Episode 274 - How Entrepreneurs Can Recover a Christian Vision for Family with Jeremy Pryor
Entrepreneurs are often thinking about how to build the best team. But how often do we think about the teams under our own households?
In this episode, we’re joined by Jeremy Pryor, an experienced entrepreneur who has recently co-founded the organization “Family Teams” We get into practical ways we can care for our spouses and our kids. We’ll also unpack what he calls the failed experiment of Western family and hear how he sees scripture calling us to a better way.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Joseph Honescko: That whole work life balance thing seems to be extra complicated for those of us who are running our businesses. Some might even say it's impossible. But what if there really is a better path forward? As entrepreneurs motivated by her faith. We know that were called to lead and love our families even more than we lead and love our businesses. Most of us understand this problem at a cognitive level, right? So why do we still struggle with it? Today's guest, Jeremy Pryor, suggests that the problem we face is actually more deeply rooted than we might even think. He says that the entire Western family experiment has failed and that the only solution comes from recovering a biblical framework for our households. And he's a guy who knows the ins and outs of this situation. He's an entrepreneur, too, who has started multiple companies and put his framework into practice in 2019. He co-founded the organization Family Teams with Jefferson Bethke to help mothers and fathers lead their families well. He joins Henry, Rusty and William on this episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast to talk about how God's word can become the key to a flourishing, powerful and life giving family. Let's listen in.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Future of National, our podcast. Before we get into the role and mission in life of Jeremy Pryor and how it encouraged us to lean into family and mission and faith. I do want to have a quick public service announcement. We have gotten together and done almost 300 of these and we want to make sure that we hear back from our audience. Ours is a podcast that we hope is an instrument of reconciling the loneliness that we all feel a lot of times as entreprenuers, and that this might be something that will be used by our audience to share with others, to encourage them through the different stories that make an impact on their life. So in order to do that, we need your help. We need to hear from you about what you think works, what maybe doesn't work. Everything is fair game. From things that you'd like to hear us do in terms of guests or themes or format, anything. But please do let us know. And you can find this survey at faith driven entrepreneur.org forward slash podcast survey all one word. So we got a friend on today, Jeremy Pryor and Jeremy and I first got to know each other 12 or 13 years ago when he was at [.....] changed the way that we think about YouTube videos. But Jeremy, it's great to see you again. And it sounds really cliche, but you don't look like you've aged at all. You look great. And most importantly, over the last 12 years, God's taught you a lot of things and you have found yourself at the intersection of faith and family and mission and just the importance of multiple generations getting together on mission and on purpose. What did you see? What needed fixing in your life and in society that caused you in this place?
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah, well, I think that one is I kind of grew up very confused about the way that family in the church just seemed like it was constantly falling apart. You know, the Western culture, we can see how much the family is in crisis, but the church seemed almost like a lagging indicator of the family dysfunction as opposed to really completely revolutionary, like leading the way that we're so in the conversation in the church tended to be, hey, we need to do a better job. You know, man, step up, do your duty, focus on the family. And so that kind of duty based message, which cause a lot of particularly fathers and fathers that are really winning in work to, you know, at work, I got these teams really working on their it's awesome. I feel like I'm doing what God's called me to do. And I get home and I'm like, This just feels like something I have to do, right? That's one way to kind of frame the way that I think a lot of particularly Christian fathers and I think mothers can to feel about the disconnect between work and their family, particularly if they find that work is really fulfilling and fitting their life. And so I grew up in the Seattle area where there was just a lot of very hyper individualism. And from that place, I spent a semester abroad in Israel and in the Middle East. I just saw a very different way of looking at family and particularly the way that they would look at family and business. What you noticed when I kept on running into in the Middle East with both Arab and Jewish fathers was that they saw business as a subset of family as opposed to, hey, I'm an individual. All of us as different family members, we're all individuals, we're all kind of going off doing our own thing. And then we come together and we sort of have rest recreation as a family. But then when we do productive work, it's all outside the family. And wasn't there not building businesses? It's not that they're not engaging in the wider economy. It's really a mindset shift. They were building a household or they were building something for their family. So I started to wonder, is that just a cultural thing? Right? Is that just something that certain cultures have and something that in the West we just think of life more individually? So the way that that started to kind of coalesce in my own mind was we have a view of family that I think is best described the analogy as the nest, right? So unless there's a place for you, go to kind of retreat and then you, you know, it resets every generation and all the chickens fly the coop, right? And then it starts over. And so in the west, we tend to have about an 80 year memory, becomes a family Most people can name with a great grandparents are, you know, we're not super into, you know, our roots structure. Whereas in scripture you see and within like the Jewish families, for example, I was interacting with these fathers, they had a much deeper memory. And when they would go to work, they were building assets for their family and they were thinking about business and their economic activity as a subset of family. Also see the sum, something like Proverbs 31. You certainly see this in example of of Abraham and the Patriarchs. And it was weird for me to see a, a modern culture, you know, and I was interacting with a lot of startups in Israel, in Tel Aviv, and just amazed at what they were building. But they saw this totally different way of thinking, particularly, I would say, different from where I grew up in the West Coast. So that collision, so it caused me to kind of take a big step back and say, what do I believe, number one, about what kind of family to want to build? How do I want to think business in relation to my family? And does the Bible actually give us any insight as to which direction to go?
Henry Kaestner: So it's fascinating. There are so many different places that we can take this. So one of the things that I think that you say I think is profound, but I really want to push into a bit is the way we do. Family in the West is mostly a failed experiment, and the scriptures are calling us back to a bigger and better design. Tell us a little bit more about why you feel that that individualism is a failed experiment.
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah, well.
Jeremy Pryor: We just found out recently that the United States is the number one country in the world with single parent families. So, you know, that blew my mind. [....] Research just released that recently also that about 60% now of people grow up at some point in their childhood outside the household, their biological father. This is historically very strange. Like we have to have a hypothesis for what happened to the family. Like there's clearly a crisis. There's something that is destroying the fabric of the family. And so when we're looking at scripture and trying to figure out, okay, is there something we can get from scripture to help us understand what has happened? And the church, again, there's a lot of areas in which we're not as bad as the culture, but it does seem like we're struggling with very similar challenges. And it does, I think, come from a hyper individualism that we've just decided culturally to accept that we don't primarily live our life [...] or in families or through families, but we atomized people into their individual identities and they live most of their life through those individual identities. And that is a historically strange thing to do. You know, in most times in history it has been way too dangerous to live in that way like you needed to live your life in an extended family team in order to just make sure that you could survive. And so what happened, I think in the West. Is that we have what sociologists call the assumption of stability so we could survive like our kids. They don't have to work with our family. They don't have to stay close to the family. They can go and explore a completely different individual life apart from the family. And they're not going to starve to death. You know, they're probably not going to die from the bandits come over the hill. They're likely to actually make it. And so what happens is we move in this direction of isolation or individualism. David Brooks recently said that when Americans become wealthy, they purchase loneliness. And we're noticing that's happening to us. We can see the statistics. We can see the the problems is creating. What I have not heard the church do is to actually diagnose the root of problem. Like what have we all agreed to? What are we capitulated. And it because this is also again, it's true people that believe the gospel. And so what was really surprising to me was in certain cultures, you don't need to tell fathers to focus more on their family. We tend to diagnose the problem, as you know, we just need to get fathers to love their kids more. You know, the problem is so much deeper than that. We don't even know what family is. And if you go all the way back to Genesis one, it's one of thing that's really interesting to me is that Genesis one is really God creating this world, obviously before the fall. And he has a huge project to create, to have his creation, his creatures accomplished. And so he creates human beings, he creates the first family. And he says that family be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and rule over creation. And one of things I think it's important to do is take a step back and say, we had that problem. We had a massive project that we needed to accomplish that would take hundreds of years, thousands of years to accomplish. What would we do? And I think we would start a business. We would start a government. We would start a nonprofit. God's answer to that project was to create a family. And so that's really interesting to me. Obviously, it's a certain kind of family. If their goal is to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue and rule. This family has to work together to accomplish that mission. It's not a mission that could be accomplished in one generation. So it's a multi-generational family. And so the way that I think about the biblical blueprint, a family is a multi-generational team on mission. It's to take on the responsibility that God's given us as individuals, but as families. And so then you see that the next part of the story is when it starts to become unveiled, is the people who are interacting with the Lord are these multi-generational families. That's what you have, you know, in Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham and all the way through Scripture and David's family. And so each of these iterations of family, these different family teams, there are given these missions and God is interacting with them over the generations. We don't believe that anymore in the West. We don't believe that in the church. What we really think is that the family is a springboard for individual success. And so a good family and I was talking to a leader of a family ministry and I you know, we were talking about this and I said I said, in the West, our definition of family success is sort of springboard for individual success. If your kids launch out and are successful and restart as individuals and we're like, bam, that is success. And he was like, Exactly. That's what our whole ministry is built to create. And I had to sort of stop and say, I think that's the root of the problem. I don't think that's what a family is. I think we think that's what a family is. That idea of the nest that we're here to provide springboards for the individuals of our family. But it's clear in scripture God didn't designed the family to be a springboard for individual success. He designed the family to work together. Every single child that comes into that family is a part of a larger team, and that team is given a mission. And so that move from the mission is a family mission to an individual mission disintegrated us. And so now how do we balance all of the crazy things we have in our lives? Because we don't have an overarching principle through which we see how we do our lives. We don't have this community through which we live our lives and try to accomplish things God's given us. We primarily see those as individual things. And when you do that, that is incredibly destructive to the family. It's going all the way back to why are we the number one country in the world of single parent families? It's because of this is because we don't need the family anymore. We are primarily extracting from the family wherever we can get to be an individual. And the place where I kind of come back and really want to have this conversation primarily is with entrepreneurs, because an entrepreneur has a unique opportunity to make this decision. I think it's very difficult for people who are working in employment situations that have almost no control of their time. The resources to they can decide to go back and adopt more of a family team mindset. But entrepreneurs have a lot of ability to craft the kind of lifestyle that they want to have for their family. And so I primarily work with Christian entrepreneurs who are attempting to reintegrate their lives together as a family and as they're thinking about the future, their children, their grandchildren and great grandchildren, as they're thinking about how to live their life as a family. An entrepreneur can decide to create my children into work. Do we live a holistic life together as a family, or do we continue to live this sort of more individualized, atomized lifestyle?
Rusty Rueff: So that's fascinating. Jeremy. Look, you know, you scaled companies, you came out of the advertising world, you had a creative agency when you adopted this pretty radical change of philosophy. I would say, you know, from what as you said, we were being either taught in the church or taught in society when you made this shift. What that look like? I mean, show us, you know, so we can learn from you. What were the some of the things that just had to change?
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah, it was challenging. And there's sort of a couple of things that we tried that really helped. The first thing was just this mindset shift that when I was going to work, I wasn't going as an individual. I'm a father representing our family, building a business for the sake of our multi-generational family. And so I was constantly finding ways to tell that story to our kids that this isn't Dad's thing, this isn't Dad's project, this is a family thing. And in trying to figure out different ways to make that work. And, you know, one of the things I was committed to do during that whole season is, for example, we have five kids. I took one of my kids to work with me every day. So on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they were, you know, as a 7 or 8 year old, they'd sit in board meetings. I would talk to them, you know, in between my meetings with people. They would interact with the different employees in our business. And it's just something that I, I offer to all of our employees at our business. I said to them, look, I know that since the Industrial Revolution, basically, you know, family and work have been disintegrated. And I think that's been a disaster. So I don't know how to it's very difficult in a modern industrial economy to reintegrate those things. And I know that everyone is kind of doing their own thing. So what we offered our employees, for example, was we said, you guys can attempt what we called an experiment, an integration. So I know that one of the problems with the total disintegration between family and work is that we assume that when somebody is on the clock, they are 100% focused on work, right? There's no integration at all. You're on the clock and your job is to work. And I agree with that. I think that as we've told employees and your time is your time now, your time is it's work time. Now, one of the questions I asked and one of these I said are places what would happen if you would find a way to integrate, you know, let's say your kids into work in some way that required a 5% efficiency hit. So now instead of being 100% focused, I'm 95% focused. Is it worth all of that time I got recaptured. So for me, for example, I'm spending, you know, five, six, seven more hours with my kids every week than I otherwise I would not [....] is that one on one time that I'm getting to have with my kids in between meetings and, you know, working with them in that way. That was an experiment that we ran as a family, and it worked so well that we decided to continue to do it for years and continue to expand it to more and more time. There's lots of ways that we can try to push back against this assumption that our work and our family life should be completely disintegrated. And so that's one example. The last one, I would say is, you know, we started our first business. We started an e-commerce business right after I left ministry and we got an investor in that business. And we would do board meetings every month. And in my board meetings with him and there were like 2 or 3 hour long board meetings, he would come with his three sons and they were all kind of in their late 20s, early 30s. And of course it was 2 to 3 hour board meetings. I would sit there in this boardroom and this father would often pause the meeting and just turn to his son to kind of explain something, because they owned a whole portfolio of companies and they were investing a lot of different businesses. And so I would sit there sometimes and just like, wait for him, you know, to finish that process of explaining things. And, you know, this went on for years. And I remember one day just sitting there listening to him, you know, talk to his son. And I kind was just did the math. And like, this guy spends more time with his kids in their 30s than most dads I know, spend time with their kids when they're still in their house. And I was a young guy in my late 20s and I just made a decision right then. And I was at that time I wasn't doing business for family reasons, but this really tweaked me. I was like, I got five kids. I want that to be an option someday and I'm not going to work like it's going to work with me. But there's certain career paths or certain lifestyles. I can choose where that would be a possibility and certain career paths and certain options I could choose about my business ownership, but that would be an impossibility. So let me decide to do that so that that's possible. And so we started in our late 20s, this process of thinking through in every business and asset development that we were doing from the perspective of what do we want this to look like when I'm in my late 40s, 50s, 60s and now we're getting into that phase, right? I'm a grandfather now. My kids are older, they're adults. Most of my kids are adults now. And so virtually everything we do from a work ministry perspective is integrate with our kids.
Rusty Rueff: And that's really cool, you know? Hey, Henry, didn't you do something similar? I mean, didn't you take your boys this summer on some of your FDE.
Henry Kaestner: So I did. I did. I've got three boys, so I'm fascinated, of course, about three generals talking about the guy that was born in the lives of three boys and my youngest one, and said he's always wanted to work with me. And that's been cool. The middle one and the older one I didn't think had any interest really in what I was doing at all. But they came to me this summer and said, I'd like to work with you, but it brings up a question and I've got and I loved it. It was awesome. Super cool, really rich time because I was able to talk to them about why I did what I did and the mission and what hopefully would advance in God's kingdom because we were doing this work under God's power for His glory. What does it all even look like? And that was really fulfilling for me. I do wonder, though, when you have different kids, each of whom in in our case, none of the three boys look like me at all and they're all completely different. I'm unbelievable. It makes me wonder if you had this kind of this sense of wanting your kids to be part of the family business, which is very attractive to me, to be very clear. But then maybe 1 or 2 of them opt out or feel like they're on the outside looking in and just understanding that dynamic as it continues. If there is some level of expectation that, Hey, dad really wants me in this business and there's something this multi-generational business, and yet I feel like I failed because my two brothers are doing it, but I'm not. And just what are the unintended consequences of being explicit about wanting my children to be a part of this mission I'm on, whether it's in philanthropy or whether it's investing or just general entrepreneurship. Is one of them or two of them or all three of them end up feeling like they'd disappointed me if that doesn't happen.
Jeremy Pryor: And that's why I think the better. Maybe phrasing is you want to be an option. And that's what I would tell my kids growing up. Like I want it to be an option. If you want to work with me, it's more on them. I'm like, I have these assets. I'm building them in such a way that I could partner with you, you could partner with me, and if you would like to do that and I told my kids I expected there would be seasons where that's not going to be the case. You're in exploring other things. You're going to be, but I'm going to make that an option for you. And then the other part of it is I would say my value is for integration as opposed to like we have this one family business and this is what I think is different to an entrepreneur and maybe somebody who who owns just one family business. So we've we started you know, we have, you know, multiple businesses and a couple of ministries. And, you know, we have assets that we built. And so what we did is we started a legacy business with the resources we had and that legacy business, which is, you know, for us, it's mostly real estate investing. That is something that all of my kids are interested in, you know, because these are assets that they're going to inherit. And so what we do is we started working together and it provided in that particular business. So we have much more specialized businesses like a [....], you know, that where I was similar to Henry, where I had one of my kids that was kind of interested in that business. And I think sometimes with a lot of dads, they get fixated on their one business that they do. And it does appeal as a specialization to maybe one of their kids. The other kids like that doesn't resonate with me. But a legacy business is different. This is why I really as I'm kind of coaching fathers who are entrepreneurs to think about this, to separate a legacy business from whatever scale business they're using to really generate a lot of their resources. And a legacy business is basically the wholly owned, capital intensive family. And it's really important that the kids take a role in that. It's not a full time job. It could be like, for example, in our real estate, my son, you know, he loves doing renovations. My daughter does property management, my wife does the books. You know, I find the deals like there's been an open doors for much more of a high variety of the different skill sets of our kids. And it's not overwhelming. And it's very clear from a future perspective why they might want to invest in learning to steward assets because they're going to inherit assets. That's an example of this isn't necessarily taking over all of their work life, and it's just there are different open doors. And so our family in other way, what kind of picture is our family is like a hub. We own various things. We have ministry of opportunities that we're part of. We have businesses that are more specializations. We have, you know, investing that we do. And, you know, these are all open to you and they're designed for integration. And at that point, it's an invitation to your children as opposed to demand.
Rusty Rueff: That's cool. I must shift gears just a little bit here. And I want to talk about busyness and success and how those two things. And I'm guessing Henry started a business. William is in the middle of starting a business. I've started a business and we all have been. I'm guessing, William, you're not sitting around figuring out what to do these days. You've got plenty of things to keep you busy, right?
William Norvell: Well, on occasion, yes. I get few task, few task.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah. So as entrepreneurs, you know, we're always busy, and I guess we sort of think we need to be busy in some ways, right? It because we have people relying on us and things to do. So, Jeremy, how could you help us as entrepreneurs, everybody who's listening, figure out how to get this sort of balanced perspective, you know, a business success and especially in the context of faith.
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah, it is. I think how to order your life is a huge challenge. So the way that we do it, we believe that God has basically provided a technology that allows for us to order our lives properly as families. And it's a technology that's called the week. Like, I think that it was actually invented by God in the.
Jeremy Pryor: Week as in w e e k.
Jeremy Pryor: is an invention. The God and God specifically says in Exodus 20 when he talks about the fourth commandment, he the Sabbath, he says, In six days you shall labor and one day you shall rest. Because that's how I did this as a pattern for you. So a seven day rhythm in designing your ideal seven days is the way that we kind of go about balancing and kind of working through busyness. And for us, you know, that starts with keeping a Sabbath. And so in our family, you know, we it's similar where it, you know, Genesis when it says and evening and morning are Sabbath kicks off on Friday night. And so we host a large multi-generational family dinner every Friday night. And so we have about, you know, 15 to 20 people that come to that meal. And so we we enter into rest together. And so there's a meal. And so that pattern of we're going to work really hard for six days and then we're going to rest for 24 hours. So Friday night, Saturday night, that's been our rhythm. We've been keeping that for the last 15 years as a family. It also allows us to experience our family identities that are very deep level. So a lot of people don't get this experience maybe at Thanksgiving or and so and it's so we're so in a practice that I think oftentimes it can be a tough experience. But we do this every week and this is another thing that we lived in in Israel several times and just were so impacted by these Jewish families and how, again, they they see family differently. And when you have when your peak experience every week is at a table with your family, it does something to the way that you view all of life. And so that's what we try to craft. That kind of peak moment in our week is when we come together around a table and it's really timeless. Like nobody's running off to do anything else. I mean, it starts and then it goes for, you know, 3 or 4 hours and we're just there with each other, playing games, telling stories, you know, eating. You know, we've got four generations now present at our table. My parents are there. April's my wife's mother all the way down to my grandson. And so, yeah, it's just that, I would say allows us to work really hard. So if we're working six days a week and we're working in an integrated way, we don't mind working 12, 14 hour days, you know, some of the days of the week. Again, it's not 12 or 14 hours away from my family. It's very integrated. And we all know the Sabbath is coming. We're we're going to have just that timeless right to enter into a completely different kind of mode of life with each other.
William Norvell: Jeremy, it sounds like you had a lot of experience talking to entrepreneurs that are trying to make this happen. I'm curious. One of the struggles I have to say for myself is like. I hear everything you're saying. I mean, it all makes sense to me. But I've got investors. I've got employees. How do you counsel people, Entrepreneurs? When is rest one? When has rest been earned? When have you, quote unquote, done enough? I feel like in my small entrepreneurial group of people try to encourage people. It's like we want all of our family. But people trusted us and gave us money. Like there's always another sale you can make. There's always something you can do. How do you triangulate that on a day to day basis of, you know, I have worked a good day. I have given this day to the Lord. I've worked under him, and it's okay to turn the phone off for two hours and spend time with family. That is that struggle that I feel like me and a lot of my friends just fight there and we want to steward God's resources well and the people that have taken a chance on us but also love our families.
William Norvell: Yeah, well, yeah, we just said they're they're God's resources and therefore I think he's the only one that can answer that properly. When you have so many stakeholders who are putting pressure on you. So I think, yeah, one way to think about this is you guys remember which day that God created Adam and Eve, you know, remembering creation days one through seven when they got created.
Henry Kaestner: Six, right?
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah, six. So they were creating day six. And what was day seven?
Henry Kaestner: Rest first. Yeah.
Jeremy Pryor: So their first day before they worked, before they did anything, their first day before they earned anything was rest. And so one of the things that we constantly have to tell our families we're working or others in the churches, we don't rest from work. We work from rest. So if you're constantly trying to earn rest, I think that there's going to be a nagging suspicion that I don't know if I did enough this week, right? I don't know if I please enough people. There's more. I could have done more. And so I think that's important to go the other direction with it because I don't think you can ever shut that down. I think you have to ask, and this is why it says you. This is why he makes the rest a commandment. And I don't think as a New Testament, you know, or Jesus, I don't feel like I have to rest or I have to keep a Sabbath. But I do think it's really helpful to me as I study the scripture, that God, he wanted his people to keep a Sabbath. And so He commanded it so that those voices would be turned off so that you wouldn't feel you have to earn it. And so because you have to give yourself that space first. And the same thing happened with this is a pattern throughout scripture, right? That when God brought the children of Israel out of slavery, he didn't like get them to earn something. And then given the law, he first gave them the Torah. And then after he came along on Mount Sinai, you know, that it was afterwards that he brought them into the Promised Land or with the gospel. And Jesus, Jesus first tells us who we are in the gospel. He He saves us first, while are yet sinners. He died for us in that state. And then from that place we come into our work. And so to me, that's almost the definition of the difference between slavery and sonship. In scripture. You know, a slave has to earn rest and a son is granted it by his identity.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, So many different questions that I want to take off the shelf, but we're going to need to close soon. But just a couple ones. Just rapid fire, because you've really got me going here. Just fourth with the biblical precedent and the model. And then how applies to me with three teenage boys, two of whom are in college and getting set and talking about career, it changed my paradigm here a little bit. I just want to explore a little bit more some operational details. So if you're working on, say, real estate and the legacy business, you got multifamily and somebody one of your children is really good at like lawn care, like they're just like great landscape architect and someone another one is better financial models, presumably the open market one has a higher replacement cost than any other. How do you think about salary compensation? Is that divided equally?
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah, it's tough because you have to decide if you're going to create a micro economy inside of your family in order to even that out or if you're going to set a market economy right. And I can go back and forth on that. Henry. So my son started a construction company with, you know, he's in discipleship house with a bunch of guys. And so, you know, they're right now living in a market economy. And I think at that stage, that age, I think that's really important, that they live in a market economy. And so they're being paid where they can generate and I'm a part of the business. Again, it's not about them necessarily. Joining me, both my daughter and my son, they both started their own businesses and then my wife and I, you know, help them. We consult with them. We work with them. You know, that's the season they're in and they deal with the market economy. In those cases, those people living in my house, my daughters who are younger, they live in a micro economy that I create. And so, like we just had a conversation this week actually, where there are some really important things that I want them to be a part of, but I don't want to compete with other possible rates that they might get in the market economy. And so I'm paying them, you know, more like a premium in order for them to do what makes the most sense for our household. So like one of our Airbnb is like we're, we're paying them a little extra than we would necessarily pay somebody to clean the Airbnb because we get to do that together. And there's a lot of other responsibilities and flexibilities that are needed to be part of this household. And so I think that that's the kind of world that. I would say when my kids are older and they're beginning to address the market, then I kind of want them to deal with the market rate challenges they're going to face out there. So both my two oldest kids are in that market economy, whereas my younger kids are still in the micro economy in our family.
Henry Kaestner: Got it. Okay. So market economy allows for a certain degree of autonomy, which helps me think through the Gen three issue, which is that this is one thing when you've just it would seem to be more and more difficult as the generations go down. So there's enough independence out there, enough example of the Shabbath type of family getting together that that makes an impression on Gen three. They see that lived out. But there's not flexibility about being able to participate in the broader market economy and somebody potentially working harder than another or potentially earning more. And yet there is this and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth is this kind of like cheering one another on people feeling free to advise and counsel is sought during the Shabbat about a problem that they're experiencing in one of their market economy jobs. Maybe speaking to that a little bit before William brings this to a close.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, for sure. I think you want your kids to figure out how to work in that marketplace, but not alone. It's okay to give children the privilege of the full weight of the family's wisdom, the family's resources. Right. The most powerful kind of privilege in the world, I think, is fatherhood. Privilege is a great book that Warren [....] wrote about. He said that they called him Dad Deprived boys. Right. And then father privilege like these kids coming from. And that's something we want for everyone. Like we want everyone to experience that. And so part of that is we need to make sure that we are giving our kids as much as we can to help them while they go out and attempt to work in the economy the way it is. And so those Shabbat conversations. I mean, we're because of the way our week is structured. I have those business meetings already scheduled in my normal workweek. And so I'm having those business meetings all the time with my kids in their businesses to figure out how to help them, to get them connected to whoever, to help them succeed. And so I would say in the Shabbat, when we kind of come back into that world, then it's pretty much, you know, the kinds of conversations. There's really almost no productive work related. We're doing a lot of storytelling about our family's past. We're talking about a lot of vision and, you know, looking into the future. We're studying the scriptures together at that time. We're celebrating, you know, with each other. And so there's a lot of leadership in the direction of like how to enter into that kind of timeless moment. But in order to do that, we do need to have enough time to have those business conversations during our workweek.
Henry Kaestner: Rusty, do you know who Jeremy sounds like?
Rusty Rueff: Who.
Henry Kaestner: He sounds like David Bruckner. He sounds like a messianic Jew.
Rusty Rueff: He does, that is true
Henry Kaestner: He sound like somebody who's kind of first for the Jews, then for the Gentiles and the Jewish lineage and history of the Old Testament? What does that teach us about God's word and his promises and family and then building the saving grace of Jesus on top of it, It sounds to me really compelling framework. Rusty has come out with this great book called Faith Code that he's coauthored with one of his great friends, Terry Brisbane. But another one of the three guys he gets together is guy named David Brickner, who runs a ministry called Jews for Jesus. And I'm hearing echoes of that through what Jeremy is talking about earlier.
William Norvell: That was that's probably the most beautiful setup for our last question you've ever done right there. You walk through the entire Old Testament, through the New Testament, through the grace of Jesus on top. And therefore, where do we end? We end at the Word of God. Jeremy We love to end every single one of our shows by referring back to Scripture and just saying, Where does God have you today? And that could be something He put on your heart this morning, even in this minute can be something you've been meditating on your whole life. But just if you could invite us into your journey with Scripture today, we really grateful.
Jeremy Pryor: Yeah. Well, that's great, guys. Well, there's one verse that I was reminded of today that I think maybe it would be kind of bring us together. So oftentimes when things are broken, when they're not working, we as entrepreneurs sometimes can think that the solution is to innovate. And I definitely have that instinct. And I've learned so often now because what you guys just said, because there's thousands of years of scriptural wisdom that oftentimes the problems we're experiencing the present or because we left something in the past. And so there's a verse in Jeremiah 6:16 that's almost become like a family life verse for our family. And it says, This is what the Lord says. Stand at the crossroads and look. Ask for the ancient paths. Ask where the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. And so sometimes it's a stand at a crossroads, like sometimes, and you're heading the wrong direction. Maybe stop right and look at these ancient paths. You know, sometimes the solution to our problem is not an innovation, but something that we have left in the past. And that's what I discovered. I really think this is true about the way we think about family and ask where the good ideas and ultimately what he's saying as the result of that is rest. And that's why we talk about this ancient way of the Sabbath, if you can, business, right And you get family right, you kind of embrace these ancient paths. Then you get rest and for your soul and man, we all need soul rest. And that's what the Sabbath is all about. We always want to enter into our Sabbath. We're talking about there's body rest and soul rest. And they're not the same thing. You know, body rest is like, I'm so exhausted that I can't answer the email. Soul rest is it is finished. It's the hardest work that I ever really had to do is already been accomplished for me. And that does something to my soul. That's the gospel. That and where do we learn that we have to stop working and just receive the gospel? And so we want to do that on a weekly basis. Just enter in as a family into the rest that's already been earned for us.
Joseph Honescko: 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.org.
Recent Episodes
Follow the podcast