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How do you turn your face away and actively beat the crud out of somebody at the same time? Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Skypod, brought to you by Holy Post Media and Spacely Sprockets. I'm here with Mike Strehlo.
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Yeah, I don't know that reference.
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A
You're too young.
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B
I know a lot of the references
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A
I know, but you're too young.
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B
That one went over my head. Okay. I'm happy that I'm too young. Sometimes in the office, we have a young team, and sometimes I'm put in the category of you and Esau and Phil, and I don't like that you're
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A
kind of in between. Yeah, I'm the bridge. You are the bridge. You are also the producer.
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I am the producer. And today we have another mailbag, a Skymail. Air mail. Air mail is what we call this. I don't care.
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It's listener questions.
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Listener questions. So you all have faithfully sent some questions in. We chose the best and we're going to get at it today. We've got some good ones in here. Yeah, I'm excited.
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A
It runs the gamut.
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B
It does. So the first one comes from. I didn't write down names, so. Thank you, listener who sent this in. You know who you are. Sky has mentioned multiple times in various podcasts about how John 13, which is when Jesus washed the disciples feet, that that's been used by pastors in an incorrect way. I would love to hear him talk about the correct way to interpret and teach that passage. Okay, sky, why do you hate servant leadership?
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A
All right, first of all, I wouldn't. I wouldn't say that when it's taught that way, it's incorrect. I don't think it's like terrible. I just think it's missing the key point of the text. So the whole. We think this idea of servant leadership is like, eternal, that it's always been part of Christian thought and teaching, stuff like that. It actually dates back to a guy named Greenleaf. Is that his name? Hold on, I was just looking this up before we started. Robert Greenleaf. Yeah. Back in 1970, wrote an essay called the Servant as Leader, which he coins the term servant leadership. And he references Jesus in John 13 in the foot washing. He's not a Bible scholar, he's not a theologian. And do I think servant leadership is bad? Of course not. Like, it's great, fine. Yeah. I don't think anybody is against it. I just don't think that's what John 13 is really about.
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B
Okay, so then what is it really about?
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A
Right, so couple things. I think the story is way more about humiliation than leadership. Okay, so let's kind of recount what's going on. It's the night Jesus is betrayed. It's after the Last Supper, before the last, it's during the last Supper and he removes his clothes and he starts washing the disciples feet. And the real key moment is when he comes to Peter and he's about to wash his feet and Peter says, absolutely not. Like there's no way you're going to wash my feet. And then Jesus says something really dramatic. He says, if you don't let me wash your feet, you can have no place with me. And that all gets lost on us if we don't understand the cultural context of the rabbi disciple relationship in ancient Judea. And in later on in the same story, after Jesus finishes washing all their feet, he says to them, this is John 13:16. No servant is greater than his master. That's really the key to the whole text. So many people have heard it taught that when Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, he's taking the lowest position, the most humiliating position of a servant, a household servant would wash the feet. But then he turns around and says to these guys, you're even lower than me. Because if I'm doing this and I'm your rabbi, if I'm your master, that means you're lower than I am. This is why Peter won't let Jesus wash his feet. It's not that Peter is trying to protect Jesus reputation. Peter's defending his own reputation. Because if my rabbi washes my feet and I'm lower than him, then I'm even lower than this. So what Jesus is doing is deconstructing the pride and ego of his disciples by himself taking on this humiliating posture and saying, you're even lower than I am.
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B
Okay, flesh that out a little bit more though. Because I think people who love servant leadership, who use this passage to support servant leadership would say, well, yeah, exactly. The leader should be willing to take the lowest job in the company. They should take the trash out.
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Here's the difference. Because I was a pastor and this is, I mean, so let's say you're a pastor in a congregation or you're the CEO of a company, whatever it might be, you're top of the org chart and you do some menial task. You empty the Diaper Genie in the nursery or you are shoveling snow off the sidewalk on a Sunday morning. Good, that's great. I mean, who's against it.
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Right.
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I'm not saying any of that's bad. The difference is if you see your pastor doing that, what's your reaction going to be?
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B
What a great pastor.
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A
Exactly. That is not the reaction that the disciples have to Jesus. They were horrified because it was a deconstruction of their own pride and arrogance that my master is so powerful, he raises people from the dead. That inflated their egos. But then when they see their master washing feet and they realize I'm lower than him, it was horrifying. So this is my problem with the servant leadership thing. In our culture today, when powerful people do menial tasks, they are celebrated for it. Nobody is celebrating Jesus for washing feet. In fact, they were trying to stop him from doing it because it was humiliating to their sense of self identity and esteem. The other thing, and this is what people completely miss when you read this story through the servant leadership lens, is John 13 is actually a foreshadowing of John 19. Couple chapters later, after Jesus arrested after his trial, when he's with Pilate, he has been beaten to a pulpit. He has got the crown of thorns on his head, the purple robe, the whole thing. Pilate presents Jesus in front of the crowds and he says, here's your king. And what people don't realize about Pilate again because they don't know the historical context of it, is Pilate was deeply anti Semitic, he hated the Jews and he took every opportunity. And there's numerous accounts from Josephus elsewhere of Pilate doing things deliberately to humiliate the Jews. And that's what he's doing with Jesus here. He's beaten this man to an indescribable, horrific looking mess. And he marches Jesus out in front of the crowds with this crown and says, here's your king. And the Jews in Jerusalem that day looking at Jesus and here's the Roman governor saying, here's your king, you pathetic, humiliated people. They're humiliated because if that's our king, what does it say about us? Just like Peter was humiliated where, if this is my rabbi washing feet, what does it say about me? And that's when they start shouting, he's not our king. We have no king but Caesar. Crucify him. What's going on there is Jesus is doing to the crowd exactly what he was doing to Peter a few chapters earlier, that if you are unwilling to accept a humiliated and crucified Messiah as your king, then you can have no place with Jesus. And. And that's exactly what the people say. We don't want you as our king Jesus. We want a powerful king, we want a triumphant king. And so all of that, all those seeds of that scene are planted back in chapter 13 with the foot washing. And this is what is lost in popular American evangelicalism is the foot washing or the scene of Jesus in front of the crowds is all about our willingness to identify ourselves with somebody that the world thinks is pathetic and our desire to be associated with somebody that the world celebrates and thinks is great. In American culture today, you'll be celebrated as a humble leader. If you do menial tasks, you're not going to be humiliated. That's the problem is, and I think in a weird way, this is what got us Donald Trump. It's American evangelicals who want a powerful leader that the world will fear and respect, rather than our willingness to be associated with a pathetic looking leader that the world rejects and thinks is a joke.
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B
Yeah, I'm trying to think like, what would be a modern day example of foot washing? And you're going to have to help me because I can think of like the example. I mean, we see this all the time, that we want Jesus, who is popular and is a winner and we want Christians to be winners. I mean, this gets out to. Is it Philippians 4, I can do all things through Christ, where like, we take that as like, I scored a touchdown because I did it for Jesus, Jesus gave me the strength. And we even, like, in conversations around the culture war, like, would the Christians need to fight and win the culture war? Right. And so are there, do you have any modern day examples of like, oh, this is like, what it means to be humiliated for the sake of Jesus?
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Maybe. But I think the key to understanding is at the very beginning of the story of the foot washing, it says that Jesus, knowing that he had come from the Father and was returning to the Father, then goes on to say he removed his clothes and takes on this role of foot washing. And so behind Jesus willingness to be humiliated, whether it's in the foot washing or later in the cross, his willingness to be humiliated comes from the fact that he is completely secure in his true identity with the Father. Right. So I think the application for a Christian or a Christian leader is to say, I am so secure in my standing with God that I do not need the applause of the people around me. So what's the application? I think when a courageous pastor stands up in front of their congregation and says something that he knows is going to get him in trouble because it's the right thing to say, that's taking on John 13, it's the willingness to crucify my reputation, to not be beloved, to not be celebrated, to accept a smaller platform. Here's a modern example that comes to mind. Henry Nouwen. This is back in the 90s now, but Henry Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest. He taught at Harvard, and he gave up that position in order to accept a role working. You know this story well from your prior job working with severely mentally handicapped adults. And there was no platform there. There was no notoriety, there was no celebrating that people were going, why on earth are you taking this lower position when you had this high position at Harvard? That's. That's a John 13 kind of application. So I don't think it's about just doing. Again, it's fine if pastors are going to do menial tasks. Nothing wrong with that. I wouldn't say that's bad. But the true application is when you accept things that people are going to ridicule you for, not celebrate you.
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B
I wonder if, even for like an average Holy Post listener, if it's like, I know personally, when I'm in a secular space and someone finds out I'm a Christian, who I know they are not a Christian, I am so desperate to try to get across to them, oh, but I'm not one of those crazy Christians. And the problem is when I'm also then willing to sacrifice other beliefs around Jesus. Jesus said really hard and challenging things that are not popular in any segment of society. And I want to either try to downplay those or pretend like, well, I'm not sure. I think there's room to disagree. And I think, like, even for moderate Christian, progressive Christians, wherever you fall, there is always this temptation that I want to make Jesus to be all things to all people, rather than. And I'm scared that people will think I'm a weirdo. And so I want to soften Jesus in areas in context where I think he needs.
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I think that's exactly it. The willingness to accept the fact that the world or your community or whoever it is, is going to think less of you because you're following the way of Jesus. That's John 13. That's John 19.
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Okay. All right, let's get to our next question. This one, it's a little inside baseball. We've answered this question before. I think, like, let me read the question here for us. This comes in every. Every so often. And I think it's good for us to answer it every so often. Here's. How do you keep from becoming this is Holy Post. How do you Holy Posts keep from becoming part of the evangelical industrial complex you criticize? As Holy Post media continues to grow and expand. So I do think if you Google, I should have looked up the episode Holy Post interview with John Houghton, our CEO. He did an interview probably a year or two years ago where he kind of gives the business model the philosophy behind Holy Post. That's a really good thing. But sky, you coined the term evangelical industrial complex.
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I did, back in 2012.
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And many people now accuse us of becoming the very thing that we have critiqued. So what would you say to those people?
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Well, as the person who coined the term, I think I have some authority in defining the term. So. And you can go back and Google, find the article I wrote for Leadership journal back in 2012 about it. I also did an explainer video some years ago on YouTube that you can search for, and that explains it too. But here's the basic idea of the evangelical industrial complex and is that it grants authority to people based on the size of their platform rather than the maturity of their faith. And the reason I said this or wrote this back in 2012 was I had noticed that a lot of Christian publishing, for example, would give book deals to people because they were a megachurch pastor or because they had a huge social media following. And it wasn't a reflection of their maturity or their wisdom or their training or anything like that. And same thing with Christian conferences. I was going to a lot of ministry conferences at the time, reporting on them for ct, and a lot of the people on the main stage were just like, not a lot, but a fair number were just horrific. And many of them embroiled in scandal. And some of them were people who, it was an open, known reality how ungodly they were, and yet they're still on these mainstage platforms. I'm like, how do I explain this? And it comes down to money. It comes down to the fact that they had a huge audience or they were super popular. And so a conference needs to sell tickets, so they have these big names on the platform. A publisher needs to sell books, so they turn a blind eye to all these allegations or different things that were going on. That's the evangelical industrial complex. It grants people authority because they have a huge following, not because there's evidence of actual godliness or maturity or fruitfulness. So the reason why I think evangelicalism is particularly susceptible to this is because evangelicalism has always been a populist movement. And so the bigger platform, the more revenue, more publishing, more Conference, that's the evangelical industrial complex. So how does this relate to me or to Holy Post Media? Let me first talk about how, how this worked itself out when I was at Leadership Journal at C, when I first wrote this article. And I, I can't take credit for this because my boss at the time, Marshall Shelley, had these values inherently. At Leadership Journal, which was a magazine that we published for church leaders and there were other magazines at the time for pastors, we had a policy of never putting a face on a cover. Like we, we were not interested in just putting celebrity pastors up front to sell magazines or subscriptions. Similarly, more than half of the content, probably two thirds of the content, if not more of the content we published in our journal were from pastors that were just ordinary pastors. They're not celebrities, they weren't super well known. They're just ordinary folks leading churches and congregations because we wanted it to be about wisdom and leadership that's godly in the local church, not just celebrity stuff. And we actually had a list of people that we were concerned about, well known names because of just things we had heard or seen or known or whatever that we were not going to publish because we knew this is not going to end well. We don't have to get in all those things. But that was our way of not trying to feeding the evangelical industrial complex kind of model. So how does this relate to Holy Post Media? This is repeating a little bit about what John, our CEO, has talked about in our business model, but in media or specifically in podcasting, this is an oversimplification, but for our purposes it'll do. There's two general models of revenue. The first model is from ad revenue advertisements. You sell ads on a podcast and those advertisers pay you money and that's how you sustain things. We do sell ads at Holy Post Media, but it's a tiny fraction of our revenue. And the reason is this, in order to make money off of advertising, you have to have a huge audience. Because the amount you get paid for your ads depends on how many people hear it. Right? So in order to get a sustainable business model from that, you have to have a massive audience. In order to have a huge audience, you have to give as many people as possible what they want, which is what evangelicalism has been predicated on.
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Right.
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We want a huge conference, we want to sell a ton of books. So you got to get the popular voices, you got to get the celebrity pastor, you got to turn a blind eye to that horrible allegation that's going to our golden goose, that's publishing the books for us and all that. So advertising lends itself to massive audience growth, which means you have to appeal to a huge market of people, which means you're probably going to be doing clickbaity, celebrity driven, popular stuff. This is also the reason why in a lot of churches you don't get pastors saying hard things. You don't get them confronting Christian nationalism, you don't get them talking about Donald Trump dehumanizing people, because it's not going to go over well with your audience. They're going to walk away and then you're out of a job. What we have chosen at Holy Post Media is, is to not build our, our model on advertising. It's a piece of it, but it's a tiny fraction. If we lost all of our advertisers tomorrow, that would stink, but we'd be fine.
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Yeah.
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Because we don't want to have to just build as huge an audience as possible. That leads to the other model, which is the premium subscription model. And you hear us talk about Holy Post plus all the time. That's what we're talking about. What that means is the vast majority of the revenue that sustains our work is coming from people who are willing to pay five or ten bucks for a premium subscription. And what that model does is it rewards us instead of rewarding us for reaching as many people as possible, it incentivizes us to give the people who really love what we're doing the best quality content we possibly can make. Because if you're willing to pay five or ten dollars a month to go deeper into Holy Post content, then when we give you even better Holy Post content, you're rewarded for your 5 or $10 support of us. So that's how we're avoiding it. And you see this reflected in the fact that the vast majority of the guests we have on our show, they're not celebrities. We're not picking people because of, well, how many millions of people do they have on Instagram that can grow our audience? That's the advertising model. We're picking people who we find are really thoughtful, super interesting, really mature, incredibly wise, have deep insights. Some of the names you'll know because I had John Ortberg on last week. I think he's both well known and super wise. But tons of the people we have on you've not heard of, you can't do that on an advertised based revenue model. So that's how we're avoiding it. I don't know if you have more to add to that.
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Yeah, I think that's good. I think the critique I will often see around this for us would be, well, your content is so important, it should just be in front of the paywall, that you should get as many eyeballs as you can on this. Or you're just being greedy by putting things behind the paywall. But those people would also. And then I think people, the one thing we haven't addressed them would say, so you should become a nonprofit and just raise money. What are the downsides of being a nonprofit? Why we chose not to go that route?
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Okay, this could get weird real quick. Most of my career has been working in nonprofits. Yours years too. And, and especially when I was at Christianity Today, which is a media ministry and a nonprofit, you begin to realize that, you know, most nonprofits are funded by a handful of very wealthy donors. And the risk in that is you are incentivized to not upset your big donors. And so what we've chosen at Holy Post is not to have any big donors, which gives us editorial freedom. Could you imagine how different our content would be if one of our major donors was a big fan of Donald Trump? Or how would we talk differently about the war in Gaza, Israel and Palestine if one of our major donors was a huge proponent of dispensationalism and the role of Israel in the end time? Something like that. By avoiding major donors, we keep our editorial independence and freedom. And by relying on five and ten dollar Holy Post plus subscriptions, we maintain our editorial independence in a way that we couldn't if we were a nonprofit relying on major donors every year to fund everything we're doing. So I'm not against. I mean there's, there's times where a nonprofit structure makes sense.
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Yes.
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I have just seen too many content ministries and media ministries have their editorial voice curtailed or steered by donors. And we are trying to be independent as possible.
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I think the other anyone who's worked for a nonprofit also, I think is familiar with that feeling of holy cow, we have to spend so much time funding trying to raise money to do the mission. We never actually accomplished the mission.
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Yes.
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And that's even true if you look at salary breakdowns of what you have to pay for a fundraiser. I saw this recently of nonprofit their job posting, and it's like they had salaries listed for people who would actually be accomplishing the mission of the organization. And then they had an open position for a fundraiser and the salary for the fundraiser much higher than what it was for people who are actually doing the mission. And I just think I am sympathetic to the people who would say, like, oh, your content needs to be out there and needs to be free and yada yada. And I would also say, like, you can't have your cake and eat it too. And I would say, like, oh, a lot of our content is free. And like, there is a reason why we even do those free trials. When we put why I'm still a Christian behind the paywall, that was a big internal debate on what to do with that. And the strategic decision we made is we're putting this behind the paywall and we're activating this free trial, one week free trial during the entire time, knowing full well, oh, some people will just wait till the whole thing is out. They'll get their free trial, they'll listen to all of it for free, and then they'll cancel.
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Fine, that's fine.
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Yeah. And that's fine. We. It's like, we have the confidence that, like, oh, we think the content behind Holy Post plus is. Is good enough. That many people will, once they realize that once they cross that threshold of giving us their first $5, they'll be like, oh, this is actually great. And it's something I want to support. And I think what has been encouraging for me working at Holy Post Media for about three years now, one would just be of our four main personalities, you, Sky, Phil, Caitlin, and Esau, you all hold each other accountable so well that everyone is quick to point out when they feel like, oh, I think we're crossing a line here. I think we're going too far there, that there's not universal agreement between the four of you, and you have such good, open lines of communication. So I think that's even a layer of accountability. And then two, that I have never once heard us as we have vision cast for what we want the company to look like five years from now, ten years from now. I've never once heard us talk about how our goal is to become the biggest Christian media company. I think that's when places get in trouble because you start making decisions based on, well, how are we going to grow at all costs? But instead, it's how we want to grow. That would be a lie to say we don't want to grow. Of course we do. But more importantly than that, how do we stay focused, faithful to who we are, what are the core values? We want to represent all of our content, and then how do we make sure we stay within that and still be strategic in the decisions that we make. And so I am sympathetic. The argument makes sense. And sometimes I wish people could just be a fly on the wall at some of our editorial meetings and business meetings, because I think it would relieve a lot of the concerns that. That they have. Yeah.
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One of the things that I find really affirming, and I've heard this from a number of people over the years, and one person put it this way, you guys are having the conversations I wish we were having in the church. And I. I don't know if people take the next step to ask, why isn't the church having these conversations? Or why are you at Holy Post Media able to have these conversations? And it's all about the economic model. Yeah, it really is. The reason you're not having these conversations at your church is because you would lose too much donor dollars. If the reason we are having them at Holey Post Media is because we are not beholden to donor dollars, and we're not beholden to big investors or donors that drive our editorial decisions. So we're able to have the tough conversations. That's exactly why. And I've said this many, many times, but, you know, follow the money, look at where it's coming from and where it's going and who's holding the purse strings, and you can determine what's getting said and what isn't. And if we were simply driven by growth reaching as many people as possible. When you look at the polling, the vast majority of especially evangelical Christians in America do not like what we say. And if we wanted to reach all those people and we had a model that required huge advertising dollars, that required millions and millions and millions of people engage in our podcasts, we would have to become way more MAGA sympathetic and stop talking about Christian nationalism or stop critiquing Donald Trump. If we really want to grow our audience, that's not what we're interested in doing. So we have chosen the economic model. We have to avoid the pitfalls of the evangelical industrial complex and to maintain our editorial independence.
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B
And there's a model where it would be better for us to go all in the other way.
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A
Yes.
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And we don't want to do that either. And I don't want to sit here and say we've gotten it 100% right. Yes. And along the way, have we made mistakes from. For sure. And we will continue to make mistakes. We won't get this completely right, but I think we want to. And we try really hard to be open to receiving that critique and that feedback and looking at ourselves in the mirror to see how are we guilty of the very thing we're critiquing and what adjustments do we need to make? And so send your feedback in and your critiques and maybe be nice sometimes. Remember, there are people who read the critiques you send in. But. But yes, I'm really proud to work here and happy to work here and it's been a wonderful experience while also admitting, oh, we're not perfect, but we're doing doing our best.
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We are.
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Okay, speaking of money, our next question is also related to that. Lately I've heard strong critiques of capitalism from some Christians around how it can exploit workers, concentrate wealth, and fuel greed. But I'm not sure if there is a better alternative. Is capitalism something to reject reform or just hold loosely? And how do we talk about this without ignoring either the real harm it can cause or the good it seems to have done?
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I love this question. I love it because it's not just critiques coming from Christians. I feel like it's just in vogue right now to critique capitalism.
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Late stage capitalism is a thing that
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is often thrown out, and you're seeing it on the extreme progressive left as well. I mean, the election of Mondami in New York, who's a socialist, is part of it. And I think the vast majority of the critiques of capitalism are completely legitimate. Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber. So head over to holypost.com skypod.com and sign up for just $5 a month. Not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Sky Pod, which means you'll never have to hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll also get access to everything else at HolyPost+, including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin Chess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe today.