Sermons That Serve - Josh Read | Faithly Stories

We had to notify the U.S. Embassy where we were located, that we were probably going to have to leave during COVID because the airports were all closed down. There was one flight left out of the country. We had no money, so we had to get on that flight. We wiped out our entire house, just called our church and said, we have these six bags in this corner, but everything else literally has to leave our house today. Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders. As they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith's journeys through their ministry work and everyday life, brought to you by Faithly. An online community committed to empowering church leaders, learn more at Faithly.co. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired on the Faithly Stories podcast. Well, Josh Reed, welcome to the Faithly Stories podcast. It is such a pleasure to have you here. It's great to be here, Alicia. I loved meeting up with you earlier, so yeah, I'm really honored to be here. Awesome. Well, here is, of course, in a virtual space, but just so folks know where we are. I'm in New York. You're in St. Louis. And we've already established it's rainy and stormy where I am, but okay, where you are. Yeah, wonderful weather. Love it. Yeah, great. Well, so Josh, you oversee digital properties that outreach, which I think a lot of people know as outreach magazine. And it includes sermon central dot com, which we'll talk a bunch about today, but it's been a long journey for you to get to this place. You ran a successful graphic design and web development company. You've served as a self funded missionary in South Africa for many years. You've done product design at a startup, but let's start with this. So in our last conversation, Josh, you told me that you were blowing up in a good way, right, as an entrepreneur running your own design firm. When the Lord told you to give it all up, can you tell me what, like, what was that moment like and what did you hear from him? Yeah, so, you know, the way that I have always tried to describe walking with a Holy Spirit to my children to friends. It's almost like because the Holy Spirit is a gentleman, it feels like the smiling elephant, right. He's leaning on you, leaning on you, leaning on you, directing you, and eventually it's like, oh, yeah, now I know where I'm supposed to go. For us, it felt like three years of preparation, possibly even longer, a friend of mine in South Africa painted this painting. And that I have hanging here to remind me of just this was his visual representation of how walking with the Holy Spirit feels like there's fog. You can kind of see further down, but you can't really see the end goal. My wife Rebecca and I had been feeling the Lord pressing on us that we were supposed to go international. We couldn't really quite feel what it was like until the end of 2009. There was a season where my business was, I was getting a lot of verbal agreements for contracts in 2010 that would have made my company very, very profitable. And at the end of 2009, we felt very clearly that the Lord was saying, would you give all of this up that I've shown you that I've kind of given you a glimpse of? Would you give all that up to go and for the gospel? And we said yes and ended up selling our house, giving all of our stuff away. And my wife was pregnant with our younger, our fourth child at that point. And once she had the baby, our remembers sitting there going was in January, we were putting the house on the market. And we were trying to determine when we were supposed to go. And we felt middle of May. And so that was two months after our child would have been born. And it ended up being that we sold our house on May 5th. So it was just wild. We ended up leaving Tacoma, Washington where my company was based. We left there the middle of May and with nine suitcases. Nine suitcases and four kids. Yeah. Wow. Two month old. Two year old, four year old and a seven year old. And so your family moved to South Africa. First we moved to Sweden just to get a break from all the stress of running a company, building a company and the transition of handing all of my clients off to my employees. And then, yeah, just me running it, we moved to Sweden for three months. There was a kind of a miraculous story that could take way longer than this for the podcast, but we ended up going to Barcelona for three months. And then from there, ended up moving down to South Africa. And at that point, we had been trucking four very small children around in suitcases through metropolitan areas that are not made for a family of six. And so we got to South Africa. And I was like, let's stay here for a little bit. And yeah, it was crazy. Well, so you eventually made it to South Africa after taking a couple of pit stops. Now, you were self-funded missionaries in South Africa, but you weren't doing conventional missionary work. Like you weren't digging water wells, right? Tell us what you were doing there. Yeah, so I arrived there to be with a group of people. They didn't have necessarily a goal in mind other than just to serve. And so I realized real quick that my skin color was not necessarily gone. People didn't want to hear what an American white person had to say. What they wanted was the money, the US dollars. So as I was walking into the township, which is where the poorest of the poor live in South Africa. As I was walking into the township one day, I saw a woman dropping off a battery powered little Jeep that little kids have. And the little kids were so excited they were celebrating. Well, electricity costs a lot of money and people in township are not going to charge the battery of this thing. So the battery was dead before I came out that day. The next day I went in and the children were pushing it around. And then by the end of the day, it didn't have wheels on the front. And so they were dragging it. And then the next morning they were dragging it. And as I was leaving on Wednesday afternoon, it was just on the pile of trash. It made me really sad as I just was pondering like, what am I supposed to learn from this situation? It was that when you're in poverty to that level, grasping value is a difficult thing to hold on to. So, and it's not just value of things, it's value of self worth. And I was sitting in shacks that with I brought tea bags and a ziplock back. And I would sit in these shacks with people and just say, tell me your story because their story had value. I personally didn't feel like they had any value, but their story at least was valuable. And their stories were so heartbreaking that I ended up just calling it my hugging and crying ministry because I would just hold people and weep with them. And that was all that I did for two years. And my heart just completely shattered because of it, because of hearing just the stories of hardship of people. A lot of the people that I worked with, they were illegal foreigners who had come from Zimbabwe, come from Malawi. And so, they had literally walked to South Africa through areas where there are lions roaming and everything else. And they had walked there and come illegally into the country just because that's where they could make a little bit more money. But they were treated horribly because they were illegal foreigners. And so, just that level of poverty that we as Americans don't see often, it just would break your heart. So, and it broke my mind. Yeah. So, you got your heart broken in your hugging and crying ministry. You did that for a couple of years. When did you become an auditor? So, yeah, after two years of doing that, they, in South Africa, they have what's called xenophobia, where it's the hatred of illegal foreigners. So, a lot of the South Africans will want more money, but then the jobs are taken by people who are taking them under the table. So, the foreigners are taking cash payment. And so, then it becomes very dangerous at certain levels in the township. And a friend of mine brought me to the chief of the township that I had been working in. He brought me to his house after two years of being in the township. And the chief came out and he was like, hey, I can't protect you anymore. And I was like, oh, I didn't even know that you were protecting from apparently he had been telling people in the township of 70,000 people. Like, don't touch this guy, he's a good guy. And that goes into a whole lot of story with my wife walking around having learned how to tie a head wrap by a friend of ours. We didn't realize that that head wrap actually represented some certain things about me. So, when she was walking with me through the township that represented some things. Like, we were so naive, we had no idea what we were doing. And yet, the Lord was with us to the point where I was being protected by the chief of the township. So, after two years, he said, I can't protect you anymore. Don't come into the township any longer. And so, it was like, okay, well, all the people I had been meeting with, I then had to meet outside of the township by coffee shops or other places. Right at that same time, a friend, a South African friend of mine got asked personally by the mayor of Cape Town, Patricia de Will, to audit the city of Cape Town for corruption. So, he needed some programmers because I had programming background. I was able to step in and function in a particular language that wrote, we wrote software that plugged into the SAP system of South of City of Cape Town. And we were able to begin finding the corruption in their system. So, I did that for a few years because of that, the Lord ended up opening a door for me to go to school for my doctorate of strategic leadership. By getting my doctorate of strategic leadership that ended up opening the door to me working for the national government of South Africa on an audit campaign. It essentially was douche. Like, what we now understand as douche, I was doing that in South Africa. So, it was crazy how the Lord, like, weaved this whole path of me going there, having my heart completely shattered. And then putting me into douche where I was having this effect on 60 million people every day, you know, some of the stuff that we were doing, so it was crazy. Wow. What a way to be used by the Lord on such scale, right, to have that kind of impact. I mean, what was, what did that feel like to you? I mean, I think looking back on it, you can make sense of the journey and you can make sense of like, here's how he used you. But in that moment, like, did it feel surreal to you? In that moment, it really didn't. It was more of a, I'm, I'm so like, just, I don't really recognize some of the stuff that's taking place in my life until I sit and look backwards. And so in that moment, it just felt like I'm doing everything I possibly can to hear and obey. Like, I've always tried to live my life like that. I was raised to live my life like that, literally just hear and obey. And so, yeah, I'm a simple guy. I have really, sometimes I think that they gave me a doctorate as a joke because I don't feel like I'm that intelligent, but here I am. So, yeah. Yeah. And there you were planted in a place where the Lord wanted you and your family and then COVID happened. Right. So tell, tell me about what that was like being in South Africa, having this huge role and then COVID happening. COVID happening was my goodness. South Africa was the strictest lockdown globally. So we were, we were not allowed to leave our house. We were not allowed to step foot onto the sidewalk outside of the fence of our house. If we were, they had, they had their South African National Guard patrolling the streets. And if they caught you on the sidewalk, you would get put into a containment camp. And that was, that was it. You were arrested. So it was the strictest lockdown globally. And because of that, every two weeks, we were allowed to go to the grocery store and buy groceries. We had to have a letter of how many people were in our household. And then you would stand in a line for eight hours, which was so dumb. But anyways. It, the South African National government ended up not wanting oversight because there was a lot of money coming into the government from COVID relief. And so our contract got shut down. Which meant that I was a foreigner. I was a US passport holder, even though I'm also a South African ID holder. And as a white person in South Africa, and with their B triply systems, it's very difficult for me to get a job in that nation. And so here we were out of money and no ability to get a job. And my stress levels were going through the roof, you know, trying to, we were having attempted breakings into our house during the period of time. And yeah, it was just all around a really, really stressful moment. In that moment, I'm going to, I don't know if this is going to answer your question or not, but I just need to tell you this part of it. In that moment, we watched the movie Voyager where it's about them shooting the satellite out in the 70s. And then it goes all the way past every one of the planets. And then they had it turn around and take a photo of the entire solar system. And then Carl Sagan in the, I think it was an 80s where he says that little blue, that pale blue dot that whole, that speech that he gives the pale blue dot, he's talking about how like all of history is in that pale blue dot. And for me, I was watching that stress out of my mind. And I ended up having to go into my bedroom and just I'm sitting in my room overwhelmed by the fact that we have no idea how huge the Lord is. And how he's the Alpha and the Omega. And the fact that my life is this vapor. And it's yet she knows my name. And so I'm sitting on the other side of the earth from anyone who could help me. But even as I'm crying out, you know, that the soul that says, I lift my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from. And I'm sitting there going, there is I have no one on earth who can help me in this moment. I'm stuck in a third world country. I have no money even to get out of the third world country. I have no money to take care of my family. I have people trying to break in and kill my family. You know, like it's I'm in this terrible situation. And there's no help in the hills. Where does my help come from? And it's like my help comes from the Lord, the creator of heaven and earth. And it was that moment where it's like the creator of everything, the creator of the beginning, he's the beginning and the end. And he knows my name and it shatters fear and anxiety and everything else when you can actually hold on to that when you can really truly hold on to the sovereignty of God. And that's what I've been able to walk away from Africa with is that it's so difficult to hold on to. I almost have to remind myself every 20 minutes or so of like, no wait, God is still big. And he knows he knows me. Wow. Wow. It's incredible to hear how the Lord used her time there. He broke your heart there. He gave you the significant role. And then he gave you revolution. How did he close that particular chapter for you and your family? How did you find yourself back here in the States? We had to notify the US embassy that where we were located that we were probably going to have to leave during COVID because the the airports were all closed down. And so we got an email from the US embassy on July 31st. There was one flight left out of the country. So if we needed to leave before February of 2021, we were going to have to get on this flight on August 16th, 17 days from them. We had no money. So we had to get on that flight. So it ended up costing us a small fortune and we called our church up and we were like, hey, so again, my wife had to give everything up. We wiped out our entire house, just called our church and said, we have these six bags in this corner, but everything else literally has to leave our house today. And so we left South Africa with six bags. So we started this whole adventure with nine bags. We ended up going down to six bags. And then we left South Africa within 17 days. So it was a really painful like my children had to leave all that they'd ever known their life, you know, 10 years of their lives. And now all of a sudden they were upended and we were standing in the United States going, what is this? Like talk about culture shock. It literally took four years for my kids to kind of go, oh, Americans are weird. I don't understand it. My kids look American. They sound American, but they are 100% South African. So it's a strange. It's very strange for them. So Josh, you and your family were in South Africa for 10 years, 10 years. Were there any moments where you just wanted to give up? There were three, three moments where I was absolutely done. Broken couldn't do it anymore. First was a year into it. We ended up, man, praise the Lord, a very close friend of mine that I had made while we were in Sweden for those three months. He felt from the Lord, he just called me up one day and said, I need to buy you tickets and fly your whole family up here for a few weeks to Sweden. We need out of South Africa. You need a break. And it was just like, oh, man, we needed that break and the Lord provided without me. It was a miracle. Wow. We came back the first year in South Africa. I thought was the worst year of my life than the second year actually was the absolute worst year of my life that I've ever experienced. The end of the second year, something horrific happened and I won't go into that. But I remember at that point, I was running a lot. And so I was like, Lord, I'm going to go for a run. I had been training for a half marathon. So I was like, I'm going to go for a two and a half hour run. If you don't show up, if you do not talk to me on this two hour run, like, that's it. I'm going to come home. I don't care about anything in the house. I'm just going to get everybody into the car. And then we're going to drive to the airport. And I am done with this country. I'm done with this, like, I was just shattered. So I'm on this run and three miles in just, you know, you know how it is when you're just angry, you're frustrated. Like, God, where are you? Where are you just crying out? And so I was like, I'm done. I'm not going to say anything more, Lord. This is a two way relationship. It has to be like it. You know, just me talking to the creator of the universe like this is just so silly now looking back. It's like a little kid throwing his toys. But like, I just was throwing a fit. And I was like, I'm going to be quiet now. You show up. And I'm running, running, running, just angry, running. And I came a couple miles into the run. And as I was turning a corner, I know the corner very well. I heard that still small whisper. And it said, I know your name. And it's one of the 11 national languages in South Africa. There's a greeting that's so deep. And it says, I see you. That's the literal translation of the greeting. And it was like the Lord was saying, I see you. I know your name. And I just, I was laying on the side of the road just weeping like, oh, like, okay, the Lord knows my name. Okay, go a year. The next time where I was just like, I can't do it anymore. The third and final time, I had been walking a sidewalk to and from work for three year or for four months, year three. And like, at that point, I'm again, having this darkened out of the soul. It's been a year since the Lord has spoken to me. It's been a year since he said, I know your name. And I'm just, I'm so it's so heavy. Being out on your own, feeling like there's no one around you. It's just you and the Lord, you know, like I'm out on the mission field, just kind of broken and walking to and from work. And I'm just depressed and so when you're depressed, you're walking with your head down. And so I know this wasn't there on Wednesday night when I was walking home from work. But then as I was walking to work on Thursday morning, I was still having that conversation with the Lord, like, last thing you said to me was you know my name. Yeah. But I'm standing here so far away from everyone I know, so far away from any support, like, I'm just like freaking out, overwhelmed by stuff. And God, like, I don't even think you know where I am in the world, let alone that you know my name. I'm going to be quiet. I need you. I need you. I need you. And I'm just walking and about 30 feet in front of me was a was a street light on the sidewalk. And as I approached the street light from the dark. This was on the sidewalk. And it is not a South African name at all. I don't know why someone would have painted that on the sidewalk because it's not like I'm the only person ever walking on sidewalk. Nobody. It just was one of those things where I was like, oh, the Lord sees me. The Lord is so beautiful. 10 years later, when he did say, like, I see you. Yeah, it's just it's one of those things that I can hold on to. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you had to wear with all to take a photo. I mean, it was just so hard to have to paint it on the sidewalk, especially like in the middle of the night, right when I'm sitting here crying out, like, Lord, you said, you know my name, but I don't even think you know where I'm at. Josh is painted on the side. And I was thank you for repeating that for those who are just listening and may not see the audio. Our friend Josh held up a photograph of what he saw on the sidewalk in South Africa, which was his name painted right there on the sidewalk where he walked every day for three months for four months. It hadn't been there before. Wow. So powerful. If that is not a testament to the power of crying out to the Lord, just crying out to the Lord. I mean, it's just such a reminder. I think sometimes we forget to, you know, even in our pain and our desperation, we forget that we can cry out to him, but look what happens when you do he puts your name on the sidewalk. Thank you for sharing that, Josh. Of course. Okay. So you came back home for your children. It wasn't didn't feel like home for a while, but you came back home. I think you worked, you led marketing at a chemical firm for a while. And then eventually, if I remember correctly, you joined a faith tech startup, which you helped to sell to push pay for hundreds of millions of dollars. Did that feel like a full circle moment for you? You know, you were an entrepreneur. The Lord asked you to leave it. And then here you are doing something not quite the same, but like sort of in the same round. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing to be a part of a faith tech. Honestly, like it's where my heart is at. And like I was saying, just the simplicity of here and obey here and obey it's interesting how the Lord has weaved this path of always being able to go into faith tech and then out of faith tech into corporate and then back in the faith. So when we left South Africa, I ended up starting at Rezzi, which got sold to push pay. Then got it. Okay, so I got that I got that a little bit reversed. Okay, got it. But then I ended up going to the corporate world and again, and going into working at that little very large chemical company as the director of marketing. And then yeah, about a year ago is when the Lord pulled me back out of the corporate world and back into faith tech. And so it, it's a wonderful thing. Okay, so so now you're at outreach and you're overseeing, I think it's 40 plus digital properties. Is that right? And you spend probably half your time if not more with sermon central.com. That's your key focus right now, right? Right now at the moment. Yeah. So tell us what what is sermon central. Sermon Central is a collection of sermons. I mean, really, it started. I want to say in 2002 by a pastor who just wanted to, it was almost like a Reddit for sermons, if you will, at the very beginning, you know, like, hey, post your sermon. Everyone will read it and kind of rank it and give notes and have more of a collaborative environment for pastors to be able to become better at communicating. It's grown and grown and grown since then. So I would say at its most base level, it is a resource for pastors to be able to be better at communicating their messages. So 2002, so let's see, it is over 20 years old now. And sometimes some of the simplest ideas done with consistency and persistency, like they, they lead to the biggest results. So how many sermons are in this database today? Easily over 240,000 messages from over 240,000 messages from all kinds of preachers, all different denominations, different styles, from the last generation of preachers from this current generation of preachers. So that's the database that you have at sermon central. Yeah, yeah, it's really a credible thing. That is incredible. And I know from our last conversation that as you think about the next chapter for sermon central, as you think about your priorities and what you hope to do with it, AI is a part of that. Tell me how you're planning to incorporate AI into this database. You know, it's really fun as I've been to answer your question, I'll go kind around about, sorry, like I have been influenced by living in Africa. So my, my answer is kind of. And you're the son of a preacher, right? And a preacher yourself. So yes, tell us the full story. Yeah, so I have been watching and looking into the fact that if you remember a few years ago, everyone was like, oh, millennials are going to be the largest part of the workforce pretty soon. And that was like the shocking number like and now we're at what 36% of the workforce is millennials. You look at the demographics of pastors and it's still very large portion of pastors in the US are baby boomers. And that like whereas 50 years ago, the lion share of pastors were under the age of 45, I want to say it was like 55% in the 60s were under the age of 45. Now all of a sudden you've got this, you know, void of pastors, my age or younger. So we're trying to look at how do you develop these young, these younger pastors who are probably dealing with them a lot of imposter syndrome. They're dealing with a lot of just struggling with, am I doing the right thing? Am I preaching the right thing? How do I know that? How do I validate my what I'm trying to communicate? How do I even communicate better? All that stuff. And that's the tool that we're trying to build with sermon central next. That is going to be launching later this year. And yes, AI is a part of that, but we're not trying to replace the Holy Spirit with AI. It's more a tool and that we see AI being a tool more than the Holy Spirit, if you will. All right, so let's get really practical, Josh. Tell me, what's the profile of the pastor that you have in mind? You're talking about the next generation of pastors, right? Your age or younger? Is this pastor a full-time pastor? Is this a bi-vocation? Like who is the pastor that you have in mind as you're building this innovative new technology? So, sermon central has been a lot of bi-vocational pastors have used sermon central over these years. So they need more help than the average pastor? Yeah, I mean, if you can imagine the stress that they're dealing with trying to run, trying to live a full-time job. You know, if you can imagine like burnt out Ben, if you will, that's one of the personas that we have burnt out Ben. 34 years old, young, young guy married probably has two, maybe three children working a full-time job and trying to run a church, trying to preach consistently good messages communicate good, but also trying to deal with the natural issues that come up in a church, trying to grow a church, trying to do social media. I mean, man, I've read through the list that I created and it gives me anxiety. I have to go back and remember, oh wait, God sees me. God sees me. So it's intense what bi-vocational young pastors are going through. Yeah, okay. So burnt out Ben comes to sermon central.com. What kind of help can burnt out Ben expect? Yeah, great question. I think burnt out Ben can come in and eventually sermon central next is going to have the ability somewhat like a medium where you can find sermons that you can bookmark, you can find pieces of sermons that you can highlight and put those into notebooks and from a notebook, you would be able to generate a draft that you could look through begin to edit. PowerPoint presentations come like you could export PowerPoint presentations, you can export social media graphics, you can export all sorts of different questions from that using AI that they could then sit there and edit. So it really is a step forward for them to be able to make sure that things are communicated clearly non-heretically. That's important. So it really will help kind of minimize the 20 hours of research and minimize all of that down to maybe preparing a well thought out well prepared sermon might only take five hours instead of 25 hours if you will. That's significant help for burnt out Ben. We have a lot of burnt out Ben's listening to this podcast and I'm guessing that some of them are getting excited to have a tool like this at their fingertips. When can they expect to see sermon central next? We are going to be opening up applications for the beta probably around the time that this podcast gets put out in mid to late August and from there, I would love to be in communication with all of the burnt out bands. I would love to know exactly what you need so that we can be building it as we go. So holding in public is great as you know is faithful. Well being in public is difficult, but it gets the best product. Absolutely. So can they come to sermon central dot com to access the application for the beta testing? Okay. They will be able to come. There will be a very clear button apply for the beta. It'll be there. Great. Great. Very exciting stuff. Let's go back to your to your doctorate. You know, you you had briefly mentioned that while you were in South Africa, you had the opportunity to get a doctorate, I think you said in strategic organizational leadership. And you mentioned it was significant because it allowed you to have this even larger role doing audit for the national government. Do you feel like it's come into play in your leadership at outreach and in the other things that you're doing? I think it changed me personally. And so yes, it comes in the play on a daily basis. I had a friend ask me like, should I do a doctor? Should I go get my doctorate and I was like, I don't know that I would ever suggest anyone to go get their doctor. But what I am a completely different man after having gone through that process, it was a very intense process. It was, you know, I was I was still at that point running my company in South in the US. So I was running that remotely. I also was working full time in South Africa in the audit. And then I was doing the doctorate. So I didn't realize that thank you, thank you for mentioning it. See you, you were burnt out then in that season, right? Like in a different way. Well, I didn't realize you were doing all of that all at once. Yeah, it was incredibly intense. I could not have done it without my wife. You know, really, she's amazing and I feel like both of our names should be on my degree because of it. But yeah, it was, you know, when you're doing a doctorate, you're having to read at minimum 30 hours a week. So I was doing that for three years, minimum 30 hours a week of just reading. So it was like, if I was awake and I wasn't working, I was reading. So it was a very intense three years, but drinking from the fire hose of all that. And just the fact that I was able to do it. Yeah. Now there's so much more that's come out of that out of my heart out of out of my mind as well. So yeah. So I want to dig into that a little bit more because you said you're a changed man as a result of it. Is it the work ethic that you developed? Like what, what, what about earning your doctorate changed you? I think it shattered a lot of the imposter syndrome that we deal with as human beings. But also, it wasn't necessarily the work ethic, but it really was more. I don't know if you've ever heard that where the marine say when you, when you feel like you can't hold your breath underwater anymore, you're actually only at 40%. Right? So when you're when they're going through their training and they have to be underwater for a long period of time and that like feeling that's actually only at 40% of what your body can take when you start hitting that. And so they have to go mind over matter and really hold like go the next level. I think that's what the doctor really did for me was made me realize, oh, that's actually only my 40%. So when I when I begin to feel stressed out and I begin to feel like, oh, this is so much work, that's actually only 40. Wow. So interesting. I wanted to circle back and ask this question because I do think that a lot of pastors and ministry leaders are always even as they are immersed in their ministry thinking about degrees and credentials and education. You know, I know some pastors who are leading sizable churches who are thinking about going back to seminary if they never did to begin with. And so I think this question of education and what you get out of it in the experience is a really relevant question to really answer that question. Is the smiling elephant leaning on you? You'll know if you're supposed to actually go back and go to school. I feel really strongly that you will know if the Holy Spirit is leaning on you at that direction. For example, when I went to get my masters, like for three years, I felt like the Lord was saying, you need to go, you need to go to seminary, you need to go to seminary. And I just was like, I hate school. I never want to go to school, graduated college, I barely even graduated high school. And it was a three year heavy, heavy weight on my mind before I finally said yes to it. So I think you'll know. You'll know if it's right or not. Well, before we started recording, you told me the funny story about how you wrote down your name as Josh can't read. And that was read out at your graduation. Well, it turns out Josh can't read can get a master's and can get a doctorate. And it's amazing. Well, if that isn't evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit and the power of God moving you into things and empowering you to do certain things, like I don't know what is. So good. So good. So you joined outreach, I think last fall, you've taken on your first big project, sermon central, you know, blending innovation and relevance and theological integrity into everything that you're building right at sermon central next. But it's just the first of many digital properties that I can only assume you're going to be working on it outreach. Tell me a little bit about your vision as you look at it, all of these digital properties that you have oversight on. And you think about the next chapter for these properties as a whole. What's your dream? What's your vision? I know that the vision of outreach in general Scott Evans the CEO when he started outreach the whole drive of it was to help the local church grow. And so every single one of the digital properties that we have has been created because we've seen a need. And we've built a tool that can help the local church grow in that little small way. And so that's always my vision. That's my art as well. I think it's the heart of all the former pastors who work on sermon central or work at outreach. I mean, you'd be amazed at my team. It's incredible. I have three former pastors myself and another former missionary. You know, it's like it's just a dream to work with all these guys. And they all have the same drive of how can we help the local church grow. So we are completely 100% behind burnt out ban and all the other people out there the strategic Steve, you know, all the name all the personas. We didn't even get a chance to talk about strategic Steve today. So that's a beautiful that's a very beautiful vision. Yeah. I love the local church. We love all the people that are out here even listening to this podcast. We are here for you. Please get in touch with me. I would love to find out how we can serve you. That's great. Thank you so much Josh. It's been wonderful getting to know you and to delve even a little bit deeper still in this conversation. So thank you for spending the time. I can't wait to continue to follow along in your journey. If the first, I don't know how many years have you been serving now 20 Josh. If the first 20 or so years of your ministry, which is everything that we talked about today is any indication the next 20. I can't wait to see where the Lord takes you. The expected and unexpected. It's going to be exciting to watch. Thank you Josh. Thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast. We pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue on your journey. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff, and volunteers. The Faithly Digital Platform offers innovative and practical tools and resources to enhance connection, foster collaboration, and promote growth within the church and ministry space. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review our podcast to help reach more listeners like you. Stay tuned for more uplifting tales from the Frontlines of Ministry on the Faithly podcast. Stay bold, stay faithful, and never underestimate the power of your own story.