Supernatural Realities - Mac Pier

00:01 - Speaker 1 I had a few things. I had some high school friends that were very committed Christians and they were praying for me. I was nudged to begin reading the New Testament, which I did. But I also had a demonic encounter in the February of my junior year of high school. That really helped me realize the reality of the supernatural, and then I also had a near-death experience, so that all happened within about four or five months and that really really got my attention. My name is Mac Peer. I'm founder of Movementorg, I've been privileged to live and work in New York City for 40 years and this is my Faithly Story. 00:32 - Speaker 2 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 journeys through their ministry work and everyday life. Join us as we delve into their challenges, moments of encouragement and answered prayers. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. Learn more at faithlyco. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired as we unveil the heart of faith through stories from the front lines of ministry. On the Faithly Stories podcast. 01:14 - Speaker 3 So could you tell us how your faith journey started? 01:17 - Speaker 1 My faith- journey started in the Midwest, where I'm from. I grew up in the state of South Dakota in a small community and from I grew up in the state of South Dakota in a small community, my family attended a Presbyterian church where I grew up and I attended went to VBS, so it was part of my formation. Growing up, my faith was not real active in high school and during my junior year in high school I had confluence of about four different experiences and circumstances that led me to make a personal faith to Jesus and, almost concurrently with that faith commitment, at the age of 17, I had a grasp of the necessity and the urgency to unite God's people to work together. How long were you in South Dakota? I was in South Dakota through my university years and then I worked for three years on staff with InterVarsity and moved to New York when I was 25. 02:03 - Speaker 3 So what city were you at, and what was that like? 02:07 - Speaker 1 Well, the city I lived in the last three years was the city of Sioux Falls. It's the largest city in the state Today. It's actually quite a rapid-growing city. We are members of a church that are now called Central Church. One of our other church members there is Senator John Thune. The church has really attracted a lot of strong marketplace Christians and it's had a big missions footprint all over the world. Could you kind? 02:31 - Speaker 3 of just expand on what life was like, but also just faith. Life in a very rural area. 02:37 - Speaker 1 I grew up in a town of 600 people. My great-grandfather, 110 years ago, started the 18th bank in the state, so when he started the bank it was still very, very rural, very, very much in the pioneer stages of things and we grew up in. 02:54 My wife and I both grew up in small towns. It's predominantly a farming background, lots of agriculture, and so we went to small high schools. My high school, my high school graduating class, was about 38. My high school attendance, my whole high school, is about 150. My wife's high school is a little bit smaller. She came from a community that had a lot of Scandinavians. Her family was an evangelical Lutheran over the last several generations, so that was her roots. We met at the University of South Dakota in Vermilion and we got involved, very involved, with the InterVarsity group there. Intervarsity really became a doorway into a deeper discipleship with some of its Bible and life conferences. We both attended the Urbana Missions Conference in 1979, which was very formational and life-changing. In fact when we were there we made a lifetime commitment to missions. So it was 45 years ago this month where we attended Urbana along with about 17,000 other university students and that was quite formational. So that was a bit of our journey there, growing up in the rural Midwest and meeting at university. 04:00 - Speaker 3 So what were those confluences at your younger age where it brought you to faith? 04:05 - Speaker 1 I had a few things. I had some high school friends that were very committed Christians and they were praying for me. I was nudged to begin reading the New Testament, which I did. But I also had a demonic encounter in the February of my junior year of high school. That really helped me realize the reality of the supernatural and then I also had a near-death experience, so that all happened within about four or five months and that really really got my attention. It really raised the antenna for me of the supernatural, the reality of eternity, life and death, kinds of issues. I was paying attention in the summer of 1976 when it all came together for me. 04:42 - Speaker 3 So what was the initial hesitation? Or you just in your family? 04:48 - Speaker 1 We grew up in a church that I would consider to be fairly nominal, so we were not anti-faith, but it wasn't something that was a central part of our lives. In my family, we had a mix of persons that were very faithful and going to church. We had others that rarely went to church, but we never really talked about our faith as a part of our value system as a family, and I think that's not uncommon, particularly in some rural areas, and I think too, like our parents, our parents were part of the what are called the greatest generation, and they tended to be very quiet. Particularly the men tended to be very quiet about things that were more private and internal, so that was a bit of the culture that we grew up in. 05:32 - Speaker 3 It's also not uncommon in urban areas about things at home. So could you elaborate on this demonic experience you had? 05:41 - Speaker 1 Sure, I was living in the basement of my parents' house. I remember it was February of 1976. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway or the end of the basement and the rest of the basement was dark. It was a weeknight and I was studying and I was laying on my bed and I fell asleep. And as I fell asleep I had a dream, and in the dream I was doing exactly what I had been doing when I was awake, wearing the same clothes, laying on bed, studying. And then I noticed that there was a figure that had walked down the stairs to the basement and then walked the entire length of the basement into my bedroom, in a sense to come and get me. And then I woke up and it was very real and there was a real sense that the supernatural was real and very powerful and it was an important contributor to get me to think about life beyond what can be seen. 06:38 - Speaker 3 Wait so what did this figure do? Or say? 06:41 - Speaker 1 or you just noticed it Well really once the figure entered into my room, then I woke up. So that was kind of the end of end of that encounter, but it was quite startling and did this encounter ever repeat itself, or was this a one-time event? 06:53 - Speaker 3 it was, it was one time, yeah, so that shocked you into like going deeper into the supernatural well, it just made me aware of of things that that were beyond what we could see. 07:05 - Speaker 1 That's like when you have that experience and you're reading the New Testament and you're reading about all these supernatural power encounters. I've had a little bit of the same experience when I've traveled to places like Delhi and have gone into a Hindu temple and you can just feel the presence of the demonic. So I really developed a sensitivity toward that. So I've been in different places around the world where you get a real sense that there's a lot of spiritual oppression, and that was somewhat similar in that regard. 07:34 - Speaker 3 Did you share this experience with anybody and did anyone help you process this? 07:38 - Speaker 1 I don't remember sharing about it with anyone immediately that summer when I was invited to come be an editor at a Bible camp up in North Dakota and I had a lot of friends that were there, so it was interesting to me to go there and be there. And that summer while I was there I did meet with a pastor who helped me understand what I had been thinking and reading and reflecting on and that helped put everything into perspective and context. 08:04 - Speaker 3 And that helped put everything into perspective and context. I think I'm trying to understand, like, how did this experience shape you and propel you toward not just faith but like like a specific framework of, like a doctrinal understanding of the supernatural right, because you can either go like the Orthodox reform side or like the more liberal, and I have no idea where you land. So, like, where did this journey take you? I'm just super curious. 08:28 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I would say well so where the journey led me. When I so, I actually remember the date that I made a formal confession of faith, which was July 20th 1976. And I remember that date because that was the date that I had this conversation with this pastor and when I prayed with the pastor and he guided me into the prayer, it was really like having a veil come off of your eyes and you're seeing things completely differently, in some ways almost for the first time, and there was a real sense, like when I've read NT Wright's autobiography of Paul and he said that in Acts 9, when Paul was on his journey to Damascus, he had an explosion of truth in his mind and his heart, and that's a bit of what I had, I would say. I had an explosion of truth in my mind and my heart and I was very motivated to share my faith with him. 09:21 Coming up out of that experience and I was a senior in high school a fairly small high school, as I mentioned, but I had about 20% of the student body in a Bible study my senior year, while we were meeting before school began, and then, when I went away to university and got active with the university, I shared in nine of the 14 sororities and fraternities regarding my faith. I would have a friend of mine go with me he was a musician and together we would share our story, and I led two campus missions while I was at university. So this is all really within five years of what I would describe as my initial conversion. So it was a real heart for the gospel, a real desire to share that with other people. 10:04 - Speaker 3 And when did your near-death experience happen? 10:07 - Speaker 1 That happened in May of that year. It was associated with our junior-senior prom. I had a date and we had left the prom and we were going to join classmates at a movie theater about 20 miles away and it was very late and I was driving and we both had fallen asleep at the week. I'd fallen asleep, my date had fallen asleep, and as we were, as the car was veering into the ditch, I woke suddenly and then I jerked the steering wheel and then ended up in the opposite ditch, facing the opposite way, and so there was a real sense that that that could have been fatal if something else had happened. I almost survived near death At the age of 14, I was on a bicycle driving on a highway and was hit by a car traveling 50 miles an hour and survived that. So within about four years I had a couple of experiences like that. 11:00 - Speaker 3 And how did that affect you? Because at 14, I guess your faith wasn't all there, but like this one, it's after the profession of faith. And how was it different? 11:09 - Speaker 1 Well, the second one was actually before the profession of faith. So the profession of faith happened in July, this happened in May, and so again, it was another contributor to the sense that there really is the sense that we're quite mortal and every day is a gift. We're not guaranteed what's going to happen for us, and so, anyway, that was pretty pronounced for me after that experience. 11:37 - Speaker 3 I guess I'm a little shocked at like not that this experience happened, but just to me when I hear that I feel like most people would just be confused right and like doubt and question, but for you it was like a positive catalyst toward faith. So, like, could you explain, like, how that works for you? Yeah, so I. 11:59 - Speaker 1 I think how it all it all converged for me is was really developing some early disciplines and reading and reflecting on scripture, even though I was still a late teenager and really became fairly rooted fairly quickly for me. 12:14 Part of it for me. I was a fairly serious student, got good grades. I didn't have a lot of other behaviors I needed to shed at that point, so it really became very substantive and real for me. Faith one of the things I learned early on is that the Christian faith is the most logical belief system in the universe. It gives a worldview that makes sense of the world. It makes sense of history, it makes sense of things that are eternal and temporal. 12:43 - Speaker 3 So what happened after college? 12:45 - Speaker 1 After college. It's a little bit of a story here. So my wife and I attended the Urbana Missions Conference in 1979, which was the middle of our junior year, so we had a year left. I was actually able to graduate a semester early, so the timing was we were going to graduate. We got married just a week after I graduated a semester early, so we were pretty young. 13:09 I had interviewed for and gotten a job with the IRS. I had gotten an undergraduate in business management. I was one of 120 applicants, so I got the job. So it felt like that was a door that had opened. And then in January of 1980, President Reagan was inaugurated and the first law he signed into effect was the federal hiring freeze. So the job that I thought I had was gone within a couple of weeks. I hadn't even gotten started. Fortunately, I was working at my family's bank while my wife finished up an internship. 13:42 But when I got the news about this job being taken away, I had to reassess my options, and I had two options. At that time I had applied for and gotten into the Thunderbird School of Graduate Management, which is a MBA program where you learn a foreign language. The other was an opportunity to join staff with InterVarsity. My staff member, John Howe, was leaving InterVarsity at that time and he invited me to take his position. I weighed the two options and felt like joining staff with InterVarsity would get us overseas more quickly. 14:16 We began that assignment, or I began that assignment, in the summer of 1981. And then, 1983, we did a 10-week mission in North India in a state called Bihar. It's the size of Nebraska and it has a population of about 100 million people. The ratio of Hindus and Muslims to Christians, we were told, was about 100,000 to 1. So it was a very, very intense experience. We were on loan for the summer with a group called Operation Mobilization and we met every Friday and prayed three to nine hours. And growing up Presbyterian, that was fairly foreign to my experience, but it was very formational. And on the other side of that experience we had made the decision and got the invitation to move to New York City in June of 1984. 15:03 - Speaker 3 What did you do in? 15:03 - Speaker 1 New York. When I came to New York I was on staff at the university. So I was on staff for 10 years. Six years I was area director. I had about five staff. We oversaw about 15 campuses. So our team worked on the private schools, like Columbia, juilliard, nyu, pratt, and we also worked with the state universities, particularly Long Island, like Stony Brook, some of the other state universities. So I did that for six years. Four years I assisted the regional director, bobby Gross, who was overseeing all of New York and New Jersey. I also had the opportunity to speak at the Urbana 93 Missions Conference, the Urbana 96 Missions Conference. 15:43 I began to bring churches to pray together in 1987. I met some staff from here's Life, which is Campus Crusades or Cruise Inner City Urban Ministry, and we met in June of 1987, and we decided to bring 16 churches to pray together on a Friday night, 1988. And during that season it was really the beginning of what I call almost a murder pandemic in New York. We had seven years in a row of eight murders a day. That began in the late 80s into the early 90s and because the city had become so violent, many of the churches and leaders in the city were feeling quite overwhelmed. So when we had that first prayer gathering we invited those 16 churches and 75 churches showed up. So it was quite a catalyst to really launch the Concerts of Prayer movement in the city. What did you? 16:36 - Speaker 3 do after. 16:36 - Speaker 1 InterVarsity. After InterVarsity, in 1994, I joined the team of Concerts of Prayer International just to work full-time on the prayer movement. For the next four years we were able to grow the prayer movement from about 600 churches to 1,300 churches that were involved in some capacity. So that went till 1998, and then we decided to become our own New York organization and we became Concerts of Prayer Greater New York. So that began in 1998, and then in the year 2000, tim Keller asked me to co-create with him what was called the Church Multiplication Alliance, and so we took a couple years to figure that out. But we started with about 10 denominations who wanted to do some church planning, particularly in and around Manhattan, and so we basically married Redeemer's expertise with our convening skills and we did that for several years. And then 2009, we commissioned the research to assess the progress we were making, and the research indicated that there had been a 300% growth in evangelical churches in Manhattan from 1989 to 2009, which was really a stunning research. And we took that research and we created our first Movement Day in 2010. 17:58 We began 14 years ago. Tim committed to speak every year, and the first year we had people come from 34 states and 14 countries and as we continued the Movement Day journey, we began to gain interest internationally. We had our first global gatherings in Pretoria, south Africa, in 2015, and then Port-au-Prince, haiti, 2015. We began to work in Dallas in 2014. In 2016, we invited the Globe to come to New York at the Javits Center. We had 3,000 leaders from 400 cities in 95 countries and coming out of that, we've really been trying to keep up with interest all over the world. I would say we have some form of presence in about 500 cities globally. 18:41 - Speaker 3 So Movement Day started off as a church planning insight. 18:47 - Speaker 1 I would say that's what its roots were. It was really a consultation that had as its vision bringing leaders from the same city in a room together to really ask the question what is God doing in our city? What would we like to see him do over the next 10 years? What does that look like? So it definitely included church planning, but it also included a number of other efforts as well. 19:12 - Speaker 3 So, based on the research, you said there was a 300% growth, but is that including if churches shut down and new ones were added, or is that a cumulative effect? 19:24 - Speaker 1 It's definitely cumulative. Or is that a cumulative effect? It's definitely cumulative. Basically, in the 80s, the estimate is that on Manhattan, where there's 1.5 million people, there were about 9,000 people attending evangelical churches and then, when this research was commissioned in 2009, that 9,000 had become 45,000. So it was actually more than a 3% growth. When the research was commissioned again in 2014, the 3% had become the 5%. So I don't think we have enough knowledge to know what percentage of it was from conversion growth, what percentage of it was people that migrated into the city, but it was a really palpable change. Anybody that was here in the early 80s and then saw what life was like in 2014 can really tell a significant difference. 20:16 - Speaker 3 So I would actually just ask you what it was like in the like. Even though I grew up in New York, I spent most of my time in Queens, so I actually don't know what the climate of church was in the city. And I do know Tim Keller was influential in planning in urban centers. But I guess now I take it for granted that we have these churches that are planted in the city and there's a bunch of them. 20:44 So what was the climate? Like? That are planted in the city and there's a bunch of them. So what was the climate like and how did the Tim Keller effect happen in New York City? 20:52 - Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good question. I think an important date to go back to would be 1964. If you go back to 1964 and you Google what is the ethnicity of New York? At that time it was 88% white, 12% African American. In 1966, president Johnson signed the Immigration Act and that opened the doors to people coming in from Africa, asia, latin America. And really what's happened since 1966, I would actually call it a very gradual spiritual awakening across New York and a lot of it the initial impact was led by immigrant churches. So in Queens you have at least at one time you had 300 Korean churches. Just across northern Queens you have literally hundreds, if not thousands, of African American, jamaican, trinidadian, puerto Rican churches that have been raised up over the last 50, 60 years. So the outer borough Christianity has been very robust and traditions like the Korean church, where they get up and have these 5 am 6 am prayer meetings. Some of the churches would actually send buses out as far as 45 minutes away to pick up people and come back and pray. 22:01 I really even though there's a lot of cultural expression there. It's also something I think God really has honored over the decades. But Manhattan has always been very different because Manhattan is in many ways Manhattan is more like Western Europe, historically very secular, very affluent, in Midtown anyway. So when Keller came along, I think Tim made several real contributions. One of his contributions in the early days of Redeemer is that he would sit down and meet with about 40 people a week just to talk with them, hear their story, and their stories really informed his preaching. And someone said that Keller's preaching was like flypaper against the culture and people really were drawn to Tim's preaching and what that could look like and so Redeemer grew very rapidly was preaching and what that could look like. And so Redeemer grew very rapidly. 22:48 And when Tim and I sat down in the year 2000, tim said to me he said New York needs lots of new churches. The conviction was that churches 10 years and younger are eight times more effective in reaching new people. He said we need lots of new churches but they're not all going to be Presbyterian. And so there was a real recognition that God was doing a lot in very diverse traditions, whether it be Baptist or Pentecostal or Methodist or Lutheran, and that was really the kind of the marriage of our outer borough network and Tim and Redeemer's church planning expertise and it really took root and there was a lot of growth, I think, to Tim's credit, over the last, especially the last, I'd say, 15 years of his life. 23:27 He really did a good job of connecting with some more of the outer borough leaders and movements. I know he was doing a lot with Spanish churches in the Bronx. I know that Tim was interacting with lots of other leaders across the ethnic spectrum and that's been a real contribution. And I think that one of the analyses of all this is that part of what Tim Keller brought and myself to a lesser extent is that when you come into a place like New York as neutral outsiders, there's some things that you can do that are easier than if somebody's indigenous to the city. It's just the nature of things and God was able to honor that and bring together an alliance and a real conviction that movements are always preceded by alliances. You have to aggregate in order to accelerate. So it's really important to marry different traditions and their respective strengths to one another the best we can. 24:23 - Speaker 3 So what are those advantages for people that not like growing up in New York? 24:32 - Speaker 1 Well, I think you come in and you're not attached to a particular neighborhood or community. 24:39 You just kind of come in and in a lot of ways there's a lot that you don't know, and then it forces you to learn some things. 24:47 It forces you to be more of an observer. One of the interesting things about New York is that I think that 90% of the active Christians in New York are either minority or immigrant, and I think this sounds a little counterintuitive. But one of the advantages of being Caucasian is that I've noticed that, for whatever reason and I don't understand it, but for whatever reason groups that are really diverse have been willing to trust a leader from a Caucasian background, just as really functioning as kind of glue. And I think our vision for our work we really see ourselves as a Barnabas kind of organization. We come alongside, we're really called to encourage and to resource and to empower and really to be deferential to others. And really to be deferential to others and that's really what we've tried to do is to really celebrate all the really diverse ways that God has been at work in the city and to use our platform as a way to bring people together that wouldn't otherwise come together. 25:43 - Speaker 3 So I've heard that in other domains about like the predominant, like white figure and how, especially in the United States, that like minorities would be more drawn to that. And someone said, and I kind of agree, I think it just comes down to when we grow up, especially in media, a lot of the faces we see are white, right, and so we just have this ingrained in the childhood and that's why representation is important, although I feel like the liberal left take that too seriously sometimes. But I do think there's going to be a shift in the upcoming generations of not just what someone looks like but what someone sounds like. 26:19 - Speaker 1 Well, I think too it's an interesting dynamic because the white church in much of urban America has really declined significantly. There was a book written in the 70s called Cities, churches and Communities. There was a book written in the 70s called Cities, churches and Communities, and the premise of the author was that after World War II the US became the first suburban nation in the history of the world, and the two things that fueled suburbanization were inexpensive housing and racism. So you had a lot of flight to be a lot of minority and immigrant communities who've been here for really for decades, if not centuries. And I'm particularly appreciative of the Pentecostal movement. I found that Pentecostal Christians have really adapted well in urban environments and they've been very resilient, and so I just have a lot of respect, respect for that community in particular. 27:15 - Speaker 3 With the current landscape and the trend that I see and I kind of want your feedback on this is that, like, as the city gets more affluent, it gets gentrified more and more. 27:26 - Speaker 1 Right. 27:26 - Speaker 3 So the minorities gets pushed out and the focal point becomes these young like high skilled, labored, like white collar people, and those people tend to like not really be looking for faith, but it just seems like for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I don't know if it's faith that they're looking for, but they are looking for something that's missing, right? So how do you see, like, everything that you've experienced? So how do you see everything that you've experienced, right? How does that look to you, projected onto the upcoming generation, and how they're so vastly different, growing up in a vastly different environment? 28:03 - Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a great observation. I would just say, as a general rule, there tends to be an inverse relationship between affluence and spiritual receptivity, affluence and spiritual receptivity, and that's why, historically, you know I think this is something that Tim Keller said at one time the least likely person to be in church on a Sunday was a white male between 40 and 50. But now it is changing rapidly with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I think Gen Z may be the first generation where Gen Zs around the world have more in common with each other than they do between themselves and even their parents. There was a French sociologist that said that Gen Zs may be the first generation that are not embracing inherited religion, and that has implications both for young people that grow up in the church, but also an opportunity to influence people that come from different religious traditions. I think the implication of it is, when you live in a fairly affluent society and, granted, there are lots of pockets of poverty in New York, but at a global level we're in the top 99.99% of relative wealth around the world the challenge is always going to be if people are going to grow spiritually, being relatively affluent, we have to challenge people to a radical form of discipleship that's going to take some really skilled leadership. 29:25 In that regard, I've been very impressed with the research of Josh Crossman and his long essay a really important essay called the Great Opportunity, and he believes that unless something changes, that we will continue to lose about a million young people a year from the church and that by 2050, half of the churches in America could be closed. So that's one forecast and he has some really good antidotes to all of that. So that's one forecast and he has some really good antidotes to all that. But I do think we have to be, as leaders, depending whether we're boomers or millennials. We really have to be paying attention to how God is stirring among young people, because I believe that most spiritual movements are started by people under the age of 28. That's really people in their late teens, college, early career. It's a really formational season of life. 30:19 - Speaker 3 But do you feel like young people usually spearhead movements? Because part of it is like I don't know better so I'm just going to go for it, and then part of it is they are more emotionally, emotionally attuned with like what's going on. 30:34 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I do think that young people have a bigger appetite for risks and I also think that young people have the ability to be creative, less inhibited, obviously, typically haven't started a family yet, don't have that set of responsibilities. By the time that I was 25 years old, I had made five major decisions. I had made a faith decision, I had made a marriage decision, I had made a vocational decision, I had made a geographic decision and if we're able to influence people young people in that and obviously people, especially in New York, get married later than 25. But if we're able to help people set their trajectory earlier in their lives, I think people are going to take greater risks. 31:18 - Speaker 3 I have a question about the church. So when church planting was happening in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, the imagery I have is just like you have a pastor and a congregation and families, right. But as the family structure is like dwindling and people are delaying family structures, like I kind of see like a lot of young adults and like older adults singles in churches, and I feel like that changes the dynamics of churches too right. And the reason why I ask this is because I feel like the church model that we have been using is being broken right In a sense because the demographic is changing vastly and the culture of that demographic, I think, is infusing into the older tradition and it's not working anymore right. 32:05 And so one thing I'm still struggling with and working through is I feel like people still need human connection right. 32:13 And you don't really get that in a large group but you get it in a smaller group, right. And I know like in my early years I was like so against house churches, but now it sounds so, so much more appealing that we can meet during the week and actually get to know each other. And because I feel like the whole pomp and circumstance of religion is dying out for the younger people, because I also think they're seeking authenticity, right. So in your mind, like absorbing that, like how would you go about doing it differently? Or maybe you disagree and the older model works, or like you know like, yeah, what are your thoughts? 32:48 - Speaker 1 Well, I think church in the 21st century has to be very innovative because a lot of times you have constraints. You have the constraints of real estate and parking and you have all those constraints. You have the other constraint that you have particularly in a place like New York, where people are really timed for and so people can only do so much. Like my wife, she started a group called Bible Study Fellowship in Queens. It's all over the world but she's the first one to start in Queens and last year they were meeting at a church, but this year they're doing it all on Zoom, just because it was really hard to get women to come out at night and all that. So I think the environment that we're in, we need some real innovators. 33:26 A good friend, robert Guerrero, who's worked with church planners, especially Spanish speakers. He talked about a church planner who started a church plan in a laundromat and you know you have to really think outside the box and figure out what you want to be. You know the guy that I studied with for three years. He was asked by Billy Graham to go study the cities of the world. His name is Rebaki and he would always ask this question what's better, a 747 or a bicycle? And the answer to the question was it just depends on where you're going, and so I think we have to be very elastic in what models tend to work. 34:02 I think, as things get more expensive in urban areas, I think that will force churches and communities to think smaller just because of the cost of time and the cost of real estate. I think we need to have a very open-handed definition of church, and I know internationally, house churches are. That's the only way that some churches, some movements, can survive. We do a lot of work in India, and because of Hindu nationalism, they're very concerned about anti-conversion laws, places like Uttar Pradesh, where the Taj Mahal. They've already put 1,700 Christian leaders in prison, so they're having to make a lot of really hard contextual decisions. 34:43 - Speaker 3 One last thing about the church thing is because you brought up a really good point about how especially just inflation things are getting more expensive. One thing I definitely do see as churches get bigger is that the concern for their budget becomes more prominent. How do you feel about that? 34:58 - Speaker 1 That's a good question and I'm always really reluctant to criticize. I believe that God leads different leaders in different directions. I just think that it's really important for any church leadership to really discern the unique mandate that God has given them, and there are some leaders that have done fantastically well using media, one of the reasons that Billy Graham became so well-known globally he was one of the first Christian leaders to really harness television and God really used that. So I'm reluctant to criticize. I think we need to always assess where we're weighting our resources and the return on investment, as it were, of those resources. I really do think the Catholic Church has gotten one thing really right, which is the parish model. I really do believe as much as possible. 35:46 If people can live near where they worship, that's optimal. I just noticed in New York that people tend to live, work and worship in three completely different spaces and it's very easy to spend so much of your week just commuting commuting here, commuting there. We had a home in Flushing for almost 30 years and we were able to, my wife was able to commute to work and we were a 10-minute walk from our church and I was able to work from home, and the difference that made over years and decades was quite profound. We really felt like we got to know the community. I really became a student. I think it's the most religiously diverse neighborhood in the world and we would meet people that would be attending mosques and Hindu temples and Buddhist temples and we were able to do that because we were really we were really committed to being proximate. I completely agree. 36:35 - Speaker 3 I also think technology and information age has like made us like it's a double-edged sword, because you know what more of what's going on, but it's kind of like do you really want to know? Because it makes you lose focus of what's happening in front of you. And the whole idea of the local church is like you should be able to like walk to your church and know your neighbors and yeah. So what are you doing now? 36:58 - Speaker 1 Well, I really invest my energies primarily in two directions. So in New York we continue to work particularly in the prayer arena. We have our January Pastors Prayer Summit coming up, january 27 to 29. We have a weekly Zoom time on prayer with about 30 to 40 leaders every Tuesday afternoon. That began during COVID, so we're in our fifth year. We began First Thursday prayer about 35 years ago, which we continue on Zoom. So that's what we do. In New York. We have our Movement Day every October. We just had our 15th Movement Day and then we also have a training initiative for under 30 leaders called Advanced Leadership Intensive. So that's all New York. 37:42 Globally, we work with leaders in hundreds of cities around the world. We create a training initiative called Movement Day Scholars that takes them through a three-year training and they graduate in community by creating a three-year training and they graduate in community by creating a 10-year plan for their city. And we've had over a thousand leaders go through that training, many of them in India, working across five continents right now. And we have these Movement Day gatherings like we'll have a large gathering in Dubai in March. Have a large gathering in Dubai in March. 38:17 Last year we had leaders from 150 cities and 45 countries that came Doing a lot in Asia in particular, because Asia is about 60% of the global population and really giving attention to that. We do a forum in Singapore, we'll do our second one this September, and then working with leaders Africa, the Balkans, brazil so it's a broad canvas for us. What are you hoping for at Faithly? Well, I know there's a need to have my understanding of it it's a bit of a—it's kind of a LinkedIn for people of faith, so that serves a really valuable purpose and how can we be praying for you and your family? 38:55 Yeah, I can pray that we continue to see favor. We want to see the church become more muscular in New York and all the challenges that it faces, and be more impactful, and then internationally, praying that God would foster greater and greater unity in some of these regions that are really facing overwhelming challenges. We're doing a fair bit of work in Beirut. They just had 400,000 people displaced during the war, so we're a bit of a thermometer on all that. So pray that God gives us favor and a way to contribute into those. 39:31 - Speaker 3 All right, Thank you, Mac for coming on Sure. Thanks so much All right. Thank you, Mac, for coming on Sure. Thanks so much. 39:36 - Speaker 2 All right, Bye guys, thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast. 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