What Would a Christian Family Look Like Today? | Jeremy Pryor

Episode Summary: 

The modern West tells a story about family that sounds normal until you measure it against Scripture: raise kids, launch them out, start over every generation, and call it success. Jeremy Pryor, co-founder of Family Teams, argues that this “nuclear family” script is recent, fragile, and negatively forming both the culture and the church more than we want to admit. So we slow down and ask a better question: what did God design the family to be?

Jeremy walks us through Genesis 1:28 as a five-part mission given to a family team: be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. From there, we connect the dots to Matthew 28 and the Great Commission, showing why disciple-making was never meant to be outsourced entirely to individuals and institutions. We dig into Abraham and why a recovered, Old Testament-shaped view of household, identity, and generations changes how we read the whole Bible, including the parts we tend to skip like genealogies.

Then we get practical. We talk about the first-century oikos household, why rebuilding Christian discipleship at home starts with something as simple as the table, and how multi-generational meals and family stories restore depth and belonging. We also address the breakdown of fatherhood, the loss of household economy, homeschooling and education responsibility, and why marriage works best as a mission-driven partnership. 

If you want to see culture change, start where you actually have stewardship: your household. 

Who is Disciple Nations Alliance (DNA)? Since 1997, DNA’s mission has been to equip followers of Jesus around the globe with a biblical worldview, empowering them to build flourishing families, communities, and nations. 👉 https://disciplenations.org/

🎙️Featured Speaker: 

Jeremy Pryor is a business strategist, family coach, and author dedicated to helping families thrive through biblical principles and community engagement. Jeremy met his wife, April, in Jerusalem in 1997 when they were students. They have five kids. They’ve founded and led several businesses and nonprofits, including Epipheo (a video production agency), Just Sew (a quilt shop), Family Teams (training content for families), and 1000 Houses (a network of Cincinnati disciple-making households). 

📌 Recommended Links

     👉 Free 5-day email series: 5 Days to Transform Your Family into a Team 

     👉 1,000 Houses Podcast: 1000 Houses Podcast 

     👉 Jeremy’s Podcast: Jeremy Pryor's Podcast - Podcast - Apple Podcasts 

     👉 Jeremy’s Website: Home - Family Teams 

     👉 Family Incorporated: Family Inc. Coaching - Rolling  

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📩 Ask us anything: info@disciplenations.org 

Episode Webpage

Transcript

Welcome And Why Culture Matters

Luke Allen 0:00

Hi friends, welcome back to another episode here on Ideas Have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. As Christians, we all know that our mission is to spread the gospel around the world to all the nations. However, our mission, the Great Co-Mission, also involves working to transform our cultures so that they increasingly reflect the truth, goodness, and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the church has largely neglected this second part of her mission. And today, many Christians are having little influence on their surrounding cultures. Join us on this podcast as we rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ-honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God. Hi guys, my name is Luke Allen. I'm one of the co-hosts here on the show. And today with me is our host of the podcast, also an author, speaker, and writer, and my padre, Scott Allen. Hey Dad, how's it going today?

Scott Allen 0:51

Great, Luke. It's great to be with you as always.

Luke Allen 0:54

Yep, this is always a lot of fun. We've been recording a lot of episodes right now as we're kind of launching season three. So this has been uh quite the tear, and I'm really enjoying it. Uh as far as uh you guys who are listening, we're so thankful that each one of you is spending your time with us here on the show. Uh just uh was looking at who's listening in here on season three, and uh happy to see that Phoenix, Arizona is still our number one city listening in. Thank you guys. Uh, we appreciate all you guys down in Phoenix tuning in. Denver, Colorado coming in second place. Portland, Oregon. Come on, Portland. Oh, Portland. Coming in third place. Yep. A lot of listeners in Portland. I love that. Me too. Uh Dallas, Texas, Accra, which is uh Ghana.

Scott Allen 1:34

So wow, we should all the way to uh West Africa from Dallas. Okay, yeah.

Luke Allen 1:38

There are consistent listeners there in Accra. I love it. Toronto. Yep. Toronto, Canada. Uh Clovis, California, Salem, Oregon, come on. And after that, I don't I can't pronounce this name of this city, but it's in Laos. So we have Laos tuning in as well here in the last couple weeks.

Scott Allen 2:01

That's crazy. Laos?

Luke Allen 2:03

Yep.

Scott Allen 2:03

Oh my gosh.

Meet Jeremy Pryor And Family Teams

Luke Allen 2:04

As far as uh the top countries tuning in, United States coming in number one, followed by Canada, Mexico, Ghana, United Kingdoms, Ireland, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Germany, more in Europe uh than I remember last season. So I'd love to see. That'd be fun. Uh Dad, as far as uh today's episode, we just got off an awesome recording with a new guest, Jeremy Pryor. Before we hop into that, uh, what were some of your takeaways from today's discussion?

Scott Allen 2:35

Jeremy's a new guest, um, and he runs a ministry called Family Teams, a great, great ministry. And uh we're gonna point you to the resources, incredible resources he has. What I love about Jeremy is he's very like-minded with the DNA in terms of the place that you begin to disciple the nations, you start with your own family and the importance of family in the Great Commission, in the discipling of nations. And so we really talk a lot about that as well as talking about how far we are from that vision, not only in the culture at large, but in the church, and just how do we help the church, our brothers and sisters in Christ, recover this beautiful biblical vision for what God designed the family to be.

Luke Allen 3:21

Yeah. I uh today's episode I I learned a lot. This one was eye-opening for me. I, you know, for a topic that we think about and talk about so much here at the DNA, there was I learned a lot, you know, and uh one of the things that I took away from was how far off of God's vision of the family um we are in the West today, and that has affected all of us in more ways than we know. And um our vision of the family is so far off that it's when you hear about the family in the Bible, you cannot use our context of the family that we understand nowadays to relate to what it's talking about in the Bible. It's it's like we we have no idea of even what it tastes like. It's like explaining what chocolate tastes like to someone who's never tasted chocolate. Like we don't even know what this concept of the family is. So we have so far to go in bringing back this, you know, pillar of culture um and absolutely foundational to what we do here at the Disciple Nations Alliance. Discipling nations starts with the individual, and then the next step in that process of discipleship is the family. So it's core to uh the Great Commission. And uh I'm excited uh to share this episode with the guests today. I hope you guys all learn as much as I did. So uh yeah, without further ado, let's uh let's hop into it.

Scott Allen 4:27

So excited to have with us today a new guest, uh uh Jeremy Pryor. Uh Jeremy is the co-founder and director of a ministry that's called Family Teams. Uh, he's also the host of a very popular podcast called the Jeremy Pryor Podcast and author of numerous books on issues of family, Chris biblical family, uh including family revision, how ancient wisdom can heal the modern family. Um Jeremy had an epiphany about two decades ago, realizing that the way that we do family in the West is mostly failed as an experiment, and the scriptures are calling us back to a bigger and better design. And since then, he has been working to impact families uh in the United States, particularly in the greater Ohio region, through various projects and resources. Jeremy, I know that's a very short bio, but uh gives our listeners a little bit uh to to kind of hold on to about you. But thanks for being with us.

Jeremy Pryor 5:22

Absolutely. Yeah, love to be here, guys. Thank you for having me on.

Scott Allen 5:24

We're so grateful. And Jeremy, I just since it's your first time on our podcast, uh, yeah, please feel free to add in anything that you feel like our listeners need to know, in addition to what I just shared there, because again, that was pretty brief.

Jeremy Pryor 5:35

So Yeah, that was great. Yeah, that there's a few assignments I feel like our family's called to. So definitely restoring the biblical blueprint of family as a team, a multi-generational team on mission, that is like heart and soul to what we feel called to do. Uh, we also are uh have a nonprofit called 1,000 Houses where we we are really trying to understand how to how to make disciples who make disciples. Um, why has multiplication broken down, particularly in Western countries when it comes to discipleship? We've been obsessed with studying that for the last 10 to 15 years and really have developed different blueprints for how to overcome those issues and get disciple making to the fourth, fifth, sixth generation. But both both the thing where both these things overlap is that you know part of our the basic design of the way God's made family is to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. That five-part mission given to us in Genesis 1.28, we take very seriously as a family. We have five kids, four grandkids. We live in a four-generation house here in northern Kentucky. All of our kids, our adult kids, three of them are married, and um, and uh we all live on the same street. Uh most of us live in the same house. Um we have four different apartments in our house. We all work together, we start businesses together, we start ministries together. Um, yeah, we're we're abandoning the uh broken nuclear family western experiment that has failed, and we are going back to the ancient path of building a multi-generational team. Um, we believe in it, it's working for us and for hundreds of other families. And yeah, a big part of what we're trying to do is just put up the bat signal to the church and say, guys, why in the world are we following the world uh down the same path? We we tend in the church just to adopt the exact same blueprint of family that the culture has. We're just like a 10-year kind of lagging indicator on all of the negative um statistics around family in the church. And I'm like, guys, we have the Bible. We have an advantage, we have a completely different way of thinking about these things. But instead of actually adopting that, we've kind of tiptoed around the idea of family, just adopted a typical uh Western idea of family. And um we're instead of being light and salt to the to the earth in this area, we are uh just following them down the same uh destructive path. And we're like, we don't need to do that. Like there's a better way. Let's get back to the way the Bible described family.

Speaker 3 7:39

Wow. Wow.

Nuclear Family Vs Biblical Household

Luke Allen 7:39

That's yeah, that was fantastic. Very powerful. Our our co-founder um always says, Daryl Miller, he always says, if the church does not disciple the nation, the nation will disciple the church. Absolutely. And that's really what we've seen in the area of family. And like you said, we have the Bible though, we have the blueprint for actually how to do this well. You went through it so quick, and I'd like you to unpack it a little bit more. Those five steps for the family as unpacked in Genesis, what were those?

Jeremy Pryor 8:03

Yeah, so so um maybe I could I could just contrast that and I'll go through what what he says there in Genesis 128. But um in our culture, we think of family. I think I think even in the Christian culture, a good family is a springboard for individual success. That that's kind of what it means to have a good family. We launch our kids out, they start over every generation. Um, your success as a parent is mostly um dictated or or described by how well your kids launch, and when your kids are gone, you're called an empty nester because really we think families are nests that launch um the next generation out. So that's what we think. That's what's intuitive to us. It's intuitive in the church, it's intuitive in the culture. Uh that is not in the Bible. That is not a good idea. It hasn't worked, it's a disaster. We've got the worst kinds of uh outcomes you can imagine. The United States is now the number one country in the world when it comes to single parent uh families. So whatever ideas are corrupting the family, it's happening here the worst. We're we have in terms of discipling the nation of the United States of America in a biblical understanding of family, we are the worst nation in the world uh at this. The divorce rate in India is 1.5%. Family is not a bad design. We have adopted uh and decided to adopt a terrible design around family that's not biblical. It's fairly recent. It's about 150 years old. It really happened slowly, but it really started with the Industrial Revolution and has gotten worse and worse every generation since then. So that's where we're at. What the Bible describes uh is in in Genesis 1.28, we actually have a description for what was in God's heart and what he was designing when he created the first family. And we read there that God said he blessed them and he said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over my creation. And so if you look at that definition of the family, it's not it's not this sort of nest version of the family. What you see there is number one, God sees them as a team, right? He tells, he says this to them. He gives them a five-part mission, but doesn't give it to an individual. He gives it to a family together. And you can tell that the family that he's actually giving this to is not a one-generational family. I don't know any family that in one generation can fill the earth, right? It takes a lot of generations to fill the earth. So that mission assumes that family is a team and working together. It assumes that the family is multi-generational, and it's it assumes that they are on a mission together. It gives them this five-part mission, be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. And so what we say is that what we think in our culture is the family is a springboard of individual success in a nest. The Bible presents family as a multi-generational team on mission. So we're not a nest, we're a team. And so that that's the way it's described. Now, what I'm saying is not is not unusual at all historically. It's not unusual even geographically. Most places in the world still think about family this way historically. Almost all cultures that had any kind of healthy family culture saw family as a multi-generational team. This is a very what we're we believe about family is very recent. Um and so yeah, we can unpack that mission. But what we think about like why God created the family, he did create it to do these five things. We we want to be fruitful, which is to have children. We want to multiply, which is to have children who have children. In other words, to have grandchildren, to raise your children to multiply, to fill, which means that you are geographically um really uh fix fixated on a particular geographical region and filling that region, but also to subdue, which is that's the that is to go out, right? To go out and to subdue, to to gain uh control of the areas of influence and the culture and to see those areas that are not submitted to Christ and to bring those under his lordship to finally rule, right? That God created families to be ruling households and to govern underneath the lordship of Christ, which is by the way, that five-part mission, be fruitful, multiply, philosophie, and rule, was recapitulated exactly by Christ in Matthew 28, right? He tells them to be fruitful, which is go make disciples, but he doesn't just tell them to be to make disciples, he tells them to make disciple makers, teach them to obey everything I've commanded you, which is the command to multiply, right? Then he tells them to fill, right? He tells them to go into all the world, to go to all the nations and make disciples of all the nations. That's the command to fill. And to subdue, he says to train them to obey everything I've commanded you, which is that's the subdue command. Why? Because Jesus says at the very beginning of the commission, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. He is the ruler, he's the king, he's the Lord. So Matthew 128 and Genesis are Matthew Genesis 128 and Matthew 28 are really parallel passages. One is the commission given to the family, which is still operative, and then Matthew 28 is the new covenant command given to the church. These are the same command. We are have the same mission.

Scott Allen 12:39

Jeremy, I'd like to pick your brain on. I mean, that's we're so aligned. I'll just first, when you talk this way, I I we are so aligned. Um, you know, we talk a lot in the Disciple Nations Alliance about the family as the, you know, if we're gonna tr change or transform cultures, nations, societies, it's got to start with that most basic one, which is the one that God created right there in Genesis chapter 1, 2, 3, the family. Um, and it's the one that all of us, you know, for most for the most part are involved in, right? You know, we we all come from families. Whether you're single, married, you're all connected to a family. And yet, um, you know, from my own experience, I became a Christian when I was um in high school, when I was a junior in high school. So I've been a Christian for most of my life, all of my adult life. Um and yet I the this kind of vision and purpose biblically of family is something that I had to kind of seek out and learn on my own. Um, you know, and I've noticed in most of the churches that I've attended when um there's a family ministry, um, it tends to be kind of focused around divorce, I would say, you know how do we, you know, how do we help people that have been divorced heal? And how do we prevent people from getting divorced? So it's all good, but it tends to focus around things like how to have a healthy relationship with your spouse and what's her love language. And again, fine, but what's not taught is the stuff you're talking about, this basic biblical design. And I'm talking about churches that really take pride in the fact that they're biblical churches and they teach the Bible book by book, you know, letter by letter. But somehow this gets missed. What are your thoughts on that? Why, why is it that the church has been like you were saying, Luke, more discipled by the nation in terms of the cultures, understanding of family than the Bible?

Abraham And The Cost Of Unhooking

Speaker 2 14:24

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's very it is very baffling. I I I had the same experience exactly that you described, Scott. My my experience was I grew up in the church. Um, there were so many amazing things that I I received in that environment. But I my first you know ministry experience was as a youth pastor to mostly public school kids and the kids in our in our own church, and there was so much divorce that I I began to really lose um uh a connection with like a desire for for having a family. And I was watching my friends just abandon the idea of having kids. Seattle, where I grew up, was the first uh place where they had more dogs than kids. And I I was like, I get it, I I can see why you're doing it. There's there's this seems like an experiment that just isn't working. Like, so let's figure out another way. I was 23 years old, single guy, um, you know, really trying to follow Jesus, but not too excited about family. Ended up in Jerusalem. I was studying Hebrew there. And while I was in in Israel, I just saw this very strange phenomenon of men and children everywhere. I mean, it was like I kept seeing it and I was like, this is weird. And I was kind of ignoring it at first, but there was one day I was sitting on a bench and I saw like a bunch of these Jewish men pushing strollers with all these little kids in tow, and I was like, that is the I've seen like a mommy brigade before. I've never seen a daddy brigade before. So I started asking them this question. I'm like, guys, like, where where do you get this idea of family? I don't I don't get it. Like what like where I come from, men and family don't mix here. It seems like men are more passionate about having kids than even their wives. I'm like, this is so weird. Um, and and so when I was asking them this question, they always came back to one a one-word answer, which sort of shocked me, which was Abraham. I was like, Abraham, like, and I had just like it's it just so happens that I I had spent um a semester studying uh Abraham specifically with probably the greatest evangelical Abrahamic scholar. I was at Western Seminary with Dr. John Salhammer, amazing, like eight of us in a class where we just went deep, deep, deep in studying the entire Torah through the perspective of Abraham. I don't remember one time having a conversation about Abraham as a model father. I just thought I saw Abraham as like his fathering and his his life as a father was sort of like a cultural element of the story, you know. Abraham was obsessed about a multi-generational family. Doesn't mean like Abraham was a camel trader, doesn't mean I need to be a camel trader. It was just one of those cultural, you know, artifacts. But here I was in in in you know, uh 1997 in a modern city filled with men who were following Abraham's way of thinking about fatherhood and family. And I'm like, that's in my Bible too. And so I I started to really ask this question, like like, you know, if you read the New Testament, it's interesting. You know, Paul says that all scripture is God breathing, is useful for teaching and correcting and training in righteousness. They they used the the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, this was their curriculum for how to disciple Gentiles. And um, and so Paul was using it. I I was not discipled as a believer through the Hebrew scriptures into an understanding of family. Like I and so I I really got all of those ideas from the culture.

unknown 17:26

Right.

Jeremy Pryor 17:27

So I think I think that if you were to get down to the root cause to answer your question, I think what happened was that we made a decision, as Andy Stanley recently said, to unhitch from the Old Testament. Like he, and he was promoting that as a good idea, by the way, which is absolutely appalling. I can't imagine something that's more dangerous to say than that. Because this is the root cause of so many of the problems that we have. We do not, we do not, we have a basically a cultural or oftentimes a Greek understanding of so many elements because we have unhitched from the Hebrew scriptures.

Speaker 3 17:57

Right.

Speaker 2 17:58

But when you hear the word Avram, Abraham, Abraham's original name, Avram, Av is the Hebrew word for father, Avram is exalted father. So one of the things we because we don't have a Hebraic understanding, we we we read the narratives about Abraham as as historic. That is not the way Jewish people read um what we call historical narratives in the Old Testament. They read them primarily as prophetic. Like that they are they are they're historically true accurate, but they was not with the j they're not trying to do the modern genre of history. There's something theologically deep and prophetic about each of these accounts in the Bible. And so what is the what is the what is the prophetic or the theological significance of Avram, the exalted father, Avraham, the father of many nations? It is to it is to unpack the way, the supernatural way that God interacts with fatherhood. Like it in the in the person of Abraham.

Speaker 3 18:48

Yeah.

Speaker 2 18:49

So I've spent years and years and years studying um Genesis from the perspective of what it can unpack about the nature of the family and fatherhood. And it is so rich and totally ignored by the church. We don't ignore it in this way. That's crazy. So that's where I think it's coming from. Like it's not it's not because it's not in the Bible, it's there. It's it's in there literal cultures within Judaism. Yeah. Yeah, that actually followed this blueprint. We have we have systematically decided to ignore it.

unknown 19:19

It's crazy.

Speaker 2 19:20

I and it's not like it's going well for us. It's not like, wow, I mean it'd be one thing if if the fruit of the Christian family was just amazing, and you just saw just the the the incredible uh um results that were coming from our abandonment of the of the Hebrew scriptures idea of family. No, it's we're we're we're having the same problems our culture's having with regards to family while we're reading the book that has very clearly described to us, but in a more of a Hebraic way, um, how God designed the family. And so that's why where I think the disconnect is we've got to get back to actually studying the scriptures and understanding that it gives us a completely different blueprint of family than the culture does.

Scott Allen 19:58

Aaron Ross Powell Well, and it's a revolutionary blueprint, and I think we forget just how revolutionary it's been historically. I was listening to Dennis Prager a few years ago, and you know, as a Jew, he was talking about how kind of the Jewish, or we could say Judeo-Christian idea of family revolutionized the world, you know, because prior to that, or you could look at, you know, the Roman world that the Jewish that the church was born into, I mean, women were viewed as tools, and should so were children. You know, they were disposable. Uh, this is common all over the world, even today. You can go to a lot of nations and um, you know, and and what that does is it destroys, it destroys people's lives. You can't have healthy cultures that flourish in any way. And it was into that kind of context that this kind of revolutionary biblical idea of family and monogamy and respect and love for wife and things like that, um, you know, uh, you know, till death do us part, these things that no nobody had ever heard of. And and by the way, I was, yeah, Luke mentioned a recent podcast of yours, and and as we are becoming post-Christian here in the United States and in the West, all of these things are coming back, right? You know, polygamy and all sorts of things, uh, you know, this kind of pagan type of family, whatever you wouldn't even call it family, is coming back. But uh, Jeremy, I want to go back to your Abraham and what you're saying about him. I think that's so profound. And um, you know, when you think of uh Genesis 12, 1 and 2, which is central to our ministry, um, it's the beginning of the mission, God's mission for the world, this redemptive mission, and he begins it with Abraham, and he says, I'm gonna raise you up. Uh, you know, you're going to have a family, right? You know, you're gonna have, he's old, his wife's old, they don't believe that they can have children. You're gonna become a family, and that family is going to become a nation, and I'm gonna bless this nation, and this is how it's gonna work. That blessed nation is gonna bless all the nations, and at the very end of the story, every nation's gonna be blessed through you.

Speaker 2 21:53

That's right.

Scott Allen 21:53

So it's so that is the mission of the church hasn't changed uh through time. It it's the family is central. Involved in it, Jesus kind of underscores it, you know, when he leaves the butt you know when he uh before his ascension, you know, with the Great Commission to, you know, to disciple all the nations. But again, we don't connect family and mission or Great Commission, it seems like at all. Those are very disconnected for most Christians. Could you talk about that a little bit more? Because it seems like you really understand this, and I just find that so uh refreshing and unusual. So talk about that connection between family and the Great Commission and the mission of the church, if you will.

The Oikos And Disciple Making Homes

Speaker 2 22:32

Yes, yes. Well, uh obviously one one one of the things that's that's that's happened in the New Testament that was that was kind of unique was that when the church, when the Holy Spirit came on on Pentecost, you saw that they were meeting in homes, right? Um, that there was this explosion of of homes or households that were learning and teaching the ways of Christ. And a lot of people are confused about that. They think that maybe Peter, James, and John, you know, circled the wagons and had a conversation about what kind of model of church should we do? What do you guys think we should go? Mega church, we go house church. I don't know, let's go house church. I like like that's the way we talk about what happened in Acts 2. That's not what happened, by the way. There was no conversation like that. What happened was that we don't understand uh the power of the first century Jewish and Roman household. This thing that in Greek is called the oikos, right? It was an incredible thing. I I find it fascinating. It was actually a part of the government. There's all kinds of laws in the Roman and Jewish world about the the oikos.

Scott Allen 23:29

So it's because it excuse me if I could interject. I'm not a Greek scholar at all. You've studied more than I have at that level, but isn't that that's the same root word for economy, isn't it?

Speaker 2 23:39

Exactly. Yeah, oikosnomics is where we come from the word economy. Right. This is another massive uh unfortunate transition, which was the the household, the oikost, was the epicenter of the economy in the first century. Every single oikost had an economic engine, had a had a had a had a had a business that they uh or land, something that was creating that economic engine. So there was a lot of laws and rules and things around the oikas. But the thing that that is interesting in terms of what you asked about the Great Commission was that the oikas in in both the pagan and the Jewish world was the epicenter of of the faith-based or religious life of of every individual. It wasn't the temple, it was it was the oikas. Like you would have Sabbath as a Jewish family, every single week it would be presided over by the Father. You had you had all these traditions like Passover, this was happening. If you read about first century Roman religious practices, the hearth fire, and the way that that that the religious life was was absolutely centered in the home. It would be supported by the synagogue or by the temple, but it was it was centered in the home. And so when the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost and erupted, what occurred was you already had these these sort of micro communities of faith uh or of religion all around. And so that the when the Holy Spirit was beginning to remake that through the gospel, it erupted through the households. And that this is now I one of the things that I'm very confused about and have been confused about for decades is what do you do in a culture that has destroyed the oikos? I mean, can you still go out and make disciples through the household? Like how does this work? Does does that commission should it go to the church, kind of what we call the church, or just like um places of worship today, or is there still a familial responsibility for the Great Commission? And so one of the things that we've decided, this was the most expensive decision we've ever made in terms of like time and energy, was that in order to see that kind of disciple-making household re-emerge in our day and age, you first have to re-establish the household. Because 98% of Christians listening to this, you'd you don't live your life as a household. You don't, those households were like 20, 30 people strong. They had economic engines at their center, they were well led. They had all kinds of faith or religious traditions going on inside the home. And so part of what we've decided to do as a family and as a ministry is to take a lot of and a lot of our time and energy. And this is what why we started family teams. We we were first doing discipleship and uh we were we were trying to support the church, and we kept running into this problem, which was we kept watching fragile Western nuclear families attempt to do this, do anything, and they just were so unfamiliar. Like the husband and wife didn't know how to work together as a team, they didn't know how to involve their kids generationally, they didn't know how to use their house as a forward operating outpost of the kingdom of God. All of these things had been redefined by the culture and accepted by the Christian church. And then all of the things that they were doing in terms of faith were all being sort of sucked into the local church environment. Nothing was happening in the home. And so we said, well, okay, we've got to start by re-establishing this oikost, this household. It's worthwhile like recreating that. So you know, we start with our family, and we had five kids, and we started to, we started businesses together, we started ministries together, we we we built our house. And so just to give you a quick snapshot. So last night, um, and this was kind of a unique experience, so I was like really, really interested to see this. So we call our community a disciple-making community, and um, and our household is a disciple-making household. So my daughter, uh Lisa, she's uh she's 20, she had uh a group of girls over and they were doing a discipleship kickoff. We have a whole blueprint where we spend six months at immersive disciple making. Um, and while she was doing her kickoff in our living room, a guy that I discipled two years ago brought his group, he's using the same blueprint down from Columbus to come and have dinner with us. And that night I was doing a training with the guys I'm discipling right now. And so what was like buzzing in our house, and this was this was our dream all along, was we want our house to be this disciple-making hub. That's what we want to create. And so just to see that picture of my daughter making disciples, my wife helping us, you know, cook a meal so that the guys that, you know, my spiritual grandsons, so to speak, are coming down from Columbus, so I could, I could invest in them while my spiritual sons are coming over that I'm discipling right now in a season of discipleship. And this is just like a day in the life of what it means to be a household on mission to make disciples for the kingdom of God. Wow, it's so beautiful. Yeah. Because I think there's something incredibly powerful about doing disciple making around the table in the living room, in an immersive way with your family, with your kids, like all of you together on mission. So um, when you let everything get sucked into institutions that are larger than the household, then you never get to have that experience. And I think that that was Jesus' first sort of picture of what the church was even going to look like. He said, You'll have a hundred times more mothers and brothers and sisters and homes, he says, and fields, which are businesses, you know, and in the age in persecutions and in the age to come, eternal life. He's he's saying, look, you guys, like this is like a it's like a massive oycost that I'm I'm creating. Well, how can you create a massive voic when nobody even knows what an oicost is? We've we've destroyed the household. And uh, and so we we I think all of our confusion about the the nature of the church, I think really stems from our our confusion around the nature of the family. And so so the these disconnects are are really rampant. That's why like that is the keystone. If we can re-establish the biblical design of family as a household on mission, like what that will do, I think is it'll start to a lot of the New Testament will start to make more sense.

Scott Allen 29:09

Wow. Luke, I want you to come in, jump in here with some of your questions as well. So you caught me stunned. That was so good. No, it's a it's a really powerful vision. And yeah, if I could just interject before you you you you pose your question, Luke, you know, uh the the word that you've used here too is multi-generational, and that's what makes the family kind of unique, isn't it, amongst other institutions, let's say, even than the local church, is there's this deep connection to future generations. And I think uh I had a big aha on that several years ago when um I read a book um on the life of Jonathan Edwards, you know, the great American theologian from the uh, you know, he was lived at the same time as our founding fathers in the 1700s, and you know, many consider him the preeminent theologian that America's ever produced. But uh in the book, they talked about his generations that have come from, you know, him and his wife's, I think it was Sarah. Um, and um you know, today you can if you are a a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, you know it, right? I mean, you you brag about that, right? So there people are, you know, they know who they are, and they've done research on this group of people, and it's kind of remarkable, you know, the impact that has rippled down through the centuries from that couple, you know, in terms of how many are cross-cultural missionaries, how many are uh have have been leaders in universities. One of them was the vice president of the United States, and it just kind of goes on and on. And and you think about the impact of a family, you know, one family actually. And we don't think about Jonathan Edwards in that respect. We think about him as a theologian and a pastor, but probably his greatest impact for the Great Commission, if you will, was the work that he did as a family, you know. And I that really exploded my own vision, you know. And it was the multi-generational piece of it. Like, wow, the ripples go on, you know, from what you do here. And that that's kind of unique in a way that I don't think other, you know, parts of God's creation can kind of say.

Speaker 2 31:08

So yeah, well, yeah, that that is so clear. Like, you know, many, many times, I don't know if you guys have ever had this experience, like you're you're wanting to get, you know, a fresh uh a fresh insight from the word of God and you're doing a Bible reading plan and you open your Bible to this day's reading, it's a genealogy in your life. I was just gonna say that. Yeah, right. It's like a lot of times you're like our our response to that oftentimes is like, what is this doing here? I'm just gonna turn the page and skip this. Yeah. Like, like, but it's important to say that if you if you get to a place in scripture that you would have edited out, that's in there, either you're a better editor than the Holy Spirit, or there's something you don't believe that God values. And so what you just said, Scott, is that God values multi-generational family. And yes, I mean, there's so much airtime given to that. And that's just one example in genealogies. But yeah, you can ask the question just like you did about Jonathan Edwards, like, how much did Abraham accomplish in his life, or how much was his, how much of the fruit of his life came from just having and raising Isaac? Like, you know, I'm sure Abraham was a great camel trader. I'm sure he did a lot of great things in his life, but we wouldn't even know who he was if he didn't have Isaac. We wouldn't have had Jesus, we wouldn't have David, we wouldn't have the Old Testament. Like, all of these things happen because he had he had a multi-generational family.

Scott Allen 32:22

And that this is this is what is in and in a real way, the New Testament encourages us to say, you know, he's your father, forefather as well, right? He is you're part of that family. We're all part of that family.

Speaker 2 32:32

Yeah, it's extremely important to Paul and Galatians three to make the make the point that he is your father too.

Speaker 3 32:38

That's right.

Speaker 2 32:39

And and and that this is what makes him Avraham, the father of many nations. Because and that this is part of what I want to say to you guys. When I was around those Jewish fathers in in Jerusalem, they were taking very seriously what it meant to be a part of the family of Abraham. And this is the big problem in the church. We we he's our father too, and we are the least Abrahamic of all the Abrahamic religions. We're the one Abrahamic religion that refuses to learn from Abraham about how to be a father and how to raise a family. And it is killing us. And we are given a direct line of descent to Abraham from what Paul says in the gospel according to Galatians. Why, why, what, why was that so important to Paul to root to say, why wouldn't you just say, isn't it amazing you're saved and you're you're in Christ? Right. No, he says you're in Christ. And you know what that means? You're a part of the family of Abraham too.

Scott Allen 33:23

You're tied all the way back to that promise. Yes. That's what I think it is. The promise that God has made to redeem the world through this family.

Speaker 2 33:29

Through families. Yeah. What he says there at the end of the of the of that blessing in Genesis 12 is that he blesses your family to bless all the families of the earth will be blessed through you. Later on, a few chapters later, he says, all the nations. There's an interesting theological connection between families and nations. But the way that God redeems and disciples nations is through blessing families to bless families. Like that's how it started. And then nations get blessed.

Scott Allen 33:55

That's right. I mean, a nation it probably we can understand it simply as just a you know a collection of families, right?

Speaker 2 34:02

So I mean in the Hebrew scriptures that was always true. E the Edomites came from Esau, the Ammonites came from Am, the Moabites came from from Moab, and the Israelites came from Israel, which is Jacob. So yeah, there's a there's a theology of of nationhood that you see in the Old Testament that is very familial. And uh we we've lost that a lot because we have countries now like America that are that are more contractual. Like we we are all part of the same constitution. We come from very different ethnic groups, very different families. And that's great. We're a melting pot, but it's important to understand theologically that God wants all the families of the earth to to be saved. And that that happens through caring about these this thing called multi-generational family lines.

Scott Allen 34:42

Sorry, Luke, I think uh we're we're geeking out here a little bit.

Healing Identity Through Family Stories

Luke Allen 34:47

Yes. Well, I think that was so good. I the generational aspect, I I was reading one of your emails, Jeremy, in that little course, um, which I'll have linked below, guys. It's a five-part email course um on the basics of this. I think it was the first email, and you said most Americans today do not know the names of their grandparents. Is that right? The great grandparents. Yes. That's crazy to me. I mean it kind of makes sense because I I I know mine, but it's barely. I don't know my great-great, you know. Um but that is that's so sad to me because historically that was like you were saying, the old testament for sure of high value, even in the Middle Ages, you know, my name is John, son of blah blah blah. They knew their family line, basically. And Dad, we've been doing some research uh recently, not not me, you and your parents have been doing research on the Allen name, which has been fascinating to me. And after this, I'm totally gonna go and do that. That's one of my takeaways today. Is uh go back to our early American um ancestor who came here in the sixteen sixties, I think. Who's a Quaker who was uh lived on land that was owned by John Winthrop, author of uh the City on a Hill sermon. And I I just think it's so fascinating to know your family line, to know your family tree. Um you're connected to something so much bigger than yourself, and that guy that came here in the sixteen hundreds, the amount of Alens that have come from him, at this point it's it's thousands and thousands, you know. And he he had no idea that he was gonna start something like this that was gonna be the seventh most popular last name in America. And but probably not just him, but still he's had a huge splash. And when you think about your life and your role to disciple your family as having that kind of splash, say b again back to um Jonathan Edwards, it's so inspiring, especially as a young father. So I'm just dreaming about that. Um but it but it's i you know, just to go back to where we're at today in history, it is difficult because, you know, I come from a strong family uh who knows the Lord, but a lot of people don't come from that. Uh their parents or don't have a good relationship with them. They might come from a broken family. Um and yet they want to build something like this. I I right now, you know, there's a lot of young people who are coming to come to Christ, which is awesome. A lot of at least in my circles, a lot of young families starting and this desire to kind of get back to something that we've lost because of really the effects of feminism on America. Um and how do we start to build that back? We are so far off the model right now, and the amount of brokenness that's uh woven into each one of our lives in our family trees is um it seems insurmountable. Um so where do we start?

Speaker 2 37:24

Well, I yeah, I like how you kind of are teasing that out, Luke. I I think that one of the things that's really important to acknowledge is that some of us are Isaac and Rebecca generations. We're we're really standing on the shoulders of people in the past that have really covered a lot of ground and have uh teed us up for a much better life uh in fa in the faith or in other in other areas. You know, some of us started on third base, you know, and we we think we hit a home run or whatever. Some people are starting, you know, on first base or or even uh um even before. And and that's that's it's really important that we don't get discouraged. Abraham uh came, the guy we're talking about, he was one of those guys who came from a really broken family. His his father, we learned about in Joshua, was uh like an idol worshiper. And so this is why God told Abraham, like, you gotta leave your father's household. Like, and so some of you guys are being called to do that, you know, and that's okay. There's a special blessing given to Abraham and Sarah generations. It's really important that you don't compare yourself to Isaac and Rebecca generations. Like you have a different kind of assignment. And so I think that people need to embrace that that what does it look like for to make my ceiling my kids' floor? That is an incredibly amazing accomplishment. You know, we we want to make sure we're making generational progress. It took generations for our families to get this broken. It's gonna take generations for us to experience that kind of deep healing. Um so I think I think that just being realistic, and then going back to what you were saying, Luke, about um, you know, roots, I think I think that I think that we we live in a culture that is obsessed with identity. And I think the obsession has come from the fact that we have cut people off from an understanding of their family identities. And so to not know who your great grandparents are, yeah, of course, like they're irrelevant to me. Why would I need to know that? Well, because if you don't know where you came from, then you're going to be endlessly searching for an identity elsewhere. And so many kids don't realize, and so many parents, they think they're they're doing their children a favor by sending their kids out into the world without any identity, any idea who they are, not say and saying, like, and we don't realize how identity is formed. Identity is often formed by people putting something on you, and so they end up in some kind of peer group that is telling them who they are. Um, kids who are really foolish, really deceived themselves, really struggling, um, giving each other identities, as opposed to saying, look, you're let me tell you where we where we came from. You know, and I think even if you come from broken families, difficult histories, I would do some research. What you're doing, Luke, is really important. You know, Scott, what you're you and your parents are doing, trying to like understand where we came from. Go back and see and try to understand. Like, is is there are there roots there that are worth like really putting putting our soil, our the roots down into those that deep rich soil? Um, so and if not, definitely build that for your future family. But for many of us, there are some amazing uh elements of identity. Like tonight, we have uh we're gonna have a Sabbath dinner that we do. We do a multi-generational uh family meal every Friday night. Uh, we have four generations around one table every Friday night. We tell stories. Um, and um, you know, my my uh my wife, she's like, my she said this to me this morning. She said, My my grandfather would would have been 121 today. This is his birthday would have been today, um, or was is today. And so she's already written up a story to tell our kids about their uh great-grandfather. Um, and and and this happens a lot. My parents, when they come, um uh often prepared to share stories about our multi-generational family. My grandmother uh came to our our Sabbath table for a season, and we realized uh as she was there telling stories and explaining things from the past that she was bridging seven generations. She could remember three generations before her, and she was seeing four generations after her. And it's it's really difficult to describe the depth of meaning our kids and all of us feel around that table every week. It's just like it is so rich. And we're talking about discipling our kids and what it means to keep our kids in the faith. You know, evangelicals, we have what, something like a 20% success rate at keeping our kids in the faith. I think a lot of this is we they there's no deep roots that our kids are like, no, this is who we are. Like this is where we came from. And I think that if you want to establish that those kinds of like that that kind of root structure, it happens around a table. And this is why one of the things that we advocate the most is uh get a multi-generational family meal going, even if it just starts with you and your kids, just those two generations. As soon as you get to three generations around one table every week, your family will go multi-generational. Like that's the moment that we see families transform from these one-generational, you know, fragile Western families into these multi-generational families. It starts around the table.

Scott Allen 42:00

I I like what you're saying there about meals and the table a lot. You know, I I think you early in our discussion you talked about the breakdown of the family in the West, kind of beginning, going back to the Industrial Revolution, just you know, increased secularism. It seems like it's on steroids right now, doesn't it? But uh, from that time, you can see the the functions of the family historically get stripped away from it kind of one by one. And uh, you know, for example, education. You know, we decided to homeschool our kids, and uh this wasn't the thought at the time that we made that decision is that we're gonna recover something that belongs in the family, the education to the discipleship of our children. But after we got into it, I realized that is a function of the family, and we, you know, we've outsourced it to public schools or other teachers. Um, but it's really meant a lot for the strength of our family, for the joy and the goodness of our family to recover that. Um, you talk about work, uh, you know, the Industrial Revolution fathers left the home and went to the factory for work, so that got stripped away. And now even meals, like we don't even eat together. We go out, you know, or whatever it is, we eat on our own. And about the only thing people do at their home anymore is sleep, you know.

Speaker 43:16

I know.

Scott Allen 43:17

And um, and and so you know, if that's the case for your family, you know, what do you where do you begin to kind of recover some of those central purposes that the family that God intended for the family? I think meals is it's the right place to start, let's just say. Yeah, it's not a hard one to recover.

Speaker 2 43:32

Yep, exactly.

Scott Allen 43:33

We're just gonna sit together and we're gonna eat. Yeah, that's a good thing.

Speaker 2 43:39

Yeah, there there is a tool that God has created to to keep the family together, to, to bring vision to the family, um, and and to to do this hard work of like beginning to um bring back these things that have been abdicated. And that tool is called the father. Like we we have we have we have you know we have denigrated this role like over and over again for For decades. We've made fun of it and uh mocked it and um you know.

Scott Allen 44:05

Yes, and it's changed so quickly. I I I'm often reminded of that because we like our kids, we like to go back and watch the Brady Bunch, right? You know, and you know, uh Mr. Brady was still a respected guy, and that was in the 1970s, and you just don't see that anymore. No. And I I think in some ways our culture today, I don't know, do you agree with this? It seems like the number one villain in the culture today is is this person called the patriarch, right?

Speaker 2 44:28

That's right. Yeah, if you if you were to go to almost any university, um, any secular university, and and were to get the all the professors from the humanities together and say, hey, could you guys just tell us what what's the root problem in the world? Like what's creating the most problems? Right. The one word you're going to get the problem. Is the patriarchy. Patriarchy. That is so shocking to me that in in a time in history where we have less ruling fathers than any other time in history, where there's more breakdown in the family, that these humanities professors would all collectively somehow come to the conclusion that a ruling father is what's actually causing the problem. That is such an absurd idea. And I think I think that that that that sort of tailored the enemy has done something to like seed that idea because that's the cure. That's not that that that is what you asked me like how to solve this problem. It's the patriarchs. That's what we need. It's it's if we can bring back fathers who have a vision and lovingly lead their families, this would completely transform. But what our culture desperately wants is to destroy the patriarchs so they can get at those children. And that that that's the only thing standing between the next generation being corrupted by by the enemy is a father. God has created, and so you, if you can somehow remove the father, did you know that in our culture, 60% of children will live some part of their childhood outside the home of their biological father? Like it's past 50% now. That that is so appalling to create a culture that has separated children from fathers in that way. And so we have got to understand how that is absolutely at the root of this whole problem.

Scott Allen 46:01

Wow. Jeremy, I wonder, you know, this has been so rich talking to you and so encouraging. And I I can just see the wealth of wisdom and practical experience that you're bringing to this subject. And I'd like to just talk a little bit about the work that you're doing with family teams. You mentioned another organization. Tell us more about that, the training that you're making available to Christians and how they can access that, how they can, if they're listening today and they go, I really need to take advantage of some of the training, the teaching, the resources that I'm hearing about here today. How do they do that? What do you what do you have? Maybe start there and then and then what how can people connect to that?

Speaker 2 46:43

Yeah, we so at FamilyTeams.com is our kind of the hub of everything that we we are trying to do to equip families. And so we do things like the Family Teams weekend. Uh we just launched um a new cohort of something called Family Inc. So a lot of times what happens is when people families get connected to us, they begin the process of learning how to live rhythmically as a family, how to begin to uh um use the table. Um so I wrote this that book, Family Revision. Um, my partner at Family Teams, Jeff Jefferson Bethke, wrote a book called Take Back Your Family, which actually goes into detail on the Industrial Revolution, how that corrupted the family, how that's been recovered. So we've done a lot of work and there's courses on there. There's one called the Seven-day Family, and this is how to like rest as a family, how to how to how to establish that table culture. But oftentimes when we start to see families begin to function like teams, one of the things that they tell us is, man, but this thing called work is you know that used to be very integrated, where you'd work with your spouse, you'd work with your kids. Um, it seems to be pulling us in different directions. And so we also coach families that are in the pro this is not required, but but it certainly is an amazing tool to bring that oy cost that we talked about earlier back to create an economic engine within the family that's stewarded by the family. We love to see families begin to create family assets. So Family Inc. is is another example of something we've created to try to help families on that journey. It's about a six-month coaching program where we really talk through and help create all those mindset shifts. We've got 10 coaching calls a month with different coaches that are all building uh assets for their family teams, have done this multiple times. Our family, we've started seven different businesses, and then all the coaches I have on there are very similar in all kinds of different industries. Um, and from the ground up, a lot of people, when they think about like starting a business, unfortunately, one of the one of the ways we think about that culturally is we think Shark Tank or tech startups, but 90% of small businesses are basic regional service-based businesses that can be owned by a family. They're not started by entrepreneurs, they're not some kind of grand new invention. They're just families saying, hey, let's take responsibility for creating this awesome service for for our there's hundreds of services that you can start. And so we just train people how to find it under an underserved element of their local economy, begin to to serve in that way as a family team so that you can live the lifestyle of actually in the same way that you guys have done with homeschooling, bring education back to the home. I'm like, can we bring the economy back to the home?

Scott Allen 49:02

Do you well speak yeah, speak a little bit about two things, if you don't mind, education? You just mentioned it there. What what what is your message on to families on that? Because that's obviously a big piece of what happens with children and families. And then just marriage itself, what what what how does how do what you're doing touch on those two topics?

Speaker 2 49:21

Yeah, so on education, you know, we're we are all also very big fans of homeschooling. We did about 80% uh homeschooling, 20% public school. The way that we think about this is our um the parents, in particular, I love to see the fathers think of themselves as like the superintendent of that child's education. Do not abdicate that role. Doesn't mean you have to be the teacher, but you do need to think about the education of your children.

Scott Allen 49:46

That that that changed my life when somebody said, Hey, you're ultimately responsible for the education and the discipleship of your children. And uh just that simple thought, like, oh, I think you're right, you know, that kind of changes everything, doesn't it? Yeah. That's right.

Speaker 2 49:59

And I in a big part, so we so like the there we had lots of great co-ops. We were part of like classical conversations, we'd we'd have speech and debate. There's a great like uh NCFCA is a is an incredible program that helps kids learn how to do speech and debate. All of our kids are have gone through that. It's incredibly useful. But I would say the other thing that's kind of unusual, maybe in our case, is that is that we just lived a very integrated life. So, you know, I had a kid come with me to work on Monday, we have five kids, so one was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the kids would come to work with me. And a big part of what I was trying to do is just help demystify. We own the company, so we were able to to uh to pull that off. I know that's not realistic for a lot of families, but but but just finding ways to be more integrated as a family. And Deuteronomy 6 really describes that as sort of what kids do with their time. I was trying to understand, like if I just had the Bible to understand the answer to the question, what do kids do with their time? It's really interesting that there's really nowhere in the Bible that you would get the indication that it's primarily around education. And I 100% think in this complex complex economy, our kids need to be really well educated. But what it really described was kids with their parents. It says in Deuteronomy 6 that, you know, talk to your kids about this when you when you lie down, when you get up, when you walk along the way. It was like basically saying that that what a child does with their time is just constantly spends time with their parents and you know, daughters with their mother, sons with their father. And you know, that this is the way that education has been done through this kind of family apprenticeship. And so we tried to like live that out. So that would be one of the unique ways that we really attempted to educate our kids.

Scott Allen 51:28

And then a marriage, is that something that you guys deal with as well? Or um how how do you t touch on that subject? I mean, marriage is at the foundation of family, obviously, that uh relationship between husband and wife. Do you have special training for husbands, for wives?

Speaker 2 51:43

Um I mean, there is I would say that a big part of the way we describe this is we there's a lot of marriage enrichment programs in the world. And so we definitely, you know, like you mentioned those, like love and respect and all those kinds of programs. You've done a decent job, I think, at that. The thing that I think we bring to the conversation that might be a little bit is trying to level up the marriage into an actual partnership. Like we want the husband and wife to learn how to work together. God brought you together for a reason, to be a team. Adam and Eve were a team, they were designed to come together. So we need to like how to craft a family vision, mission, values, things that actually allow us to start to function like a team. And so we we do want to start with trying to zero in on that marriage and talk about what is what is that romantic partnership really about? It is incredibly unique that God wanted a team that at its base had this fiery love connection that kicked it off, and then this amazing uh selfless love that that develops over time. Um, and so we we do talk a lot about what that looks like because you know a lot of families, they're just like a lot of marriages are marriages in which like we're trying to sort of cope with um how can we stay married um while being, you know, dealing with our sin and selfishness. Like I want to talk more about how do we maximize the design of marriage, which is which is this partnership, this incredible, like what a wife brings into that relationship, what a what a what a husband brings into that relationship are so different and so dynamic um that we want to like really understand how to maximize that partnership for the kingdom of God uh and for the raising of those families. And so we we we want to champion what that looks like. So we spent a lot of time.

A Final Charge To Start At Home

Scott Allen 53:28

No, I love that. Yeah, just for this broader purpose and mission that you're talking about, because so often it seems like, yeah, the marriage conversation is just a cubbyhole, you know, it's it's just about you two, as opposed to you two on a mission, like you were saying. Yes. Um, that puts it in an entirely different frame and I think a much healthier frame. You know, it's not kind of navel gazing at that point, it's looking out together forward. What are we going to do together? So um, yeah, really love that. Luke, as we wrap up, I'd just like again to open it to you for your thoughts or or questions, final questions here.

Luke Allen 54:00

Um yeah, I see we're getting low on time, but just thanks so much, Jeremy, for your time. I really enjoyed this. I hope we can get you back on again. It feels like we just barely scratched the surface of everything I was hoping to talk about today. So uh it'd be great to have another one down the road. Um, for anyone listening who'd like to learn more about any of those resources that Jeremy just mentioned, those are going to be all linked in the show notes below. So make sure to avail yourself of those after this discussion.

Scott Allen 54:21

Excellent. Well, Jeremy, thanks. Thanks for giving us some of your time. Thank you for um just the work that you're doing, the ministry God's called you to, and and for sharing that through these resources that you've got, your podcast, the books, and the other training resources at Family Teams. Um just want to encourage all of our listeners to please avail yourselves of those resources and and this incredible uh resource that uh of Jeremy himself and his his teammates. Um if we want to disciple the nations, if we really want to see transformation in the culture, honestly, this is where it begins. And the great thing about it is when you think about your nation or even your community, it seems daunting, like it's too big. What can I do? I'm just one person, what can I do? But this is another reason I think God's raised up families, because that's something you can get your hands around, right? That's a community that you can you can have an influence on. You can put down that flag uh just like Joshua did, right in the center of his family and say, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And you bring about a change there, and that's where it begins. And that so this is, you know, we are the Disciple Nations Alliance. We're all about seeing that change rippling out, but boy, it's gotta start right here in the family. And so, Jeremy, I'm so thankful for people like you that really get that and are passionate about living it out and are sharing your resources and training with others. Thank you.

Speaker 2 55:44

Absolutely. Thanks, guys, for having me on.

Scott Allen 55:46

God bless you.