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So I kind of kept my foot in each of those hairballs. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I am Sky Jutani. We are doing a skydive today, which is a solo podcast where I just monologue about whatever. Those of you who are relatively new to the Skypod know that some weeks we have a guest on to do an in depth interview. Other weeks we have Drew Dick on to do a Drew's Newsletter episode where we cover different news stories around the Internet. And then usually the last Friday of every month, we have David French on for French Friday. But this is a skydive. There's a couple things going on that I wanted to touch base on. Well, first of all, it's beautiful outside. It's summer in Chicago and it's early summer, which means it's not too humid and it's not buggy yet. It's just like the perfect time of year. Guys are familiar with downtown Wheaton, where our studio and offices are. There's a tent that was put up during COVID that all the restaurants have tables out of. It's right outside of our building. And it is like the best time of the year here in Chicago. I love it. I don't have any travel plans, at least significant travel plans for the summer because our kids are working and young adults, and we're just here. We also have that puppy that you may have heard about on one of the previous episodes, ted. He's now five months old. He's, I think, over £50 already. He's a massive dog, but he's also so kind of too little still to be left alone with a stranger. Anyway, so we're stuck home all summer. We're doing a ton of travel in the fall, and that's because this is graduation season. Our youngest child just graduated from high school last weekend. And so we are in the midst of graduation season with, I think, so far over the last two weekends, I have been to 10 graduation parties, all for friends of ours or friends of my daughter who all graduating from high school. Now, I grew up here and I graduated, what is it, 32 years ago. I don't remember graduation parties being as nuts as they are now. I don't know what's happened. I don't know if it's true in your community, but they are. They're big. They're big here. It's a huge deal. We threw a party last weekend for my daughter, but one of the things that's got on my mind going to the graduation and all these graduation parties and all the graduation cards and all the things is it's people are in seasons of transition, right? They're going off to college or whatever their next station is going to be. Some are graduating onto jobs or out of college and into potential careers. So that got me thinking about that season in my life. And just advice for graduates. And this is not going to be like a strictly advice for graduates kind of episode. For that you should listen to Advice Ish, which is our podcast with Advice Ish on it. This is about some reflection on my own career and the directions and twists and turns that it has taken and drawing out some lessons from that. I also want to relate that to some of the new things that are happening here at Holy Post Media that you might be aware of based on things we shared on the flagship show, but how they relate. But to kind of organize my thoughts, I returned to a book that somebody gave me probably 20 years ago, and I love this book. It's a lot of wisdom and it's kind of fun. And if you haven't bought it or you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Although the concept's pretty simple and I'll kind of give you the breakdown here. The book is called Orbiting the Giant Hairball. It's by a guy named Gordon MacKenzie. The subtitle is A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace. It was published back in 1996 and it's kind of become a classic in the business management self help sort of genre. There's it's not a Christian book in any way, but still nonetheless full of humor and wisdom. The core tension of the book is between corporate bureaucracies, which he refers to as the Giant Hairball, and people who have a creative vocation or a creative calling. MacKenzie himself, I believe, was an artist at Hallmark the Card, the greeting card company. And he talks about how as an artist you want to be kind of free spirited and independent and out there creating your thing and unconstrained by tradition and bureaucracy and all the structures of a corporation. And yet you kind of need the corporation in order to get your creative ideas to the world disseminated and sold. And you know, all the infrastructure that corporations bring. So it's the tension between those two things. And the core concept is if you are completely enmeshed in the hairball, in the corporate bureaucracy, it kills you as a creative. It's just no fun and it's stifling and suffocating. But if you're completely disconnected from the hairball and you're out on your own, then you might be free and creative, but you have no way of getting your creations out to the world or creating a sustainable existence for yourself. So the happy medium between suffocating in the hairball and being totally disconnected from the hairball is what he describes as orbiting the hairball, being connected enough to benefit from the strengths of that organization or corporation, but independent enough that you can still be creative and do your thing. That's the basic conceit of the book. And I hope just from that brief description, you can kind of already get a glimpse of how this could apply to various areas of life. Not just work, not just corporations. But I thought what I would do today is take that idea of orbiting the hairball and share some of my story, at least my professional story, and the twists and turns in that, and how I have been challenged by suffocating within hairballs at different times. And the decisions I made to try to get out of one hairball but ended up in another hairball. And how now I'm 50 years old, I've tried to figure out what does it mean for me to orbit the hairball. And then I want to talk about how that relates to what we're doing here at Holy Post Media, because I think I've taken the lessons from my own hairball experiences and tried to incorporate them into how we're building things with the team at Holy Post. And then maybe by the end, we'll come up with some applications for everyone in general. So hopefully this is in some way helpful to you whether you are in a life transition or not. Okay, so let's start with hairball number one for me. I went to my undergraduate years at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, graduated in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Comparative Religion and History, which is code for I didn't have any marketable skills or abilities or network. So I knew I was going to grad school for something. I had debated going to law school. I have often looked back on that decision and wondered if I made the right one. It was between law school and seminary. Obviously, I ended up in seminary. So then I was at Trinity in the late 90s. And when I was at seminary, even there, I was not sure I wanted to go into ministry. I wasn't sure I wanted to go into pastoral ministry or local church ministry. But I graduated in 2001 from Trinity and didn't really have a job. I was working. I was applying to a lot of places, getting rejected from a Lot of places. And I ended up working in my father in law's warehouse because you do what you have to do. And in the midst of that season, found out that my wife was pregnant, sort of unplanned, with our first child. And that kind of lit a fire under my rear, as it often does. And so I knew I had to find something. And long story short, I ended up taking a position at a local church here in Wheaton. Now, having grown up here, I, a friend of mine said, you grew up in Wheaton. You know lots of churches in Wheaton. You have a seminary degree. You should just get a job at a church in Wheaton. And I did jokingly said to him, I would not take a position at a church in Wheaton unless God audibly called me. Well, I ate those words. God did not audibly call me, by the way. But I ended up at a church in Wheaton, and my primary role there was teaching and preaching. I was not the senior pastor. I was not the lead pastor. I was the youngest person on staff at the time, but that was my primary role. And the reason I call it a hairball is because I found it to be challenging for a number of reasons. And it wasn't like I went into pastoral ministry or the pulpit ministry because I had some burning need to be on a platform and speak and teach. I have no background at all in performing arts. I was not on the drama team at school. I didn't do public speaking. I wasn't on the debate team like Caitlin Chess was. In fact, I pretty much try to avoid any spotlights as much as humanly possible as a kid and as a teenager, to the degree that when I did have to do some public speaking in seminary and then as a young pastor here in Wheaton, I would. How do I put this gently? My body rejected this calling. I would get so nervous and so upset in my gut that I kept a modium with me at all times in my backpack or in my desk or we're like before I had to preach somewhere. It was. It was not pretty. It's just. It's not my natural inclination. It's not my training or desire or anything like that. So those early years were really, really hard. Now the hard part especially was I got a lot of affirmation for it. Like, people thought I was fairly good at this. And so I kept getting more and more opportunities, which is how I landed this job at Blanchard Road Alliance Church on the south side of wheaton back in 2001. But I quickly discovered two problems or two hairball like qualities to this role at the church. The first was the problem with preaching itself. So after a few months into the role, maybe a year or more, I realized, man, I'm putting 20, sometimes 30 hours of my week into sermon prep, writing these messages, studying for these messages, outlining, prepping, all of it. And that's a lot of my time, first of all. But then I also realized that the entire way we structure church, at least in the Protestant stream of the church, and especially in the evangelical Protestant stream of the church, the whole church is built around the preaching event, meaning the centerpiece of the church's week is Sunday morning and the service on Sunday morning or multiple services on Sunday morning. Everything orbited around that event. And the center of that event was the sermon, which was, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes sometimes. So the children's ministries, the other adult ministries, everything kind of spun off from this central thing. And the pillar, the tent pole of that whole thing was preaching. And what's hard about that is as I started digging into the statistics, I realized that the average church attender in America, even the most committed church attenders in America, according to Barna, only showed up to church about twice a month. So I was putting 20 to 30 hours every week into the sermon prep. The entire church programming, all the structures revolved around the sermon. For people to sit there to hear me lecture for maybe 30 minutes, if I'm lucky, they would show up twice a month. So maybe 60 minutes of my Bible. Now, even if I were the most gifted, brilliant Bible teacher the world had ever seen, that's pretty hard to compete with the hundreds of hours that these people marinate in other media throughout their weeks. And I began to realize this after some time that I was pouring all my energy into this activity. And I wasn't convinced it was all that fruitful. Another way of saying it, I wasn't convinced it was really that formative for people, that it was really shaping their faith in the way that you would think the amount of resources being poured into it would tell you it should. So one story that comes to mind, I remember I preached one Sunday, and I forget who it is. I quoted somebody in my sermon and I named the person I was quoting in the sermon. And the next day, or maybe Tuesday, a very lovely woman from the church came to meet with me in my office, and she was upset with this quote that I had used in my message. It wasn't that she was upset with the quote, she was upset with the person I quoted and to her credit, anyone who's been in pastoral ministry knows people are upset with you all the time for all kinds of reasons. It's the mature church member who actually comes to talk to you directly about it rather than just talk around you about it. So to her credit, she came and sat down in my office to talk to me directly about what she was upset with, and I give her enormous credit for it. But she talked about this person that I quoted, and she said, I don't think it's appropriate for. For you to quote this person in your sermon. I asked her, okay, why not? And she said, well, he's part of the emerging church. This would have been about 2002, maybe 2003. So if you're old enough to remember that era, this is when the emerging church thing was kind of a hot ticket. She said, he's part of the emerging church. And I said, okay, I wasn't aware of that, but what's the problem with being part of the emerging church? And she said, well, Chuck Colson says that the emerging church is heretical. And she added that Chuck Colson is on Moody Radio. And what was kind of implied under that message was, you, Pastor sky may be my local pastor, and you may have been here for a few years, and you may have built personal relationships and credibility within this congregation, but you're not on Moody Radio. You're not Chuck Colson. And whatever you say in your sermon, I'm going to weigh against what I hear on the radio or whatever other Christian media I'm engaging, and that's always going to have more authority and influence in my life than you will. And I think she was a little mistaken in her critique of this, of this quote and everything. But regardless, what I took away from that engagement, and it was one of many in one form or another, was no matter how many hours I poured into my sermons, no matter how sermon centric our church was, no matter how great the preaching may have been, no how biblically accurate or theologically rich it was, at the end of the day, I'm never going to compete with the hundreds of hours that people are marinating in other media, Christian or otherwise. And that was part of my realization that this hairball of the way we do church, the tradition of doing church, the model of doing church, this sermon centric model, is it's not great. It's kind of broken. There's an expectation that you do it, but its fruitfulness, I think, isn't what it used to be. The other element of the hairball the church that I encountered was the fact that though my title was pastor, I really wasn't doing that much pastoring. By pastoring, I mean actually caring for the sheep in relationship to the sheep, guiding the sheep. Whatever pastoral metaphors you want to use, it's supposed to be relational. The shepherd knows his sheep, and the sheep know the voice of the Shepherd. That good John 10 kind of language. That wasn't really what my job was. It was what my title was. It was not what my job was. Because my job, other than writing and delivering sermons, was managing programs in an otherwise Fairly Large bureaucratic 501C3 nonprofit organization. That was really my job. I had a conversation with my supervisor, who was the senior pastor at the time, and I don't know, 25, 30 years my senior, and he had decades of experience in pastoral ministry. I remember one day we were sitting down in his office, and he said to me, sky, do you have any ambitions to be a senior pastor one day? And this is a few years into my time there? And I said, this probably came out so wrong. I was so dumb. But I said something like, you mean the way you're a senior pastor? And he said, well, yeah, the way I'm a senior pastor. Do you want to be in this role one day? And I said, oh, no, no way. And he asked me, why not? And I said, now that I've seen it up close and I see what you do, John, I said, a huge amount of what you do is just managing this bureaucracy. It's vacation policies and payroll and meeting with insurance providers and dealing with business issues and building issues and this committee and that committee. And I wasn't disparaging that work like it has to be done. I recognize it has to be done, and I'm grateful for how it was done and that he took on all those responsibilities. But in my mind, when I went to seminary and was contemplating being a pastor, it's like I didn't think I was going to be spending a disproportionate amount of my time just managing a 501C3. I thought I was actually going to be in the trenches with people in their lives. And there was a degree of that, but not nearly as much as I had expected. And so that was the hairball for me. It was the ineffectiveness, and in my mind, some of the futility of all the effort and energy that went into the preaching act, combined with the lack of actual pastoring that a pastor does, and just the management of the hairball. And so about three Years into my time there, I was just. I had a growing angst, a growing dissatisfaction with the hairball. And I was coming home every night when I was home at night, because, as you know, in church work, a lot of evenings or committee meetings or team meetings or whatever. So the nights I was home, I was complaining to my wife. Around the same time, the church erupted into a big conflict that didn't directly involve me, but it sidelined a lot of the other work that I was trying to do at the church. So I just felt like my wheels were spinning, and I would come home every night and complain to my wife about, you know, I don't know about the church, and I don't know if I should be doing this, and I don't know if this is really my calling, and should I go back to school for a doctorate? Should I do. So I was all over the place. And at this time, we had one child, and. And I think Amanda was pregnant with our second. And I remember after me doing this night after night after night and kind of venting to her about my frustrations, she probably got sick of hearing it, but she said to me, sky, what do you want to do? Which is a great question. And I said to her, you know, I've always wanted to do more writing. I loved writing when I was in high school. I did a lot of writing as a college student. I always looked for opportunities to write when I was a seminary student. Didn't find very many, like, outside of school. And I just never had an outlet for it. I just. I'd love to do writing, but I don't know how to do that. I don't know what my options would be. I don't even know where to begin. And being wiser than I am, my wife said to me, well, Pastor, why don't you pray about that and see what happens? Of course, she was absolutely correct. And so I committed to begin praying about what I actually wanted and not just coming home and venting to her about my frustrations in my hairball church role. And so it sounds like an exaggeration, but it really isn't. I started praying about this whole thing and my desire to do more writing. And within two weeks, I was contacted by two of the leaders at Christianity Today, the president and the CEO. And I was a younger pastor in the area. And there was a member of our church and a friend of mine from church who was an editor at ct. She was an editor for. Not CT itself, but the CT had. I think. I don't know 10 or 12 magazines at the time. She was an editor on one of their other magazines. She had recommended me to some of the vice presidents and leaders at CT as a younger pastor in the area. That might be good to bring in for, like, a focus group, basically. So two weeks after I started praying about this, I get invited to a retreat not too far from here with all the vice presidents and executives at Christianity Today. And I think at the time, I was 28, 29 years old. And I basically spent two days at this retreat with the leaders of C T telling them my honest opinions about the stuff they were producing, the resources, magazines, other things like that. And it was kind of awkward because I was basically telling them all the reasons why I don't read their stuff very much. And to cut a long story short out of that two days, they started inviting me to write for them and do more projects with them. And within a few months, they actually offered me a job to start working for Leadership Journal, which was the magazine they produced for pastors and church leaders. So in late 2004, I started splitting my time between the church and CT, and that's sort of the next hairball I became a part of. I'm leaving a lot of the details out of here, but in that role at ct, first of all, the things I was so grateful for is I finally had an outlet to do some writing. But I didn't just grow as a writer in that role, I grew as a journalist, which I was not trained to be. But one of the kind of prerequisites of doing journalism well is you just have to be a learner and you have to be really curious, which are two qualities I had. But I am, in total, I am totally indebted to Marshall Shelley, who was the editor of Leadership Journal, my boss there for many years. He took me under his wing, trained me. You know, I was green and didn't know a lot. And I grew as a writer, I grew as an editor, I grew as a journalist. I began to travel a lot through ct, got around the country, saw other churches, got into a lot of ministry conferences, saw behind the curtain, met all kinds of interesting people, and it just kind of opened up my horizon quite a bit. And it was wonderful to get out of the little tiny hairball of my local church. I was still at the church, and I was still preaching regularly. I was still on staff. Our family was obviously still committed there. But I got to this bigger exposure of what was going on. And I'll never forget when I started going to ministry Conferences on behalf of Leadership Journal at ct. I was there as a reporter, not as a speaker, not as a member of the event in any way. But because I was with ct, I basically had VIP privileges. I got access to the green rooms and to the speakers and to the event organizers, and saw behind the scenes and all this stuff. At one of these conferences, I think it was probably in maybe 2006 or 2007, I was at the National Pastors Convention, which was held every year in San Diego. I think it was in winter as well. So it was just a great time to get out of Chicago. The National Pastors Convention was put on with a number of partners. I think the biggest one was Zondervan, the Christian publisher. And while I was there, I got to know some of the Zondervan editors. And of course, I'm hanging out with the speakers, and I'm a nobody. I'm a total nobody in this whole thing. But one of the acquisitions editors from Zondervan was a guy named John Raymond. And he knew me a little bit through some of the things I had written at Leadership Journal, got to know me a little bit in the setting of this conference. And at the end of the conference, we were kind of saying our goodbyes. See you next year or whatever. Next event's coming up. And in. In passing, John just said to me, hey, if you're ever interested in writing a book, let me know, and I'd be interested in hearing your ideas for a book. And I was like, wow. I. I left going. I didn't think that opportunity was going to come along, but it did. Now, in that time frame, this is just before the Great Recession, if you remember, that all erupted in late 2007, 2008. This was a time when Christian publishing hadn't yet really shrunk down the number of people they were publishing. You could still get a book contract back then and not really have a ton of name recognition. They were still taking chances on unknown authors who maybe had a decent voice or a way with the pen. And I think John recognized that in some of the writing I had done. He said, well, why not? We'll give a chance on Sky. And so I got my nose in the door of publishing really before that crackdown happened, which I think really happened post Great Recession. I'll get into that in a little bit. So I was really, really lucky, because at the time, I didn't have. I wasn't in a mega church. I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have a social media media following. I wasn't even on social media. It was in its infancy. I had nothing except some credibility as a good writer for for Leadership Journal. So I I had written a few months before that an article in Leadership Journal about the intersection of consumerism and Christianity. And I I liked that article. It got a good response from listeners or from readers. And so I ended up pitching a book idea to Zondervan about consumerism and Christianity, which eventually became my first book, which is called the Divine Commodity. Let me give you a little insight into how Christian publishing works. The hairball of Christian publishing and C T is a part of this to a degree, or was in the magazine world, but it applies to the book thing as well. Well, so don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. 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