Tag: church

Advice For Someone Starting a Business or Non-Profit

December 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 106 of The Edge of Innovation, Jacob Young is sharing some advice for someone starting a business or nonprofit organization.

Sections

Maintaining Healthy Rhythms
AI Technology & Mimicking A Person’s Voice
Should We Trust What We Consume or What We See Now?
Is Authentication in Information a Major Issue?
Is Foregoing the Digital World Even An Option?
Will Machines & AI Take Over For The Minds & Hearts of Entrepreneurs?
The Playing Field Is Even For Everyone To Be Able To Innovate
Innovation Is Still A Human Process
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

Advice For Someone Starting a Business or Non-Profit

Paul: So, one final question. What would be the one piece of advice that you would give to somebody starting something? I know what you’re doing isn’t a business, but I’m sure there’s a lot of angst that you’ve had, a lot of joy you’ve had, a lot of good, a lot of bad, a lot of hard, a lot of easy. And what would be that one piece of advice that you would give out to somebody?

Jacob: For beginning something new, either an entrepreneur?

Paul: Yeah.

Maintaining Healthy Rhythms

Jacob: Interesting. A friend of mine here in the city is – he’s about my age. Maybe a little bit younger than me. He’s an entrepreneur, and he’s not a Christian. We’re very good friends, and he has started up two restaurants here in Manchester. And I think the similarity for what our experiences is, is that if you are starting something new, you are dreaming something into existence, and that’s a very scary dynamic, and it can be a very all-consuming dynamic. Whether it’s a church, or a restaurant, or a tech enterprise, a software, an app – whatever it is – you’re dreaming something into existence, and you’re banking your livelihood on that happening. And so, it can be very all-consuming.

And what my friend and I are regularly kind of checking in on each other with is, do you have healthy rhythms so that you are a whole human being regardless of what happens with whatever you’re starting up?

Paul: Your enterprise.

Jacob: Yeah, whatever your enterprise is. A church, an app, whatever. I think that tends to be where I would aim at for, men and women, young men and women, whoever, who are starting up something new is, not only do you have the ability…

Are you honest with assessing what do healthy rhythms look like for me, and human health look like for me? Do you have people around you – whether it’s a spouse, or close friends, or family – that are able to hold you through that?

Because I think we all have, like, “Oh, I’m fine. You know, I can work eighty hours a week.” Well, you’re going to do eighty hours a week for forty weeks straight, and you’re going to be checked into a psych ward. It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. And having people who can legitimately say to you, “Hey, you need to re-evaluate,” or, “Let’s re-evaluate your healthy rhythms so that you’re whole.” And some of that includes talking to people who had no relationship to what you’re doing. I have no idea what it’s like to start a restaurant, but I really enjoy hanging out with my friend, and he helps me keep my head above water. Just like it’s good to talk to somebody that has no relationship to the church.

But, a part of maintaining healthy rhythms is maintaining healthy rhythms with people who are just not doing the same thing that you’re doing. You know, and the reason that’s important is because, if you’re actually killing it doing whatever your enterprise is, you’re going to networking out your eyeballs with people that are in the same, or close to the same, sphere of life that you’re trying to build within. Right? I mean, if you’re trying to do an app, you’re trying to get investors who invest in the tech world, so you’re still talking to the same people that are within your sphere. You need to get out and go to a cooking class and learn how to make some killer baked salmon or whatever it is you’re going to make.

It’s a part of being a whole person, and everything about your life is not going to be consumed by what you’re trying to build. So that’s, kind of, where I would go with if you’re trying to start something, a church or not, that’s where my mind goes.

Paul: Ah, I think wise advice.

Jacob: Yeah.

AI Technology & Mimicking A Person’s Voice

Jacob: Can I ask you a question?

Paul: Of course.

Jacob: In the tech world, in The Edge of Innovation, I am increasingly concerned about AI technology as it relates to mimicking and emulating other people, to put it in a broad way. So, I would be curious what your advice is. So, this last week, you have this whole deepfake that’s been on the Internet for a few years now, and now this is being used in very inventive ways.

And so, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with who Jordan Peterson is, but he writes this article this last week saying somebody had made a website using his voice, and you could type in whatever you wanted, and it would emulate his voice from recordings. It used machine learning and AI technology to take his voice and then say whatever you’re typing. So you can type in Mein Kampf, and he’s going to recite it with his voice. And so now it becomes a question of, “Did Jordan Peterson actually say that or not?”

And the concerning thing that was in that article, regardless of the person involved, was that technology is now… basically, they only need about six hours of audio recording to be able to produce that type of technology for anybody.

Paul: Right.

Jacob: That hit my radar immediately, because I’m like, “As a pastor, I put out forty minutes or whatever of audio recording on the Internet every week.” And, as a podcaster, you do similarly.

Paul: Right.

Jacob: And it’s just — It’s deeply concerning as to, “Okay, how do I understand that? But then, what are the ramifications and anticipations and liabilities I need to be aware of moving forward?” Does that question, or does that dynamic make sense at all?

Paul: Absolutely. I mean, you, you mentioned two different things. You know, you were worried about AI and its applications, and then you went into a very specific example of a technology, mechanism, or methodology to do something. They’re very different questions. The whole concept of AI, or artificial intelligence — There’s a point at which something becomes intelligent or not intelligent, and I don’t think we’re really anywhere near that. We have really expert systems that can infer things from larger sets of data than we can. We infer things. You know, somebody’s, is rude to you. You can infer they have a bad day or whatever that is, or we can infer enormous amounts of information with the tone of voice, body language, all that kind of stuff.

And so, systems — computer systems — will be able to be taught, in some ways, to do some of that, but it’s not true artificial intelligence and machine learning. I mean, it is, but it’s not necessarily what science fiction talks about as AI.

Should We Trust What We Consume or What We See Now?

Now, having said that, your concern is not unfounded. It’s not fake. It’s true. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that I can emulate a voice, or I can send an email that looks like it came from you, or I can do all these different things. So, the bottom line is, I think, that we are in a situation where you won’t be able to trust what you consume or see. That’s the only thing we can do. It’s that, how do you know?

I have a friend who has a Wikipedia page that is quite controversial, but he has a high-resolution scan of his signature there. And it’s like, “Why would you put your signature up there?” I think he even has his Social Security number on there. And it’s a very interesting question. So, now, the point becomes that if you see something with his signature on it, did he sign it, or did somebody put it there from using his high-res sample? And you can’t necessarily know that. So then, it becomes, “Oh, I attest to that, indeed did sign it.”

“Is that your signature?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Is that your Signature?”

“Well, I believe it is.”

They are very different answers.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: It will be the fact that I could very easily post something with anybody’s name that I want to. I mean, well — You know, just yesterday one of the senators had a fake — or an alias Twitter account that was actually him, and then, it’s like, “Well, why would you do that?” I mean, regardless of what your political persuasion is, well, what was your point in doing that? And you look at the story that the person has been trying to tell over that. So, it’s very interesting. We have to reconsider the way we validate the sources of information we have.

Is Authentication in Information a Major Issue?

Jacob: Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. Like, it seems like authentication is a major issue at that point.

Paul: It is, but I don’t believe there will be a technical solution to it. It’s extremely difficult. In the world that we’ve created, there are just too many cracks in the foundation. And I’m very frustrated with the Equifax breach, and what has happened to that company is virtually nothing. I mean, even if they get a quarter or a half-a-billion-dollar fine, it’s not a big deal, you know. Nobody goes without pay, and they make that money back in a couple of years, and everything’s fine. But yet, now, my personal information is out and available for other people, and so, what did you expect, I guess.

The bottom line is that with the genies out of the bottle, there’s nothing we can do to put that information back in the bottle, and our systems are built in such a way that they’re built by humans, and there’s a lot of mistakes that humans make, and most of the issues that we see with technology are because humans made a mistake. So, I look forward to finding out what I’m going to say in the future.

But, it’ll be a lot about relationships and saying, “No, that doesn’t sound like Paul. That doesn’t sound like Jacob. That doesn’t sound like Bob. That doesn’t sound like Julie, you know.”

And we’re going to have to get to it and it’s going to be interesting. I mean, there’s been a lot of science fiction written about things like that. Photoshop was the first thing. It’s fairly easy now to Photoshop something and make a person that wasn’t there, there.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: And this is just the next level. It was difficult at one time to put somebody into a photo. Now, it’s virtually trivial.

The same thing will happen with our voices. The same thing will happen with our presence, our GPS locations, and all that kind of stuff. It’s an interesting, interesting new world.

Is Foregoing the Digital World Even An Option?

Jacob: Do you feel like that would be an argument, then, for foregoing the digital world?

Paul: I don’t think it’s an option. I mean, you’ll have your outliers of people who say, “Oh, I forego that,” but your sheer absence will almost point to where you are and who you are. I don’t believe there is a digital world. It’s just the world. I’m not negative or positive about it. It’s just the way it is. You lived on a street when you grew up, and you had neighbors, and that was the fact. It was that fact. And they had right assumptions about your family and wrong ones and whatever. They heard snippets of conversations, and they formed opinions, and they heard complete conversations and formed different opinions. It’s all the same thing, except there is a great ability to mess with people now.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: So how was that?

Will Machines & AI Take Over For The Minds & Hearts of Entrepreneurs?

Jacob: Well, I’m curious – Again, maybe this is a silly question. I wonder, you were saying with the AI and is working with a larger data set in terms of machine learning, or kind of, that realm of things, do you foresee that the future of — even talking about the nature of your podcast of innovation — that the innovations and entrepreneurial work that comes out in the future, could that basically be pumped out from a machine rather than from the minds and hearts of entrepreneurs? That is, if the nature of entrepreneurial is engaging with problems and finding a solution, are computers the front edge of determining what those problems are and finding solutions rather than humans? Does that make sense?

Paul: Yeah, it does. I don’t know that. It’s interesting. In teaching innovation, you’re teaching people to think differently, and in developing AI or machine learning, we’re trying to teach a computer to think — or to emulate thinking by sheer volume of processing power. And it’s usually the subtleties that make an innovation innovative. There is an “aha” moment that’s like, “Oh, that’s what it was.”

I was just rewatching the introduction of the iPhone, and as Steve was dancing about with the thing, we’re talking about an iPod, an Internet device, a phone. Are you getting it? An iPod, an Internet, and a phone. An iPod, an int— You know, so it’s just one device.

And very, very interesting, in reading and watching some of the videos about the gestation period of the iPhone and what happened during that time, and how some of it was innovative. One of the most innovative things was the ability for when you scrolled with your finger, that it had a rubber band effect at the bottom.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: That made the human interface better. Now, could a machine figure that out? I guess I’d like to think that someday it could, but before that was… I mean, when I say it now, it’s an obvious thing, that you can sympathize with and say, “Oh yeah, I see that.” You can’t necessarily remember how bad other devices that didn’t have that rubber banding effect were to use. I do, because I’m a nerd techie, and I remember that kind of stuff, and I saw phones and devices that didn’t have that rubber banding effect.

So, there’s this thing, in data science, called fuzzy, fuzz… Well, it’s fuzzy math or fuzzy data, and the thing is that where you take the data you have, and you make it a little bit more, and a little bit less, and you change different parameters of it to see what happens, and it has to do with chaos and things like that. And so, as, as we start to apply those things to data sets, I think they’ll be tremendously beneficial to help us realize things that we wouldn’t have realized otherwise.

Now, having said that, I don’t know that we’re — You know, the synthesis of something — That rubber banding effect is a human realization that we needed to have a way to experience something in a different way. if you were to go to a native on an island, and say, “Here’s two phones,” and they’ve never seen a phone before. “Do you like the one with the rubber banding effect or the one with out?” I don’t know that they’d have a context to make a decision. So that’s difficult, I think, for machines to do that without a lot more data about that.

Now, I think you could probably build an expert system or an AI that worked on just interface things, and then, as the people started to feed into it different options, it could probably meld those together into the better option that we couldn’t do.

The Playing Field Is Even For Everyone To Be Able To Innovate

Jacob: Yeah. But, then, it seems like the controlling factor in terms of what qualifies as innovation is the human factor, not merely the parts and pieces that actually end up being put together.

Paul: Right. Well, that’s true. Yeah. I have a good friend that says – he was giving a lecture in Washington, D.C. just a few blocks from the Library of Congress – and it’s all the answers are there. And now, all the answers are in your pocket. You just need to know what question to ask.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: And so, none of us are uneven. The field is completely even for us to be able to innovate. It’s really a thought process. There’s nothing I intrinsically have that’s better than you or than the person across the street. We are all able to innovate similarly. Now, we might have differences in the way we can execute that innovation, but a lot of that comes with persistence.

Innovation Is Still A Human Process

Jacob: Yeah. So that’s the interesting. That’s a helpful dynamic. It’s that, at the end of the day, the innovation is still a human process. It’s not merely a — Maybe that was where my question was wrong-footed. It’s merely a problem–solution process. It’s a human process, at the end of the day.

Paul: I think so. I think so. But I do think machines can assist on that. They could probably predict better than a human could what you might like to have for dinner if you gave them the information. You know, “I had a hard day. I had this, this, and this,” and, “Okay, well, then. If it’s going to be comfort food, okay, let’s make pasta.” You know, so, however you’re wired, or if you have celiac disease, they’re not going to suggest that. So, it’s all data, and it’s an optimized fit.

Humans, we process enormous amounts of data, and don’t underestimate the amount of data that we process. We also filter out good and bad data, and machines don’t have necessarily that ability to weigh what’s important and what’s not important yet. So, I don’t know.

Jacob: Actually, well, that’s helpful, yeah.

Paul: I don’t know if that’s, you know —

Jacob: No, I appreciate you letting me get into the interviewer chair and ask you a few questions on that.

Paul: Oh, absolutely.

Closing

Paul: All right, well, we’ve been talking with Jacob Young. Do you have an official title?

Jacob: I’m the Great and Mighty Jacob Young.

Paul: No, no. Wasn’t it — What were we saying? It was just yesterday that we were talking about — Oh, Mister Awesome, that’s right.

Jacob: Yes, yeah.

Paul: Is that on your business card?

Jacob: That is, yeah.

Paul: All right. Well, we’ve been talking with Jacob Young, a church-planting pastor in Manchester, New Hampshire, and we’ll have links to his website and some of his blogs.

I think it’d be good for people who are listening who might be interested to follow him and see what he has to say, as he’s sort of on one of the cutting edge of our society right now. New England is really in a post-church time, and you’ve chosen to go and really plant a church, start a church in a hard area.

Jacob: Yeah. Exciting times, and I’m enjoying it. It’s a fun time, you know.

Paul: Cool. Thank you, sir.

Jacob: Yeah, Paul, thanks for your time.

More Episodes:

This is Part 3 of 3 of our conversation with Jacob Young!
If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here!
If you missed Part 2, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

How Church is Different Than Other Organizations

August 20, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 98 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Mark Dever, the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. about how a church is different than other organizations.

Sections

Becoming A Pastor: Was it Worth the Investment?
How Church is Different Than Other Organizations
How the Church Can Help You Succeed in Life
Christianity Versus Other Religions
Investigating Christianity
Success: Random Chance or Careful Planning?
Is Being a Pastor, a Job?
Delegating
More Episodes
Show Notes

How Church is Different Than Other Organizations

Becoming A Pastor: Was it Worth the Investment?

Paul: So, welcome to the Edge of Innovation. Today were talking with Mark Dever from Washington D.C.

Okay, so, twenty-five years ago you were going to be a – as far as you know, or I don’t know exactly when it happened – you were going to go be a teacher and you went and started being a pastor at a church?

Mark: Yeah, I taught for a little while at Cambridge in England and then I had an offer to teach at a theological seminary back here in the States and then this church came up in the middle of Washington D.C. and after investigating it, I just felt this is what I should do. My wife agreed and so we did.

Paul: Wow! So, how has that worked out? So, I mean, that sounded optimistic at the point but I know obviously we’re twenty-five years later. Has that been what you expected? Was it worth the investment? Was it worth the risk?

Mark: Yeah. Super, super so. Yeah. Very much so. When I got here, there were one hundred and thirty people, mainly in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. The budget was in the red. They had the church kind of on the ropes. Now, as I said earlier, there are about a thousand people, the average age of thirty. The congregation is doing well. We’ve been able to see other churches in D.C. sort of turned around. So, yeah. It’s been very very encouraging success in the work.

Paul: So, you just said something that’s intriguing to me. You said the congregation is “doing well.” Can you flesh that out? What does that mean?

Mark: We’re seeing people who were not Christians become Christians. We’re seeing Christians grow spiritually, come to know more peace, more joy, to show more love in their lives. Marriages beginning and improving, ability to raise children, rear children well in the community. Just lots of good fruit in people’s lives. Dealing with hard things of cancer and unemployment and bereavement.

How Church is Different Than Other Organizations

Paul: So, it sounds to me, as you’re talking through this, that this is a little bit different than many other organizations that one might be involved in because you’re – I don’t want to say it this way – but it’s sort of like some of the things you’re doing seem to matter as opposed to me going to a photography class and saying, “Okay. Now I know how to take a better picture.” These seem to have more depth or more meaning. Is that true? Is that the nature of this particular church or is it the nature of the church in general?

Mark: It should be the nature of the church in general to be more comprehensive than a photography club. The closest analogy that you would have probably, socially, is ones’ family.

Paul: Go on. I have my own family. I’ve only had one. I only have one set of experiences. I can observe what I watch on TV and people I know. I see a lot of bad family experiences out there. So, how does this speak to that?

Mark: Well, I would see that in our local church, when we join, we take convenient. We literally read a big statement together where we say that we will care for each other and it’s kind of like what goes on in a wedding ceremony. The difference is that with this convent, we have the freedom to leave this church and go to another one or if we move someplace else with our jobs, or because of our families, that we move.

Sorry. You’re hearing the sirens of downtown Washington D.C.

Paul: Oh, that’s okay. It gives ambiance. We actually called the fire alarm to see if they would come and put that in the background.

So I’m struggling to…. I was raised in a church myself. A Catholic church. So, I’m getting a sense that there’s a lot more depth to, as you said, it’s not like a photography club. It’s more than that.

How the Church Can Help You Succeed in Life

And we’re talking with lots of different people and lots of different people are listening and one of the reasons people are listening is because they’re an entrepreneur and they want to be innovative. They want to understand how other people succeed in business. But really what that means is they want to know how people succeed. Success is a huge measure of a person’s wealth, success, or whatever it is. How does the church, play into that? Is the church something that you do once a week or does it change your reality. Does it reorder your priorities? How does it do that?

Because one of the things – I’ll let you talk here in just a moment – because one of the things you learn in photography class is that if you don’t take any pictures, you don’t have any pictures. And that’s how you get better at taking pictures, is to take them, live that out. And the church that you’re talking about, both specifically and more in general, can you talk to that?

Mark: Yeah. I was talking to a friend who got married about fifteen years ago and he was observing that as he looked around at other friends of his that got married about fifteen years ago, every one that was not involved in a good church, was either divorced or their marriages were on the rocks and struggling. Whereas, every couple he knew that was involved in a good church and had that really at the center of their lives, were doing great in their marriage. I don’t know if you can draw a direct cause and effect line, but I know that in the church we certainly do spend a good bit of time trying to help each other, including in very personal things like your marriage and family.

Paul: It sounds like it’s a good organization to be a part of. It helps me understand how to have a better family, have a better life. Is that what it is or…?

Mark: That’s certainly part of it. I had one friend in England when I lived in England who was moving up to Scotland. He told me he was moving next week. And I said, “What are you going to do in Edinburgh when you get there?”

And he said, “Well, on Sunday I’m going to go to church.”

I said, “Go to church? You’re an atheist!”

And he said,” Yeah, but whenever I move somewhere I always go to church because Christians are the nicest people. You just meet people who help you in so many ways, so I always go to church.”
So I don’t think that everybody’s testimony, but I think church is a good place to start to get to know people but the purpose of the church ultimately is for you to get to know God and for you to have a relationship with God.

Paul: Isn’t that a pretty bold statement?

Mark: It is. It’s a great statement too. I think it’s true. I used to be the agnostic and became a Christian.

Christianity Versus Other Religions

Paul: Well tell me about that. Why Christianity? Why not one of the other religions?

Mark: I looked into other religions. I read the Koran. I read the teachings of Daoism and Confucianism and all kinds of stuff and just through a long process I became convinced that there really was somebody named Jesus of Nazareth and that He really did rise from the dead. And once I was convinced that He really did rise from the dead, I felt an obligation to pay attention to Him in a way I didn’t really feel an obligation to pay attention to people, you know, no matter how great they are from Mahatma Gandhi to Mohammed.

Paul: So, the differentiator for you was this raising from the dead?

Mark: The resurrection. Yeah.

Paul: So, how do other religions counter that? In other words, that’s sort of like, okay, we have… Apple sells the iPhone and nobody else sells the iPhone so it’s sort of like if you want an iPhone you have to go here. Is that the same thing with Christianity? That if you want to believe in somebody that rose from the dead, which seems like a pretty miraculous thing – I don’t have many things in my life that automatically heal themselves. How does that – not battle but that discussion happen? Is it like the trump card? You lay that down and that’s it?

Mark: I think some people are disinterested in the fact. I think others don’t engage with it carefully. Others are skeptical of it for understandable reasons. Others, like myself, become convinced it’s true. And once they become convinced it’s true, they begin to consider the significance of it and they begin to read Jesus’ own words and listen to His teaching and beliefs and end up having their lives changed by it.

Paul: So, you are saying that this really happened and this is really true?

Mark: I’m saying this happened as much as the Macintosh happened. It’s that real.

Investigating Christianity

Paul: And so, what pushed you towards even investigating this? I don’t know, how old you were when you started to investigating this?

Mark: Teenager. I just wondered about a sense of purpose in life, why I was alive, if there was any higher purpose to it.

Paul: Interesting. So, you investigated all these different religions?

Mark: I did. I was a thorough and academic type.

Paul: What was the tipping point for the cause? Were there other tipping points that you said, “Okay, there’s something here. I’m going to go down this path,” and then returned with, “Oh no. That’s not the good path or not the path I believe.”

Mark: Well, I think I started with other philosophies that are less supernatural, just because I didn’t have any experience of the supernatural and so I just assumed that that was not true. And once I kind of exhausted what I felt that could contribute, I started looking at philosophies and religions and the religions kept seeming very explicable. I thought I could understand why, if a prophet, preacher, arises in that area, in those centuries, he can completely, for understandable reasons, for me as a secular person, create this movement, this kingdom. With Jesus – I turned to Him kind of last because I assumed I knew Him being an American, or I knew about him – with Jesus, He just didn’t fit into all my expectations. He was both too loving and too self-centered. He was both too grand in his ideas about himself and too self-giving. It was just stunning. He blew all my categories.

Paul: You just said self-centered. Isn’t self-centered a bad thing?

Mark: Well, if you’re anybody else yes, but if you’re God I think it’s appropriate.

Paul: Interesting. So, are you…

Mark: We’ve got to be way outside of what you guys normally talk about.

Paul: Well, yeah, I guess we are. That’s probably true. But heck, it’s my show. So…

Mark: True.

Success: Random Chance or Careful Planning?

Paul: One of the things that I’ve always wanted to get from people is why they do what they do or why they did what they did and those inflections points of those roads taken. “Oh, I went down this path and I learned this and I came back and I did this.” And you know, as we’re talking about these things, you’ve got a successful small business if I talk in my parliaments and you have been an effective leader, CEO, president, whatever the tile is. You’re a pastor. You didn’t go to school for business. You didn’t go to school for how to manage people. How did you get to this point? Is it just random chance? How did you set forth and did you plan to succeed? Or you didn’t plan?

Mark: I probably didn’t plan a lot. I think I tried to be faithful and then as opportunities came up, I tried to decide how best to use them. As I got to hire people, I always want to hire the best people. I want to hire people I can trust who will do thing without a ton of supervision and then when we started an organization to try to help other churches called 9marks.org, I did the same thing there. I tried to hire people to run that so that I would not need to do that. We’ve had excellent people running that parrot church ministry, which is about a two million dollar a year budget, with about twelve or thirteen employees. About half those full time, and half of those part time.

Is Being a Pastor, a Job?

Paul: And so, what is the fabric of the work that you do? Is it largely managing people or is it….? I think you’ve already said, you hire people so that they can manage themselves, but how does that work? When you come to work in the morning, is it work? I have difficulty in separating work from life because I enjoy work, so you know, I enjoy it as a oppose to… I know some people that go to work and they stop work. Tell me about your life that way.

Mark: Well, I know what your difficulty is because when my computer crashed a few weeks ago, I called you during your birthday dinner with your family and you very kindly helped me anyway which I’m not sure you should have done.

Paul: Well, yeah. We’re still working on that.
So how do you…. Is it a job? Because one of the things I’ve talked a lot about and read a lot about, is the difference between starting a business that can sustain itself without necessarily me, and/or just starting a job, which is I’m going to go out and fix somebody’s computer and I’m going to go from company to company and do that. And if I don’t do that, the business stops. And that’s vastly different than starting a business which equips people in that business to go out and fix people’s computers.
So, how do you fall in that realm? Because I would imagine that people are coming to see the Mark Dever show on Sunday. It doesn’t sound like that.

Mark: Is that your final question?

Paul: I think so. I think it is. Yes, I think it is.

Mark: They’re definitely not coming just to see me in the Mark Dever’s show. They’re coming – some of them may have heard of me and want to hear me preach particularly – but no, they’re coming because of what they know from a friend of theirs, from a family member, that’s happened in their lives and they’re wanting to learn more and understand more about what it could mean for them.

Paul: Okay, so but now, you as a leader of this organization, what do you do? I mean, when you come to work, what is it you’re thinking of? Because I think about, okay how do I improve this system? How do I improve this? I work with our customers. I make sure that their expectations are being met. What is your fabric of everyday work?

Mark: Well, it varies. It’s going to be me leading public services on Sunday and me leading a staff meeting on Sunday night. It’s going to be me leading a staff during the week on Tuesdays and then a planning meeting on Tuesday afternoons. It’s going to be me teaching scripture publicly on Wednesday night and me often leading a discussion for those who are interns who want to be pastors, on Thursday morning. And then Friday and Saturday, writing my sermon and Sunday preaching it.

Delegating

Paul: So, you didn’t really say managing people. I mean you sort of talked about having some meetings and discussions.

Mark: Yeah, in our church’s structure, there is an associate pastor and he is the one who will do more immediate management of people. I kind of delegate that to him.

Paul: I see.

Mark: So, it’s a small enough staff, you know, fifteen or so people, that I end up doing a lot of managing as well probably.

Paul: Would the staff say that as well do you think?

Mark: I think so I think so.

Paul: So, we’ve been speaking with Mark Dever, the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C.

Thanks for listening and we’d love your feedback!

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of 3 our interview with Mark Dever. Stay tuned for parts 3, coming soon! If you missed part 1, you can listen to it here!

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