Michael Foster

I'm a pastor, writer, and businessman. My wife and I have nine children and live on a small farm in Batavia, OH. God is good.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

What's my plan?

Same plan as always:

[pete oaks @pt0kes]

“are you worried about the php vulnerability”
“no, are you”
“no. do you know what php is”
“no. do you”
“no”

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

Years ago, I learned that not all gins are created equal.

Tonight, thanks to a jar of Dollar General pickles, I learned the same is true of pickles.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@CTmagazine Because you want to project your sins onto dead heroes who can’t personal refute your evil attempt to normalize your own perversity.

That’s why it was published and republished.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@CTmagazine Because you want to project your sins onto dead heroes who can’t personal refute your evil attempt to normalize your own perversity.

That’s why it was published and republished.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@TBNikon 👍

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

If you build well, you will face this internal threat...

Today’s post is a rough follow-up to yesterday’s. It involves one topic I talk a lot about and another I’ve found I must talk more about: building and authority.

As a first-generation Christian, I think and write a lot about building a Christian household. As a church planter and churchman, I think and write a lot about planting healthy churches and building healthy ecclesiastical organizations. As someone who has been a hiring manager and now heads people and culture at a mid-sized company, I think a lot about hiring and developing employees and maintaining a company culture. My life has been dedicated to building things, usually as the senior leader or part of the leadership team.

While your experience may be different from mine, most of us will eventually find ourselves responsible for building something at some point in our lives. We each have our capacities and opportunities and should seek to make the most of them, whether small or large. My early ministry responsibilities were setting up and tearing down chairs and teaching four-year-olds about Jesus. Never did I imagine I would be where I am. But I digress.

Building and authority are intimately interrelated. Think of Nehemiah. He’s most famous for rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. He was able to accomplish that because God gave him favor with the king, who entrusted him with the authority to get the job done. Right at the beginning of the book, enemies of God challenge whether he actually has that authority because they don’t want to see him successfully strengthen Jerusalem.

These were external enemies: men like Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. And when we’re building something, these are the threats we tend to think about most. People trying to corrupt your household from outside. Competitors trying to take your business down. Spiritual forces and false teachers trying to pollute and undermine the work of your church. Those are real threats, and we must be aware of them. But I want to talk about an internal threat that every Christian builder should expect to face, especially if he builds well.

I would summarize this threat as those who want the benefits of what’s been built and is being built without any regard for, or submission to, the authority that makes it possible.

A few examples.

A husband and wife are both literally and metaphorically building a Christian household. Under their roof are safety, comfort, and provision. If they’re doing a good job, there is no place like home. Their children have clothes, warm meals, and, in this modern age, all sorts of fun, such as video games and so forth. If Dad is a good head of his household and Mom is a good helper, the home is a place of discipleship and true biblical peace.

Yet many children, especially in their teens, challenge the authority of their mother and father while wanting all the benefits of living under their roof. It is easy to raise entitled kids, especially if you refuse to discipline them in a Hebrews 12 sort of way. If you tolerate their disregard for the God-given authority from which they benefit, they can tear down from the inside what you have built. Instead of the peaceful fruit of righteousness cultivated through discipline, you will experience the chaos of unruly, rebellious children.

The best companies hire, fire, and promote based on core values. They understand that even a wonderful product or service producing healthy profits won’t sustain a business that cannot attract and keep quality people. So you must build an environment where those people want to work: good pay, good benefits, and quality people working alongside them, whether in the office or on the shop floor. You must look for people deeply aligned with your mission and the way you conduct business.

One distinction I’ve used in my years of hiring, including the last 400-plus people I’ve been involved in hiring, is something I think I picked up from recruiters at Amazon. I ask: Is this person more missionary than mercenary?

The missionary cares about the mission of the business. He loves the space it’s in and the work it does. He doesn’t just want to benefit from it; he wants to contribute to it. Working alongside like-minded people doing quality work is something he wants to be part of.

A mercenary, generally speaking, is primarily attracted to the benefits. He may think the mission is nice and be happy to contribute, but his loyalty is pay-to-play. Like a mercenary willing to fight for either side in a war, it comes down to who pays best. Obviously, we all work for pay, and there’s no shame in that. This is just a simple paradigm for considering where a person’s primary motivation rests.

I would argue that our social media environment has trained much of this generation to think almost entirely like mercenaries. People come into a business wanting its benefits while deeply resenting the processes and practices that make those benefits possible. If that mindset isn’t corrected, they will undermine the very culture that produces what they came for.

You see this in churches, too. If the elders and deacons do a good job, the church will form a community of different sorts of people around the Word of God. In hard times, people will have support, whether relational or financial. Their children will have friends. Their wives will have friends. Their souls will be nourished. There are incredible benefits to being part of a healthy church, and people will stay in a church for a long time because of them.

I remember being at a church where a friend disliked the senior pastor. I would say he even despised him. I asked why he stayed, and he said he loved the music, all his friends were there, and so forth. I was quite close with the senior pastor and knew he had been instrumental in making almost all of that possible. That was when I began to understand that people can want the benefits godly authority brings without any submission to it.

Back to Nehemiah. In the first six chapters, he deals repeatedly with external threats. But in chapter 5, you see an internal threat: nobles and officials exploiting their own people through interest and debts that cost families their land and brought their children into servitude. Nehemiah has to confront them.

Then, in chapter 6, you see nobles corresponding with one of the chief external enemies, Tobiah. He had married into a Jewish family, his son had done the same, and many in Judah were bound to him by an oath. By chapter 13, Tobiah, who had opposed the work from outside, has been given a room in the temple courts by Eliashib the priest. Verse 28 also tells us that a grandson of the high priest had married Sanballat’s daughter.

Nehemiah had rebuilt the walls, but his enemies found their way inside through relationships, particularly marriage and family ties. These compromises violated the covenant commitments of chapter 10, including the explicit vow against intermarrying with the surrounding peoples. In chapter 13, Nehemiah confronts these breaches and holds the people to their vows.

The wall addressed an outside problem, but walls can’t keep out what the people inside invite in. Some of the gravest threats to Nehemiah’s work came from compromise within Jerusalem.

So it is with any builder, whether he is building a Christian household, a business, a church, or anything else. The more significant the benefits of what you’ve built, the more important it is that those living under its roof preserve the culture that makes those benefits possible. That will always require some degree of submission to the authority over it.

And as an authority, you must practice godly, benevolent discipline. You’ll have to say no. You’ll have to confront entitlement. If you’re a parent, that may mean one of your teenagers screams that he hates you, that you don’t understand his life, and all the other nonsense foolish kids say. If you’re an employer, you may have to fire a manipulative employee who is at odds with the core values and live with the nasty review he posts on Glassdoor. If you’re a pastor, elder, or deacon, you’ll have to deal with people who claim you’re a tyrant, that you’re power-hungry, or that your church is a cult.

This is the cost of leadership. Sometimes it’s steep. But it is never as steep as the cost of abdicating God-given leadership.

Painting: Eugenio Zampighi

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

Before you make a man a leader, whether it’s a sales manager or an elder in the church, there are a couple of simple questions you should ask yourself.

First, is his leadership sought out?

There are a lot of people who like to talk and insert themselves into the lives of others. Sometimes that can be mistaken for leadership ability. But they could actually just be busybodies who like to talk about doing things more than actually doing them. This is the opposite of leadership ability. They’re avoiding real work under the guise of being helpful.

That’s why it’s important to ask whether their leadership is sought out. Is this someone people naturally go to when they have a complex situation they’re trying to figure out? Do people seek out his judgment, advice, and direction?

Both promotions and ordinations are essentially confirmations of something that already exists. A simple metaphor would be that there has to be a fire burning. Making someone a leader doesn’t start the fire. It should only throw gas on it.

Second, what is the quality of the people seeking out his leadership?

This question isn’t all that different from the first. Is it just low performers? Is it just entry-level people? Is it just people starting out in life? Or is it high performers, peers, and people who have been around the block a few times?

What you’re trying to determine is whether this man possesses an ability and capacity that distinguishes him from others.

Young people and entry-level employees can easily mistake seniority in life for actual ability and capacity. One of the greatest challenges of leadership is leading people who are very much your equals, or even above you in certain ways. That requires something more than simply being older, more experienced, or more outspoken.

If no one is seeking out a man’s leadership, or if the only people seeking it out are those on the very bottom rung, chances are he isn’t a leader. Not yet, anyhow.

There are certainly many other questions to ask before putting a man in leadership, but in my assessment, these are two of the most revealing

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

Hop off the train of disobedience...

[Colin J. Smothers @colinsmo]

Found the next project for @MikeCosper: The Rise and Fall of Christianity Today

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

You matter to people who will still care and think about you long after you are irrelevant to most everyone else.

Set priorities accordingly.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

100%.

It’s just as bad or worst in reformed/confessional homes.

We focus a lot on how the world actually is AND how it could be…

[Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 @aaron_renn]

In my experience, evangelicals view formation as about shoehorning their kids into an evangelical-specific subculture, rather than preparing them for life in the real world. There's also a lot of addressing the world as they think it should be rather than what it is.

[Michael Clary @dmichaelclary]

My wife pointed out that the Home Fires podcast with Tilly Dillehay and Abigail Dodds talked about Loser Theology recently. (Tilly also endorsed the book.)

It's good to know women are calling each other to reject passivity and become High-Agency Christians.

Ladies, check it out! Spotify and Apple links below.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

I only play two games: Fight Night (2011) and Civ 5. I’ve been waiting for a new Fight Night for 15 years. I am excited its coming, but I fear it’s going to be terrible.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

If the evil zeitgeist of our age is, “You will own nothing and be happy,” then you should be able to see how well that aligns with those who tell you there’s no point in even trying to own things and you might as well give up.

People who have a stake in something fight harder to protect it.

So, if you want to make people easier to control, you want to divorce them from ownership, one way or another.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

No, work preexisted the fall and was part of the world God called very good:

"Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." 1:28

"The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Gen 2:15

And it was only cursed after the fall (3:16-19). Also, being cursed is different than being a curse.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

First, I doubt this…

Second, I hate this. Work as a gift from God. We were created to work.

Third, this is the somewhat inevitable rise of neo-feudalism. It may not take this form, but it is already developing.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@ryanleichty Just as you can benefit from a pastor, you don’t know, so can you benefit from a dead illusion. The point here, though, is about the importance of flesh and blood relationship where you know and are known.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

Every once in a while, I get asked, “Who are your favorite pastors?”

I think it’s a funny question. It’s like asking, “Who’s your favorite boxer, artist, football player, or actor?” Those are questions I could answer fairly easily. But asking who my favorite pastor is is closer to asking who my favorite dad, mom, or grandparent is. It’s not so much whether they’re my favorite. They just are. They’re who God has given me.

Of course, what people are really asking is, “Who is your favorite writer, speaker, or content producer who happens to bear the title of pastor?” It’s not someone you actually know, other than maybe shaking hands in the lobby or chatting over coffee at a conference. You don’t really have a relationship with that person.

All of my pastors have been quite influential in my life. My first pastor was Roger Webb. My second was Randy Warwick, followed by Brian Nevins, then Russell Smith, then a pastoral team led by Tim Bayly, and lastly, Andrew Dionne.

All these men have shaped me in very significant ways. And since they were the pastors of churches I joined, they were my pastors. I don’t think of them in terms of favorites. I think of them in terms of influence.

Roger pushed me to simply trust God and follow Him wherever He might lead me. Randy taught me, very much by his example, to invest in others and sometimes radically delegate responsibilities. Brian was incredibly compassionate and also introduced me to G. K. Chesterton. Russell was my first Presbyterian pastor, and through his influence, I dove deep into the writings of men like Iain Murray and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, along with the Westminster Standards. Tim was quite the personality, but he was a man who thought a great deal about the inner workings of organizations and the human soul. Andrew was very much a workman, disciplined when it came to sermon preparation, leading elders meetings, and so forth.

There were things about all these guys that grated on me at times, and we had some significant theological or philosophical differences. But they were all my pastors, and they all loved me and invested in me. I am who I am in no small part because of their influence.

They were real men with real sins and real foibles. Very few of them are the sort of men you would invite to speak at a conference. None of them had super popular podcasts, and only a handful actually wrote books. But again, they were real men whom I actually knew.

I think we make massive categorical errors across nearly every area of life these days. Sermons have been turned into commodities. Pastors into celebrities. Churches into purveyors of goods and services. Online social media connections into friendships.

And we’ve become so accustomed to these substitutions that we hardly notice the difference anymore.

Recovering the West is going to require a stubborn sort of person who simply refuses to play along. You're going to have to be willing to be at odds with the current culture if you want something different.

Painting: Hanne Lore Koehler

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@JoelBrizzee Amen, I can relate in many ways.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@ryanleichty No offense, but I don't think you are tracking.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

@The_John_Galt_ Adventures in missing the point.