Off Grid Christianity – Episode 184 – David Pitts

0:00Hi, my name is Martin Pernell and welcome to Off-Gruek Christianity. A weeky podcast for those who go or don't go to church and where we can meet and hear from those that are to meet their faith count. This podcast series is to encourage via conversation and you can contact us as well by email ogc at accessradio.biz and biz of course is about biz. Today's guest who is he? He had a business career that can be summed up in two words, problem solving and we're not talking cross words either. He has worked for large multinational to smaller charities and voluntary groups. Our guest was the lead author for the world's first full surgical curriculum published in 2005. So how did our guest become so heavily involved in training people, especially surgeons? Why did he want to start his own company in 1992, specialising in creating solutions to people's centered problems? Why did he go to university to study psychology and does he think therefore he is? How has this psychology degree from 1970s helped or hindered his Christian faith? What problem solving initiatives would he use today to

1:04help others who consider themselves off-grid Christians to not lose but enhance their faith? And with all his business and psychology know how, what problems would he like to solve within the church set up today if allowed? Gives me great pleasure to welcome David Pitts. For those that don't know you, where are we speaking to you from, good sir? I'm in the the office in our house in Cooper and Fife, about 10, 15 minutes drive from St Andrews. See, I need to be there with my golf clubs. The thing is though David, people are going to say that doesn't sound like even an eastern Scottish border type voice. So where are you from originally? Born and raised in the West Midlands, little town called Albury in the heart of Piki Blinders Country. Was there until I was about 19 when took to Manchester and I was in Manchester for 30 years, got headhunted for projects up here in Scotland in 2003, been here ever since. And have they accepted you as one of their own yet? Absolutely not. No, if you've ever been in a pub in Scotland, everything including bad weather and the price

2:07of petrol is the fault of the English. Yeah. Good mention, it's our fault as well for their football team, but I won't. Five important questions, maybe not so, to ask you if that's okay. Let's see how we get on. Question number one, if you can invite anybody from history, for an evening meal, a live or dead, so that you could ask in questions, who would it be, please David? Might have got two here, a big one and small one. The first one, Tom Paxton. Tell me more. Tom Paxton, American Folk Singer, came to prominence 1960s, 1970s. Songs like Last Thing on My Mind, The Modellous Toy, Rambling Boy, those kind of folk standards would all be Tom Paxton songs. And I first encountered his music when I was at university and I got involved in the heading along to the folk club. And I remember going to to watch Tom Paxton play at the Manchester Free Trade Hall as it was then, 1970s. And he was just amazing because there he was on stage, with two people, a keyboard player and a bass player. And he basically held the floor

3:11for several hours, keeping the attention of an audience of 2,000 people playing through these songs. Lots of people from Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton to Val Dunicon have all recorded Tom Paxton songs. And they range, Martin, from the romantic ballad through children's songs to taking the Mickey out of politicians and some very moving tragedy songs, if you like. Now in his 80s and still performing, as we get older, Martin, we start missing the people that we knew when we were young. And Tom Paxton went through a really interesting life. He was a contemporary of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and comedians and angels. He's all about the pub that they all used to go to after the gig and spend the early hours of the morning drinking together, telling stories, singing songs. One thing I'd like to get him talking on, I'd like to hear his views on people that he's influenced.

4:14Yes, certainly he influenced me bizarrely, because when I went up to Manchester's University in the early 70s, I started playing guitar and leading a worship at the Christian Union. And what I used to do on my feet then had owed a lot more to Tom Paxton and Mike Harding than it did to anybody who would have considered themselves a worship leader. And in those days, there were no worship leaders. Fantastic answer. We've never had Tom Paxton before, because I'm in a good mood. I'm going to let you have two. So who's the second person, please? The second person is a girl called Lizzy Loat. Lizzy would now be in her early 20s, but she died. I was sharing a flat many years ago with a guy called Kevin, who eventually married a lady called Hillary. And they came to my wedding some years later with a baby in arms called Lizzy. And some 15 years later, Lizzy Lo committed suicide. Lizzy massively influenced the incident, massively influenced a number of churches in South Manchester

5:18towards an inclusivity agenda. But of course, she's not around to ask questions about the detail of what happened and how we could learn to not let it happen again. And it's all very well to debate what a scripture text means. Or Lizzy, who said what to you that caused you to think that as you put him on writing, I think, how I am and who I am is not acceptable. And it will bring shame on my family. What influenced did it have on you that in that time, you would not have seen any Christian leaders who were gay. You would not have thought that I can... This is how I feel. This is who I am. One day, I can be this kind of leader. So I would love to be able to explore that with her. And I would love to think that I could talk her out of it if I was over there. But now she would be in her 20s. It would be a very interesting conversation to learn from.

6:18In the light of what you shared about Lizzy, thank you for showing. And for those that listen at the moment, thinking, oh, I want to know more of myself because that's how I'm feeling. About all two years ago now, I had the pleasure of having as a guest Andy Robinson. And he has a website living out dot org. He together with a few other ministers who also realised that they were gay. They wanted to make sure there's loads of material available. So they formed this website called livingout dot org. And so many resources on there. And they're very recommend the podcast. Yeah, it's well worth checking out. Question two, who is your favourite biblical character or favourite biblical story or favourite power? Well, please could sir. Caleb, son of Jaffana. What a character. In book of Joshua, I think it's somewhere around chapter 14. It's a fairly short passage. And you get this snapshot of a story of this guy called Caleb. And at the point at which the story happens, he's in his senior years. But if you pause for a second and say just a minute,

7:23let's look back at what this means for where he was and what he did and what he came through. Caleb has a fantastic story because he was obviously a boy in Egypt. So the first battles he had to fight would have been of survival, just keeping alive in the circumstances. He would have come out with Joshua and Moses during what we know as the the Exodus. So he had all of the battles of being a soldier of working out what the mission was, working out what we're trying to do. And then he had the battles of seeing things go a bit awry. And many of us have that problem that he saw one of the greatest leaders of all time, arguably in the Old Testament certainly, Moses failing. He saw things falling apart. He saw people making a golden calf. He saw the tablets of stone, the Ten Commandments being brought down. And then we see him fighting the battle of the years of the the passing of time

8:28where he's he's sitting there in front of Joshua. His old friend saying, look, I know that I'm 80 years old, but I'm not diminished in any way. And the the classic translation, well, I was in Sunday school, was always give me this mountain. But I think the thing I really like about Caleb is now we think what he said was give me the hill country, give me the hill country, and he locates it. And he's basically saying, give me the West Bank. He's basically saying, I'd like you to leave me to conquer the most vulnerable rat infested difficult to defend area in the whole of the whole of the program. And so here's a guy who went through everything and survived in the end still prepared to to follow the mission, still prepared to go out for a fight to do what he could to help those that he does that he could. The other thing Martin would be nice if we could bring Caleb back for a conversation now to be able to say to him, okay, look, Caleb, you've seen what's been going on

9:29in recent years given what you what you came out of Egypt trying to do given your mission and how you tried to pursue your mission, how do you feel about what's going on in Israel these days? And what could you say in reflection? What would you now see as the the mountains that you'd like to conquer in the new terrain of Israel, Gaza and the rest? We're really interesting. And of course people say Caleb, is he a friend of Jeremy Clarkson on his tractor? Different kind of question three, if you were Prime Minister for the day and could change any law or impose a new law, what would it be please, good sir? I'd like to make habitual stupidity, a custodial sentence. I'm off. We all make a mistake, but some of us make mistake after mistake after mistake and some of us make colossal mistakes that are completely inexplicable. Coming around to things about organizations and charities and whatever, we do not think through

10:29how we plan something. So let's say that we've got two churches and we need to bring those two churches together into being one church. This is never going to be straightforward. So in industry, you'd go out and you'd make something called an impact analysis or a plan and you'd make a list of who all the stakeholders were and you'd work out what the effect of this change would be on all the stakeholders. You'd look at why there is a need to change, you'd look at other possibilities of the merging the two churches. You'd do all of that and you'd write reports and in the writing of the report, it would bring your analysis out for judgments as to how good it is and you'd think again about certain things. But when we do this as Christians, churches, charities, all too often, we don't do any of it. We just decide, okay, we're going to bring these two churches together and I'm just going to announce it, I the diocese, the Presbyterry, whoever you are.

11:30And so we've now decided that church one will close and they will join church two. All right, so this is going to go down well, isn't it? Then we say, well, okay, let's be a bit clearer about this. In fact, the possibility here is that there are three church buildings. Building number one, we rate as A, not that we've actually done any surveys or anything, but we think this is, this is an A quality building. Building number two will make a B, as will be building three. So we've got two buildings that are indistinguishable. We've got one building that's better than either of them. Well, that looks fairly clear, except that the building that's clearly should be the choice doesn't belong to either of them. That's belongs to a different charity. So how do I make the decision between do I go to this building or that building when we've got no facts and figures? Oh, well, just sign this paper and we'll leave you to it. What you've got is colossal stupidity in some groups that I'd like to say you would never find an industry. That's not quite true.

12:34But certainly you've got people in leadership positions who really should be thinking more, more clearly about how they developed people's places of ministry, the places where they routinely go to learn about God and learn about themselves. Yeah, that's interesting what you said there. David, I think we're going to use that as a springboard for we'll go later on. So thank you. Question four outside of family events. What is being your most enjoyable day out? I was doing a project in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was doing a series of workshops with orthopedic surgeons and they said to me, is there anything you'd like to do while you're here? I'd love to go and see an American football game. Well, it's out of the season. Sorry, can't do that, but we'll fix up something else. So it's the end of the working day and they said, come on, David, you're going to get your act together. We're off out. We're going out of the front door and there's a stretch limo waiting. The stretch limo is equipped with the best American beer they can offer. No comment. And off we go to a basketball game. This is a basketball game between

13:36the LA Clippers and the Charlotte bees. I'd never been to a basketball game before. We go in, one of the guys is the doctor for the Charlotte bees. We are on the second row from the front. This means that we are within smelling distance of the touch line. You can see the sweat listening on these enormous bloke's bodies. And this guy, Larry turns to me, said, would you like anything to eat? Anything to drink? I said, what sort of things do you eat and drink when you sit and then these kind of seats? Would you like some pizza? Yeah, okay. So this girl comes over who looks like she stepped straight off the front cover of some incredibly attractive women's magazine and says anything I can do for you, sir, and goes off and brings back this ice cold beer and a domino's pizza in especially sized box that makes it convenient for you to eat it while the game carries on. So we watch this game. The crowd goes wild every time the home team scores and there is complete silence every time the visiting team scores. And while all of this happens, there's a motorized

14:44blimp about the size of one of these shuttles from the Starship Enterprise that's flying around the ground and zooming in on the camera and various things. It was just a great evening. Never been to a basketball game since, but it was good while it lasted. That's a great answer. Thank you. Question five. What has been your most embarrassing moment, though, David? The only one I'm allowed to tell you about, it was 1975, I think, and it was coming up to Freshers Week and the Christian Union me included organized a band. This band was going to play in an open air setting outside the new ecumenical chaplaincy that just been built. The band were the mighty flyers. The flyers were loud and they were there for that purpose to kind of let as many people know that something's going on as possible. Going around the university and in the weeks that followed, it was perfect. Everybody knew that this band had played my psychology tutor thought it was the greatest social event ever bringing all these people together. Blah blah blah blah. There were people who in Rush Olman, did spree that was miles away were saying, yeah, I think we could hear it there. I'm living in

15:48Humhaul. I ended up having to talk with the Warden of Humhaul, Dr. Hartzhorn, who was very unimpressed for some reason with the Christian Union at that point. We didn't know why. We were talking about Freshers Week and I was saying how pleased we were at how the concert with the mighty flyers had gone and he said, yes, it was quite interesting. He said, we were in the building next door trying to run the inaugural meeting of our Quaker Society. A tad embarrassing. It's not a lot of you say to that really, is it? Sorry about that. A piece in love. Yeah. Well, sir, I think I'm going to have a classic case here of a blank sheet of paper and see where we go, but very quickly to sum it up, looking at your CV, it's phenomenal. You've mentioned psychology, but you then basically going to what can only be described as my neck of the woods, which was as a training officer and helping out on so many issues. It's why I say you are in two words, a problem solver because you've worked with so many multinational companies both here and abroad. But one thing that really stuck out

16:54for me was that for some reason you aimed up working with surgeons. Here's someone who hasn't really got a medical background, but this then became the mainstay of your life for maybe 20-odd of which you wrote the curriculum that helped around the world in Malaysia amongst other places. So how did you get involved with surgeons? I went to church, one of my close friends at church, orthopedic surgeon, and he used to run courses for nurses in internal fixation, fixing fractures. And we walked his dog on a Sunday afternoon, and he would talk to me about these courses. He would describe what they're trying to do and what they're trying to achieve. And until, well, when you do this and this, this happens, doesn't it? He said, yeah, he said, how do you know that? I said, well, when you get a little rubber hammer thingy and you strike my knee just around the patella and it goes, boy, you know that that's going to happen, don't you? It's about the anatomy and physiology of learning as much as it's about the anatomy and physiology of the human body. And the way that you bring people together and what they do, it's the same kind of thing. So that's how it started.

17:59I went along to look at these courses that he ran. This is where the psychology comes in. If you go to sociologists or maybe medical education people, they don't tend to say show me, but psychologists, particularly occupational psychologists, whenever you want to solve a problem or take a look at, you want to take a look at something, show me what it is that you do, not just what you think you do. And eventually I ended up in operating theaters watching surgeons do what they do. And it wasn't always what they think they do in terms of teaching and helping people to learn. But it began in Manchester, the guy called Ray Ross, getting me to go and look at his courses that were funded by Swiss, a Swiss surgical foundation. They kind of invented screws and plates for fractures. I ended up being their international education person. And that's what took me all around the world, met my wife and Malaysia. It's all about communication. If you hadn't walked that dog, I started talking, would you've gone around the world, would you've met your wife

19:01and Malaysia? Most probably not. And there'd be so many instances I would have thought, just like the film sliding doors, you know what I mean, where you have a decision to make or should I go through that door, should I go through that door? I open your mouth and speak, say something, and see what comes back. It's wanting to speak, but even more important to listen. And if we did that more, wow. Tell you a quick story. One of the things I got from my dad was always tell the truth, and always speak up in everything that I've done. Sometimes I get myself into trouble for it, but I try and tell it, tell it how it is. Very first course I went to to look at for Ray. There's a guy called Professor David Rowley, passed away a few years ago, and he was giving a talk. And I wrote in my notes about this presentation. There's nothing wrong with this man that a good tailor, a decent barber, and an amputated ego wouldn't cure. And I gave these notes to Ray, being, as I thought, from a mate of mine, I said, these are just for you. And of course, he shared them with David. I can't tell you exactly what David said, because it's not repeatable, but he said, gosh, this gentleman is

20:04absolutely right. Wow, he got away with it. Yeah, so that was the relationship that then started in another whole bunch of the stories. And that's the one that led to the first curriculum with David Rowley. And that's how come I ended up in Scotland. We became great friends. He liked having somebody around who told him the truth. He didn't have a lot of that. And the same would go for a number of the industrial setting. I just say right at the beginning about your psychology degree, and has it helped or hindered your Christian faith? It's obviously helped you, which is great in your job, because you brought in a different perspective on how to problem solve issues in surgery. But how has it helped you in your Christian faith, with such a fantastic brain and psychology being part and foremost of you? As a Christian, when I was at university, I struggled sometimes with what people would say was the truth. Somebody would give a talk and they'd be talking about the theory of evolution as if it was the fact of evolution, to which my response was, look, I really don't mind

21:06there being a theory of evolution. As long as we accept that none of us were there, we don't actually know. And therefore, how can it be other than a theory and what are the other theories? So in looking at the way that people hold a belief, in looking at the way that people perceive things, we don't have any problem accepting that there are such things as visual illusions. We see what we think are a set of facts in a drawing and our brain perceives them in different ways. So once you've got that idea, then it's not a big jump to say, well, whatever the set of quotes facts are, we can look at them in different ways. And if you take that into a surgical training context, one of the places I'd began with the UK people, they showed me the facts of their assessment system and there's a yellow form and a green form. I said, well, what are these things do? Well, the yellow form is the trainer's report on the trainee. Okay. And the green form is the trainees report on the trainer. And we

22:10looked at the context of these forms and I said, so these forms don't work, do they? What do you mean? They don't work. We've been using them for years. I said, well, I know that we're having this conversation because they don't work. And I can tell you that no surgical trainer is going to give some trainee a bad report. If he thinks he's going to have to then fix what the problem is, because he's got enough to do anyway. And I can tell you that no trainee is going to give a trainer a bad report if they think that this trainer makes at some point in the next 40 years of their career, I've influenced over where they're going. Hence, I can tell you the yellow and green forms don't work. And that's an example, Martin, of looking at something. It's the same thing looking at it from a different perspective and being able to say, so now we need to do something different. The podcast is called off-grid Christianity. How has your psychology degree helped or hindered you in your faith? If you asked me about the psychology degree, then the biggest help

23:11that it gave me was because it was a broadly based degree. The degree that I was, I had the opportunity to do, included a little bit of everything. And that meant that we were looking at how people thought and behaved from perspectives of physiology, of comparing our behavior with that of animals, of people in societies, people in social groups. So with that breadth of analysis, with that breadth of models that I had access to, it's always helped me to make sense of what's going on in the groups that I'm part of, not always comfortably. And sometimes, Martin, people don't challenge what they should challenge. Sometimes people leave churches and they don't tell anybody why. Now, if we look at scripture, particularly Matthew 18, it actually says very clearly, if somebody put your nose out of joint, then tell them what they did. But people become quite culturally

24:13obsessed sometimes in churches with being nice, that they forget that they're called to be kind. And to be kind to somebody is sometimes to have to say, look, what you said, I don't think it was true. And it was really hurtful to me. And actually, at this point, I don't think I can be here with you guys if this is what goes on. And you, you'll find that reflected in in big events, the stuff that Andy Graystone and the Channel 4 documentary about John Smith were talking about. The psychology bit in my journey was very helpful to give me a vocabulary to describe things that go on. If you don't have a vocabulary, it's very difficult to grasp what it is, what the it is. You're reaching out and it's almost like you can't see it. There's a passage in the New Testament where Jesus has healed a blind man. And he said, says to the blind man, so what's going on? What can you see? And the blind man says, I can see men as trees walking. And for me, that's a very profound

25:19statement because the blind man has never seen people before. So what he's trying to do is to make sense of something and he's touched and fell to tree. And he's saying, well, it's what I imagine as a tree, but it's moving. So having a vocabulary that will help you to understand the effect of paradigms, to understand the things that are going on in groups, to understand how how status and culture is driving a situation can be very helpful, but it can be very uncomfortable. It was a while before I came across things like Myers-Briggs type indicators and things that described the way that people prefer to act. And the Myers-Briggs indicator has four letters to it in my case, ENTJ. And I had a conversation one day with a guy called Steve Aesop and Steve has done quite a bit of research into people who were off the grid as Christians. And he said to me, you know, he said, your Myers-Briggs type was very, very typical of people who find themselves

26:24off the grid as far as church and Christianity goes. It's about the way that you think you come from a very small percentage of people who have that profile. So routinely, you see big pictures. Routinely, you wanted a judgment. You want something to be completed. And routinely, your energy comes from people. So you don't want to let go of the church experience. But because of other things that you see, you're seeing, you find it uncomfortable. Which is very, very profound and very, very helpful. So let's develop that. Psychology, yes, I get what you're saying, is giving you the skills for communication. Problem solving seems to be with you throughout your working life, where you could know that regal some amazing stories by just going in and putting in a different angle of attack and they'll get, oh yeah, and thought of that. Where can this apply, do you think, today in the church, so that maybe we could actually grasp more of what Jesus is saying? They say there was Einstein that said, you can't solve a problem with the same technology

27:26you used to create it. That's very true. Parafraise that. Intelligent people don't deliberately do stupid things. If somebody is intelligent, if what they're doing is obviously stupid, well, maybe they can't help it. Maybe it's an addiction of some sort. Maybe they don't know it's stupid. Maybe actually it's not stupid. It's your perspective that's wrong. With concepts like these in the church, we could help to avoid 90% of the real difficulties, the really emotional pain that's caused by people. Partly because once you get, quote, leader to understand that what they are doing is being experienced by other people as stupid, then why would they carry on doing it? Well, if it's because they're a, let's call them a malevolent actor, the things they're doing are actually there to feather their own nest out of their own pride. Well, let's expose that. And I say that trying to keep a very adult to adult

28:30voice. We're not talking witch hunts here. We're talking about merely saying, look, if this is how you'd like to act, well, that's not appropriate here. Let's not do it. And we can either not do it by you changing what you do or we can not do it by you not being here. But using concepts that enable a dialogue and doing it on a face-to-face basis and making sure that we actually tell the truth, not just what's nice is a way that we could move forward in all sorts of areas. And I think, as we look at strategies for development in the church, and remember, I was with Scripture Union for a number of years working with local churches, we can, we can't. We have fantasies about what's going to work. But if you, if you run the numbers, you know, if you say, well, we've got this many people in our congregation, this is the amount of finance we have. This is what we need to do with the number of children, young people we have access to. These kind of facts then give fuel

29:34for our prayers. We all believe in miracles. But we need sometimes to define the miracles that we're believing for, to enable God to work in our minds as well as our hearts, to work out what we should do next, and to work out what the training program has to be. When I was with S.U., I used to go and speak in Bible colleges sometimes. And in general, mine was the only talk on how to work with children and young people that they heard in the whole of their ministerial training. Now it's never going to work, is it? It's never going to, never going to work. So if we can have the conversation that says, yes, we need more children's workers for such and such an age group, well, let's have a program to develop them first. Or if we don't have the numbers to do that, how are we going to combine with another fellowship to do it? No point in having 20 people in this room, 30 people in another room and 40 people in another room in the same town. How do we build the bridges that were enabled us to

30:37all be in the same room and bring the children's work or whatever together? There must be vickers and ministers out there who are trying to sort out a problem. But because people think they know too much on a subject because they're Christian, therefore everyone's equal, they're not. What have you seen as in the model, the way a church runs and the way that a business runs? What would you do about it? That's a really difficult question for the time we've got. If you've got somebody who is the full-time worker, then one of the competencies, if you like, one of the abilities they need to have is to be able to tell themselves the truth. And part of that truth is you don't know everything. Part of that truth is that you need a team of people no matter how small your congregation is. Part of that truth is you need the skills to build that team. So where are you going to get those skills? Now what most ministers, full-time workers, whatever, don't have access to are

31:38external people like me. See, I did a lot of work with big multinationals. At one point, I was working with Huat Packard. And if you were a new divisional manager in their test and measurement organization over a period of eight to ten years, one of the things you had to have when you were appointed was an hour with me. And the purpose of that hour was to say, look, here's what I do and what I know. You can come to me anytime I'm here in your head office for an hour and talk to me about whatever issues you've got. Those issues could be personal. You know, I'm feeling insecure about X, Y and Z, but they could also be very practical. One guy one day said, to me, look, I've got a writer staff development plan. I don't know what one is. So it took us 20 minutes to sit down and show him what a staff development plan was and how you write one and who draws it up. But a church minister doesn't have that access. Neither do they have access to somebody who

32:42will genuinely help if something is really going wrong. And again, when I was working with these big companies, I would occasionally get phone calls about very difficult things. Something that somebody had done that they knew was stupid, but they didn't know why they'd done it. And they were seriously afraid of losing their livelihood because of it. They didn't need counseling. They just needed somebody to listen for five minutes and say, well, okay, the next step is probably this. I'll hold your hand while you do it. Ministers are left on their own for this. And a lot of the modeling that happens is that they're listening to people in conferences give talks about how to do it. And that doesn't help. If you don't know how to do it, then being given three Bible verses on how you should do it will probably only make you feel more guilty about not being able to do it. When really what you want is somebody to sit down and say, okay, we need to look at this data,

33:43this data, or this set of figures, or tell me who XYZ are. Tell me who these people are. Tell me what they want. Tell me what makes them tick. It's a kind of a coaching that they need. When I began doing what became called executive coaching programs, nobody knew what they were. And just as I modeled the style of worship leading on Tom Pakistan, I modeled what I did in executive coaching on industrial chaplencies. So I was there caring about people, asking them questions, trying to help them to see their own situation in different ways. And finding a way to get into churches and not make people feel threatened. People feel threatened Martin very easily. And sometimes it's almost unavoidable that they will do. It's very difficult. Yeah, very difficult. Does that go some way to answering your question? We're just warming up, I think, because from a business point of view, we've got strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. People have heard of that model before.

34:46You just mentioned being threatened. But if you're a minister and you've got Mrs. Brog's coming to you who thinks she knows a lot about everything. In fact, she knows hardly anything. You don't want to upset her because she'll go around and blab things off. As a minister, you've got that to sort out as well. But with all the business models that you and I could discuss further, all things that we know that work. A minister should at least know the Bible. So for those that are going through at the moment, with your problem solving hat on, let's take a scene where it says in the Bible, I'll give you an example. For me, Paul was probably one of the first really, truly great presenters for training officers because he goes in and he says you've got even over their statue to an unknown bloke, an unknown God. And I know that unknown God is, turns it around, and off he goes, brilliant, what a great presenter. Fantastic. That's what I got out of from that. So there must be people that you know in the Bible that you can say, wow, what a great

35:46business model we can use from that principle in problem solving. So who comes to mind? Okay, well, let's stick with Paul because if my recollection is correct, around the very incident you're just talking about, there's a group there called the Bereans who I think quotes were were noble in character. Now, the Bereans were prepared to examine the scriptures as they use them. They were prepared to look at what was what was written and to listen what to what Paul was saying to see how it fitted together. And they did it quotes nobly. I think they were open-minded is what alludes to and finding a group of open-minded people who who won't begin from the point of view, I believe you're wrong and I'm going to prove that you're wrong from the scriptures. The next part of that jigsaw puzzle I'd take from Paul again. I'm doing this off the top of my head. There's an incident where a whole bunch of Jewish people came along and they said, look, if these people want

36:47to be Christians then they must first be Jews because the gospel is first the Jews and therefore in order to be Jews they must be circumcised. Paul clearly knew this wouldn't work and if you then look in Romans, you find Paul and I preached on this once, you find Paul in Corinth and he's clearly worried about what's going on in Rome with people being forced to be circumcised. Without anesthetic or whatever it was they were using to cut things in those days. Paul was worried about it and so he went back to the scriptures and so what do the scriptures really say? So now let me tell you the grace of the Lord Jesus is enough. What we require of you is this, this, this, this and this and this doesn't include being circumcised in the flesh. You can be circumcised in your heart or I can't remember the phrase that used. So we're looking at getting a group of people who will be who will be honest, getting a peer group, a support group,

37:49a group of colleagues, we're looking at how you then create that group of people who can be honest with and will be honest with each other. You're then looking at taking the rule book and examining it in context. Whatever your rule book is most companies have manuals and things or did have manuals. Do the manuals say the right things? Are you asking somebody to do something that is actually feasible and possible? You know, and again, Paul, Barnabas and others, they were live dealing with these issues. They couldn't just pop over to Rome from Corinth. You know, it was like a three week journey or something by boat and whatever. So we're looking to take the honesty that we can learn from some aspects of business management and staff development and transfer it to biblical contexts in which I mean, Jesus would say to us, tell the truth, be open and honest with people the way that he dealt with people was different according to who they they were. So the way

38:53that he dealt with the woman at the well in Samaria. So who are you? Oh, you have so many husbands. Well, actually, you've got this many end and the one you have now blah, blah, blah. And he was very caring, a very engaging. It was a very personal interview. He didn't do that with the money changes in the temple. He turned up and he kicked the tables over. So there's different actions and strategies to deal with different sets of circumstances. I think one of the things that drove me over the years was to try and care about people. And in business, you do get some very caring individuals. You also get some people who don't know how to care. So you have to engage with these people in different ways. And sometimes people will just not want to engage. The classic win, win, win, lose, lose, lose, whatever. It has to be no deal because there's some people actually you can't

39:55work with. But if you can keep an open conversation, it'll go a long way. Again, Martin, I hope I answered your question. You are. What you're saying here, like Paul, is that horse is for courses, really? Just because you've got the world's greatest race horse, he might not be any good on the grand national because he can't jump. So you wouldn't put him in the grand national. And yet it seems that maybe in Christian circles today, it's like, no, we just have to do it this way. And that's it. As if we've not learned anything from what Jesus was saying. And then Paul was trying to emulate as well. Can I just add one thing in there, Martin? Yeah, go for it. One of the common problems I've come across with professional groups. And in that, I would include lawyers, doctors, surgeons, church ministers is a belief that what I do is difficult. There's then a temptation. The dark side is then to slip into what I do is difficult. Therefore, everything else is easy

40:55because when I'm fixing this knee, when I'm solving this tricky complex, illegal case, when I'm interpreting the complex biblical passage, I see all the subtleties and the nuances of these and ideal with them. But when it comes to mere relationships, when it comes to merely organizing a Sunday school program, when it comes to, well, I've just got a 20 minute talk to give on Sunday afternoon. Of course, that's straightforward. Well, no, it's not. You're dealing with a group of people in a short talk on a Sunday night or wherever it is. They need something specific to get them through Monday morning. And what is it? And how are you going to know, unless you understand some of the details and the pressures of their lives? So just because what you do is difficult. It doesn't mean whatever the else is doing is easy. Very good. Well, in that case, then, it's called off-Greek Christianity. People who predominantly listen to this, I would say are the ones that are maybe feeling a bit cheesed off going to church. And it's the same old thing.

41:56It hasn't really moved on. Okay, they've got the food bank, they've got this, they've got that. But they're only really emulating what other churches are doing. They might just be bored, full stop, they're missing the point. Maybe what Jesus is saying. They could be a load of reasons why people are just sort of saying, oh, do you know what? I'm just getting fed up with church at a moment. So with all your knowledge that you've gleaned from the business world and in the Christian world and been a Christian yourself, what can you share with us to say, hey, bloody blah, what would you say? I'd say that I wish I had a magic wand that I could wave and make all the problems go away. I think I'd say number one, we have to keep focused on the fact that God loves us. God loves us, not just everybody else. And I think we need to keep in mind that He wants us, He wants us to experience Him, He wants us to, if I say have a good life, that sounds a bit bland. His desire is not that we live a difficult life, but it's equally not to make our lives easy. I think that we need to

43:01keep going on the trying to read the Bible. I think we need to keep going on the looking for ways that the Bible is relevant to who we are and where we are. And we've talked in this conversation about people like Paul, we talked about Caleb earlier on, so Old Testament and New Testament, where there are relevantcies to how we are in our own situations here. I think what I would recommend is if you can go online and start to find out a bit more about yourself, things like a Amaya's Briggs type indicator might be very helpful in giving you a vocabulary that describes how you like to act. Why helps you to understand why you prefer certain things? Back when I was at university, I would never have entered any kind of contemplative worship service. I always wanted to something a bit more active and directed. But now I enjoy that a lot more. So how are you?

44:04What sort of thing do you want? What sort of thing do you like in your worship? And there might be worship experiences around that you want to try, that you've never tried before. Churches that once you wouldn't have been comfortable there, experiences and conferences and stuff, pilgrimages, and those sorts of things. So I think that there's a case for looking for different things and working out what your preferences are and trying to understand why you're not feeling comfortable in certain places. The other thing I'd say is that businesses make mistakes. But because if they don't do something different, they will go out of business, then they try different things. We mentioned Houticula if you look at where they began with test and measurement equipment. The first big contract that Mr Heulis and Mr Pachard got, I believe, was from Disney. There was a movie called Fantasia and it brought together all sorts of musical instruments and pieces of music and they needed a way

45:09of balancing up the musical instruments and the volume and the sound and whatever. So they needed test and measurement equipment to do it. And Heulis and Pachard from their garage in California, wherever it was, that was where they started. But then they went to all sorts of things. They made computers in a box. Heulis Pachard used to have a product called the IPAC IPAQ and they brought this out while I was there. There were a number of people around who were saying, look, guys, this is terrific. It's got a color screen. It uses a stylus. The only thing it needs is a SIM card to make it a mobile phone as well. They didn't do it. And because they didn't do it, Steve Jobs did. And the iPhone is history. That's what happened. Yeah. Wow. Where is the same thinking in the church? Where is the thinking that says there are thousands of people out there who are not coming to church?

46:11Not just how can we do what we do better, but what should we do that's different? Why is there not a Saturday morning breakfast club for blokes? Why is there not any of the number of things within the church program, rather than a service on a Sunday morning that's only attended by 20 people? Where's the honesty and the question and the questioning that says, what can we do that's going to change this? We can't just carry on doing what we've always done and it's not working. That would be certifiable stupidity, as much as anything else. I'm sorry, Martin, I don't mean that. I don't mean that critically. Because again, with my psychology hat on, people who are in stressed out situations are not usually creative. They need a bit of space to get their head around things. And they need people from outside the box that they can trust and and talk to. Yeah, which means, yes, again, communicate. Go and speak to somebody, bring somebody in,

47:14facilitate. Might it or who is in your congregation? In your congregation, you and I have both been in congregations at some point. Yeah. Therefore, there are congregations that you've been in that have had access to an industrial training officer and they never used it. There's churches that I've been in who have had access to somebody who could instantly pretty much run a training, a trainers program or a one day course for children's workers and they never were interested. So, there is talent in the church that's being ignored because nobody's taking the time to get to know. Good point. Two questions to wrap it up. First one, because it ties up where we came in at the beginning and that is in your psychology time at university, you see the press, they can't be a God because bloody, bloody, bloody, from your psychological hat, you would have counted the argument because, hey, you're a Christian. So, you have one minute, please, as to how you would

48:14count the argument, they can't be a God off you go. I think that anybody who says that there can't be a God, first of all has to tell me what kind of God can't there be because you already have a lot of God's on your shelf at home. You have a box that you go and sit in front of every evening and you look at things on it and you believe some things and you don't believe other things. You have a box that's your bank account into which resources go out of which resources are pulled and you don't see it but you believe it's there and you believe it affects your life. So, let's explore some of the boxes in your life already that will help you to understand, it'll help me to understand what you mean by God cannot be there and I might agree with you that the kind of God that you think can't be there is the kind of God that I don't believe in anyway. So then let's look at the evidence and let's for a moment to answer that kind of question forget about scripture because there's going to be also to resistance to that. Let's talk about

49:19what you need in your life. Let's talk about the things that you hope for. Let's talk about the things that you feel insecure about. If there was a God, what would you want him to do for you? What would you be looking for in a God that you can believe in? I would then say to you because I'm answering that question, if I look at the church, I would find it very difficult to use that as just the whole idea of who God is. This podcast that we're doing today and the entire collection Martin, 180 or whatever it is of ones that you've done show a vast breadth of activity that people are engaged in that promotes hope because they are Christians because they are people of faith because they're trying to mirror who they believe God to be in the work that they do to help individuals and communities. So the fact that the people listening to this podcast

50:22who find themselves off the grid Christians still identifies Christians should be a source of great hope and challenge about whether there is a God who is there because there are so many people who even in uncomfortable circumstances believe in God and believe that he is interested in and in control of their life. I think that when we see the journeys that some people have had through incredibly difficult circumstances, you know, and I mentioned earlier on Lizzie Loan of Parents, Kevin and Hillary, devastating to find that your daughter, your little girl, has just taken her own life because she has become so convinced of something that something is hopeless and yet they're still here and yet they still carry on and yet this has become something that they've talked about to people that other people have found helpful and hopeful. All of these things I would put together and say, look guys, this is not a checklist of an answer. This is a

51:28jigsaw puzzle and you'll see different pictures in different parts of the whole jigsaw puzzle and it all adds up together to say yes, no matter whatever it is I see to the contrary with some difficult people I still believe that God is there and that God is listening. Absolutely brilliant answer. Thank you so much. Let's go for the final question then. David Pits, who is your Christian hero, please? It's Guy called Trevor Harris. Trevor was my son-in-law teacher, youth leader when I was around 14, 15, 16 years old. Every Sunday afternoon Trevor would come to supervise a little group of us of the same age and he would teach us about Bible stories and about things that were going on and how our life should be. Trevor was a lecturer in further education. He brought absolutely leading edge tools with him like whiteboards before whiteboards existed. We were used to seeing things visually in front of us, not just in a book or a textbook. Trevor was a hero. He worked with us

52:29to create coffee bars. We took the church building or the church basement and he campaigned so that we could hammer in nails, open congregational church, we could hammer in nails and hang up fish nets and whatever else and then we would get people to come in and sing songs and to lead and to talk to young people and that would include somebody who you know. The first time I met Dave Pope was in his middle 20s. He had just joined the movement for world evangelization and he was part of a group called the Elysians and they came to our coffee bars and sang and played and day spoke and one of the things that got me into doing psychology in particular occupational psychology was that that's what David at university. It was called industrial psychology then and he was the only person I ever knew in those days who'd done it. Trevor Harris took myself in another lab on his first journey to find out more about what goes on in Eastern Europe. We traveled to France

53:33with him, talked to some Polish refugees in northern France. Trevor made it possible for me to then spend two summers at the Rosenhof just outside Salzburg where they had a kind of a halfway house for people who were going in and out of Eastern Europe with aid and with bibles and that kind of stuff. I had the privilege of smuggling a car into Romania and we had to bring it back but that's another story. Trevor then went on to work full time. He left his secure job as a lecturer and teacher locally and he became a member of field staff for Slavic Gospel Association, then became a field director, then became the general director and retired from that somewhere around 2003, 2005. I think it was and he passed away a few years ago and it was literally only thinking Martin about answering this question for this podcast that reminded me of how influential Trevor had been on the lives a little group of kids in the black country in the 1960s and 70s.

54:40So a great character and his wife was called Joan. She was my first first ever Sunday school teacher when I was a five year old kid and became a Christian. Incredible people. Well it's great when people fly under flag for people like this. David you're given us so much to think about you've given us so many great answers, lots to chew on and hopefully people have found today's podcast of immense value. David's thank you so much for joining us today, it's been great. Thanks for the opportunity, Martin. Great privilege, thank you. Please go ahead and if you haven't clicked the like and subscribe or even notification buttons, please do next time on Offgrid Christianity. Recently I wrote an article about being a pastor and a father figure. We don't have to have naturally fathered someone to mentor that child. I have been pastoring us since 1992. I have so many people that passed through our church, some without their fathers, some with fathers present, but the struggle with the legacy that your father has left them.

55:45So what one can do obviously is to walk with this children, walk in that journey with them and then recruit more mentors that will be able to help this young man and young women as a case maybe as well. So we can walk through that and get so many more men on board to be able to help all the children. So I guess that's that would be the only way we can help really because at the end of the day, if children who are born without their fathers or no one their fathers or they were born without even having any form of relationship with their father, they will eventually grow or not knowing the role and the responsibility of a father, particularly if they are young men and that's why we need more men who will be able to roll their sleeves up and say you know what, I want to help. I want to be a part of this person's life. I want to be a mentor to this child. So

56:46like I said, you don't have to be a biological father to be able to help our young men who are also going to difficult times and struggling out there. So please join me with our special guest author, pastor and founder of the International Father Movement, Tim Ola Dipol and wow, what a great man he is. Until then, Cheerio.