Hope for the Next Generation with Ron Luce

Hey, welcome to Brave Men Today. I'm really fired up about the man I'm about to talk to. We just had a conversation talking about what it is to change the future of the world. It starts with 13-year-old young men. I think he's right on track with it. His name is Ron Loose. And Ron Loose has been a friend for years. He was the head of, started a thing called the Choir of the Fire in Teen Mania. And you may have heard of it. If you hadn't heard of it, you've probably seen the results of it. They did, they reached hundreds of thousands, millions of young people with huge stadium events for years in the 90s and early 2000s. And up through 2015-16s somewhere in there, he transitioned into the ministry. He has now, we're going to talk more about it. But, man, nobody has been on the forefront of reaching the next generation more than Ron Loose. I so appreciate his friendship. We are allies and we root for each other. And he's excited and fired up about what we're doing with Christian men's network. Our dangerous nations work going around the world, the whole initiative and project and mission outreach to reach the most dangerous nations in the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ and raise up strong men, strong families, strong churches from Nigeria to Pakistan to Somalia to the southernmost tip of the Philippines. We are hard at work on this and excited about what's going on. Hey, so Ron Loose, oh, you see if you're looking it up at all. And remember for all your discipleship needs for mentoring and helping men reach their place of spiritual formation in Christ, go to cmn.man, Christian men's network, cmn.men. And brave men, the brave men podcast and then we have the brave men email, which comes out three times a week. Inspiration, keep everybody fired up. Not only that, you know, it's about enlarging our hearts. It's about strengthening us. It's about being able to withstand the chaos and compromise of this culture and being able to stand strong with courage and character. That's why we're doing the brave men podcast about enlarging our hearts. Fired up the runs here with us. I'm excited. You're here. Please tell somebody about it and wherever you're listening to the podcast, go in there and click on subscribe. That actually the algorithms actually put us in front of more people. And no matter what country you're from, thank you for being a part of it. You can write to me at Paul at cmn.man. Paul at cmn.men. Thanks for being with us today on brave men. I'm fired up about this. This is going to be a great time together. Thanks for being here, bro. Brave men. It's brave men with Paul Lewis Cole. Wisdom and courage for the journey. Hey, Ron Lewis, you were right. You wrote a book called Battle Cry for Generation 18 years ago. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And in that in that battle cry for generation, Ron Lewis said, we are in a fight to save the youth of America. And you talked about a coming day where there would be as, as has been said, no seed of the gospel in the next generation. And Ron, you were right tragically. What do we do about it now? Yeah, I wish I wasn't right, honestly. And back then when I wrote the book and we did campaigns, stadium events, all of this, we were called alarmists, like, oh, you're just trying to row everybody up. Yeah. And really, it wasn't even my dad. I was data that I cited from Barna in other places. I was just trying to coalesce the body of Christ around it. So we move us down. No, this was data driven, not just like, hey, I think or I don't like or I feel right. This was data driven. Everything you've done has been data driven to get the church at least engaged. But the good news now is that, see, back then, like we're doing big rallies every week. Yeah, where you had teen mania, yeah, and choir, the fire, choir, the fire conferences. I mean, I remember you going into, like, I can't remember the cities all across the nation. 33 cities a year every year. I mean, we got the week. Yeah, it's crazy. And by the grace of God, we saw millions of young people come, but the problem is, is that stating events don't change the generation. They can, they can be grading counters with God. But the problem has been we've been having those kind of encounters with not just us, but all kinds of ministries for all these years. But in spite of all that, we keep losing more of each generation, both here in America and around the world, in spite of everybody working hard. I'm working hard, youth pastors working hard. Okay. And so it caused us to push back and go, okay, let's look at the data now. What's going on with the young people here in America and around the world. But also, let's look at who knows how to reach and disciple. Like who's doing a remarkable job at that around the world. And so we went on like a four or five year study as I found about a dozen churches around the world that are truly remarkable that they focus on reaching and discipling, reaching and discipling. They've been doing it. When you say the word disciple, it's, you know, a lot of people think, well, it's the four classes you take, I have to say, but they think of it completely different. It's 101, 201, right through. Rather than thinking, it's the process of becoming more like Jesus. The spiritual form of meeting with him, learning from him, metrics along the way. And so, and you say metrics, what you mean is, are we actually progressing? Are we progressing in our walk with Lord and like increasing character, increasing? Are we changing the data, for example, in a city, you know, as far as crime or depression and things like that? That's one way. Are we are we changing the practices of what young people actually do? For example, are they watching less porn than maybe their peers? Or are they spending more time in scripture? Are they watching less media than whatever, because whatever you watch is what shapes you. And so, and so anyways, we learn from churches around the world that are really remarkable at reaching and then discipling where they are taking them, they're reaching them in the sweet spot. The sweet spot globally seems to be about about 13 years old, where they, you know, like 90% of people come to Christ before 20, but the closer you get to 13, the more likely they are to come to Christ. All of that, yeah. A lot of youth minutes you've been focused on trying to reach kids who don't want to get caught. They're 16, 17, 18. They're cool. They're driving. They're drinking. I don't want to get caught by some guy who's trying to present his cool. 13-year-old wants to get caught. They're, they're thinking, okay, I'm not a child. I'm not an adult. What am I? But I don't know where I'm at. And they want to belong. Like what group will I belong to? Will it be the cool kids? Will it be the drug kids? Will it be this group? This music group? And usually the churches running right by them. These churches, one of the things they, they all do, some version of is they really focus on reaching kind of the bar mitzvah age, 12, 13, 14 years old. That's when they're going after them when they're most likely to come to Christ. Well, don't we see that in the world, Ron? I mean, here we are. We're talking about things as a church and we tend to forget that there is a massive advertising world that is studying our seven, eight, nine, 10-year-olds. They know exactly when something's tipping, right? They know, okay, this is when they're interested in that. This is when they're interested in this. And they change their marketing. They change all the things based on that, right? Yeah, and when the big study came out, not even look at that. Yeah, big study came out several years ago. 13-year-old is the branding age where they, they figure the marketers of the world. If they can get them to love their brand by the time they're 13, they'll buy it the whole rest of their life. So they go after them like crazy to buy their chips or their Nike's or whatever they can to get them to love it. And so, but the church is usually running right by them because, well, they come ... We're still treating them like kids. Right. And then if they do come to Christ at 13, like, what do we do with them? I'll come to church. I don't know what to do with them. How do you, I said, one of the other things we found remarkable at these churches around the world is they take them on a journey from the time the 13 when they come to Christ all the way to their 21-years-old. And they put them in what I would call like a pipeline of discipleship like Red Bull for your faith for seven years. It's Red Bull, Red Bull, Red Bull, Red Bull, just growth growth. And it's very overtly, we're going to train you how to live according to scripture. A Christian world view. Exactly. And so they're and they all are on a trimester system, 12 weeks and then 12 weeks and then 12 weeks with assessments along the way. So think about what they literally do is look at. What do you want them to look like at the age of 21 as far as their character or their practices and then they reverse engineer it. So what should they be learning at 13 and 14 and 15? And it's just like scope and sequence at a school, right? And then part of the process is within a year after they've come to Christ, they turn them into disciple makers. So now they're involved in discipling young people that are just a year or two younger than them. In all of that pipeline, they're not just learning, but they're helping other people learn. They're bringing other people along. Exactly. Yeah, which we know always grows us. Anytime we help somebody else, we know that that enlarges us, stretches us, right? Right. Increases our capacity. So this is data driven. So you had these huge conferences, acquired the Fireteen Mania. What, five, six years ago, you changed direction. Right. And went to this data driven in your building curriculum. It's called generationnext.me. Is that your website? That's the website. And our we developed the whole scope and sequence for churches because if you think about a pastor's thing, well, that's great, 13 to 21, but that's a lot of work to do. So we've actually scoped in sequence. We call it pathway to freedom. And we've got the first year and a half written churches already around the world, already have adopted it. And because they're looking for something that actually works. And when you look at churches that have been doing it for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, this is not like, oh, this is a nice theory. This actually works. It actually works. Yeah. And so that's what we want. I mean, you know, if I'm a pastor, and I'm trying to reach my community, I want stuff that works. And well, I'll tell you, particularly in the United States, and you know this better than all of us. Pastors are hit from 20 different directions. The next best thing to this thing, that thing, and at the same time, we're trying to deal with somebody's broken heart, broken marriage, abuse, whatever it may be. And then we're trying to do an upbeat Sunday service or Saturday night, Sunday, whatever the thing may be. We're trying to get the Bible study stuff going, trying to get it. I mean, we are just, I mean, we are working hard. Right. This thing. Right. Right. And it seems like youth ministry has been the thing where it's the obligatory thing. Yeah. We have a budget for it. We have a little room set aside, but we never expect a lot out of it because we really hope we can get a climbing wall someday. Right. Yeah. Well, we haven't, I think the challenges is that for all the sweat and the money that's been put in, we haven't seen extraordinary results. So we just kind of keep doing what we're doing. And we've have kind of a broken paradigm of youth ministry, which for the last 40 years has been sort of the same thing. Higher the cool guy with the tattoo to try to woo kids to your church. He leaves after a few years, then you hire the next cool guy. Well, no, the thing is, is that I went to a Bible college for a while. I was, actually, I was asked to leave two of the nicest Bible college. But that was just because I was surfing all the time. So, and they didn't give it as a course. I don't know, sure, it were a little short-sighted on that. But here was the thing is you come out of there and then you go be a youth guy and then put your really just trying to go do the next thing. Right. And be a associate, be an executive pastor and then move up, get your own place. So youth became sort of, yeah, just kind of the thing you do. But I can remember young people, 14, 15, and of course I came up in an era of great transition in America in the late 60s. And, and stuff shaking and moving, and man, by the time guys were senior in high school, and we're going to youth anymore. Yeah. Because it was like, we don't do that. You know. So we found that pastors that really coolness thing, pardon me, the coolness thing wore off. Right. Right. Right. And, and just because the guy had really cool torn jeans or whatever and all that, you know, it's just, I mean, you can spot him in Starbucks. Right. Right. Right. Right. That guy's a youth pastor. You know. But at the same time, I mean, it's probably one of the most important things we do in church life is the spiritual formation of our young people. Right. Right. And pastors that that can admit, like realize that you know what we have a problem here. We need some help. Then there's a lot of hope because as we present kind of a data driven process, we call it project 13 because we're teaching churches to focus on the 13 year olds. Okay. The bar mitzvah age, you know, making your faith real for your own and then help them to learn to go on a journey. Well, then this is great hope for both denomination leaders, pastors because even though pastor doesn't like he's not the youth pastor, he's thinking about what is my church going to look like in five years, 10 years, 20 years. It's what happens with the young people. That's what your church is going to look like. That's what it's going to look like. And that's what I explained that to I was sitting on a plane with a man and the guy next to me is with a really large investment firm. And I talked about we deal with fatherlessness and child abuse at christian men's network and he said, oh, it's interesting. I said, no, it's more than interesting. It's your future. He said, what do you mean? I said, if we don't solve the fatherless issue, if we don't solve this issue of young people spinning out and have no hope, I'm going to tell you something, all your investments and Toyota dealerships are, you know, whatever infinity dealerships, they're all 20 years from now. They're going down to you know why you're not going to have enough buyers. You're not going to have enough people working. We already have what the Wall Street Journal called a hollowing out of America, you know, through the fentanyl crisis and opioids. And because you've got all these small towns across the middle of America, they have no workers. Nobody, the people that grew up in there got off and drugs. They got off. They went to the big city. They didn't come back and they're just dissolving. And it wasn't because it wasn't because a young person grew up and said, oh, yeah, I got to get out of here. This is, you know, what happens? Their life just got captured by the enemy and their attention got captured and whatever captures that attention, you know, we'll end up directing your life. What's the data say about an average young person in our churches right now? Well, first of all, one of the indicators we encourage all pastors to monitor is, do you know the average age of people that come to your church that are 13 and up? Because across the board in America, the average age of a churchgoer of a mega-church is 40 years old, average age of a churchgoer in a small church of 100 or so is 53 years old, right? But if you look at the macro data around the world, the median age of Christians in the world is 30. That means half of all Christians are over 30, half are under, median age of Muslims is 23. So with that trajectory, so half of all Muslims plan to think about childbearing years and all that, they predict, Pew predicts that by 2050 Islam will be the dominant faith of the whole world, the dominant religion. And so one of the things we encourage churches to measure is, do you know your average age, not just from your membership data or whatever, because it is at the man of the woman, but 13 and up? And then what's the trend in six months and then in 12 months? Because most churches are growing a little bit older each year and they don't realize it. A little bit older. So slow cook. And so what happened in Korea in the last 10 years, they've closed 10,000 churches. Come on. Everybody died in the church. I mean, they're old, no young people. I mean, in Korea, you know, for me, just in my mindset is this bastion of Christianity, right? And it was. And it was, but it's not. Well, they went from two percent Christian to 33 percent Christian in one generation. Who's ever heard of that? That's amazing, right? Today, it's 1.7 percent in the young generation. Really? So they didn't as much as how great the revival was, they didn't get it to the next generation. So, you know, revivals can come and go based on, is the church focused on the next generation or not? So we encourage, we encourage churches to think like this. When, if the data, International Bible Society, all this is 83 percent of anybody comes to Christ, so between four and 14 years old. So any entrepreneur that knew that would say, that's 83 percent of my new customers are coming from, I got a focus on that. But the church doesn't do that because we don't know how to deal with the conundrum of, but Jesus loves everybody, let's try to reach everybody and we reach very few of anybody. But at the same time, Jesus did this when he was here on the planet in person. He loved everybody, but he also spent more time with the 70 than the crowds, more time with the 12 and the 70, more time with the three than the 12, based on receptivity. And so we can do the same thing, we can love everybody in the community, but also focus on those most likely to come to Christ, while the world's going after them, we ought to be going after them and then take them off. Absolutely. So, because they're in a malleable position. Exactly. And we've got, you know, the pornographers right now, and this is something, I mean, my dad said it 30 years ago, and he was right because it's still true. It's actually trended down. He was talking about going after 15-year-olds. And now, if you will, you're going after 10-11-year-olds. And I think the attorney general of the United States, and I know we've got friends of ours in countries around the world. And I would say the trend has got to be the same. And you travel a lot internationally. Would you say the trends are essentially the same? Very similar. 13-year-old seems to be this age all around the world where we find a lot of churches, even Nigeria. They have huge revival going on. It's like what happened in the 70s and 80s with Korea. However, they're not reaching their young people. The young people are like, hey, we're a part of this cool global generation, we're on our phones. And that's our parents' tribal cool thing in the church. We're a part of the global generation. And they are befuddled. They don't know how to reach their own young people in their own nation. And so we are partnering with churches like that around the world. So what I see is I see marketers who are trying to change and shift. This whole thing with target stores. The issue there was not that they had a particular brand of Pride Month or whatever. They've done that for years. They've had it in the back. But what they did to me is they tried to bypass parents and talk to kids, right? Because somebody somewhere within that organization who had an agenda said, you know what? We still need to get to the 10 and 11 year olds. Right. And that's essentially that pornography have done. I mean gamers, you know, anybody, they're going after you're going to talk about 13. You know, really it's 10, 11 and 12. It's junior high. You know, Sesame Street's doing Pride Month this this month. It is just heartbreaking. You know, oh my god. Yes. It is just heartbreaking. Yeah, you know, Pride goes before a fall. And the fact is is that, you know, it's um, you humility month. It doesn't go over that well. Does it? Doesn't give like marketing humility month. It's kind of like it's kind of like in the church. You know, we do leadership conferences. Yeah. And everybody wants to go on with us. But we do very few servanthood. Right. Hey, how about a serving conference? Yeah. You know, I'm good. Right. So, uh, but the data says basically that the 12 13 year old right in there is the maliable part, which is why we need to have fathers in the home. Exactly. Fascinating stat, friend of mine wrote a book called Boy Crisis. And when he wrote that, one of the things he discovered, and now I'm seeing it come out a little bit more because people are starting to use some of his data is that, uh, the best way for a, uh, and I'm talking about boys because Christian is now where we're, we're, you know, male oriented in that sense because I figure if we, if we change the hearts of men, we change everything. Yeah. So, uh, and we're about raising up dads. But, a young boy raised under father and a mother in the home, gender specific is the best way to raise a boy. The next best way, statistically, is a father. Father led. So, if there's a single parent, but it's a father, the child is almost at the same level as a father, mother. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Single mom is where the whole thing just drops off. Right. Because a, a boy needs that father. That's right. And when he came out with those stats, people are like, oh, yeah, man, this is your, your miss, missod, missodianistic. What is a missodianist? Yeah. That's like, you know, male, you know, female, bashing all this. No, we're talking about saving the life of the next generation. And, uh, every woman you talk to who's trying to raise children would say, I need a father figure. Right. In this boy's life. Right. I need somebody, which is why I believe we're supposed to, we need to raise up in the church of Jesus Christ. We need to raise up, uh, sports coaches. Right. I mean, think about think of 600,000 new literally coaches in popcorn or football and, you know, ice hockey and all these different things of 10, 11, 12, and 13 year olds. Think about if we raised up 600,000 men, right? Who, who coached those guys? Wouldn't that be fantastic? It would change everything. I, I thought also we ought to have like, uh, Christian big brother, big sister programs in our churches. Absolutely. For all those single moms who need, they know they need a male influence on their kids' life, but they don't know where to go. There's been a study, uh, a number of studies done on the efficacy of these different groups. One of the ones I thought that was interesting was that they said, uh, it didn't change the behavior long term. Was the scared straight. Remember that whole thing when you, you bring convicts in, right, ex-cons, you just scare the hell out of the kids and, uh, no, no real long term change, but the, but the one, one of the big programs that they said really made a difference was big brother, big brother, big sister. You know, somebody who took time and mentored and, uh, it's, uh, one of our partners, Tony Rory with Minne of Honor. Yeah. You know, that whole concept he's got, which is, just once a week, 90 minutes, once a week will change the way a young person sees things. So how do we do this as a church, Ron? Well, one of the things parents don't know how to disciple their own kids. Yeah. So, um, one of the, uh, ways we encourage parents like some of the tools I was talking about we developed is even if you're not adopting the whole thing in your church, you can do it with your, your own children. So generationnext.me, uh, and what's the name of the, well, they, uh, there's project 13 is one of the tabs there, where we teach churches how to reach and disciple the young generation and there's resources there. But it's something that, I can do that as a parent parent can do it and you get one for you, one for your kid and it's quiet time. So if something to do every day in your quiet time for like 10 minutes and at the end of the end of the week, there's discussion questions. So it's really a, like, you don't have to sit there and instruct your child. You're both going on a journey together. Let's discuss it and what the Lord is teaching us along the way. So it's a real practical hands-on thing that parents can do. And because a lot of parents like, I don't know how to disciple, they've never been disciples. Well, the book, no, the tools help them. It's more like an activity guide for you and Jesus every day for you, your son and, or daughter and Christ every day. So that's, that's one thing that we can do. But churches that have started to catch the vision, like, okay, we realize it's a different framework. It's a different paradigm. But, um, you don't have to change everything. But a lot of it is like, let's connect the dots, what you already want to do. You know, you want to reach kids, you know, you want to disciple them. Let's synchronize it better based on what we know is working around the world. And it's sort of like tipping your sale a little bit. You, you go a lot faster across the lake. Kind of, you've already got the sale. You already got the boat. Let's just get it in the right direction. So you can have a lot more traction. Yeah. We, if we raise up, and my, you know, my whole b-hag, you know, raising up pastors who disciple men and men who disciple men is that when we do that, it begins to, it, the matriculation of that just runs, it's like influences like water. It runs down. And it begins to change the atmosphere of things. And when fathers begin to actually father, when, when we begin to act with, uh, and give children security and affirmation and wholeness and value and, and discipline out of love, then it begins to change their, their hearts, right? Well, it becomes multiple, multiplication, like, yeah, it, it, it grows rather than linear. It grows exponentially because when you have people making disciples who make disciples, fathers making disciples out of their sons and all that, rather than abdicating fathership or discipleship, well, that's the church's job. That's why I pay tides and hope that you cope for the best kind of thing. That's right. Yeah. It's, it's like the man who just drops his child off at, at the church goes, Hey, you know, however he turns out, is your fault. Right. Right. Or it's worse than that. So fix my kid. I wrecked him here. Fix. Yeah. Fix my kid. And we, you know, we see a lot of that's the church's job. That's why I give you money, right? To fix them and that kind of thing. Well, meanwhile, the, the world's working 24 seven to mess up our kids, you know, because we don't accept responsibility. Yeah. Or again, one of the major reasons I see that churches don't adopt some sort of form of discipleship right now in the United States and in most of the world, only about 7% of churches actually have a fixed pattern of discipling men. In other words, here's the process. Here's, here's where you're going to go. We're going to do this and this and this. And I have nothing against pancakes. You know, I've got nothing against getting together in a fellowship thing, but fellowship always has to be the byproduct, not the, not the center of it. The center purpose must always be spiritual formation and discipleship. So, so I think for most of us as pastors and leaders, one of the reasons we don't disciples one, we don't know how we don't want to fall on our face. Number two, we've never been disciples. We got taught. We weren't fathered. Then we went to college and learned how to be a pastor, but they didn't teach. They didn't mentor me. Right. They taught me stuff. They gave me information. You know, so they didn't, they didn't, with the spirit of a father, you know, put their arms around me and say, hey, we're going to walk you through this till you're successful. Right. You know, so, so what happens is, if a man doesn't know how to do something, he's not going to go for it. Yeah. Right. Like we just don't want to look like an idiot in front of people. So we don't do this. We don't want to look like, you know, dumb dad in front of our kids. But the fact is, is that just even if we don't know exactly what to do, doing something is better. Right. Right. I mean, just sitting down with your seven and eight year old and saying, hey, we're going to pray tonight. Right. We're going to pray for mommy and daddy. And we're going to pray for, you know, maybe moms not there. We're going to pray for this situation. And just a 10 minute thing can begin to totally shift that. Right. And now we have the tools with, with what you're doing. Well, anything, and others building on what you just said. So if in fact, most pastors, even most men have not been discipled. Right. I wasn't discipled. I got on fire when I'm 16 years old. I'm out of my mind in love with Jesus. I start reading my Bible. I didn't even know it was okay to read my Bible outside of church. I thought I might get in trouble for it or something, but I just did it anyways, you know, well, you've given your testimony years and years and years. You really came out of an extremely difficult situation. Yeah. And the Lord, you know, did a lot of healing, a lot of restoration, but it wasn't because I was discipled in a process. And most pastors, I don't think we're discipled. And so what happens, I think it informs our praxis. So we go, listen, I got on fire. I didn't have a disciples at program. So what we really need to do is just get people on fire. Get them on fire. So that's why we have revival after revival after conference. Whereas I think we are the outliers, we're the anomalies. The way it was done in the early church, we commit to the Lord and we gather around the table. We say, let's go on this journey together. And so we, but we've, we've let because we got on fire and never got decided, but we, we think, well, it's like priming a pump. We just got to keep trying to prime it and prime it and get everybody on fire by having an encounter with God. We're running our car off the battery. I love encounters with God. But when you don't have a process of ongoing growth, where you're teaching them to meet with Jesus every day and internalized scripture and things like that, well, then you're going to have to be cranking that thing again and again, reprim or reprim or reprim or reprim the pump. And so what we're moving from a event-driven Christianity to a process trip. Yeah, it's just like trying to be married and stay married, just based on sex or a really good day night every now and then, you know, not going to work. Exactly. It's a process of growth. Unless you're friends. Right. Unless you develop a deep intimacy of spirit to spirit. Right. It's not going to last. And that's why people do that. They choose partners based on charismatic appeal, you know, looks, personality, whatever. Right. And then, you know, wow, five years later, it spins out. Right. You know, how many times have we seen that? Right. A lot. Well, one of the things that we learned, because I think in presenting the gospel to the young generation, a lot of times, we've made it so spiritual. It's just heaven or hell. Do you know where you go if you die tonight? Yeah. Rather than Jesus wants to be a present reality right now for issues in your life. And so one of the things we found from the churches that are doing this really well is the very first trimester, first 12 weeks, is not a lot of theology. It's more felt needs. And so in our series of pathway to freedom, the first trimester is how Jesus impacts every part of my life. So what about friendships? What about romance? What about your parents? What about forgiveness? What about authenticity in terms of, you know, the music you listen to real friendships in each week is a different thing. So it's showing how the Bible and how Jesus shows up in all these different, if you're so lonely, you want to kill yourself, it doesn't do you any good to prove Jesus the only way to heaven. You know, like you got to know that Jesus is going to help you right now. Then the second trimester will talk about building your life on a solid foundation and why Jesus had to die in the cross and things like that. So, you know, I think we've gotten so ethereal that people like, what I'm hurting so bad, do you have anything to help me? Because I don't know what to do with the brokenness I feel. And we got to make sure we present that yeah, that you don't get healed instantly, but you do get healed in the process of walking with Christ and the Bible has to something to say about every aspect, every dimension of life. How many young people who are 13 years old in a church? And again, you know, I live in North America. And so just, you know, in general, how many of our 13 year olds will actually be there when you're 21? Right. Yes. Some studies say like 80% by the time they're 21, don't come back to church. Okay. So less than less than one out of five. Right. Okay. So four out of five, leaf, are gone. Right. 13 year olds in our church, running around, you know, we're, you know, nothing wrong with play days and stuff and having fun and all that. I think it's extremely important. It's part of a holistic healthy life. But they're gone, man. Yeah. A lot of them, they can't even hold on to them when they get 15 and 16. And then when they get out of college, one of the things that comes, so a kid comes back from college. Yeah. And he goes, well, that's, that's not my pastor. That's my parents pastor. My pastor, the cool guy with the tattoo left. So what watch what happened in the unhealthy process that we've adapted. So we only know the pastor only a lot got to hire the cool guy. Hires the cool guy. That guy leaves after two or three years to another opportunity. So now he's got to go hire the next cool guy. Yeah. Well, the kid comes back from college going, that's not my pastor. My left. My guy love. And so what the pastor's literally doing is paying somebody to cause people to leave his church. He doesn't even realize it. And so the great thing about Project 13 and what we've learned around the world is it's not personality driven. It's process driven. Yeah. Well, there you go. Okay. So now I didn't come to Christ based on this youth guy. I came because I met Jesus Christ. I had a revelation. And the person can be interchangeable, but you're on this path from 13 to 21, growing and getting stronger and multiplying yourself and discipling others. Yeah. I am, I am strong in a community of believers. I'm strong in a local church, you know, Christy men's network. You know, what we do when we talk about discipleship and fatherlessness and all the things, everything comes back to the church being the hope of the world. Right. Right. And I think sometimes we push back on that because we've seen abuses in the church. I mean, I mean, I'm talking with Ron loose and Ron loose, who wrote battle cry for generation 18 years ago. And then you've written a number of books since then. Some great things and some data driven things. What was a book that just came out four or five years ago that was well, it was my doctoral position, faith at the speed of light. Faith and speed of light. And it really documented all that we learned around the world, the trends that are most impacting the church right now. And the churches that are defying those trends. And so we put all the case studies and everything in there. So somebody's really wants to geek out on data. And Ron loose, you've been in the middle of this battle. And for the next generation, basically your whole life. And you know, what is it right now? Here we are, we're listening to this. We're hearing your things. What is it as a pastor and a leader business man? Because I'm looking at this thing saying, you know, this is, are the churches growing right now, Ron? Are churches, are the number of people going to church in North America? Is that going up or down? No, no, it's talking Protestant. No, it's going down. And it's going down. Oh, but for sure. And the average age of the church is getting higher and higher, it's getting older. So it's far less of each generation. Gen Z is about at 28%. They think Gen Alpha is going to be about 14% that call them self-Christian. The older ones, the millennials were there like at 35%. So you can see a steady trend. It's gone down, down, down, in spite of everything we've done in the name of youth ministry. We keep reaching less of each generation. Yeah, the fastest growing religious group I saw is the nuns. Exactly. No, any. Right. No religion. But the good news is there's something we can do about it. And instead of throwing our hands up like, well, we've tried everything we know. Well, why don't we try something? You know, every industry uses best practices from other people. You know, let's learn from, they're not our competitors. Churches around the world that are doing it really right. And so that's what we've tried to curate it with Project 13 and try to really help churches that really want a fresh approach. How important is it to raise up fathers? Well, listen, it is a tragedy to think about, you know, that thank God for spiritual mothers because the dereliction of spiritual fathers even the physical fathers might be there, they're not spiritual. And so having a that that priest in the home that's kind of really watching and rearing and caring about the growth. And I would say all the fathers listening, I encourage you to really exercise your priestly, you know, like be the pastor of your home kind of thing. But also the atmosphere. But also set a think about fathering or pastoring the young men in your region, you know, whether that's, you know, do stuff with your son and their friends and hey, let's jump into a Bible study. Let's do something where you, they feel like most of them are not going to have fathers in their life. Yeah. Yeah, I find that, you know, even like my son Brandon is coaching literally. And so he's got to lose six and seven year olds and and parents are involved, but but you see, you see this thing where that coach has a coach. He's helping some of these young guys deal with certain stresses. I mean, I get going up the bat, you know, and baseball is trying to hit it and he's all upset that he didn't and he can sit down, look in his face and tell him, you know what, your value is not just hitting the baseball. You know, your value is as a young person who you are and whatever that whatever his name is, Jamal or, you know, Bobby or whatever it may be, he says, that's your value, that's who you are. Identity is a core issue. Yeah. So for me, raising up fathers is not just raising up physical fathers, which is important, but the spirit of a father, right? Because what you were just talking about is taking, taking responsibility for our community, right? And I think so often the church has taken responsibility for the people in the pews, right, not for the people in the streets. Right. And honestly, if we could become, the church becomes the problem solver, rather than just the preacher. So there's fatherlessness in the community. We solve that problem. That'll woo people to the church. And we shouldn't be only perceived as the finger pointer. You need to, or you're going to go to hell, but we look at the problems. Jesus has all the answers to all the problems in our society. And if we present it in a way that you wear the problem solver, then we'll end up wooing a lot more people to church. Yeah. Well, solving problems is how you, well, basically that's in business and you solve a problem. That's how you gain influence. Influences always based on solving problems. So Morgan Stanley and these big financial organizations didn't grow large just because they, they, you know, took somebody's money. They solved an issue for somebody. They solved the banking issue. They solved a loan issue. They solved a, you know, expansion issue. They solved an investment thing. They solved things for people which is why they grow. So the church needs to become a place of solutions. We're going to solve, we're going to solve the food desert. Most, I would say that most of us don't know the closest food desert to us, you know, which is no fresh vegetables within two bus stops or, or a ten minute walk. So, you know, when, you know, and there's 11 of them just near where I live and the church that my son pastors is hard at work at solving the one that's right next to them. So that, for instance, there was an after school program and he asked them, he said, what helps expand this to more kids? She said, well, we just need another commercial refrigerator. And this is not, we're not talking one of those walk in $20,000 projects. We're talking a $2,500 refrigerator. So his church put a new, showed up one day with a new refrigerator for, which doubled the amount of capacity of food, which she was able to get from Western and some of the other, you know, food banks. And she was able to put more food in there and put more kids into an after school food program. A $2,500 refrigerator solved an issue for about another 40 or 50 kids every week. Which, you don't know what that does for that family, right? So we look at these things and when I study these things out and back on the whole father piece, you're talking about the Bar Mitzvah thing. One of the powerful things that, in fact, Leonard Sweet in the book, The Well Played Life is what kind of put me on to it years ago, my professor and my current doctoral program. And Leonard was talking about how the Jewish family had identity and how that got instilled in young men and women. And why they did so well and why in the Jewish community, we see so many people coming out with at high levels and how many Pulitzer Prize winners and you can go right on the line, come out of a very small sliver community of people. And he said it's all based on identity because at the family table, at least three times a week, the father would sit there and read from the Torah and say, not just these are stories of our heritage, but this is who you are. This is your identity. So rather than a young person, which most young people come in out of college and university now are still trying to quote unquote find themselves, right? When a young person who's been through that process with a father goes to university, they already know who they are, right? Now give you a great example is Harvard. Harvard is a non accredited school. And most people listening to what he means is not accredited. It's not accredited. Why? Because it's Harvard. So it doesn't need an accreditation. It's Harvard. Why is it Harvard? It's Harvard because of the people who came out of it and what they've done successfully. A number of years ago, they began intake. In other words, success is not just based on what goes out, but what comes in. That's why Jesus didn't just take whoever showed up to be the first disciples. He chose them, right? So again, you're a pastor leader and you're going to take that three and you're going to take those and make those guys leaders choose the guys. Don't just find somebody who's sitting around. In fact, in fact, the man who's not busy is not going to be a leader. Go find the busy guy. Go find the busy guy. Because everybody that Jesus chose was working. They were busy, man. They were leaders. They served others. They served the marketplace. And so what he discovered and what we find out about Harvard is they begin intake based on test scores. Here's the scores. We want the highest test scores. What they discovered over time was that because what Harvard's accredited by is the success of their alumni. And what they saw is they saw more problems, more issues, a declining in the success rate of the people who came out. They began to study, well, what are we doing wrong? What's happening here? Is it diversity? Is it this? Is it that? Whatever. And what they discovered is that they had dropped the category from their intake that they then added back in. It's called character. That's fascinating. And they begin to look at, okay, who's actually out working, doing things in the community. And now all of a sudden they added that back in, begin to change things. Now, here's the underlying deal. Here's a, and you love this stuff because you love data. And here's the underlying thing that they discovered. When we're talking about developing characters, what they discovered is a child, boy or girl, who had a meal with their family at least three times a week, like just a meal, not even like a teaching thing with a tour or whatever. Just a meal with their family where there was interaction and community. That young person had, it was a significantly higher rate of possibility of success. Just a meal with their family. Just sitting together, phones down or left in your room or wherever, phones off, just a meal where they talk three times a week, totally changed their success rate of that child. So when we talk about a father and we talk about the atmosphere or you're a single mom, don't just try to be the hero where, because it's so difficult, you're working, you might be working a second job, you're trying to make everything work and you want your children to be happy. So you become sort of a hero and you let them drink, you know, I don't know, unhealthy soft drinks every, every dinner, because it's just the quiet's the moment, right? You know, my thing is turn the phones off. Go ahead and set the atmosphere. If you're a father, if you're a single mom, whoever it is, wherever you are in that situation, if you're raising up a child, set the atmosphere. It's your atmosphere. So you set the atmosphere. Set the atmosphere of peace. Just quite everything for a moment. It's okay. Here's what we're going to do. And it becomes part of who you are. I think there's a well-known actress who, the story was just told recently, it just came out that her, none of her children have smartphones. And she's very well-known. I think her oldest child is like 15, something like that. And they have flip phones. So they can call her any emergency, anything they've got, bam, they got 20 numbers they can call, you know, they can call her. She's single mom. And she said she decided her kids' lives would not be formed and shaped by Instagram and TikTok. And of course, kids aren't on Instagram as much, they're back on Facebook. I don't know. All that stuff. It moves and morphs back and forth. But the thing is, is that you said, she set the atmosphere. And it became a normal thing. It became normative. So when they asked her 15-year-old daughter who was sitting with her, do you feel like you're left out? Oh no. I am more at peace than any of my friends. I'll tell you that one of the, I love what you said about the parents setting the identity and the atmosphere. Another thing that parents can do in that regard is they usually don't think they have much influence over this, but help your kids get the right peer group. Oh wow. That's fascinating. So one of the churches we study said, we figured if we can preserve their relationships with the right people, we'll preserve their faith. Because they're not just a family. They're a part of a peer group, they're some peer group. And so one of the things that we kind of inadvertently discovered as we're helping churches learn how to do this, is that we call it social engineering their friendships. So watch this. That's fantastic. Small groups will start and they'll start discussing things. And after a while, they find kids are like, they're going to hang out with each other and they're going to each other's ball games. They were never asked to do that. But they're doing things that normal friends do. Instead of just going go find Christian friends wherever or just hoping that they find them when you drive them to youth group every week, you can provide an atmosphere and invite five or six friends over. Let's go through this book, these tools together. It teaches them to be vulnerable, to care, to pray for each other. And then they end up, you really social engineer like you teach them, you know, that social media is taught. I can have a thousand friends with still fill lonely. And if I get mad at somebody, I just block them. You're teaching them how to have real friendships and you work things out and you give each other and things like that. And so parents, you have a huge opportunity to help create the right posse around your kids. But you share, give them food every week. That's the love language, you know, international love language. But then give them something journey to go on together, a spiritual journey that will essentially, you know, they come, they graduate from this, they go to this school, they go over here, but if they can preserve the right social group, you'll preserve their faith. Wow. Ron, that's social engineer relationships. That is huge, man. We can do it. Yeah. That's fantastic. I'm going to put that in the book. Well, and in terms of solving problems, I mean, the scripture, the Bible solves all these problems and pastors and churches that are looking like, how do we solve the problem with youth ministry? We have a whole kind of a flash drive that gives all the training on how to do. How do you implement these? What are the best practices? How do you implement them? Just get on a website. You can find general about it. Yeah. Okay. And so, so what I'm looking at on the website, here's generationnext.me generationnext.me. And you've got Project 13 and you've got a whole thing like how to implement it, how to start it. Correct. All right. So it's fantastic, man. And I love being an ally in all of this. Yes. And telling people about it, it's along with some of the other great people that we're working with. Right. Because if we all work this together. That's right. I mean, if we stay friends, if we're hanging out, you know me and Chris Harper and you and Tony Rory and different people, if we do this thing and do it together and raise the water level, then what happens is it touches everybody. That's right. And I just believe that the greatest church, I have such great faith in the next generation rock. I believe the greatest church is having yet been built. Amen. I believe or they're there and they're going to continue to grow. I don't see why a hundred-year-old church shouldn't be vibrant, excited, fired up, stuff going on, and a lot of young people in it. Right. Amen. And so I just have a lot of faith in the next generation. I think I think some of the greatest leaders, servant leaders are right now in their late 20s and 30s and early 40s, these guys that are just have some, I don't know, they got some spiritual going ads on. Amen. It's fantastic. And I just have a great faith in that. I have a great faith in the fact that when Jesus returns, he comes back for a powerful church, a bride that presents to him and says, here, here is your bride. And I don't think he's coming back for a bride that's in tattered, soiled clothing, kind of just barely hanging on, beat up. And we go, yeah, we kind of made it through. We got a few people. Right. Here you go. Amen. And you know, I understand the trends. I understand the whole 2050 thing, Pew Report, all that sort of stuff. But I want to tell you, man, I believe in the Good News report. Amen. And I believe the future is bright for those who are following Christ with reckless abandon. And I believe that if we'll raise up young men and women, like you're talking about Ron, so thank you for you and your wife, Katie and family who committed your lives to this. And thank you for being faithful. I mean, you wrote this book that I have on my library, 18 years ago, and you haven't varied. I mean, you've learned more. You got your masters, you got your doctorate to your road to get all these different things. You've stayed at it, but you're faithful. I want to thank God for that, man. Well, it's a pleasure to be with you, Paul, and so excited about the legacy that you're carrying on with men here in America and around the world and look forward to partnering together. Yeah, we're actually sitting in the studio that we built for Christmas Network doing this podcast. In fact, this is, you're the first one we've actually podcasted, we've actually done in this studio. Oh, I feel honored. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, I just thought of that. Wow, it's been quite a rush getting here. We did the live broadcast to in Urdu in Farsi for Iran, to Jack Stan for pastors in Syria, Turkey, different places, and then course through Pakistan, and then the side-by-side translations to Vietnam. Nice. But Ron Lewis, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for being here, and generationnext.me. And remember for all the disciples of needs that you have for men and raising fathers, C-M-N dot men, Christmas Network C-M-N dot men. That's not C-N-N. You're not going to get any help going there. C-M-N, Christmas Network C-M-N dot men. Thanks for being a part of the Brave Men podcast today. God bless you and what you're doing. Remember this hope is a live, hope has a name, hope's name is Jesus. You've just experienced Brave Men with Paul Lewis Cole. Paul is president of the Christian Men's Network. Connect with Paul at C-M-N dot men, or write to him at Paul at C-M-N dot men.