor as well. So I felt this before. There’s a little bit of an intimidation factor when entrepreneurs move really quick and they break things and they fix them and they break them again. I think there’s a sense of how do I he will this gift. But I think in this in this cultural moment, I mean, we’re recognize there’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, men and women, to go out and create something that’s never been created before. And so pastors are able to have a little bit more of a sort of an open hand towards the things that entrepreneurs are going to create, knowing that look like if they go out and build ministries and they go out and create things, the pastors can come alongside them and support them and that kind of stuff. But ultimately, it’s going to be it’s going to be good for the church because they’re going to create something that’s never been created before and things are going to take off in somewhat not, but they’ll still have opportunities to really mold them and make sure that they’re in line with the gospel. And so those are a lot of opportunities that I see it. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities for pastors to really sort of take a step back. But also partner with entrepreneurs is a critical guest and created a full.

Chip Ingram I think as pastors, we we thought we’re supposed to develop these programs to meet all these needs and everyone’s told to get all their needs met through our one local church. And I think actually what you find is that God’s put people in the local church who have a variety of gifts to meet the various needs of that community in that place. Hey, man. And what we’re really best at is loving people, shepherding them. Over and over I got to where I realize I mean, so, you know, you guys know some some of the guys that were in our church, I mean, this this guy’s got the executive office and app or Google or these places. And I’m thinking, how can I help you walk with God? How can I help you with all these pressures in your marriage is really hard. Those jobs create wealth, and wealth makes it hard to be a good dad because you can give your kids just about everything instead of hold them responsible or make time. Those jobs will eat your life and just let work take you over. See, as pastors, our role doesn’t get diminished. What it does, it gets focused on how do we help entrepreneurs in where they really need it, and then how do we let them blaze new trails, launch new ministries and get rid of the red tape and the bureaucracy that most of them experience in the church?

Dan Owolabi You know, Chip, I’ll jump on that. That is a fantastic statement. And I think one of the things that’s super important in that is that an entrepreneur, if they really want to run and so you sort of come back, then rotate and give them the opportunity to do that. That is huge. But I think what happens is oftentimes pastors don’t know who the entrepreneurs are that think they assume, hey, look, you know, most people succeeded in their jobs. There’s a very small percentage of people that are willing to run. If you can find those people, bring them together in groups, might take them to a conference like work together with those, you know, small group of people they can run and you can shepherd people who have a daily 9 to 5 job different way, but shepherding entrepreneurs and letting them run and giving them freedom, but also supporting them in ways that haven’t felt supported in their whole lives. And that’s a that’s a recipe for miracles. I mean, thanks to really start to when when you do things that way. And it’s really.

Justin Forman Fascinating how we’re stepping into a new age. You know, we’ve talked about this from a content standpoint. When I think about my kids on a Friday night, we all get together and watching films and watching Netflix. You know, my two girls might be watching something. My wife might want to watch something. My teenage son might want to watch something else. And like so much of content, consumption has become micro targeted, right? Like, you find the audience, you find a movie, and it’s all about matching. We talk about a endless amount of content from YouTube and other user generated stuff. There’s so much out there and it’s less about content. It’s about matching. And isn’t it a fascinating thing. And yet the number one way that we communicate to the church, we communicate to the body of Christ on a Sunday morning, it’s still that one to many, right? Like there’s going to have to be some innovation, something there that’s going to happen. There’s some disruption for good that when you’re sitting there on a Sunday morning and you’re thinking, if I’m, you know, and me, people often talk about this, if you’ve come from a broken home in a broken place and you didn’t have a great picture of a father, if you’re talking about the relationship with God in a heavenly Father perspective, that’s going to be hard to break through. Well, so if we take that analogy and we talk about entrepreneurs at work and there’s so much challenge, but yet there’s so much opportunity that the gospel could go deeper if we could figure out how do we kind of like find that little target audience and really hit them with that right perspective to it. I just think it’s fascinating, especially in a time and era that we find ourselves in political campaigns where people are microtargeting a group. The same could be true. There could be an opportunity here for the church as well.

Chip Ingram And even some of the comments of. It’s unconscious. But I don’t mean this strictly that you just said it because we’re so ingrained when they come in. They’re sitting there in the church.

Justin Forman And really.

Dan Owolabi Right.

Chip Ingram Right. That’s where participation is going to happen. Is really that the right model is there may be a time where everyone needs to come together, but do we need to do it the way we’re doing it if participation is going to happen? You know, interviewing people who have had broken world experiences. And that group’s going to be meeting for this season over here. In other words, I think we got to question all of our assumptions about what sort of I go to this one place and these things happen at that place, and they do this for my kids at that place. And now, by the way, and I’ve been a part of that for, you know, for 40 years. But what I can tell you is the churches that become very effective, the biggest work you have is trying to figure out once they get to that one place, how to do what you said. And so that’s why it takes huge amounts of staff, huge amounts of money, as opposed to, again, it’s a paradigm shift. Every member is a minister. Everyone’s in full time ministry. We’ve got to give them the platform and allow them. And it’s messy. Let them do some of the teaching. Let them do the sharing. We got to the point where people would come with that idea and usually it’s like, Well, we can’t do that right now. Or often someone would say, gosh, that’s a really important person. And they reported that you’re so, well, we’ll try and go do their thing. And we just came to, you know, Hey, this is something has happened. Runaway teens or HIV patients who are, you know, wish you’d be doing X, Y and Z. And I got to where it would be like, Wow, that’s great, guys. Put that on your heart. I said, Yeah. I said, We’ll find at least two other people. Okay. Two other people that that’s on their heart. And then tell you what, you know, eventually I had a full time person to do this, but it was that I want you on one page. You can give me five, but I only read one on one page. Identify the problem. Second, this is my solution. And what are my first three steps to solve that? You and your team, by the way, we have no budget for it, but we’ll get 1% behind you. A 80% of the people never came back. So at least I didn’t have to try and fulfill their role. And then the greatest ministries that ever happened were like and they were you know, one was an entrepreneur, a mom with a special needs Down syndrome, adult child who said no one cares about her. She found two other ladies and she found a guy with some administrative gifts. I looked up three years later and we had like four rows of Down syndrome adult kids in church praising God. But again, our churches are filled with people. You know what? Well, you don’t have to motivate. Those people don’t have to tell them they ought to come to church. You don’t have to say you really ought to give. We’ve got to unleash people into what God made them to do and the passions he gave them. And we have to understand the current organizational structures at times can support it. At other times it won’t. But let’s let’s ask. Do you really think that really church is very organized? And me, for 300 years we never had a cathedral.

Justin Forman Then they didn’t have Google sheets. They didn’t have.

Chip Ingram Work Google sheets. You know, as one historian said, it got messy and there was chaos. And, you know, church history is about where the cults emerged and all that. They basically had this is the work of Jesus. And every time we get together, we’re going to remember exactly who he is and what he did. We’re going to take the Lord’s Supper, but not as little add on this as Central. Second is your identity completely changes. So it’s not just about getting wet. It’s you used to be this. You died and you got resurrected and there’s a whole new light and there’s a whole new agenda. And your God that worked in the East. And guess what? Are you ready? You’re not some audience that needs to be pandered. You’re not a consumer. You just joined the supernatural army of God of Light against Darkness to completely change the world. And it starts in your home, your neighborhood and your world. And by the way, our job to help you get there.

Dan Owolabi Yeah, that that’s fantastic, you know? Yeah. And I just I’ll say this for the fifth time today, your optimism is so contagious. I mean, this fantastic to hear because I think what you’re looking at and is you’re looking at a situation where people wonder why it’s messy. Like, why aren’t we there yet? Why are we still talking with the same problem? But what you’re doing is you’re going back to the early church and you’re saying, look, hindsight is deceptive. Oftentimes when we read the Bible and we said everything is just linearly, first they did this and they did this. And I don’t know. I mean, there was a lot of switchbacks, a lot of mistakes. In fact, the other day I was just reading about the civil rights movement and I said there for a long time I thought it was just somebody did this and then somebody did that, and there’s something to that. And they just kept winning along the way. And the reality is it was messy and confusing and hard and people quit and then they came back again. And, you know, it’s a lot. Some suddenly got killed. And, you know, so you’re thinking about what real movement should we look like. And oftentimes in the middle, you don’t realize you’re in the middle of a movement. You just really struggle, struggle. And so I think what you’re doing is you’re giving us hope and you’re saying right now feels like a big struggle and it feels messy. And pastors are like, why are people leaving and why aren’t they coming? But what you’re saying is there’s a lot of hope and it’s going to be messy. And it’s okay to embrace that and recognize you’re not going to see God working the full picture until years later.

Chip Ingram Maybe you’ll see.

Dan Owolabi And maybe you’ll be up. You’re not going to look back and say, I see it now.

Justin Forman Yeah. I mean, how many how many movies are very good without a good villain? How many movies are very good without a struggle? Why would we think that our faith is being different? When you think about some of the things like, as you said, a movement has to have struggle, has to have versity as part of it. And what makes this epic quest good makes what joy makes it for that adventure of it. And there is just so much it wrapped up in that I want to pivot us to a thing here because we often say that we don’t want to give a pep rally without a football game to go to. That’s Texan for we don’t want to give you all hyped up about something without a next step. And so when we think about this idea, one of the reasons why we want to intentionally have this conversation was, a, to celebrate what had happened, to celebrate what has happened, to celebrate how it’s become normative, to have this conversation about faith and work over the past 20, 30 years. There are an endless amount of heroes that we could celebrate and thank in that. But one of the things that we want to point to is we want to make this conversation durable. It’s a word that we’ve used a lot. It’s actually some friends that we met. It was on it talked about this durable network of a conversation of how do we keep this going and what does that look like. And so we have felt just called as a team of faith to an entrepreneur to say, okay, there’s something trying to happen. What Chip’s talks about is not an isolated conversation and praise God for it. There’s more pastors that are waking up saying, okay, we got to question the model. We got to flip the script and we got to do this. We don’t know the answers. It’s still messy. We’re shaping fog and we got to do this together. And so as we’ve gotten into that, on February 20th, we are hosting an event specifically for pastors that are stepping into this moment, and they’re wrestling with this question saying, goodness gracious, something is happening here. There’s an opportunity. I want to find out what is it, what’s happening now in this moment and how can we get involved as a church? And so some of the details on that is going to be three streamed events were streaming it regionally for different parts of the world. We’ve got an Asia kind of Pacific region. We’ve got an Africa Europe kind of time zone and we’ve got the Americas and three different places. We’re gathering pastors in the convenience of online because we know how busy the schedule is. We know how high demand it is. We wanted to give an easy first step. And so Pastors and Entrepreneurs conference is attempting to bring together this conversation in a safe place, talking with other peers to wrestle through these issues and say, what might this look like? And so if you’re listening and you’re an entrepreneur, I want to encourage you, this is the place to invite a pastor. Now, it doesn’t have to just be a teaching pastor, executive pastor, men’s women’s pastor, discipleship pastor. Why is it that somebody is in your church that really is centered about connecting? Passionate about convening. I think one of the chip’s things that he talked about is oftentimes we mistake. And I think this is part of the movement’s fault from an onus from a faith and work kind of conversation is we’ve expected somehow a pastor to go through business school, go through an MBA, walk in our shoes and fully understand everything. Newsflash That’s not going to happen. There’s going to be a mutual respect. And the same way that we’re not going to stop everything. Our business plan go to seminary and everything. We’ve got to respect the role that God has for each of us to play. And I think one of the greatest opportunities that pastors can be as a conduit and a convener, a conduit and convener and connector and kind of the things that what Chipp mentioned are bringing those people together. And so our hope, though, is that there’s a conversation that takes place that so people can understand it and understand this conversation. So Chip is going to be a part of that. Some other friends like Nicky Gumbel and Dermot Gray and David Platt and others, are we presenting some information from Barna, from the research with David Kinnaman? But we really want to make this a place to wrestle through this together. And so, guys, I would love to flip it to you as we’re kind of coming to this close here is, is like what encouragement we got entrepreneurs listening. How would they crack the code? What’s the advice that you would give to them as they’re going to talk to their pastor and they’re making that invitation. What would be the angle? What would be the perspective? What would be the plea? What would be that message that you would encourage of why a pastor should come join a conversation like this? Chip, we’ll start with you.

Chip Ingram I think one is I would as an entrepreneur, I’d I’d sell I wouldn’t give a little invitation. I wouldn’t do it by email. And hope becomes I would get a lunch or a coffee and then I would identify with him first. You know what? The world kind of got turned upside down. Lot of people have been in The Crucible and you’ve been in it a lot. How can I help? I really want to. I want to. I want the church to be successful. What? What are your current needs? If you if you’re listening, what are your top 2 or 3 challenges as a pastor right now? Yeah, I think the thing is that as pastors, we always feel like someone’s asking of us. What can I saw? What can I do? Why marriage is hurting or, you know, why aren’t you doing this? Or why aren’t you doing that? I think I would come with the posture of I would really like to be a part of helping. And and I think that, you know, I have a network of people and a skill set. And I’d like to invite you into my world, because I think there’s a lot of us that don’t know how to get into your world. But I think there’s may be some of you that know how to get into our world. Before you ask me the question, actually, I’m sorry. Being a pastor, I jumped immediately to if I was a pastor, how I look back on. How did all these like, well, you know, my friends, how well, how in the world did all those people end up teaching me the kind of stuff that you guys are talking about? And what I remember is I just as a pastor, I thought were you help me, I can’t do X, Y, Z. I don’t know how to do X, Y, Z. This is a bit over my head. Would you I remember one guy said, would you give me an hour and and I know you’re super busy. Just an hour. And I’ll have on the whiteboard my challenges and I mean really clear and I’ll have a turkey sandwich and we eat for 20 minutes. You eat and I’ll give you. I will, I will, I will identify. Here’s where we’re at. Here’s the challenge. Here’s my biggest questions. And then we you for 40 minutes talk into that. And that was actually the guy we learned later started Kleiner Perkins at Twitter. And because someone told me that guy’s a really good leader and he knows a lot about this stuff and I’m thinking, I don’t know what to do. He came number one, he got a good turkey sandwich. And I mean, I learned 20 minutes. I was done. I had it really clear on the whiteboard. And three hours later he left. Yeah, well, he he started to Look, Jeff, here’s how leadership works and here’s how you doing it here. At this point, you need to go to a matrix. What are your KPIs? I said, what’s a KPI? Okay. I look that, you know, okay, here’s what we’re doing. What do you know? And literally he became an early coach and then it was like, wow, there’s all these people at these us, you know, on the pastor side. So I tried to flip it. And I think if an entrepreneur would say, Boy, you’re under a lot of pressure, I would love to be of some help. I don’t really know how we’re going to have a conference where Pastor Thorne’s producers talk. What we need is, you know, the synapse, right? We need that little synapse where pastors get connected maneuvers and connects, get connected, where we get a little bit of a common language. And then I hear, here’s what I would say to is because entrepreneurs are very, very dizzy under pressure and move fast, Pastors are largely overwhelmed and some do, but most don’t move very fast, as I think you have to be willing to say, don’t tell him you want to help them unless you. Don’t. I mean. Are you willing to after this conference, say and by the way, they’ll they’ll they’ll frustrate you to death, you know, because it’s obvious to you you need to do X, Y and Z and and well, that’s you know, I’ve got to talk to the board and we need to have a committee and of. And you’re shaking your head going, gosh. And so you have to help him learn how to talk to to make some of those changes. And the greatest friends I’ve had in the whole world in my whole pastoral journey, some have ended up on a board, but it’s been a guy on the sidelines or two that I could share. Here’s all my issues. I don’t know how to do this. Will you help me? And I mean, I met with him, if not weekly, almost weekly, and it was like I was going to school and this is what happened last week. Here’s what I started to understand. And it taught me to think in a different way. So my point is, we all want this to happen. I just wrote this word The cost is high because it’s time to pay it. Really? You really? Yeah. I mean, we really have to care for each other. And I would say the same to pastors. We want people to show up with their gifts, their time and their energy to make a difference and their money and run our program. You got to just throw that out. You got to love people. You got it. You got to find out how are they really doing Just because you’re smart and you got money, that doesn’t mean your life’s going well. Just get you got a pretty wife and you walk in the door. It doesn’t mean your marriage is going well. As you know, Justin, entrepreneurs and people that run fast have a variety of issues that the average person may not have. And a pastor could be one of the greatest gifts that ever happened to say I mean, I just I’ve said to guys that I’m sure that they’re very famous and very powerful, but you keep living the way you live and you’re going to be on life number four. But I care about you. God’s forgiven the past. You know, you keep. Entrepreneurs need someone that I don’t want your money. I don’t want your vacation house. I’m not going to accept anything from you. I want to help you. But that’s got to go both directions. And then when that trust is built, that’s when I’ve seen great things happen. And this certainly is not. I mean, the pastors that I run with or the entrepreneurs that I know, this is happening all over the place. But it’s got to be what you all are doing is this conference to me is like it. It has to be a beginning synapse. You know, I have this picture of of the electrical impulse moving from this side over to the other side. And we got lots of pastors that care and lots of entrepreneurs, but we’ve got to get them together.

Justin Forman I love what you’re saying there, Chip, I think. I mean, when we break it down in some of those relationships that are closest to us, when we think about parenting or in a marriage relationship, nobody gets very far by demanding. Nobody gets very far by asking, loudly, pleading, yelling, trying to get their way. But if I were to own it for the faith and weren’t conversation over the last 20 years, I think that that’s been a lot of the problem. Our tempo, our tone. We’ve come to a pastor out of our frustration without understanding theirs. We haven’t come to a place of humility. We’ve come to a place of frustration. And we all know whether it’s through parenting or marriage or whatever it might be, we’re going to get a whole lot further if we change that temperature and we change that tone. And I think that that’s very much true in this relationship because there’s a gap. And we’ve got to come with that posture of humility. I love love what you have there. Dan, what would you add as we come to a finish here?

Dan Owolabi Yeah. You know, I think I would agree with everything yourself to this point. And I think inherent in what you’re saying, obviously relationship is key. You know, relationship is the bridge in which you really see truth and you can have that conversation. I think inherent in that is a realization that the entrepreneur themselves has a responsibility to transmit the gospel within their sphere. I think their pastor isn’t somebody who’s on a pedestal like, Why aren’t you helping me? No, no, no. We are partnering with you. And so the sense of like being arm in arm together and saying, okay, I get that you’re you’re I mean, you have a sphere that is just killing you moms and, you know, just a lot of different people who, you know, really I mean, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to reach. But I have my space and we’re doing incredible work over here. Is there are ways that we can form together having this sort of joy conversation and not sort of holding the past responsible for something that he never and believe was supposed to do in the first place, you know, or, you know, a language that he meant where he can actually speak because he never got an MBA. And so realizing that I have my responsibility, he has that is his or she has hers or whatever. Just recognizing that there’s a moment of sort of joint accountability and then coming together just like chipset and say, all right, so where can we meet together and actually share notes? Where can we help each other in that conversation, in that moment, and is able to say, hey, there’s actually a conference room that actually speaks multiple of our languages? Yeah, we can come to I mean, all along you want boy, you know, I looked at if you can’t come this year, I get it. You can come next year. In fact, I’ll get a chicken. I’m going to turkey sandwich. We’ll come down and sit together and we’ll actually watch it. Then we’ll spend 20 minutes whiteboarding after we’re done. But like that sort of, you know, not looking for the pastor to sort of serve us. But I’ll say, hey, look, let’s do this together. And on the world, let’s let’s fight the giants gods behind us and get our challenge in front of us. Let’s we’ll get it together. That’s inspirational. I think a lot of pastors will get on the.

Chip Ingram Yeah. Good morning.

Justin Forman What would a great flipping the script there Dan? Yeah if we started the conversation said pastor hey we know the church is we’re going through a tough season. Well, you know where there weren’t any tough season culturally, climate, whatever it is, we’re here to help. I’ve got some conversations, some questions that posture of humility, of which have talked about me and that just just a great way to do that. So let that be your encouragement and let that be your charge feature. And entrepreneurs, as you’re listening to this and you’re thinking about how do I start that conversation started out of humility, started out of that place of wanting to work together and true to form, we want to make sure that we give you tools to even make that conversation easier. While we can’t give you a code for a turkey sandwich for free or a chicken sandwich for.

Dan Owolabi Free, not right now. It’s coming though.

Justin Forman Right now and it might be in the works. We brought somebody else to play, maybe to come through on that. But in this moment, we do want to give you a tool to do that. So if you use a code called church, and if you are listening to that, use that code Church 100 on that pastors and entrepreneurs.org website. We want to gift you with a free pass to being able to make sure that you and your pastor can attend to being able will experience that. We never ever, ever want any sort of finances to get in the way of what God doing. And so if there is an opportunity for that code to be helpful to you, to your ministry, to your church, and just make it even easier to have that conversation, we hope that that would be a tool for you. So February 20th, we will be having that conversation. We hope that you’ll join us. Chip, Dan, so grateful to be with you, grateful to see what God’s doing and and just what encouragement you’ve been to the movement and the work that God has, both of you guys and so grateful for having you join us.

Chip Ingram My pleasure.

Dan Owolabi It’s been a lot of fun.

Chip Ingram Great to meet you then.

Dan Owolabi Yeah, you too. Nice person.

Justin Forman All right, guys. Well, we’ll see on the next episode.

Thanks for joining us. Thank you for joining us for the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. If you are interested in learning more about the Pastor and Entrepreneur. Conference on February 20th, head to the link in our Show Notes. Podcast listeners and use the code form in 50.  To get 50% off the registration fee.

In a world where darkness lurks behind every screen, can capitalism become an unlikely hero? This eye-opening episode reveals how entrepreneurs and investors are wielding the power of business to combat sexual exploitation and human trafficking. From AI-powered solutions to disruptive economic strategies, discover how faith-driven innovators are turning the tables on predators and reshaping the battlefield in the fight for human dignity. Prepare to have your perspective challenged and your hope rekindled as we explore the cutting edge of redemptive entrepreneurship.

If you’d like to hear more about the Faith Driven Entrepreneur community groups, go to faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/groups.

Richard Cunningham Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Faith Driven podcast. And I say faith driven without entrepreneur or investor on the back end, specifically, as Justin Forman, executive director and president of Faith Driven Movements, is in the podcast studio. We’re doing something fun today and unique where we zoom in on one of the solving the World’s greatest problem themes, and we do it on our FDE and FDI podcast as we’re going to bring in marketplace leaders, entrepreneurs, investors alike talking about this particular problem. And we’ll introduce our guests here shortly. But Justin, big episode today, a tough topic as the particular problem we’re highlighting. It’s a heavy one. And I want to give you kind of some time to give context of this episode and then we’ll introduce our guests.

Justin Forman Yeah, big episode. And when we talk about solving the world’s greatest problems, we don’t have to look far to see how dark it is out there and to see how dark some of these things. And certainly this is one of those it’s one of the darkest places that you might look in terms of solving the world’s greatest problems. But as the world gets darker, I think we get more encouraged when we see light breaking through and we see entrepreneurs and investors doing things and pulling on solutions and levers that haven’t been pulled on before. And, you know, I’m I don’t know about you, Richard, but often times I feel my heart break. And I think of oftentimes the survivors, the people that are been hurt and they have been wounded. And what encourages me most about this group and so many others in solving the world’s greatest problems is the people that are getting upstream and thinking about what is that other lever and what is that other issue upon. And I think with today’s friends, as they share about what’s happening here, there’s an economic lever to some of these solutions. And oftentimes we don’t see these. We see our humanity, our brokenness, the morality. But we don’t know that there’s like really an economic problem to solve that if you can disrupt the economics, if you can disrupt some things for good, that some of the downstream things get that much more turned around. And so I think it’s a fun way where we get to see entrepreneurs and investors really stepping in to solve some of these big problems.

Richard Cunningham Today, the adult entertainment industry is a technologically advanced and high strategic engine. It knows how to prey on the most innocent, the most susceptible and the most unsuspecting among us. And their strategy is working. The average age of someone’s first exposure to pornography is 12 years old, and that initial dose of unsolicited supply creates an avalanche of demand. Porn sites receive more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. That’s all the movies watched on Netflix, all the shows streamed on Amazon and all the tweets. All of them combined received less traffic and attention than pornography. 28,258 users are watching pornography every second. Over $3,000 is spent on porn every second on the Internet. 35% of all Internet downloads are related to pornography. 40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites. 4.6 billion with a B. Hours are spent watching pornography videos on a single site in just one year. But what does that even mean? These are statistics. You’ve probably heard versions of them before. And while they’re wildly unsettling, it’s hard to know just what to do with. The truth is that according to the Journal of Sex Research, 64% of men and 30% of women are viewing pornography. And 100% of those people don’t want to listen to a podcast about the damage caused by porn. Let’s be honest. If you’re in the group that doesn’t view pornography, you don’t really want to hear about it either. It’s a problem that has long existed as part of the underbelly of society. It once lived in the fringes of our psyche like a shadow you’d occasionally see out of the corner of your eye. And while there’s a very real temptation to keep treating it like that as something that is someone else’s problem or not something that affects me. The reality is that it isn’t someone else’s problem, and if it doesn’t already affect you, it’s going to. This is a problem that if Christians don’t start taking it seriously, is going to continue to have massive downstream implications. There were only beginning to understand. So if your opinion of pornography is simply that it’s a moral wrong and something an Internet filter can solve. Buckle up. The reality of this problem is worse than you think. And then even worse than that. But if you clicked on this podcast, you already know we aren’t hoping to solve the easy problems. We’re staring the world’s toughest challenges straight in the face, and we’re talking to the people who are tackling them head on. Amen, indeed. Well, we’ve got Dr. Lisa Stroman in the podcast studio, clinical psychologist, author, recent author of Digital The Stress Growing Up Online, a specific focus on children and young people in this kind of issue of sexual brokenness. And then West Lyons, an accomplished venture capitalist, a very well-respected investor in this broader faith and investing movement of equal venture fund friends. Welcome on to the podcast. Before I go much further and don’t give an intro that nearly warrants how impressive you both are. Lisa, we’ll start with you and let’s get some kind of background on who you are and a little bit of your stories and then we’ll get going.

Dr. Lisa Strohman Sure. Thanks for having me. I am a psychologist, an attorney. I went to a joint program from undergrad to go into policy work and at that time was offered a position to work as an honors intern with the FBI, which was a super cool experience. And I worked in Quantico with the profiling team to classes at BSU and then was invited to become a visiting scholar based on that internship. And they sponsored my dissertation. So I ended up being with the Bureau for 6 or 7 years in total, depending on if you count the AP. And it was an incredible opportunity for me. I learned a ton and I was there when unfortunately Columbine happened. So I was shoved into this world of online safety and what kids were going to do with technology even before social media was launched. So I just remember pivoting and saying, you know, wanting to be a guardian ad litem was kind of my dream in that joint degree. But shifting over and just saying like, somebody needs to really look into and shepherd through the psychology of technology. And so I’ve spent a career doing that. So 25 years in that space.

Richard Cunningham And that’s so powerful.

Wes Lyons Wes Lyons thankful to be here? Thanks for hosting us. I get to work at Eagle Venture Fund, where we get to use venture capital to try to solve some of the world’s greatest problems. And one of the ones that we’re getting to work on under the banner of the Eagle Freedom Fund is investing in technologies that fight human trafficking. A huge chunk of that is online, a safe Internet for kids. Companies like Lisa’s Game Safe, where we’re trying to create scalable solutions to the sexual brokenness, to human trafficking. And it’s a really dark subject, but it’s also incredibly exciting to work with entrepreneurs who have scalable vision for change that bring hope.

Justin Forman Now, guys, I’m very grateful that you guys will both join us here today. It’s been a gift to spend time with you guys here recently filming different pieces of this story. And I think it’s important as we start this off to recognize this story has many different faces and has many different angles when we talk about brokenness. We can look around the world and it’s all encompassing in so many different facets, but specifically this issue. There’s exploitation, there’s trafficking, there’s sexual brokenness, there’s different angles to that. And so I think it’s important that as we start this conversation, we recognize that there’s different angles, but also to recognize one of the reasons why we do this podcast, as Richard and I team up for this, we want to highlight some of the things in the conversation that’s happening already in solving the World’s Greatest Problems initiative. And so if you’re not familiar with the website, if you’ve been paying attention to Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, it’s a new initiative in a site that has been designed to say, how do we start having these conversations? How do we make what feels otherwise overwhelming and complex and make it accessible so that we can begin to process, to have these conversations, to feel how we might be called into this space as entrepreneurs, investors and giving whatever that might look like. So there’s a full episode where we work through some of the stories, we work through some of the conversation into that, and there’s going to be other pieces that you’re going to find there to include an incredible story that we’re filming with these guys and just what’s happening through Freedom Fund and Eagle Venture. So be sure to check that out. But I wanted to make sure that we start with that framework because a lot of people that are going to enter this conversation are coming from different places and going to think, Man, you’re only tackling a piece of the puzzle. And that’s right. There’s no way we’re going to able to round all the bases in this kind of conversation. But what I want to start with is I think oftentimes when we think about evil, we think about evil is this thing that we always slip into, and it’s this evil that maybe it’s like, man, we have a moment of weakness. There’s a moment of brokenness. And while that’s true and there’s responsibility, we all have to take for that actions. There’s a sinister intentionality that I think is on the other side of maybe the screening, the other side of this equation that we need to look at. And we said that was one of the things that struck me when we spent time together. And you just talked about the way that people are being targeted, the CEO, the way that people are trying to get people into this area of brokenness, specifically in this area of pornography from a young age. Can you speak into some of the things of what you guys have found in that journey?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Sure. You know, it’s interesting. I think that a lot of times when you look at the rates of exposure. Or to pornography or exposure into these kind of dark worlds. It’s happening sub10 at this point in our country. And so what we look at and obviously we’re not going to do causative studies in the U.S. because you can’t do experimental studies where you’re putting children into cohorts where they’re going to be have, you know, harms placed upon them. But you can do correlational studies and you can look at what’s happening. And so the average in the United States of where children are first being exposed is typically around second grade, where they’re given their first research assignment, which means that they’re mandated to go into this Internet world and research things that are tethered with ads and things like that that pop up on them innocently. But it’s almost like you can’t unwind that. And so what I’m seeing is that those children that have unfettered access or even monitored access, the parents think that they’re doing the right thing, are fundamentally different kids. And so in my practice, when I see if I go into, say, a speaking engagement in a school or I go to a town hall, I can tell you which of those children have been exposed because they’re hypersexualized even at like nine, ten and 11. You can just tell the way they dress, the way they present themselves, versus those children that don’t have that exposure, that are more innocent and natural. So we have to think through of like the technology is being a portal to these things that are industry moneymakers. And so when you’re going into a very high billion dollar industry where you’re you’re going in and getting children at such a young age, you’re getting ten plus years earlier than you can get them as active consumers legitimately. So that’s what we see and that’s what we fight against.

Justin Forman Yeah, the intentionality of that evil. In some ways it’s surprising. In some ways it’s not when you think about so much of like TV and media demographics and you talk about advertisers and they talk about the value of the younger audience, if you can get them engaged, of course, in a business, we understand there’s more of that. I hate to say it this way, but the tragic view of like a lifetime value and what you’re exploit, what you’re talking about bringing to light there is that, yes, they’re targeting people from a young age. You know, my wife and I, obviously, we have three kiddos and it was eye opening for us years ago when we would hear that the average age of exposure was above ten. I think it was first told to us like it was 12 and it was, you know, probably the picture that you would have would be the the bus ride home from school. And one of the kids has a cell phone and it’s unfiltered and it kind of goes from some of those things. But what you’re talking about under ten years old at that young age with that intentionality, it’s startling. And it’s it’s. It’s crushing. It’s almost kind of crossed a threshold where as parents, we are just it’s no longer that you can hide from it. You have to be prepared to kind of teach people how to deal with it. And, you know, one of the other things that I want to kind of bring into is they experience it in the unexpected ways. And, you know, after our time together, I cringed as a parent to think at how young of an age we had our kids in games, specifically things like Roblox and other things that you speak of that I mean, there’s just so much happening on these platforms that we don’t know about. Can you shed light on the game side of things and just what’s missing there?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Sure. I think that in gaming, what we see is parents want their kids to experience just fun. They want them to go out and they want them to connect. And that’s what we all should want. We want our kids to have those experiences. But what we’re seeing in gaming is that there’s no kind of line between adults and children in the gaming worlds. So some of these games like Roblox or Minecraft that you think about farm life like you think of, these are kid games. Well, imagine yourself if you’re a predator. And we know from David Erb, he’s the whistleblower from Metta that there’s tens of millions of predators online on a given day. And imagine if you’re looking for a child today and you’re going into a neighborhood with a van. It’s very unlikely that you’re going to see a child. But what they can do is they can go into these kids facing games and go into those very innocently with a totally innocuous avatar or pretend that they’re a child and they can have conversations and start to groom those children without that child even knowing, without the parent even knowing. And so the gaming community hasn’t figured out a strong stop on that. They don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re not doing. Right. And so they’re kind of clumsily trying to come in and fix that. And right now, when you look at kind of roadblocks as an example, they’re coming in like if we see anybody that is inappropriate online, we kick them off of our platform. Okay. Well, that’s fantastic. Now all they have to do is create a different avatar, a different sign on and come back on and do exactly the same thing. And they’re not notifying the parent. They’re not notifying anyone that the child may have been exposed to some sort of sexual deviancy or any of those things. So the child now holds that and is shameful and hurt and curious and not sure what to do with that information. And we’re not protecting our family unit by giving them the right or the ability to do that. And and that’s why I was so excited to join Game Safe. As they’re doing that, they’re giving contemporaneous reporting to the parent and allowing us to understand and see exactly what our children are being exposed to.

Justin Forman You know, one of the things I love about this podcast is that in the solving world’s greatest problems side of things, we get to deep dive on some of the statistics, the issues we tell, some of the stories in that episode. There’s incredible parts that we’re telling the story from the brokenness side of things, the therapy side of things, the statistics side of things. But one of the stories that our audience is particularly drawn to is that of Layla’s story of saying, What does it look like to take down and to bankrupt Pornhub? And we’re seeing that some of the solutions are not necessarily just saying how do we prevent how do we take away some of these things, but how do we really go at the very business model side of things? And where one of the things that you said when we spent time together is that this is sometimes more of an economic issue, more than it is anything else. Can you explain what are you guys finding out when you see the economic issue and how we can follow that?

Wes Lyons One of the key questions when you’re looking for a really scalable solution to an issue this hard is trying to figure out who has. It’s this magic pairing of the pain and ability to pay for a massively scalable solution. And in this case, you actually have to add that the parents feel the pain. And when they realize that their kid is in danger. And that’s what Game Save is primarily tapping into in the direct to consumer is parents want to protect their kids. And the ability to hand them the easy button, you can protect your kid. But then what we’re seeing here in the last even in the last ten days, as we’ve seen short sellers on Roblox actually buying big short positions and then publicizing, there’s incredibly high numbers of predatory activity happening there. Dr. Allison, just for sharing about. And that’s actually destroyed $2 billion of market cap in Roblox in the last ten days, kind of highlighting that there is very real economic consequences for not solving this problem. And it helps validate the thesis that we’ve been preaching that this is actually a business problem, if that makes sense, and that we can use business to some extent. Business or capitalism got us into the problem because Roblox has not put any brakes on this because they just wanted as many users as possible. If we’re very simple about it, and then we’ve been making the case that there is an economic model to scale really large solutions to this. So on both cases, you have pain in ability to pay. What would you add to that?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Lisa I think that that’s perfectly said in that respect because I think that we don’t ever take a second to understand the mechanism of what financial is driving the market for the gaming. Kids just want to play. Parents just want to have a safe place to let their kids go. But we don’t really think about it because they’re kind of free services. You can go on and you don’t have to pay anything initially. And so, you know, my work that I do with kids is really to educate them that they are no longer a consumer, but they in fact, are the product in a lot of these situations. And whether it’s the porn industry or whether it’s the gaming industry, they’re the product that is being sold and used to make money.

Justin Forman I want you to push into that one more before Richard. And we push into like the solution and the legal venture side of things in the work that’s being done. Lisa One of the things that was both fascinating and scary as you talked about, how the algorithm it’s this mysterious thing. It’s a mysterious piece of the conversation. We know it’s been a part of probably first introduced to us in our Google search and then our social feeds. And we kind of think of this, but it’s this mysterious thing. And yet to kids at an early age, it’s not actually so mysterious. And sometimes it gets to know them more ways than a parent can. And your analogy of kind of breaking that down of like what this algorithm is to kids at a young age, can you talk about kind of what is it, when do we first encounter it and what are we competing against as parents?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Wow. I mean, that’s a big question. You the algorithm start way into the very, very early games where the kids are doing, you know, say, ABC Mouse or some of the educational tools that parents will use. Any time that you’re putting a child in an interface that is online, you have to assume that there’s an algorithm that is leading them through that process, and it’s learning from that to better their product in the end and to better the connection and the drive for the child to return to it. What that does for a child is it’s training them. And I’ve argued this point. I’m very good friends with Dr. Drew Pinsky, who works in addiction. And he and I have talked through the fact that we’re really priming children to become addicts in other spaces by doing these very early introductions that are algorithmically keeping them hooked into these games. So, you know, it can be as simple as, like, understanding a child. I’ll take ABC Mouse because my children were on it. And the minute I saw that, it wasn’t about drawing the letter appropriately, but it was really more about getting the coin so they could buy the sticker to put on to the landscape. And you can see it happen if you’re looking for it, if parents are trained to look for it. And when that happens, it shifts. So my work in elementary school, I think, is the most vital work that I do because we have children that are open to learning and we’re open and not as exposed as they are by the time you get to middle school or high school. But in that elementary school age of very example, I would say is that many of them by sixth grade, I would say the schools that I’ve gone into in the last three years, almost 75 to 80% of those kids are truly looking at wanting to be as a career, an influencer or a YouTuber. And so for them to see those words has to have some modicum of understanding that it’s about following in. It’s about getting the likes and it’s about doing things that create that algorithm to give them more attention. And so I think that our consumerism of the children is being overlooked. You know, we’re looking at the parents or we’re looking at the schools, but the kids themselves, in my opinion, is the biggest solution that we can like dive into and support.

Richard Cunningham Well, I mean, this has been powerful to listen in on. Lisa gave us some kind of phenomenal context on her passion and motivation for this work and where it all started. Wes, you’re a venture capitalist and you are looking specifically at Eagle Venture Fund and within your Freedom Fund for solutions to human trafficking and kind of this issue of sexual brokenness. What was some of the original motivation for this investment thesis? And then after that, I want to get into some of those portfolio companies and kind of some of those redemptive stories of solution providers.

Wes Lyons Yeah, the origin story for me started on the battlefield in the Philippines, where I saw ISIS using children in combat. And that just wrecked me. I was actually already in the finance world and was mobilized as a reservist. So I was already thinking with the world of finance, when I encountered the really tough experience of spending the day hunting for kids, trying to save them before the unthinkable happens, and coming home and processing through the grief of what I was doing there. But also through the years of of processing and understanding how big this problem is. When you look at the breadth of a $345 billion industry of buying and selling people. It’s breathtaking. But also as faith driven investors meeting more and more and more entrepreneurs, you have these really exciting, scalable solutions has also grown our hope that we can be part of something that the large is doing that’s much bigger than ourselves.

Richard Cunningham And maybe a few examples of portfolio companies early on that you guys are extremely passionate about in the ways they’re attacking a problem.

Wes Lyons Well, Game Safe is a great example where they’re helping parents protect kids online. We’ve got to be part of tackling this journey where Texas is a phone that doesn’t have any exposure to the Internet or kind of any social media at all, or helping people have the best of an online phone experience. But actually none of the addictive elements to it, which is really been inspiring. And then another good example would be Darkwatch. There’s about 32,000 brothels operating in the United States run by 200 crime organizations, and they’ve mapped those cartels and actually coming to businesses and saying, Would you like to know if you’re doing business with the cartels? And in many cases, what people don’t understand is if you look at this $345 billion industry, that’s kind of like the revenue line on that. Overall, the business of human trafficking, the expense line, much of that expense line on the 345 billion is flowing through legitimate businesses. It’s flowing through rideshare companies, through hotels, through cryptocurrency exchanges, through banks. And most of the brands that we know and love passionately don’t want to do business with the cartels. And so if you can bring them that solution and there’s more than 40 hotel brands in court over literally human trafficking allegations right now. So when we see the short sellers losing $2 billion, when we see JPMorgan getting hit for $290 million, when we see these major flairs of what effectively are pain for corporations, that just brings out a treasure trove of opportunities to build scalable solutions that faith driven entrepreneurs who are hunting for ways to express the Kingdom of God are more than excited to step into.

Justin Forman So I want you to hit on that. Like if you weren’t paying attention, if you’re on a run and you missed those numbers on that scale, how many brothels, how many crime organizations?

Wes Lyons 32,000 brothels trafficking about a million people run by 200 crime organizations.

Justin Forman And $345 billion.

Wes Lyons There’s a little bit. So 345 would be a global number. And that 32,000 is a US number. So I don’t want to overly mix those.

Justin Forman But when you look at that and then you hear statistics of like there is more consumption than on Netflix and Amazon and X combined, we talking about a serious issue. What I love is the subtlety that you hit on is that the way that you can disrupt this is like where does all of those other operations pass through? And that you can attack kind of some of those things because as you’re pointing out to companies are thinking more about that because there’s a real price if they don’t pay attention to that. There’s a real price if they don’t have that, because the consumer, us as we’re buying and purchasing, we want to know that we’re purchasing for something responsible. Can you talk about that? Westlake, where some of the places where companies have taken note said, my goodness, we didn’t realize something was happening and maybe you don’t need to get specific on a company, but when you talk about an industry, what are some of those places where that whether it’s ridesharing or some other thing, where are those places where people are taking note of what’s. Happening.

Wes Lyons I think the hospitality industry as a whole has created a number of nonprofits and done a lot of training. So where we’re at in the movement, in the hospitality, about 80% of the trafficking in the US, if you just look at calls into the trafficking hotline, are happening in hotels. So they’ve done a lot of good groundwork where they’ve rallied into organizations and done training. What we’re trying to do is say, Hey, that’s amazing, all the ground that we’ve made. Now let’s apply a ton of tools like Deja Vu AI, who’s able to take an advertisement for a traffic person and actually do location work on where did that picture come from, or other tools where we can start bringing scalable solutions? Because if you imagine if you work in a hotel and you got training and are waking up and going, Wait, there is human trafficking happening, you can’t actually call the police because you felt weird about like that looked a little off. It’s just not at all appropriate to call the police to say she looked a little young or she looked a little scared, like, you can’t do that. But if you start creating the systems to say, hey, I’m just going to put this into the app, there’s something funny or I won’t say explicitly the things that you might clean up in a hotel room after 12 customers, but you can imagine what would be cleaned up. Those types of things are not things that you would call the police about. But if you start keeping track of those in a technology solution that’s also doing facial recognition. You can imagine we can decimate human trafficking domestically in the next few years.

Justin Forman So you talk about the economic equation, and I think what you talked about is like in sometimes you’re trying to raise the expense line item. Like can you talk about like the theory of change here and behind it, like, how do you defeat this? It’s not that you can probably eradicate all of it, but you can really attack it from a certain economic angle. Explain what you mean by that.

Wes Lyons Yeah, no, Thomas from Darkwatch really taught me to think about these cartels as entrepreneurs who have a revenue line on one side and an expense line on the other. And if you can drive down demand through a whole litany of making it more scary to go buy sex, any ways that you drive down that revenue line and then pushing up the expense line, there are fewer and fewer hotels where it’s safe to operate, fewer and fewer banks where it’s safe to operate. If you can get the expense line to cross the revenue line, that business breaks like we decimate trafficking. So it’s really it’s powerful to change our thinking from, hey, we have to catch everyone or like kind of we tend to think about it in the one off rape type of mechanism. That makes sense. You’ve got to catch the bad guy. But if you think of how to break a business, you just have to make expenses higher than revenue in the business breaks.

Justin Forman Yeah. Powerful thought. Before we go back, I want you to explain this idea of just why is for profit solutions so needed in this space? A lot of times our heart is a church feature and entrepreneurs, investors listening to this, we break and we think of like the survivor and we think of like, how can we help? But when you think about the other side of things and the for profit, why is for profit solutions needed so much in this equation?

Wes Lyons It’s a really good question and we had to wrestle with that too, as we started grappling with the gravity and magnitude of the issue. I would submit it’s just the sheer scale of the issue. And in our lifetime, we’ve watched a billion people come out of dollar a day, poverty primarily through capitalism. And it’s just it’s what capitalism is good at. Like, for better or for worse, it scales things. When we look at roadblocks as scaled it creative experience a little bit further than it should have. And that makes sense. For better or for worse, capitalism just takes things in. It scales them. And that same mechanism that seen a billion people come out of dollar day poverty. If we can aim those mechanisms redemptive at seeing millions of people come out of slavery, it just seems like one of the most exciting ways to grow capital on the planet.

Richard Cunningham Lisa, let’s go back to you for a moment. One of the things that’s been top of mind, this entire podcast as we’ve been just going over this, is I can’t stop thinking about social media. I mean Tik-tok, Facebook, Instagram, X, but then also the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfakes. And you’ve run into some situations there where technology is being used for brokenness. And I think you’ve got a pretty powerful story around A.I. and deepfakes as well. So what comments and thoughts do you have there?

Dr. Lisa Strohman I think that now that we have AI consumer ready, right? So there’s apps that you can go to the App Store or Google Play and you can download these apps that allow now any individual consumer to more for face, more for body like create videos. So when we talk about deepfakes, there’s all these different variations of it. But what I’m seeing happening now is that you’re starting to see kids experiment like they should, right? They’re curious and now they have what on the App Store allows a four year old to download four plus in many of these. Where you’re allowed to go in and create deepfakes on video or pictures or those kind of things. And so one of the cases that we’ve had recently was a school had just come into session. They’d been there for a couple of weeks. I get a call. The principal had been flagged as posting or having a video posted of himself that he was talking to a female student and the female student was asking for grades to be changed to all A’s. And the principal said that they would do that with a sexual favor in return. And so none of that was actually true. You know, two students had filmed this talking as a narrative had gone in, taken a picture of this principal and morphed his body into that video. But the consequence of that was now the FBI showing up at a school system. Right now, we have police officers involved for criminal action on the student. The family is now impacted because there’s suspensions and an impact there in terms of like schooling, choice of where they’re going to be and whether or not the school is going to let them back in. But more so, too, is the victimized principal that is really, truly dedicating his life to support these kids and to be in to talk to them and now trying to figure out how does he manage that? Does he privately press charges? Does he allow the school system to manage that himself? And so you’ve got this conflict of like just kind of very rape. And that’s one system or one example in a system that where I’ve already had at least two dozen calls on this issue. I think that in the App Store there was an app that I highlighted in a presentation I had recently that you have to be nine in order to notify someone, you know. So you’ve got, you know, these open source abilities for children to go in and do very, very awful things. And the teachers and the administrators are having to deal with it.

Justin Forman Yeah. And while I don’t even know what to do with some of those things of what you’re just mentioning, like we often talk about how money can be a tool for good, and business can be a tool for good, but it can be a source of brokenness. And in the same way, we’re seeing technology play itself out in that same manner where so much redemptive and great things can come from it. And yet we haven’t even like fathom the depths of intentionality of brokenness and how these same tools are being manipulated in the opposite direction. What I’d love to do is we’re kind of coming to a close here in this episode and we’re just scratching the surface of this, but what are the things that give each of you guys hope? What are the things that you’re seeing that you’re saying, Man, here’s the win. Here’s something, here’s the progress. Hey, it’s a dark world. It can sound like the sky is falling. But what are the things from each of you guys perspective that you’re seeing that gives you that hope? Well, let’s start with you.

Wes Lyons I mean, it’s so dark that you’ve got to lift your eyes to Jesus fast or else, like, no entrepreneur can give me true hope. But as we’re scanning out, we do get to spend most of our day working on solutions, and many of them are incredibly exciting. And getting to see entrepreneurs working together is also really, really powerful. Where entrepreneurs in the UK are working with entrepreneurs in the US and people working on policy start to cross, collaborate with those that are creating companies or even some of the people that are involved in the court cases trying to highlight what’s actually been this toward solutions. When we start seeing that cross collaboration happening, the body of Christ is standing up and saying, Let’s work together in a way that is deeply exciting.

Dr. Lisa Strohman You know, for me, I’ll use a personal example because I have multiple examples over the years. But recently I went to Wyoming and I was in a conference, probably 250 people there. The host of the conference, the prevention specialist, brought her daughter, who was 12 years old and was really fighting with her mom about wanting to have social media and all of the things. And I went up and gave my presentation and I talked about all of the different things that the industry does in order to take advantage of kids. And I talked about some of the things that it impacts their brains, their neurochemistry, their neurobiology, the structural aspects of their brains. And I talked about how it’s winnable when we stop and start to educate and we understand and give this power to the kids. And at the end of my speech, the woman came over and she said, My daughter would like to talk to you. And she came up to me and she had tears in her eyes and she gave me a big hug and she said, I just deleted everything on my phone. And she said, And I’d really be honored if I could be your team lead for your mentoring program in my school. And so I gifted it to her on site. And then we prayed and I told her it was going to be okay. And I know that that’s the answer, right? Scaling that and getting those kids to be the voice is light. They will do this. They will do the work because when they hear it and they know it, they will do it for us.

Justin Forman Such powerful things. You know, I think oftentimes we talk about solving the world’s greatest problems. And sometimes we say that solving the world’s greatest problems, we are oftentimes the world’s greatest problem. It’s us. It’s our sin, it’s our brokenness. And this is an issue that as parents, as ourselves in different places, we all find the church is certainly not been immune from it. This has been a big issue of our generation. And as you said, it’s an individual conversation. I think one of the things that I take away from this conversation with you guys is just a hope that this is also what a beautiful opportunities for the body of Christ to help the hurting to come along. For those that are surviving, they’re walking out of some of these brokenness or walking out of some of these painful situations and also to engage the economic side, the business side, and to say, hey, there is an economic equation that if we can disrupt, we’re never going to again eradicate sin from this world. That much we know, but we can really see some of this disruption happening for good. And so when I when I hear about why the story of Pornhub, when I hear about some of the different ventures and Evil Freedom Fund, when I hear about this economic model of what we’re going at, man, it makes you proud of the home team, makes you proud of the church. It’s like, man, we figured out how to take this upstream, how to take this to a different playing field and really kind of evaluate it in that way. And guys are just so grateful for you, grateful for the work of what you guys are doing, grateful for the way the Eagle and the freedom and just thinking about this in a different way. And as you said, bringing resources to bear that are needed for an issue of such skills. They’re so, so grateful for you guys. Thanks for joining us. Thrilled to have you guys here on the podcast. For those listening to this and want to push more into the issue in the conversation. Be sure to check out that Solving the World’s Greatest Problems website for the Faith Driven Investor is for the Faith driven entrepreneurs. That is a place where we’re going to dive into the issue. You’re going to hear some of the stories there, but you’re also going to hear specific ways that you might build and invest and give differently when you hear issues like this. And so some of the same companies that you heard West talk about some of the same ministries and that you might be able to give to, you can find a best list of those there and not sit on the sidelines, but find ways that you, your family or your business might get in the game here. So great being with you guys. Thank you for joining us.

Wes Lyons Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Strohman Thanks for having us.

Richard Cunningham Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you. With content and community, we know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur or talk.

In this episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, hosts Henry Kaestner and Justin Forman reflect on the recent Faith Driven Entrepreneur conference and introduce a powerful message from Derwin Gray, former NFL player and pastor.

Key points:

• Gray compares spiritual warfare to animal hunting tactics, warning entrepreneurs about the devil’s strategies to isolate and weaken them.

• He outlines three common temptations entrepreneurs face: performance (“I am what I do”), possession (“I am what I have”), and popularity (“I am what others think”).

• Gray emphasizes the importance of adopting a wartime mindset and utilizing the armor of God as described in Ephesians 6.

• The hosts discuss the relevance of Gray’s message to entrepreneurial challenges and the importance of recognizing spiritual battles in business.

• An upcoming prayer series based on Gray’s teachings is announced, designed to equip entrepreneurs with spiritual tools for success.

Discussion Questions:

• How have you experienced the three temptations (performance, possession, popularity) in your entrepreneurial journey? Which one challenges you the most?

• In what ways can adopting a “wartime mindset” change how you approach challenges in your business?

• Derwin Gray emphasizes the importance of putting on the “armor of God.” How can you practically incorporate this spiritual discipline into your daily routine as an entrepreneur?

• How can recognizing spiritual warfare in business help you make better decisions and maintain a stronger faith?

• What steps can you take to build a support network of fellow entrepreneurs to combat isolation and strengthen your spiritual defenses?

If you’d like to hear more about the Faith Driven Entrepreneur community groups, go to faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/groups.

Henry Kaestner Entrepreneurs. Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m here with Justin.

Justin Forman Good to be with you, man. Good to be back in the studio After a lot of weeks on the road, some travel out there. The conference in 270 watch parties and also a really unique conference on the other side of the world.

Henry Kaestner Indeed, indeed. Where were you for the conference? I went to a watch party. I decided that I was going to be on the road, going to a conference in Austin, Texas, and I got a chance to go to the Austin, Texas watch party that was hosted by Dustin Elliott and Richard Cunningham, and they ran out of theater. It was amazing. But then I had a little bit of regret that I didn’t go and accept the invitation to go to Manila because they had a 350 people there. It was incredible. Alan Barnhart was a co-host there, but just really encouraged by how many watch parties of scale were around there. Where were you?

Justin Forman Well, the pictures were amazing, weren’t they? I mean, and on top of that, as you said, we may have just discovered a new model of movie theaters. Movie theaters make great watch party places for Faith Driven Entrepreneur.

Henry Kaestner Because they’re not used at the lunch hour.

Justin Forman Yeah. Well, a fun thing, man. One of life’s greatest gifts. One of the fun days for all of us in faith Driven is this day we get to see pictures around the world. I know. It’s like I may have said on social media, it’s like Christmas morning when you get to see all of these different things about how God is working in this movement, how wide, how deep it is. And I look forward to it, too. And it is the highlight of the year.

Justin Forman And yet a secret, a confession. Maybe I was not able to go to a watch party. I was not able to make it to watch party this year. I was so lined up, I was ready. I was prepared to join the one at Cottonwood Creek and Sam and what he was leading there and looking forward to that so much. But as you know, I got a text from my brother the day before, and it was just one of those moments where I’m the oldest of four, the Foreman four, if you will, and then walking through life together. Highs, the lows, the challenges, everything. And just fun to watch his journey and got a text that was just one of those things that you pray about you’ve been praying about for decades. And there was that moment where he threw his hands up and said, It’s not about me and I can’t do this on my own. I certainly can’t do it better than God. And I want to make a big step. I want to make that public confession. And so he texted us as a family and said he wanted to get baptized and what a text what a call what a time what a sweet season even in the midst of hard, hard seasons. To be there and hear how God works and so grateful.

Henry Kaestner so awesome. The backdrop was incredible. But the subject matter. my goodness. And knowing a bunch of that story. Celebrating with you both from afar is such a good dude and just in faithfulness and praying for him. And that’s encouragement to me. I think so many listeners here on this podcast have family members that don’t yet know Jesus and just not giving up hope. And I’m going to continue to pray for those. My family don’t yet know Jesus, and I hope that you all will do the same, but I hope we’re all, as a community celebrating with you. And my goodness, if there’s ever a good reason to not be able to attend a launch party, I really get.

Justin Forman Yeah, it was. And it was a gift to be there. It was a gift to change plans on our way to design something we’ll probably talk about here in a little bit, but headed from Dallas to Seoul, Korea is, of all places, in somewhere in that flight path is California. And so it was just one of life’s greatest moments to surprise them, to be there with them, to be there to celebrate, to be there to as brothers in so many different levels, and to celebrate that with them. So, so grateful to you two friends, to Sherie, that just the family and everything that made that happen. And to be able to share that moment with him was truly a gift. So if there were ever a permission slip that one might have maybe to not be there at a Faith Driven Entrepreneur event, it’s to experience something like that. So what a moment it was.

Henry Kaestner And there are lots of reasons to miss and we never want any part of our ministry to be any sense of obligation or for you to ever feel sold on anything. Of course. But we do want to invite you in to participate whenever you can. In community, there is something really special about getting together and community with other faith driven entrepreneurs that understand some of the challenges. And today we’ve got somebody who’s really helped us to unpack all of that, Derwin Gray and what he’s able to share during the conference. I mean, some of the best content, maybe the best we’ve ever had.

Justin Forman Yeah. You know, there’s so much to admire about doing. There’s so much that I know that our listeners and people that we’re the conference connected with. But, you know, one of the fun things for us, I mean, Henry and I both alluded to it. We got a chance to go to listen and listen is this gathering that was a 50th anniversary they were celebrating, started by Billy Graham for gatherings, just some unique gatherings, unique times where the body of Christ from around the world comes together, both to celebrate, to praise, to worship, but to wonder what might be, what could be, what might be the season that God has us in. And it was fun to see Derwin there. It was fun to connect with him and hear him share with others. And this isn’t just fun experience to see the Body of Christ. I mean, 200 and I think a 202 different countries.

Henry Kaestner Yeah, 5400 delegates.

Justin Forman Yeah. 5400 people. 202 countries. I know there’s tons of favorite moments that everyone might have, but one of my favorite, I can’t sit still for very long. And so one of the things that I enjoyed was there was moments during down if you got a chance to experience this, but when all of the body, the people that were all there during the main session were all gathered around tables and they gathered tables around region, around language, of course, so that people could connect with one another in those times and prayer when you could walk through the floor and hear dozens of languages being spoken. I mean, this side of heaven, I don’t think there’s anything like that. I mean, what an experience and prayers we know. It’s it’s the lifeline. It’s our oxygen we breathe as entrepreneurs, as we battle, as we’re in that battle. And I think that’s one of the things I love most, is it Derwin brings the eyes for us to see that this is a battle. This is an optional right.

Henry Kaestner And, you know, when you talk about prayer, prayer is so overlooked. I mean, there’s this entrepreneur. We’re doers, right? We’re doers. We can see I work hard at this. I do this on my task list and I get this accomplishment and that to show for prayer, if we just are honest, is faith driven entrepreneurs is hard. It’s hard sometimes it’s like, you know what else is hard for entrepreneurs is marketing. Marketing is difficult sometimes to really get attribution back to what’s really working well. Prayer is kind of that spiritual form, too. It’s is this overall blanketing and surrounding ourselves with the goodness of God. And it’s hard to go ahead and say, I can see exactly when that prayer was answered at 1102, because we want to have this instantaneous results faith driven entrepreneurs And that, of course, Justin, as you know, was not just the problem that I’ve had as an entrepreneur or that you’ve had as an entrepreneur. It was the problem that the kings of Judah had, right? Okay. So you got Kings of Israel and they divided. They’re all bad, right? So nothing to talk about there. Among the kings of Judah. There are some that are bad and there are some there are good. But virtually all of the kings of Judah go back and look at it. Some of the incredible this is like any bag of. Before there is even any type of biography. Channel biographies that we see in Second Chronicles are really compelling and second kings to it’s just what you see about these good kings are due to did so many things right, but almost all of them made a critical mistake along the way and it was not seeking God and his will out for some of them was a trade deal with Kush. Others, it was whether to go off in a war, of course. And I tell you, you read it, you know, like, my goodness, why wouldn’t you do that? Why wouldn’t you? She got out before going to war or doing a trade deal. And then I realized in my life how many times I’ve made decisions. Because you think about it, these are the good things due. They’re making decisions out of common sense and they’re good people, right? But God wanted them to reach out to them. With all the decisions major and minor we see now, am I doing it well? But I’ve infrequently done it well. And maybe that’s one of the biggest things that our audience might ever hear.

Justin Forman Yeah. You know, it’s interesting how you talked about the idea of like cause and effect in the space in between. That kind of causes us to wonder as entrepreneurs from marketing for prayer, for whatever is how do you connect the two? And yet the stories you bring up there was a pretty close correlation. There was a pretty close cause and effect. Like, I mean, when you look back in that and you look back in Chronicles, you see, and they didn’t see God, they went off to war and got slaughtered. There was like direct correlation in some of those moments and in the times as entrepreneurs, as we struggle to find that in Scripture, we can certainly see that in that instance right there.

Henry Kaestner Yeah. Verses like Johesephat that I mean just pretty much showed up and like the enemy had like left and left all their goods behind. Like the battle was won. The battle is the Lord’s but he was in contact with God ahead of time, knew the God’s favor, was in it, and worked really well. But gosh, I just I miss it too often. But fortunately, because of those lessons and because it Derwin’s teaching, which we’re about to listen to, I stand a much better chance at doing it better going forward.

Justin Forman Indeed. Well, let’s do that. Let’s press into this. We like to do this to give the highlights of some of the best things of the conference, some of the things that attendees and partners and friends just said. This stood out, this resonated, and more people really need to hear it. So we want to share this episode, this part of this series that we’ll talk a little bit later about that. But let’s go ahead and listen to what Derwin has to say.

Derwin Gray My grandmother got me hooked on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, one of the most epic animal and nature shows ever. This show taught me about lions and how they hunt. And the male lions were the protectors of the pride. But primarily it was the smaller, faster lionesses that were the hunter. The lionesses in a coordinate, a strategic method surrounded their prey and closed in on them. Their goal was to isolate and separate the prey from the herd. The devil works the same way. The devil cannot steal your salvation, but he can steal your happiness and effectiveness for God’s kingdom. And that’s why the Apostle Peter warned us about and compared him to a lion on the hunt. Be sober minded, Be alert. Your adversary, the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for anyone he can devour. Dark powers desire to isolate and separate us from the herd, our brothers and sisters in Christ in Christ, we protect and strengthen each other. Resist him firm in a faith knowing that the same kind of suffering are being experienced by your fellow believers and faith driven entrepreneurs throughout the world. The God of all Grace who called you to His eternal glory in Christ will Himself restore, established, strengthen and support you after you have suffered a little while. Thankfully, Jesus restores, establishes, strengthens and supports us.

Derwin Gray What if one of the wildebeests said to the thousands of others in its giant herd. Why are we running from a few lions when there are way more of us? What if instead of running from them, we stood close to each other and in unity started running full speed toward them? Our sheer numbers and powers will crush them. We will no longer be their prey. If only the wildebeest knew how powerful they were together, they would easily defeat the lionesses. Often as followers of Jesus, because of our ignorance of how strong we are together in Christ, we are overcome by the forces of darkness. Instead of living out our Holiness in Christ Jesus were sabotaged by the enemy. Instead of living in the collective strength of the church, we decide to be lone wolves. Many of us have yet to realize and live in the power of Jesus, who defeated the dark powers and triumphed over the power of sin and the power of his church, which protects us from the plans of the devil. Never forget the cross was bloody and the tomb is empty. Jesus won. We ride the coattails of his victory.

Derwin Gray There’s an old saying. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Often think this is what the accuser says to his demons who are assigned to destroy our witness. Dark power strategically attack God’s kids with three temptations. An emotionally healthy, spiritually Pete six zero explains them as number one. I am what I do. Performance number two. I am what I have possession. And number three, I am what others think. Popularity. Apparently the devil doesn’t think he needs to update his strategy because he’s had so much success with this one. One of the traps of the dark forces is to convince us that we are strong enough to fend off his assaults alone.

Derwin Gray The first temptation to believe I am what I do to fall prey to the performance mindset. After 40 days of fasting, Jesus was hungry. The tempter said to him, If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread. The devil knew Jesus was hungry and he wanted Jesus to use his power to turn the stones into bread. Jesus. He wanted Jesus to base his life on his performance instead of God’s provision. We either live from Jesus’s performance or we die from our own performance. Based living is a life rooted in our own accomplishments. As entrepreneurs, this is often the place where we get attacked the most. Our ventures consume so much of our time and energy that our identity is often misplaced in what we do. What we’re trying to build, what we’re trying to accomplish. Along the way, a great space of life is a life rooted in the accomplishments of Christ. The beautiful obedience of Jesus stands in the place of our ugly disobedience. Jesus defeated the first temptation by quoting the Old Testament. It is written mentioned, not live by bread, alone by every word that comes out of his mouth. Jesus trusted in God’s provision. He did not have to strive to make something happen. Jesus knew that his God deeply loved and treasured Him. This fact is true of us, too. His grace is enough for us. We’re not what we do. We are what Christ has done for us.

Derwin Gray The second temptation is to see ourselves as I am what I have. Greed is Satan’s spawn and leads us to say I am what I possess. Watch out and be on guard against all greed. Because one’s life is not the abundance of his possessions. The Tempter wants us to believe our lives are found in our possessions. However, Jesus wants us to know our lives are found and being possessed by Him, and in using our lives to serve others generously through our possessions. And Jesus period of testing, Satan took him to a high mountain and showed him all the world in its splendor. The dark power was tempting Jesus with. Aren’t you tired of the Jews being oppressed by the Romans? I can give you all this power. You can possess it all. If you bow down and worship me. Jesus responds with Go away, Satan, for it is written. Worship the Lord your God and serve only Him. Jesus’s allegiance was to God. Jesus won the war. We could not because we’re in Jesus. We are more than conquerors. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the devil’s work. 1 John 3:8. When we pray, do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. We are affirming Jesus as victory and Christ. We’re not helpless. He even gave us battle armor to wear called the Armor of God.

Derwin Gray The third temptation is I am what others think, also known as popularity. As entrepreneurs. This can also be a unique challenge. We want to be seen. We want our businesses to be successful, which is often synonymous with being known and liked. We we want to be viewed favorably by our community’s clients and other businesses. We want to be the best brand, have the best reputation to be the first thing that comes to mind when people are in need of our particular goods and services. In some ways, popularity can feel like the goal of entrepreneurship. Being successful is a good thing. But having our identity rooted in a firm foundation is critical in Christ. Our popularity does not matter because Jesus is our identity and temptation to the devil took the Messiah to the holy city, had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. In essence, Satan tells Jesus, show everyone how big of a deal you are. Jesus responds with it is also written. Do not test the Lord your God. Jesus was secure in God’s love. So the opinions of Satan or other people did not sway him from accomplishing his father’s will. We’re not what others say about us. We are what Christ has done for us and the love He speaks over us.

Derwin Gray To combat these temptations, we must adopt a wartime mindset. Jesus came to battle with the devil prepared and cultivating a wartime mindset. We must remember that because of Christ’s vast power, we live in victory. God is all powerful. Satan is not. God is present everywhere. Satan is not. God is all knowing. Satan is not. God is sovereign. Satan is not. God is greater than God is greater than Satan. It is not even close. And the same Jesus that obliterated the works of the devil has graciously given you battle armor. What the scriptures call the armor of God. He knows we’re going to face battles. We’re at war with powers and principalities every single day.

Derwin Gray But our God doesn’t send us into the cosmic battle without proper protection. In Ephesians 6, Paul describes the armor we get to put on. And it’s stronger than anything the enemy might throw at us. The belt of truth is the gospel. The good news that we’re in Christ concealed by the Holy Spirit. The salt of the enemy cannot withstand the power of the Holy Spirit that dwells us. The breastplate of righteousness protects our hearts from the enemies of salt of condemnation. We move forward in what I call gospel shoes. Paul says that our feet are fitted with readiness from the gospel of peace. As we charge ahead, we push back all evil and darkness and free, all those who trust the message of salvation. What ancient warrior would outlive a battle. Without a shield. Our God gives us the shield of faith as the ultimate defense. Knowing that Jesus, the protector and object of our faith is stronger than anything coming after us. And the last thing he tells us to put on is a helmet. And listen, as a former professional football player, I know the importance of a good helmets. Athletes have specialized equipment that was designed to protect them. But God. Has created a far superior helmet for his people, one encased in his salvation that protects our minds from the evil thoughts. And trains us to think about the world differently. But that’s not just what God gives us to wear into the battle. It’s what he entrusts us to hold.

Derwin Gray He has given us the most powerful weapon. Imaginable that will slay the demons that come against us. The Word of God is the source of the Spirit is a double edged blade that heals and gives life to those who submit before it. It destroys the dark powers that stand against him. The whole world is a spiritual war zone. Any time we walk into our offices or a lunch meeting or anywhere else, we’re walking into a battlefield. Can you imagine walking into a battlefield without armor or weapons? That be foolish? We do the same thing every day when we don’t take the time to put on the armor that God has gifted us with. And the enemy is ready to pounce. But when we pray, we access the protection and weapons necessary not just for survival, but for us to thrive. Entrepreneur don’t go into battle with bare fists and no protection. Take the gift offered by our God and use prayer as your weapon in a time of war. Thank you for inviting me to be a fellow traveler on this journey with you. May God bless you and keep you as you continue to follow his call and pursue his goals.

Justin Forman Man, I tell you, Henry, we talk about it like being in war all the time, and there is nothing like somebody to get us fired up. Thinking about the war and the battle that we’re in is a guy that’s been, you know. Helmet to helmet in football, going into battle, knowing that like if you’re not wearing your helmet, if you’re not wearing your pads and you’re going out into the world, you’re going to get hit. It’s going to hurt. And so I love, love, love Darwin’s framework, love that practical side of things. I know as sports fans we can resonate with that is I mean, you can’t get very far in a football field without your helmet. You can’t get very far without that shield. You can’t get very far without those pads. And it’s crazy to think as entrepreneurs that we think of you.

Henry Kaestner Yeah, I love the football analogy, but is you talking about as Derwin talks about of course I mean is part of it is of course putting the form of God on. All right. Most of our audiences can be familiar with the Ephesians 6 and how important it is, but I think that it’s also just really important to understand, like the enemy we’re facing. And for me, it’s almost like, Gosh, I’m on the line. I can see the defensive lineman over there. I think that that’s where the battle but also and I get like my clock cleaned from like a blindside hit and I had no idea where it came from because I didn’t really know who the opponent was or where they’re coming from. And so so oftentimes the national I’m like, my goodness, the battle here. The battle is this problem I’ve got or the battle is this customer is just so needy or just the battle is just I just can’t get this, you know, big elephant client across the line. That’s about and then, you know, that’s not a battle. The battle is a spiritual one. And we have to know the game that we’re in, who the opponent is. And then, yes, of course, put on the form of God. But it’s also turning our self away from where we thought that the rush was coming from and realizing this is safety blitz, something altogether different. And Derwin so good.

Justin Forman Yeah, you know, I love that analogy of I think so often times we look at darkness and we look at sin and brokenness and we think it’s like accidental. It’s just happenstance. It’s just not there. But when I hear this scripture and I love Derwin, how we started off this idea of like, the devil is prowling around. Like when I think of like lions and I think of is that analogy that nature shows? Like there is somebody prowling around seeking intentional watching every move is looking to destroy is not just crossing our path. There is a scheme, there’s something behind it. And I think if we do that and we recognize our opponent, it should cause us to bring another level of intentionality and raise our game. Like you’re not just going to think that like somebody’s just going to be accidentally or intentionally doing that and just as you said, run into that bliss. You’re not just going to walk into it, you’re going to brace for it, you’re going to try and avoid it. And I think the intentionality piece of that is something I’m so often reminded by that I miss is somebody really is out there to destroy us.

Henry Kaestner Yeah. And you know, it’s football season. We’re kind of dating this a bit, but we’re watching football and I think about this whole kind of the safety. You know, I think I’m a lineman. I think my opponent is the person on the other side of the line. And I know it’s the safety roaming around and defense at secondary. There’s just there to just completely just mess things up. And I don’t know where they’re going to come from. But Derwin lays out a framework that I love so I can know that that person roaming around to just cause havoc has three primary tools that they use, three defensive schemes or three blitz schemes that they’ll get. It’s just meant so, you know, walk us through it. So yeah.

Justin Forman Yeah, I love that. I mean, we heard that. We just heard that a little bit here, but I’d love to double click on that. As you’re saying, there’s three blitz is what a great analogy that they continually run. And if you’re talking about a defensive coordinator in the football season, if you run a blitz that’s effective, they’re going to keep running it till you figure it out. And so when you look at those three blitz as I love Germans, brain criminal like I am what I do where our focus shifts to the achievements that self-reliance, that independent spirit, that in some ways is a gift, but in some ways it can be our Kryptonite that instead of seeing it as God’s provision, we start to think more of ourself, we think more of what we do. We. I love his phrase where he says we either live from Jesus’s performance or we die from our own. And that I don’t mean I don’t know about you. That one. That is easy for me to see my own life. That’s easy for me to see. And entrepreneurs it like. This is a blitz scheme that works on us without much effort almost at times.

Henry Kaestner So the first of the three P’s, that one was performance performance. I am what I do. What’s the second one?

Justin Forman The second one he talked about is we heard is like a possession. I am what I have and you know, I’ve got three kiddos and maybe oftentimes it’s easier for me to see it in their life. But if I hold a mirror up, I can see it in my own life. And the greed and materialism as we are surrounded by all the world’s trappings, entrepreneurs, they can become driving forces. And how do we see on guard, you know, how do we cultivate? I think some of the things we talk about the Faith Driven Entrepreneur spirit of generosity so that one life is not in the abundance of our possessions, it’s not in the abundance of things that we have. And man is easy. Somewhere along the way, that’s a hook, that’s a blitzkrieg, that’s something that gets run. And then the third one is what he talked about as popularity. As I start to become. What of thinking about what others think of me? And, you know, if you can be generous and push off, I am what I have. If you can kind of push away the things of what I do in the insecurity of that, you can start chasing at some level a legacy or something of what others think, not a legacy of what Christ thinks, but that need for that external validation and approval takes precedence over our identity in Christ. I mean, when you weigh that out, it’s not hard to see that like those bullet schemes are being run a lot. And unfortunately, yeah, they break through a lot of times.

Henry Kaestner So you mentioned also so you know me well enough to know I love a good framework. So those three P’s huge takeaways for me. But you also mentioned some of the quotes that he had in there and I’d love to hear from our audience what they thought really jumped out for them. So you talking about we either live from Jesus’s performance or we die from our own, you know, similar to that, that really resonated with me is the devil cannot steal your salvation. But he can and in my life often times has steal your happiness and effectiveness for God’s kingdom.

Justin Forman Yeah.

Henry Kaestner He’s come to lie, destroy and steal. I just resonate.

Justin Forman You know, I think one of the other things that I know we’re kind of coming close to the time here in terms of today’s episode, but one of the things that I really loved is this phrase entrepreneur don’t go to battle like with just bare fists. Don’t go to battle without any protection. Take the gifts offer to us. I think too often times we think it’s like I have to put on the shield. I have to put on this faith, I have to do this. But I love the thing you often say, or just like this is our competitive advantage, this is our competitive advantage. And when you think about war, and especially when you think about war in the early times and the Israelites, what won those war, A lot of times, certainly God’s intervention. But there are so much when you talk about the tools of war that were effective, when you talk about, you know, Bronze Age and iron and just the advent of technology, how one thing would decimate the previous. And we don’t look at it as like we have a weapon of war, we have a tool in our hand, we have a helmet, we have a breastplate. We have all of these things that really can help us, not in a prosperity way, not in a prosperity gospel kind of way, but in a way that can really, truly compete and win for the things that matter in me. And I just I don’t know, maybe if it was part of the last 20, 30 years in the church, but it feels like it was like a god to you to put that on me. And it’s a competitive advantage that we often miss.

Henry Kaestner Yeah, right. Well.

Justin Forman Well, always great to be with you. Always great to debrief. Always great to celebrate some of the things of what we’ve seen God do. And this was certainly one of them at the Faith Driven Entrepreneur conference. What a gift it is. We’re grateful for Darwin unpacking this truth, but what you saw at the conference was just a glimpse. It’s just a piece of the puzzle. And we’re thrilled to say that here in the coming months there is going to be a new series talking about prayer, and it’s going to pull through some of the things that you would see in Darwin’s book that he had written on the topic, but also pulling through the scriptures and the frameworks and the things that apply most to entrepreneurs. And so that four part session of a study. Stay tuned. Just some wonderful work from our content team pulling that all together. Thrilled to make that available to Faith driven entrepreneurs everywhere to be able to use wherever you’re meeting with your Faith Driven Entrepreneur group, your C 12 group, any group that you have out there that connecting, we hope it’s an encouragement and a reminder of just all the incredible tools that are available to us. So stay tuned for that. Henry always great doing this. Would you mind just closing us in order prayer and praying over the entrepreneurs.

Henry Kaestner That are out to do that. But I also want to throw out a call to action. In addition to looking out for the series, We Can Have A Prayer is awesome sharing this time with you. Justin It’s awesome sharing this time with our audience. Of course, if this is a podcast, that endurance talk is something that encourage you consider for it and you’re on to somebody. This is a broader movement and this is a movement that you own you as the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. This is your movement and this is something that you can bring to other entrepreneurs that are out there wrestling with the same types of attacks that are coming in from the defensive secondary wrestling with the real challenges without even really knowing who the enemy is. So think about for this song, but I’ll pray for us in the meantime, Heavenly Father, thank you first and foremost, for the way you love us. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in the building of your kingdom under your power for your glory. Find is faithful and obedient. Find us motivated out of joy and gratitude for the gift given us the gift of life. And it’s in the name of that gift. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen. Amen.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you, with content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur or talk.