 This is Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men here with the new 21 Report and Pastor Michael Foster. Hey, good to see you. How have you enjoyed your second 21 convention? It's been good. It's interesting. It's very calm, very smooth. I mean, it's always a smooth production, but it's just more relaxed, like deeper, calmer discussions. Like, I was talking with Tanner about Latter-day Saint Eschatology, which I didn't know. Eschatology, Doctor of the Ends of Things, and then talking to Cortez about all his deep thoughts that I didn't know. I thought so because I'm on his email list. And, you know, on Twitter, he knows the Twitter game, but the email lists are like, okay, this guy's got some more depth to him. So, yeah, Jeff Younger and I are debating the different facets of Eastern Orthodoxy. You know, this is not what people think happened here. They're thinking like, oh, we're talking about just pickup artistry or whatever. But no, it's a deep political, religious, significant conversations, really hard topics that usually you can't have without people getting kind of inflamed, right? Not the case here. It's been really good. So, it's been a good time. I look forward to talking. I've done a lot of sessions. I've done a lot of panels and I'm happy to slide into home base with you. Fantastic. Well, last year, I think you gave one talk, or did you have a couple of talks? I did two talks and a couple of panels. And then this year, you did talks, panels, MC, patriarch, and close their opener. Yeah, it's been busy. Yeah. I mean, have you been excited? What has been your response to the growth of the religious topic within a convention such as this? Very happy. I mean, first off, it's easier to talk about religion if you don't have to like sneak it in, right? It's like just open. Everyone's thinking through the deeper implications of the situation we find ourselves in, recognizing that it's not just about like near biology. It's not just about chemicals, but that there actually is a spiritual reality. And I got people here that aren't Christians straight up telling me that, yeah, I recognize that Satan's real and there's demonic forces. And I'm like, this is very surprising. Like go on, I want to hear more. So yeah, it's great. And I've been able to just be very open, very frank with where I'm at. And I think I hope it's a model for other Christians that you don't have to become a softer, gentler Christianity and like downplay what you believe. Wait, what? Yeah. To engage in conversations. You can be friends with people you disagree, you have to. It's America. Like it or not, it's a pluralistic society right now. And you have to learn how to have these conversations with your neighbors. It seems that what people want, they want to say, you should believe this. And then like, like, boom. Right. But change happens a lot of times, at least from our vantage point incrementally. And you have to be able to enter into conversations that sometimes are tense and no one to back off and come back at it some other time. It's about learning to be appropriate. So I kind of hope I'm giving a model how to bring Christianity back to the public square without Genesee and its uniqueness and its difference, but also being a voice among other voices and hopefully the most compelling voice. I think Christianity is uniquely true. I think there's things that I agree with with all the speakers here, like incredible amounts of commonality. I think we all more or less agree on the enemy. And it's funny, like we agree that's like Marxism, feminism, but even with it's taken as spiritual like the evil one, like the devil or some demonic forces, it's funny to hear a lot of men saying that. So, so at the very least, most of these men here are what I would call cobal patrons, that their guns are pointed towards the same enemy. Right. Right. And it may be after we deal with that enemy that we point guns towards each other. You know, I don't know, but at the very least we're there and there's a lot of allies and the number of Christians here this go around and people considering Christianity very seriously is stunning. So I'm glad to be part of it's been good. It's been an upgrade from my perspective since last year and a lot of different ways. Have men been coming up and engaging you in conversations and with it with a sincere willingness to learn like, okay, I'm ready to receive messages that I might not have been ready to receive before. Yeah, they are. Well, actually, it's a little better than that. It's I've been thinking about these things. I've been weighing these things. And now that you said this, I think I want to take a step to check things out. Wow. Right. And that's good. That's good. I always say, so here's this rule in church planning. Okay. In church planning, if someone comes to your church for the first time says, this is the church I've been looking for all my life. This is the most amazing church. I just can't, you're so good on this, this and that. You'll never see them again. You'll never see them again because someone interested in commitment doesn't talk that much. So it's like, you know, what about this? What do you think about this? They're like checking you out. They're feeling, you know, they want to make sure before they put a ring on it, you know, metaphorically speaking, that they've done their due diligence. And so rarely are people that are like crazy all in, lead to anything of substance and people that are like more careful, dipping their toes in the water. Those are the people that actually end up becoming kind of a vertebrae of your church holding the whole thing together. So it's good when I hear men say that's really good. I want to think about that. Can you recommend books? Is there a church I should go check out? That's encouraging to me because that shows that it's, it's coming from a place of meditation, of a consideration that's not just a mere emotion. Yeah. I talked to a lot of men who asked me questions about Christianity, because I'm very public about my faith. And a lot of them will say things like, Oh, you know, I had bad experience with Christianity in my childhood. I don't really know. I don't really like it anymore. What do you say? And that seems to be almost the exclusive reason why people don't entertain Christianity that I've encountered unless they have some other faith, for example, but people who grew up mostly in America, maybe in more or less Christian households will say almost always, because of some bad experience in childhood, they're just kind of closed off to the idea now. What do you say to those men? I say that my younger brother is very scared of Dovermans. And that's because a Doverman pincher on two different occasions chased or bit him. Right. Okay. So his, his fear of Dovermans is very logical. Right. On two occasions, he had this now Christians that grew up maybe in the church that was legalistic or weird or aggressive towards masculinity, you know, in a sense they've been bit by Doverman over and over and over and over again. You have to ask though, is that the nature of the thing itself? Right. And it's not. And it's, and so what I tell them like, well, tell me more about what you understand about scripture and about church history. Like, are we limiting Christianity to the sample of your experience? Or are we looking at it from a much broader view? Right. So have you actually read the Gospels? Does the Jesus of the Gospels sound like the Jesus of the church you grew up in? Well, I don't know. Well, you should go read it. Go read it. Read it for yourself, man. You know, I mean, I can talk to you about it, but I'd like you to go read Luke for yourself. Jesus whipping people. Jesus standing on his ground. Jesus telling people say, Hey, I want to follow you, Jesus. I just got to bury my dad first. Let the dead bury the dead. You come and come now. Right. Does that sound like the Jesus in your church? It's probably not. If you look at the Jesus and Christianity throughout church history, you'll see it wasn't aggressively against masculinity into the last couple of centuries. And even then it's gotten really intense in the last 80 years or so. So that's what I would tell them. Start there. Just read, like do your own research, do your own work, man. And then we'll see. I don't care if they read that. I want them to read it. I don't want their faith to be in my interpretation of it or my personality. When you start getting in social profile, people will follow you and believe whatever you say. I think that's natural because we're looking for a father to tell us what's right. And so you become that, but I don't want people to depend on me. I can't hold that burden. The burden is on the word of God. What does God's word say? What does the Bible say? Well, I can't find a church that seems that fits that. And I say, Well, that's a problem, but like one step at a time. So let's start there. And so I'm happy to be someone that has that voice that can try to help them find a church that is doctrinally orthodox and for the most part approximates what should be important, grace, repentance, salvation through Jesus alone. The Bible was the final authority, not the only, but the final highest authority that interprets all others. If we could find that in the church, frankly, it doesn't hate men and doesn't raise women to pure angelic beings. If we can do that, they probably can grow and they'll do all right for a while. Man, there's so many places I can go with that. I'm curious, church is hating men. This is something that I hear from so many Christian men that I talk to as they go to church and they feel like they're put beneath their wives or they're denigrated and they're just not seen and sort of at the same time told to man up. The common thing repeated in the house of God. And I know that's something you're working towards. I wonder if you can speak to that, working away from it. Yeah, it's sad. It's a mixture of things behind that. It's not just, first off, they don't know that they're doing it always. They don't really get it. The pastors don't hate men because they don't think they do. They've been conditioned into one, believing that women are somehow less sinful. But that even works its way out practically. Like they might not write that down on paper. But like a great example is women cheat just like men cheat. And I know a lot of church planners whose wives were unfaithful to them and pastors, quite a few actually. And I could think of one in particular who was a good man and they've had a ton of kids and they'd been married for many, many years, over 20. Okay. And that she just kind of lost her mind. And she went and was unfaithful to her husband. And like so many men, he wanted to work it out. Men don't like to restart. Right. Right. They're very practical. Women have, yeah, women tend to have like a sort of divorce fantasy. Like I'll divorce this guy and then I'll find the true soulmate, the better guy. You pray love. Yeah, that's right. Men are much more practical. Also, I mean, the culture is conditioned in that ends with women as well. But I, even with that guy, people were like, well, it was something you did. It was something you're, you weren't, you know, you weren't the perfect husband. You're like, who is it? Right. Like, who's the perfect wife? But it's always on the husband. So I make a distinction between responsibility and blame. It is the husband's responsibility if his wife cheats on it. Right. That doesn't mean he caused it. He has to make a decision or deal with it. He's the head of the household. That might mean he is within his rights through scripture to divorce her. And this is responsible to make that decision, not hers. Right. Because he's the head of the household. But he didn't necessarily cause it. And so you can see where they always think women are innocent, like that they actually think there's something pure, more childlike about women. That's not scripture. Right. Scripture uses adultery as it's, as its main metaphor for idolatry and being faithful or unfaithful towards God. And it's always God is like the husband and the unfaithful covenant people, the Old Testament people, the church is like a woman, a mistress, right? A woman of the night. And so the main metaphor for being unfaithful religiously in scripture is an unfaithful woman. So how in the world? So you hear things like this, my favorite one is like, if he had, if he had loved her like Jesus, she would have done that. All right. Now wait, in Revelation chapter two and three, Jesus gives seven different churches and he's speaking to them and he's calling the repentance. He says, if you don't do this, this and that, I'm going to spew you out. Right. I'm going to be done with you. Okay. Well, wait a second. Why are those churches behaving bad? If Jesus had loved them like Jesus, wouldn't they all be good? Because the church is given as a metaphor that Jesus is the crown and the church is the bride. Well, it's because women have agency. Women are smart and they have abilities. So it's kind of funny that it's like, it's feminine. It's like it's misogynistic. Like these pastors are acting like women are like little babies. No, they made that choice. And so I think that you see that's coming into churches and men don't want to stay there. And men, men will put up with quite a bit like very homoerotic, feminine music. They'll put up like when they go into the bathroom, it's like they stumbled into the woman's bathroom at Pottery Barn. You know what I mean? It's like, you designed these churches. So it's not a very masculine environment. They'll sit there preaching that can be very condescending towards men. And the whole thing is just try harder, try harder, man up. And there is a sense like if I man up, we mean like embrace your masculine nature for a holy purpose, then it's good. But it's usually just kind of barking. Like it's kind of like a boomer barking. Like, I did it, you can do it. You know? And guys will put up with that for a time. And then they're like, I can't do this anymore. They're leaving the church. It's not good. It's not good at all. We need men. Men give more. Men work. So they give more to the church. They actually serve more in practical sides of the church as deacons, fixing things, whatever. They bring stability to a church. When there's more men around, the kids tend to be more well behaved. They're the lifeblood of a church. If you want to, if you want to get women and children, you go for the men. The women and children will follow. I love the women and children in my church and I minister to them. But I do certainly put a special emphasis on the men. Because if my men are well taken care of, then the women and children will be well taken care of. It's not my responsibility to be every woman's emotional support. That's her husband. That's not my job. I can't be every kid's dad. I have my own family. I'm there to feed that fire, to encourage it, and to equip men to do the work. And so these churches are always talking down to men and shaming them and emasculating them. And they're destroying, they're destroying themselves. It's like they're blowing up the very foundation underneath them, which God builds on the foundation of men and churches. You hosted a panel on men and religion with Jack Donovan, Jeff Younger, who's Orthodox. He's Orthodox. Ken Curry, who's Christian like you. I think Jack is a pagan. I don't know if he would describe himself with that, but that's how I associate. And then who else was on the panel? Tanner, who's a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. How did that go? It was okay. It went well. No fist fights. No. No, no, no. No, they're all men, of course. We could all disagree. And so I wanted to have the conversation like you're at a bar and you meet these guys. And you're figuring it out where you're at. And it's almost like a bunch of guys at a bar and you're watching the same game you like. And you're all fans of that game or whatever. And that's what's brought you there. In this case, the game is how do we help men? And then as we're drinking and watching this, we start talking and finding our differences, pushing each other a little bit, but pulling back at the right amount. Instead to me, it's like I want to maintain the distinctions between Tanner and I's understanding of the Trinity and all that sort of stuff. But I didn't want it to come out of a place of insecurity like I disagree with Tanner on this, this, this and that. Right? We're able to allow those distinctions to kind of come out in the conversation, but also show people like you can talk about hard things in a respectful way. And then what I told people is like, yeah, Tanner's a ladder day saying, I'm not, I disagree a bunch of things. Would I want Tanner as my neighbor? I would. We'll argue over the fence, right, and my neighbor who will be safer, right? Kaylee's a sweet woman. He clearly loves his family. He's clearly involved in it. And he straight up said he wouldn't want my sons to marry his daughters. And that's awesome. I respect that, right? I respect that for religious reasons. It is. You can ask him about that, you know, next time, next time in the newer 21 report, but even newer, even newest. But yeah, we, we, but I love that. I love having Jack up there. I love hearing a guy who's not a Christian try to process through these things spiritually. That's where this whole last book was on, right? And so the fact that that's opening up in the ministry as a conversation is a positive thing. We just can't blur all distinctions, but we also can model for people and mature a conversation. That's how men should talk. We can disagree, right? We can even get heated, which we never did. It was that a lot, way more laughing than anything. We can get heated and walk away and come back to it. And that's what we have to do. People don't just convert like that usually. And there's like, I converted overnight, but what happened is that there was a girl Margaret in my art class that was a great example and kept kind of low, like very subtly evangelizing me. And then my biology teacher was going after me hard. And he was a manly man and a man of science, a very thoughtful man. And all that was kind of like almost like pre-evangelism. I don't, it was prepping me. So there was a lot of decisions that happened along the way, a lot of conversations. And then there was one night where I like, was it atheists in the morning? I wasn't Christian, right? It's like, so was it like momentarily or did it happen over time? And so you just got to be willing to have the conversation and sometimes to get as far as you can. You're like, well, that's how far we can get. And that's okay. That's all right. Did you speak at 22 conventions this year? I did. What did you talk to the women about? I talked about hope. I wanted them to know that even if they had been a whorish, right, like a prostitute, that there's still hope for them. And as, and that they're here, they're most likely considering that. And as they try to transition from that old way of living, that evil way of living, here's a few areas to work on. And I talked about modesty, both in clothing and in attitude. And I like to use the analogy of volume or sound. And so when you think a beautiful song, and if you turn it down the way, you can't hear it. And if you turn it up all the way, it doesn't sound good, right? It hurts your ears. It's not good. So a woman's femininity, even sexuality, should not be turned all the way down. It's weird for a woman to hide her breasts, to be ashamed of it. Something's not right. It's usually a sign of sexual abuse. It's also not bad to turn it all the way up and everything's hanging out. Good to turn it all the way up. Yeah. And so there's a spectrum, there's a spot somewhere where that modesty exists, right? And it's not, you can't say, oh, it's got to be exactly at 11 out of like 30, right? It's a little harder than that. There is a relative or subjective aspect to it. But there is also objective things involved. So I wanted to call them to that. And then I said, you know what though, I see all these women in the trad world on Twitter and stuff, and they're wearing the dresses and they've got the long hair and all that. But you see them manifest a very feministic brash attitude. And so like you got the trappings of womanhood, right? That's good. That's good. But kind of rather you have short hair, even blue hair, and pants, and have a feminine attitude. So scripture calls a woman to have a gentle and quiet spirit and not to be a loud woman. Loud there is, again, speaking of something that's not actual sound, but a way of communicating. She pushes herself on people. She's tumultuous. She's boisterous, right? She's not quiet. She's not comfortable with her rank and place and things. And I rather than pursue that, pursue both. And I was telling them, don't be Mrs. wrong, because, you know, you can be very braggadocious as a woman, and you can let everything hang out. And you will attract the type of man. We will not be a quality man. Quality man will know instinctually that that's danger. And if they've been reading Proverbs, they'll know explicitly to avoid that woman to not go on her path. So I wanted to say, look, you can rebuild from the rubbles. I like the picture of when they reclaim wood, like these old houses and they take the wood and they build something beautiful out of it, right? So the house of your life collapsed. We can build something new. That's God brings beauty from ashes. It's a great still work. Wonderful. Yeah. Where can men go to find out more about you? What you do? I know you have a book coming up. I do. Canon Press is publishing. It's Good to Be a Man, 11, 30, 21. So whenever this is out, probably it'll be out. Thank you. I can't believe I got it done. Did you get your copy yet? I don't know. I don't know. I'm in Orlando. Okay. That's true. So it's good to be man.com is our website. And we started putting up our weekly emails there. You go to notes. You can read those. We do. We haven't really been writing a blog for too lazy. But there's emails that come out every Saturday. And there's also a podcast that we've got about 75 episodes and we throw them out there every once while. You can go to East River Church of Batavia on iTunes or Stitcher or YouTube. You can listen to sermons or if you want. That's the best way to find me. Great. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Great talking to you. This is Will Spencer with the Renaissance of Men here for the... It's not real. It's not real. It's all a lie. I want you guys to know. It's all fake. But love for Jesus is real. This is Will Spencer with the Renaissance of Men here with the New 21 Report. Thanks so much.