Places I’ve Been

13 May 2025

If you read the gospels carefully, you will discover that Jesus goes to the places and the people who are totally respectable, and to the people who are…at the other end of the spectrum, shall we say. (Note Luke 7:36-39, which nicely encapsulates both ends of the respectability spectrum, or compare John 3 to John 4, or Luke 11:37 to Matthew 9:9-11//Mark 2:14-16//Luke 5:27-30, Luke 19:2-7, Matthew 11:19). There was a point in my Christian life where I noticed that fact in a more-than-theoretical way, and it’s had a profound impact on me. For your amusement and edification, Gentle Reader, here are a few of the places I’ve been….

Bacon, Beer, and Body Paint

Once upon a time, I had a minor role in launching/promoting an event to benefit an oil field worker named Dan who’d been handicapped in a vehicle rollover. Insurance covered his medical expenses and bought his motorized wheelchair, but didn’t cover the necessary modifications to his house so he could get around in there. Doors needed to be widened, etc. And of course, he also needed a new job, and training for it. Dan’s brother had a few thousand bucks, but that wasn’t nearly enough to fund everything that needed to get done.

But Dan’s brother was also a good salesman and knew a little about event planning. So he piled the money into a fundraiser: a beer-and-bacon festival. He got a local business with a big parking lot to let us use their property for the weekend, and a handful of other businesses to sponsor the event with give-aways, door prizes, etc. They had a couple of breweries, Denver Bacon Company, I think some insurance and real estate brokers, a local pot shop, that sort of thing. They got musicians, face painting for the kids, all kinds of stuff. A good friend of mine worked for one of the businesses, and asked me to help promote the event. I took posters to businesses in high-traffic areas, personally invited everybody I knew, everything I could do to promote it.

Come the day, I showed up and hung out most of the day. I still have a set of 4 tin cups from Sailor Jerry’s rum that I won in the door prize drawing. It was all going swimmingly until the spokesmodel from the pot shop visited the face painters. I recall passing through that area and noticing one of the painters doing a piece on her back, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Half an hour later, I see a huge crowd over by one corner of the building. I wander over to see what’s going on and discover this same model doing an impromptu photo shoot wearing nothing but her Daisy Dukes and expertly applied body paint. So then I get to decide, do I just leave? Do I just avoid her? Something else?

Right on Target

I was down at Centerpoint chatting with one of my regular guests. He was a bit drunk, as is usual for him, and he asked me to pray for him about something. I did so. When I finished, he thanked me, and then he grabbed my shoulder and said “Now I’m gonna pray for you.” I didn’t want to tell him not to, so I let him. In minutes, there were tears in my eyes — without knowing it, this Jesus-loving drunkard was praying for the deepest concerns I had that week. Was he in active sin? Yes. Was he being led by the Spirit despite that? Undoubtedly.

“Tim won’t go!”

Went to a friend’s thirtieth birthday party. She’s one of my favorite felons, and has a friend group to match. We closed the restaurant where we started out, and then tried to go to a pop-up haunted house down by the highway (this was in mid-October). By the time we’d re-convened in the haunted house parking lot, they were closing. So we’re standing in the parking lot as the last carload of our people arrives. Someone catches them up on the situation and explains that we’re trying to decide where to go next. One of the guys says, “Titty bar!” My friend vetoed it immediately: “No, because Tim won’t go.” She wasn’t just assuming (although she was right); she’d been there when I declined an invitation from her boyfriend a few weeks earlier. 

If it’s spiritually risky to be like Jesus, it’s spiritual suicide to knowingly refuse to be like Him.

Suicide by Tim

I’m sitting at a kitchen table with a man who’s threatening to kill me. It’s not an idle threat; he’s a combat veteran, a Marine turned cop. I know he’s drunk; I assume he’s armed. If you were watching through the window, the scene would look pretty calm. Samuel (not his real name) is talking; I’m sipping a glass of water. Below the table, I’ve quietly drawn and opened my carry knife. Plan A is talk him down; Plan B is “I go home to my wife, no matter what happens to him.” At the moment, the most likely approach is to send the water glass flying at his face while three inches of very sharp steel comes in low for whatever I can reach, before he can draw whatever he’s carrying.

This was not in my plans for the day. I’d gone down to the Springs to spend an afternoon with my friend Jack on his day off. We’d eaten and talked, and I hung out for a while at his church’s coffee shop while he worked a volunteer shift. (That shop itself is a cool story for another time.) Afterwards, we went back to his house, and a bunch of his friends and coworkers came over to hang out. The beer and whiskey flowed freely, and in due time Samuel took offense at something I said. The initial threat was just a generic “We can take it outside” type of thing — I forget the exact words — but things turned ugly when Jack tried to intervene.

“You don’t want to do that, Samuel. Tim would do you. Just let it go.”

That was like pouring gas on a fire. “I’ll kill him!” Samuel said. “I don’t care!”

He didn’t, in fact. Samuel’s squad had been on patrol when their humvee got hit by an IED, killing his three buddies. He had a massive case of survivor’s guilt that he medicated with whiskey when he was off-duty. Samuel really didn’t want to be alive; the only reason he hadn’t killed himself was because he was afraid to face God after committing suicide. Jack’s attempt to deter Samuel had the opposite effect: Samuel wanted to die, and Jack had just told him I could get it done for him. He escalated and threatened my life in a roomful of witnesses in order to create a situation where I’d kill him. But that didn’t mean he’d go down easy.

Until He Stood Up

Back when I first started Centerpoint, I would have one of the guests assist me in serving the Lord’s Table. One night a fellow I’ll call John asked me if he could assist me. He had been interacting reasonably well during the service, so I didn’t see any reason why not, so I said yes. He stood up next to me, and it quickly became apparent that he was drunk enough that he wasn’t going to be able to continue standing without help.

By this time, we were serving, and I couldn’t see how to swap him out for someone else without conveying a rejection I didn’t want to convey. So I got my arm under his elbow to give him a little extra stability and soldiered through. Right decision? Probably not, but I couldn’t see my way around it in the moment, so I went with it.

And So On…

Am I telling you that you should be willing to go anywhere, with anybody, anytime? No. Please note, they knew I wouldn’t go to the strip joint. If a particular place or group of people presents you with a temptation you can’t handle, then don’t do it. “Flee youthful lusts,” remember? If you can’t go to the place and be with the people and give God thanks, then turn down the invitation. “Whatever is not of faith is sin.”

But if your misgivings about going to the place or being with the people are founded in some ridiculous notion that Christians are supposed to be country-club respectable, if you’re worried about what other people will think of you, if you think “it’s just a bad testimony,” for vague and unspecifiable reasons…repent. You need to re-read the Gospels and have a hard look at how Jesus ministered, who He was willing to talk to, what He was willing to be accused of. They called Jesus a glutton and a drunk that pals around with traitors and whores. When’s the last time anybody accused you of that? Never? So that would be a way you’re not like Jesus. A servant is not greater than his Master. Repent.

I’ve got more such tales. I wouldn’t handle them all the same way now that I did then. Sometimes that’s a matter of brainstorming after the fact and coming up with a more gracious or wiser approach. Other times, I’ve grown in discernment and interpret things differently than I used to. I didn’t do everything right in the past, and I have no illusions that I’ll do everything right in the future. And you know what? Back when I refused to go to those places and spend time with those people, I never made any of those mistakes.

But avoiding people and places that Jesus wouldn’t avoid was just one more thing I needed to repent of. I did, and I’ve no regrets. If it’s spiritually risky to be like Jesus, it’s spiritual suicide to knowingly refuse to be like Him. Get out there. Whoever those people are for you, Jesus loves them. You should too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

In the Company of Badasses

6 May 2025

One of my daughters sent me Aaron Renn’s interview with David Murrow a while back. The subject of the interview is “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” which is also Murrow’s book title. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I encourage you to listen to it, but one particular thing jumped out at both of us: safety.

Murrow talks about how virtually every Christian radio station has a tagline that’s something like “listening that’s safe for the whole family,” which is obviously designed to appeal to Christian moms. That makes good business sense for the stations, since mom is the one who decides what to listen to in the car. Murrow points out that at the same time Mom is getting her safe listening option, little Johnny in the back of the minivan is getting catechized that Christianity is the safe option that appeals to his mom. By age 11 or so, testosterone is flooding his body and he’s looking for danger and adventure and the opportunity for hijinks…and we’ve spent his whole life teaching him that Christianity is safe. Then we wonder why he’s turned away!

My daughter is a teacher and youth minister, so kids abandoning the faith is something of a preoccupation for her, as it should be. “You were raised on Christian music,” she said to me. “How did you avoid this trap?”

As it happens, part of the answer is that I wasn’t really raised on Christian music the way she was thinking, not like Murrow is talking about. I grew up on a lot of old music: everything from old cowboy songs to bluegrass to classical to native American chants recorded on the reservations to the soundtracks of Victory at Sea and Hatari! (Yes, on vinyl, but not because it was cool; it was just all we had.) Contemporary Christian music wasn’t really in the mix much at home, although I certainly heard plenty of it at church.

But there’s a much more significant answer: I grew up around people on mission. I never thought Christianity was safe.

My parents weren’t missionaries (although they tried, to the point of attending candidate school once upon a time). My pastor wasn’t a missionary either, but he’d tried, hard. After getting rejected by around 30 mission boards, he concluded that the Lord was telling him to stay stateside, and accepted a pastorate. My pastor’s brother, however, founded a little mission agency called World Evangelical Outreach. WEO (pronounced “wee-oh”) was headquartered in my hometown, first on the church grounds and then in the same little office building as my dentist. I still remember walking into the office and hearing the secretaries answer the phone “Wee-oh, how can I help you?” (Later on they changed their name and moved to a bigger location, then ultimately to a KOA property outside Orlando. You would know them today as Pioneers International. They’re, ah, a little bigger these days.) A lot of their missionaries passed through our church, along with others with New Tribes, Sudan Interior Mission, Arctic Missions, China Inland Mission, Baptist Mid-Missions, Greater Europe Mission, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and many more.

These people were not safe; they were badasses. Men who smuggled Bibles into Communist countries and evangelized whole villages on their way back out, who made contact with reclusive tribes in deep jungle, seeking to save them from extermination by loggers and oil workers, who spent nights on an Albanian warehouse roof with an AK-47 to protect the winter’s food supply for an orphanage, who flew in and out of tiny jungle airstrips to get someone to life-saving medical care. Women who saved abandoned twins in sub-Saharan Africa, brought girls out of sexual slavery in Saigon, defied apartheid to bring the gospel into villages that would never otherwise hear. Couples who travelled the Sahara together to find nomadic Tuareg camps, built houses in the New Guinea highlands to bring medicine, literacy, and Jesus to remote villages, ate and shared Jesus with Hezbollah fighters, their wives, and their children.

Of course we didn’t stay stuck in our own century either: we read tons of missionary biographies and all kinds of Christian history, too. I learned about Mary Slessor, David Livingston, Amy Carmichael, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Polycarp, the Forty Soldiers. So as I write these paragraphs, I have names and grainy photographs and artists’ renditions in my head for some, but I also have memories of men and women around my dinner table. One of them taught me how to play dominos; I showed another how my Transformer worked; a third explained to me how he lost his ring finger. The stories from centuries ago are real to me, part of an unbroken legacy that stretches from the Old Testament prophets through Jesus and the apostles and right on down to the guy sitting next to me at the kitchen table, asking me to pass another of Mom’s sourdough muffins (which are in fact delicious).

Some of them came back every four or five years to tell us how things were going. Some of them came back on medical evac flights. Some of them came back on medical evac flights and then went back again, and again, and again. (Ralph and Maridee Sauers, I’m looking at you.) Some of them didn’t come back at all; we’ll see them again in glory.

Obviously their Christianity wasn’t the safe, Mom-approved path. It was the biggest adventure in the world, far superior even to joining the Peace Corps or the military (which some of them had also done, before). Tourist travel was childish and self-indulgent by comparison — not even in the same league. For the longest time, I thought I was going to join them overseas. I did short-term hitches doing child evangelism in Spain, a building project in Trinidad & Tobago, teaching English and computer skills in central Russia. Closer to home, I served on street evangelism teams in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, various locations in metro DC, and a series of places in the southeastern US, especially Florida. I knew that God could call me anywhere, and I was ready to go!

Imagine my surprise when He called me to California, of all places. We had a long argument about that, and I lost. After all, I did tell Him I would go anywhere! So I went. After I finished seminary, He took me into the desert for six years, and from there to the heathen wilds of Denver, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been overseas, training pastors in Australia and such, but it seems likely that the majority of my calling is stateside.

These folks’ legacy of following Jesus anywhere He leads has informed my decisions my whole life, is with me today, and I’m pleased to pass it on in turn to my students, my daughters, my disciples. There’s another little kid I ate with last week, and I’m the guy at his kitchen table, asking him to pass another muffin while he shows me his Lego model. (And because God’s fun like that, his name is Timothy too. Wild.)

I’m not surprised when God calls me somewhere surprising, if I may put it that way. The darker the corner, the more it needs light. Some of the corners have been pretty dark, but that’s another post. The point for today is, your kids don’t need more vapid CCM; they need time with Christians doing dangerous things for Jesus.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Don’t Miss the Confession

16 April 2025

One of the basics of good shepherding is to remember what you don’t know. When they say “We had a fight last night,” you don’t know if it was a minor argument, a shouting match, or a physical brawl. You have to ask more questions if you need to find out. But there’s also another key mistake you can make: missing what they are telling you.

Jack and Jill have been dating for a while, and things are starting to turn a bit more serious. Then one day, Jill breaks it off. “I just don’t think we can have a good relationship if we’re not honest with each other,” she says.

Jack is baffled. Over a beer with his buddy Eli, he vents: “I don’t know what she’s talking about! I’ve worked so hard to communicate clearly and listen well! I’ve been as honest as I know how to be! I just don’t get it!”

Eli nods. “She thinks you’re dishonest with each other, but you’ve been honest with her.”

“Yes!” says Jack.

Eli sips his beer and steeples his fingers. “So what does she know that you don’t?”

Obviously, when Jill tells Jack that they’re not being honest with each other, she’s confessing that she hasn’t been honest with him. She thinks it’s mutual; she may be right or she may be projecting. But she’s wildly unlikely to be wrong about herself.

When people say things like this, don’t get so caught up in defending yourself from the embedded accusation that you miss what they’re telling you about themselves.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

On Becoming a Mentor

1 April 2025

In Part 1 of this series, we considered finding a mentor. Now, let’s talk about the other half of the equation: finding an apprentice.

Lack of mentorship is of the biggest problems the West faces today, in and out of the Church. The Boomers as a generation shrugged off mentoring. When they were young, they were famous for saying “Never trust anybody over 30.” (I think it was Joe Queenan who observed that as they aged, they have done their part to ensure that it remains good advice!) As a result most of them were never mentored themselves, and then didn’t know how to mentor when it was their turn to give back. Mostly, they assumed every generation behind them would want to be neglected, which explains most of what you need to know about how Gen X was parented. This assumption was highly convenient for the Boomers, who as a generation were focused on enjoying life and couldn’t be bothered with the inconveniences of legacy. (Yeah, I know, not all of them. But a critical mass, easily enough to create a crisis of mentorship.)

But let’s assume, Gentle Reader, that you’re willing to embrace the hard work of mentoring. Probably the most common question I get from would-be mentors is, “Where did your apprentices come from? Where do you find these people?” Here’s what you need to know about that.

(1) They’re everywhere. People are desperate for what a mentor can provide, young adults especially. I can almost guarantee that you talked with someone I’d consider a candidate in the last couple days. It’s not about where you look, it’s about how you look. You need to learn to see what’s in front of you.

(2) Mostly they don’t walk up and ask for mentoring. But they definitely signal need:

  • “I guess I don’t really have a dad.”
  • “It must have been great to have had someone to show you how to do these things.”
  • “I just don’t understand those people!”
  • “I don’t really know what else to do.”

In a hundred little ways, people signal that they need what mentoring can provide, and that they are aware of the need. They often don’t know that mentoring can meet that need, but they have something going on where they’d be happy to hear “I think I might be able to help with that.” That’s where it starts. Don’t wait to be asked; go fishing for men!

3) Since you’re not waiting to be asked, you’re going to do some work up front. You know the white-bearded master that pupils climb a mountain to find? Being that guy is a cool little fantasy, but most of the time that’s what it is–a fantasy. In real life, they’ll show you a need, and you’ll respond with blessing and service, demonstrating that you can help meet that need, and that there’s more where that solution came from. They might jump over hurdles later after you’ve demonstrated what you can offer as a mentor, but they aren’t going to do it to start with. Expect to be generous with your time, money, effort, attention. If you’re not willing to do that, you shouldn’t be mentoring.

3b) One of the other common things I hear is “I’m investing everywhere I can, but nobody’s taking my advice!” If you’re having that problem, reconsider the nature of your investment. Invest your gratitude, your praise, your effort, your connections, your money. If there is anything virtuous, if there is anything praiseworthy, invest in it! Bless what can be blessed. If you can’t see what’s good, nobody will listen to you about what needs correcting, and nobody should. Quit pontificating and do some actual work.

4) The most straightforward way to “fish for men” is to make the initial overture and invest in the people around you, and then pay attention to what happens next. Most people won’t reward the investment. That’s fine; plenty of people didn’t reward Jesus’ investment either. Think “Parable of the Sower” here: some never start, some are drawn away by shiny objects, some quit when it gets hard, but some pay off –some just okay, some well, and some handsomely. But none of that happens if you don’t sow the seed. Start the ball rolling. Notice the need and do something about it; at least make an offer. When you see a return, invest more, and let the relationship grow organically from there.

When that works, congratulations! You’re a mentor. How do you do it well? Stay tuned.

Comments Off on On Becoming a Mentor | Love of Generous Fruitfulness, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, Real Ministry Training | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Getting and Keeping a Mentor

18 March 2025

Young adults need mentors, and a lot of them even know it. Most young adults never get a mentor, because they don’t have the first clue how to find one, and more importantly, how to behave in a mentoring relationship. It’s not their fault; nobody is born knowing these things. Unfortunately, most older adults no longer teach this skill set — not even parents. From the Boomers onward, far too many adults don’t know how to mentor, don’t want to, and simply refuse to assume the responsibilities and moral authority to do the job well.

So if you’re in the market for a mentor, but don’t know where to start, pull up a chair, grab yourself a fine brewed beverage, and let Uncle Tim lay some wisdom on ya. There’s two skill sets you need here: finding and acquiring a mentor to start with, and then living in a mentoring relationship.

The first thing is identifying the person you would like mentoring from. This can be really simple: look for someone who…

  • is who you want to be when you grow up, or
  • can do a specific thing that you really want to to do.

You’ll be tempted to think of internet personalities or celebrities. Stop it. Work harder; find someone less famous, and preferably someone local. Once you’ve identified the person, move in for a closer look, as close as you can get. Do you want the whole package, or some specific skill? Are there particular things about this person you definitely do not want to pick up? Think about that one long and hard; if you spend significant time with this person, you may end up more like them than you wanted to be.

Once you’ve found the person…then what? Ask, of course! But there’s an art to maximizing your chances of getting a “yes.” First you need the right mindset, and then you need a good approach. As a potential apprentice, you need to have a clear understanding of the nature of mentoring relationships. In no particular order, here are some key things to know:

  • If you’re just getting started, all you need is someone a little ahead of you. As you grow, you’ll come to need (and be able to attract) mentors with much greater experience and skill.
  • Every beginner dreams of being mentored by a master teacher from day one. That really does happen occasionally; I’ve met a few such people. Usually, that person is the teacher’s kid, favorite nephew, or something like that. If you get such an opportunity, by all means take it, but don’t sit around waiting for it to magically happen. Normally, a master teacher’s time will be spent with advanced practitioners who have already put in the time to master the basics of the craft, and who have already proven their commitment to continuing in the work. Those people are a much better investment than you are as a beginner. If you’re the kind of person who won’t engage unless you can be guided by a master, then you’re also the kind of person no master will take. Nobody needs an apprentice who won’t get over himself.
  • It’s really rare that anybody worth following actually needs your help. Unless you happen to have some special skill your prospective mentor really needs, this isn’t going to be an even exchange at the beginning, which means you’ll be asking for an investment, not a trade. (There are ways of evening up. I have a colleague who cold-approached a world-class practitioner and asked him to mentor her; she offered to pay his regular hourly rate for any time he spent on her, so he wouldn’t lose money. He said yes; she worked her tail off, and today she’s highly and uniquely skilled. She also spent a small fortune getting there; not everyone can do that. But it was money well spent.)
  • Since it won’t start as an even exchange, you will be a net drain on the system in the beginning. Teaching you has an opportunity cost; your mentor is going to get less of something this year because he’s spending time and effort on you. What the cost is to him depends on the situation; it might mean slowing down his work so he can teach you as he goes; it might mean taking fewer jobs in order to make time for you. The time he spends with you might otherwise be spent with his wife, his kids, his friends, reading, learning some new skill, or binge-watching UFO documentaries, but count on it, that time is coming from somewhere. No need to feel bad about that; your mentor thinks you’re worth the investment, or you wouldn’t be here. But he has an expectation that the investment is going to pay off; it’s up to you to make sure he’s right.
  • Speaking of the investment paying off, here’s a basic rule of human behavior: everybody always gets paid…somehow.
    • You will get tutelage and experience.
    • Your mentor will get…something. In order for the relationship to work well, you need to know what he’s getting out of it. Find out what it costs and don’t be put off by the inconvenience. Training an apprentice isn’t convenient either; this is your end of the deal. If it’s not worth the cost, then find a different mentor. If it is, then pay it and make it look easy.
    • It’s an asymmetrical relationship, but it’s not asymmetrical everywhere, all the time. There are things your mentor will do for you that you couldn’t do or wouldn’t be expected to reciprocate. That’s fine. There are other things that you absolutely should reciprocate, and you’ll blow up the relationship if you don’t. Know the difference.
    • Balance is a moving target. Your obligations mount as your skills grow and your mentor’s needs change. Keep an eye on ways you might be able to reciprocate now that you couldn’t have when you started.
  • If you have integrity, you will at some point disagree with your mentor. That’s okay. Your mentor is not God, and it’s ok to disappoint him—but make it count. If the relationship is worth having, then it’s worth taking good care of; don’t become a disappointment through inadvertence or over something stupid.

Knowing that’s what you’re getting into, do you still want this person to mentor you? If so, then you want to ask in a way that maximizes your chances of getting an enthusiastic “Yes!” Here’s what you need to do:

  • Do your homework.
    • Know as much as you can about the field.
    • Know who you’re approaching. Study websites, social media pages, curriculum vitae. Whatever’s publicly available about where your prospective mentor has been and what he’s done, learn it.
    • If your prospective mentor has already produced material for up-and-coming workers in your field, get it. It’s gauche to ask an expert to tell you a bunch of stuff for free when their livelihood comes in part from selling that same information. If it costs money, then spend some! Read the books; watch the videos; listen to the podcasts. Digest that material ahead of time; don’t ask your prospective mentor to waste time telling you things they’ve already put out there.
  • Have something to show for it
    • Having done your homework, showcase it. At a minimum, come in with some intelligent questions: “I read where you said X, and I was wondering….”
    • Better: “I’ve been following your instructions from [book/podcast/article], and here’s what happened. I have some questions about my next steps.…”
  • Ask boldly
    • We all fantasize about our chosen mentor seeing how we’ve applied their work and begging us to come study with them. It’s okay to have the fantasy, but know that it’s a fantasy. People worth following already have plenty to do; mostly they don’t go about asking for more work.
    • Be very clear ahead of time about what you want from this mentor. Do you want them to give you a book review? Help you put together a business plan? Edit an article before you submit it? Help you figure out which school to go to? Find an investor? Talk about life over coffee for an hour a week? I strongly suggest writing it down clearly. “I want [person] to [action] for me.” You may not get what you want, but you should know what you want.
    • Don’t be coy. You’ve showcased your work; you’ve made the best case you can that you’ll be a worthwhile investment. You know what you want from them. So ask clearly for the specific investment that you want.
      • It’s ok if you’re just asking for something small, like “Would it be ok if I call or email to ask about advice on next steps every couple months? It doesn’t have to be a grand request.
      • On the other hand, if you want more, ask for more: “Could we meet for an hour every other week for the next year?”
      • You may well get a no. Take it gracefully. God has a way of bringing people back around in our lives; don’t burn the bridge. You never know what will happen later.
      • You may get “I can’t do that, but we could….” and an offer of some lesser level of investment. In that case, take it and follow up quickly. Treat it as a second interview.
      • You may just get an assignment. “I can’t meet with you, but here’s what you should work on next….” Frequently, your wounded pride will tempt you not to follow through on the assignment because they turned you down. Do what you want, but know that once upon a time, a very busy man gave me such an assignment. I did it, and it changed the course of my life. (God was being kind to me. In hindsight, he would have been a terrible mentor. But it was a great assignment. I’ll tell you about it sometime.) Also, again, treat it as a second interview. Sometimes it is.

If you got a “no,” don’t give up. Keep looking around. Locate another likely candidate. Do the same thing. Keep going until you find what you need.

On the other hand, perhaps you got a yes. Now you have a mentor! What do you need to know, to keep the relationship good? First, go back up to the top and review all the things I said about the nature of the mentoring relationship. Have all that firmly in mind. Then…

  • You got into this relationship seeking guidance. So take it. If it doesn’t work, come back for a debrief. But don’t come back with “I thought your advice was stupid/hard so I didn’t do it, and now I need help managing the fallout of my poor decisions.” Can’t complain about the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do. If you screwed up, it’s not the end of the world; recover as best you can, go back to the drawing board, and do what you were told.
  • Some of the guidance your mentor gives will seem stupid. That’s normal. Real life is frequently counterintuitive, and if you already knew all the smart ideas, you wouldn’t need a mentor, wouldja? Go ahead and do what you’re told; see what happens. Usually, hindsight will provide all the insight you need. Sometimes, you’ll need further explanation. The best time to ask “Why?” is after you’ve gone and done the thing. Don’t ask for someone to invest valuable time and expertise giving you guidance and then argue with them about it. Show your commitment, then ask: “I woulda sworn that wasn’t going to work…and it did. I still don’t get it. Why?” Occasionally—because even the best mentors are fallible—it really will be stupid guidance. But as a newbie, you can’t tell whether the advice is wrong, or you are wrong. Accept that occasionally you’re going to follow bad advice. It’s the cost of doing business.
  • The above is a useful rule of thumb, but there are exceptions. Sometimes a promising-looking mentor turns out to be a tyrant who’s exploiting you and giving nothing worthwhile in return, and you really should just walk away. On the other hand, sometimes your mentor simply didn’t understand the problem. The easiest way to navigate that is to take responsibility yourself: “I’m so sorry, I don’t think I explained the problem properly. Let me try again….”
  • Some guidance will call for a metric ton of hard work, and you’re going to be tempted to seek shortcuts. Don’t. In the words of Scott Sonnon, “Until you have thoroughly mastered the basics, every ‘new’ idea you have has already been considered and rejected, with good reason.” That won’t be true 100% of the time, but close enough. Your time will be better spent working hard to master the basics; innovation can wait. (That said, look up the story of Gaston Glock sometime. There are occasional spectacular exceptions.)
  • You aren’t signing your life away when you apprentice to someone. You answer to God on the last day for yourself; you have to choose to follow your mentor’s guidance or not. But you can’t reasonably expect someone to continue to invest in you if you don’t take their guidance; conversely, if you don’t find their guidance worth following, you probably need a different mentor anyway.

So there ya go. I hope it’s helpful to you. Now, I know some of this is hard to hear, and of course I understand if you disagree. No worries; I’m fallible like everybody else. Maybe you know better than I do. And anyhow, I’m not holding a gun to your head; ain’t nothing stopping you from doing it your way. Best of luck….

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hospitality as Alchemy

18 February 2025

I’ve been meditating recently on the parable of the unjust steward, found in Luke 16:1-13. Since Jesus Himself calls the guy unjust, obviously it’s not the cheating that Jesus is recommending. What does Jesus want us to take away from this?

The steward has a short window of opportunity where he has access to his master’s accounts, and he makes the most of his temporary access to make friends for the long term. We find ourselves in a similar situation. Everything you have can just disappear (as some of our brothers and sisters in California recently found out). But while you have it, what are you doing with it?

We can squander the goods we have, or we can use them to lasting effect. Few things are as fungible as a warm meal. The scraps you don’t eat will be cold in an hour and inedible in days; what you do eat will end up in your toilet in a day or two, depending on your intestinal transit time. But that meal, that future poop, shared with someone else, becomes an expression of love and care. Applied to someone at the right moment, that very transitory matter becomes a lifelong conviction that they’re loved.

The alchemists of old expended enormous effort trying to turn lead into gold. In hospitality, we do something much more spectacular, and we succeed at it! We transmute the basest of matter into something better than gold: the pleasure of God and the care of His image. So go forth and be hospitable to someone who can’t pay you back.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Glories of a Good Corn Dog

7 January 2025

Imagine a friend of yours got involved in a commune, one of the really crunchy ones that does their own farming and such along with poetry nights and music and art. They’re pretty good at all this, actually. They’re using some really interesting permaculture practices at the communal farm, the poetry is actually half-decent, and they make the absolute best goat-cheese pizza you’ve ever tasted. As you ask a few more questions, it turns out that come March 21st, they’re all planning to drink cyanide in order to liberate their spirits to join the alien spacecraft that’s coming to take them away. Upon further investigation, this is the third such cult the charismatic leader has founded. He contends that the suicides of the two previous groups have indeed gone on to be with the aliens, while he selflessly remained behind to spread the good news.

How fast would you want to get your friend out of there?

So listen, I have some bad news for you. Large swathes of Western culture are that commune. We’re doing it in slow-motion, but look at the birth rates. What we are seeing is a cultural suicide pact. Hold that thought for a moment, we’ll come back to it.

****

In a post that’s worth your time to read, Michael Clary observes that one of the major objectives of neutral-world church strategy was “drawing left-leaning urban millennials, the most coveted demographic of the neutral world church planting boom.” In the interests of drawing the left-leaning urban crowd into church, we were all counseled to be “gospel centered” and “major on the majors,” setting “secondary matters” aside as “distractions.” Why were we given that counsel? Is it because our church growth experts were so taken with the gospel that for them, everything else just paled in comparison? Pretty to think so…but no, as I’ll demonstrate about four paragraphs down. Our experts knew that the left-leaning urbanites we were courting despised everything we love: backyard barbecues, fireworks on the 4th, “World’s Greatest Mom” mugs from Wal-mart, funnel cakes and corndogs at the county fair, all of it. They told us to “major on the majors” because our corn dogs offend left-leaning urbanites.

The urban elite have way fewer kids than the rest of us. It’s “grill Americans” who have the kids; the ranks of the urban elite are fed by a steady stream of young adults emigrating from flyover country. As a result, the rank and file of left-leaning urbanites didn’t grow up in that culture. They actually came from “grill American” culture, and lhey left it behind on purpose in order to fit into the elite leftist culture of their colleges. (You can tell this by their social media feeds over the holidays: they’re constantly reposting supportive tips for getting through dinner with your conservative relatives. Natives of the urban elite don’t have dinner with conservative relatives.) As young adults, these cultural emigres look back on heartland American culture with the white-hot disgust of the newly converted. In part, that performative disgust is driven by vulnerability: if you grew up slinging fries at McDonalds, you can’t afford for anybody at your art gallery job to even suspect you of plebian tastes — the accusation alone could ruin you.

I had half a mind to make this post a hit piece on that sad and hypocritical demographic. While they maybe deserve it, they need Jesus too! Somebody’s gotta go in there and get them, and the ugly truth is that unless you happen to catch them struggling to change a tire, you probably can’t make the initial approach in greasy Wal-mart jeans with a Modelo in your hand. When it comes to the logistics of winning that demographic, our neutral-world coaches were not wrong about the things they would find off-putting. But this is one of the major problems with managerial culture: it gets preoccupied with logistics at the expense of values.

Our coaches didn’t just steer us away from tailgating at the high school football game; they also told us to expunge all references to the sin of abortion from our church services; in fact, they told us not to talk about politics at all (as if the Bible doesn’t speak to such issues!) They upbraided us for big celebrations of Mothers’s Day and Father’s Day. They wrote long think pieces about the dangers of what they called “idolatry of the family” — a sneer at those who have the audacity to think growing up, getting married, and raising kids is normal. “Major on the majors; keep it about Jesus,” they said. “All things to all men,” they said. Too many of us listened.

Here’s what actually happened: Our advisers were not counseling us to “avoid secondary issues” because they cared so much about the gospel; it was because they wanted to muzzle the conservatives. Conservative values embarrassed them, and so as long as the voice of the church on “secondary issues” was conservative, no excuse was good enough for bringing those issues up. Now that left-leaning urbanites occupy positions of influence in the church, the very same advisers have suddenly discovered that there’s nothing more gospel-centered than a left-leaning take on…well, anything.

That joke about global warming on a record-setting snowy day? Total distraction. Come on, let’s keep it about Jesus, okay? But Greta Thundberg on climate change, that’s gospel-centered. Christians of all people should care about the world God made.

What are we to do with this situation? We can gather in twos and threes in desolate places and grind our teeth about the injustice of it all, but let’s not. I suggest we rethink the situation from the ground up. Let’s go back to that admonition to keep things gospel-centered, and have another look. I’m going to say something a bit controversial, and I welcome pushback, but I think I can make it stick.

I contend that we had a gospel-centered culture, however imperfect. In order to appeal to the coveted neutral-world demographic (left-leaning urban Millennials), we were urged to surrender our gospel-centered culture in favor of a different culture entirely. It is…ah, not obvious, shall we say, that the replacement culture is more gospel-centered than what we had. For one thing, that culture is committing suicide in slow motion. Remember the low birth rates? These are the people driving those statistics. Left-leaning urban Millennials are the cultural equivalent of that commune with the suicide pact.

Was existing grill-American culture perfect? By no means! But the Christian version of it loved children, honored mothers and celebrated fathers, valued and incentivized intact families, loved our country, made quilts and fluffy biscuits and plumbing that worked and sturdy front porches for the kids to play on, and had kids to play on them.

Left-leaning urbanite tastemakers don’t have kids. We traded young adults who got married and raised families for young adults who shack up, get cats, travel the world, and “don’t feel called to children.” We traded women who knew all Grandma’s best recipes for women who can’t make anything but a cocktail; men who could build a retaining wall in a weekend for inexplicably bearded men who can’t so much as change a tire. (A friend of mine asserts that today, a conspicuous beard is “the push-up bra of masculinity.” I’m afraid she may have a point.)

Conceding that someone needs to win these folks to Jesus, why would we want to adopt their culture? It’s not like it’s an improvement. So here’s my modest proposal: the gospel is indeed the center, but it is the center of something. Something good, not to put too fine a point on it. Where we genuinely fall short, let’s repent, and having repented of the evil, let’s not be embarrassed by the good things that remain. Let’s be a little loud about the beauty of marriage, the joys of having a gaggle of kids, the pleasure and difficulty of physical work, and the glories of a good corn dog. We have plenty of room to grow, but let’s not give up the good we already have for bland, HR-approved substitutes. Yech.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Example They Don’t Understand

26 November 2024

Back in my days running the sound board for my church, I quickly learned that invisibility is the key attribute of a sound tech. Everybody in the house should hear everybody on stage effortlessly, and everybody on stage should hear themselves and each other effortlessly, just as if there were no electronic amplification involved at all. For a young man both interested in technical things and possessed of a young man’s ego and hunger for recognition, it was a perfect lab for character formation: if I did the job well, nobody gave me a second thought.

The only time anybody looks back at the sound booth is when something goes wrong: they can’t hear a soloist or a speaker, there’s a sudden screech of feedback, or some such. Those mistakes are obvious enough; everybody knows they’re happening. But there’s another, more subtle type of mistake.

When the mix is off just a bit—one voice a little too high, another instrument a little too low, too much reverb here, just a touch too little mids there, that sort of thing—nobody looks back at the booth. But there’s an unease in the room. They can’t consciously name what’s going on; half of them are not consciously aware that anything’s going on. But there’s a wrongness you can feel, a restlessness in the crowd.

I learned to pick up on that restlessness as a newbie. The problem was, as a newbie, I was barely half a step ahead of the crowd. I know something was wrong, because I could see them reacting to it. But I often had no idea what was wrong, or how to fix it. The one thing I had going for me was blind instinct. I’d just get my hands on the knobs and start adjusting—a little too far this way; a little too far that way; back until it felt right, then stop. Move on to the next control. I couldn’t tell you, much of the time, what the needed adjustment was. I couldn’t consciously hear it, and after dancing all over the sound board, I usually couldn’t tell you which adjustment made the difference. But I’d get done making adjustments, and it just felt right to me. I could see the difference in the room, too: people would settle back in their seats, quit fiddling with their bulletins, just sing along with the music.

My fellow sound techs, including the guys who trained me, noticed. I remember more than one of them asking me “What did you do? That sounded good!”

I would just shrug. “I adjusted it until it felt right.”

In those days, we were blessed to have members of the music group Glad as part of the church, and sometimes Ed Nalle would sing on a special occasion. I vividly remember Heidi, Ed’s wife, coming back to the sound booth on multiple occasions. “Can’t you hear that?” she would ask. No, I couldn’t. Then she’d grab a chair, turn it around backwards, and half-sit on the chair back in front of the board. She’d reach up and make a couple of adjustments. It would sound better.

Unlike me, Heidi knew exactly what she was hearing, and knew exactly what to adjust. She ought to; she’d been running sound for decades. She had words for things I wasn’t even sure I heard, and as far as I could tell, she was never wrong. Looking back, I probably could have learned a lot more from her, but it honestly never occurred to me to ask her to stick around after service and show me what she’d adjusted and why. I don’t know that I’d have had the nerve; she was a seasoned, working pro, and I was a barely-trained amateur. So I just stood at her elbow and watched. I tried (failing, half the time) to hear exactly what difference each adjustment made. But sometimes I could hear the difference, and those times made me a better sound tech, just by watching Heidi’s example.

Why am I telling you this?

Because we rub shoulders every day with people who are the moral equivalent of barely-trained me, back in the day. The world these days makes them uneasy, and they’re not sure why. They don’t quite have words for it. Of course, there’s little they can do outside their own lives to influence the mix, but even in their own lives, most of the time, they have no idea what they’re doing. A little of this…oops, that was too much; dial it back. A little of that….

Catechized by a culture that’s abandoned special revelation and at war with natural revelation, they don’t even suspect the existence of instructions that could help them. The culture has worked very hard to make them deaf. But the image of God is still within them, and a sinful, broken world hurts them even though they don’t know why they hurt.

As Christians, we hear what they don’t. Sometimes, we can explain; other times, they’re so deaf they can’t hear us anyway. What we can always do is what Heidi did for me: be an example. Half the time, they won’t be able to tell why we’re doing what we’re doing, just like half of what Heidi did was completely opaque to me. But the other half the time, they’ll be able to tell the difference. Maybe not anything they quite have words for, but it just feels better somehow. So even if you don’t know how to explain yourself, even if you know they wouldn’t get it even if you could explain well, just be an example they don’t understand. Your very existence shows them that a better way is possible.

Of course, you’re only an example if they can see you. Let the unbelievers around you into your life. In a culture that often hates us, we’re tempted to just hide. Don’t. Let them see you. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Micro-Christendom in Practice

4 November 2024

I got to guest on a podcast this past week. “Micro-Christendoms and Local Government” released a few days ago. It’s episode 24 of The Civitas Podcast, hosted by Peter Leithart and James Wood.

The Civitas Project is a mostly an academic endeavor out of Theopolis Institute, focused on what they’re calling “ecclesiocentric postliberalism.” That’s a jawbreaker of a term, but it describes a very practical reality. The classical liberal order–the political and social world championed by the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill–is dying. The old-line secular liberals weren’t able to contend with the “anything–no, really, anything!–goes” relativism of the potsmoderns, who in turn lack the resources to contend with the dictatorial howlings of everybody from rabid feminists to woke fascists to Muslim fundamentalists. We live in a world that is rapidly abandoning relativism for a new morality hostile to anything true, good, or beautiful. That’s the “postliberal” part. The “ecclesiocentric” part argues that any sane response to the world we now live in has to begin with the church at the center. The Civitas Project exists to figure out what, exactly, that might mean. The project existed for a few years before going public with the podcast, and has also produced a book of essays, Hell Shall Not Prevail, which is well worth reading.

On the podcast, Peter and James mostly interview academics from a wide variety of fields. If you’ve been hanging out here long, Gentle Reader, you know that I’m not entirely without academic chops, but I gotta tell you, I’m nowhere near the stratospheric level of the average Civitas guest. So how’d I end up on the show? Peter and James got interested in coming down to the other end of the spectrum to chat with some practitioners. Peter was kind enough to think of me, and given his area of interest, I immediately thought of Joe Anderson. The resulting conversation was a great deal of fun, and you can hear it online or wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay, Pt. 2

22 October 2024

We ended part one with a question: it’s easy enough to see why pagans might believe that all intimacy is ultimately the same, and all leads to sexual intimacy, but what would possess Christians to think that?

Fear, that’s what.

Some of it is fear of adultery. It’s a massively destructive sin, and sensible people don’t want to be anywhere near it. But then, sensible people don’t want to be in a house fire or a high-speed auto accident either, and don’t on that account cut off the electricity in their houses or refuse to drive on highways. Sensible people recognize that everything has risks, and if you think electricity is risky, reading by candlelight is not exactly risk-free. A 30-minute drive on the highway has its risks, sure, but the 60-minute drive it takes to stay off the highway also has its fair share of risk exposure. Our problem, in this case, is that we’re sensitive to the risks of one course of action, and utterly blind to the risks of the other.

Adultery’s damage is well-known. The damage done by fearing and avoiding meaningful interaction with the opposite sex is less well understood, but no less real. Lacking an appreciation for the benefits of healthy cross-gender interaction and friendship, we see nothing there but danger. We ought to know better, because our advice to just stay away from the opposite sex does not track with how Scripture tells us to behave (but we’ll get to that).

Part of the perceived danger comes from a mythology we’ve allowed self-justifying adulterers to build up for themselves. “I don’t know how it happened!” they say. “One thing just led to another!” Too many Christians take these ridiculous claims at face value, and we really ought to know better. It’s fairly difficult to have sex by accident, unless you’re already so far compromised that the final PIV detail hardly matters anyway. But foolish Christians buy this nonsense, and then build on it: since apparently nobody, not even the adulterers, really knows how adultery happens, they conclude that men and women just need to avoid each other. Any intimacy of any type is a threat, and so they treat all intimacy as the same thing. Ironically, their fear of becoming like the world is the very thing that causes them to become like the world (no surprise if you remember Prov. 29:25). But God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Tim. 1:7), so let’s not forget what He’s told us about sin. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11).

Some while back, I sat in a marriage counseling session with a husband who’d cheated and a wife who was deciding what to do about it. “I don’t know what happened!” he said. You know what I told him? “You just blew a hole in the bottom of the boat that is your marriage, and you’re taking on water fast. You need her help” I pointed at his wife “or you’re sunk. You need her to believe that this isn’t going to happen again. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ doesn’t inspire confidence.” As we dug into it, what we found is that his initial “I don’t know what happened” response was a defense mechanism. He didn’t want to think about it. It was just easier to say “I don’t know what happened.” Part of my job was to help him do the hard work of facing what he’d done and excavating how it happened so they could prevent it in the future. Over the next half-hour or so, he faced his sin squarely, dug into how he got there, and then we made a plan to keep him out of similarly tempting situations in the future.

What we found, of course, tracks with Scripture (and common sense). He didn’t commit adultery by accident; both parties knew what they were doing. At a certain point, a decision gets made that involves a zipper, and nobody concerned is somehow unaware of the implications of that decision. Sexual arousal is designed by God to be the sort of thing that gathers momentum as it goes, a bit like a long, steep playground slide. When they’re already three-quarters of the way down the slide, it’s easy enough to see how “one thing led to another” until they ended up in the mud puddle at the bottom. But how did they end up on that slide to start with? Answering that question is where Scripture is a big help.

God tells us: “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.” The process certainly is deceptive—hence the warning against being deceived—but it’s not a mystery. God has told us all about it: we need to police our desires.

The deception comes in not believing God about this. When the desire passes through your mind, it’s not just a harmless pleasant thought. If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t…but it would be fun,” you’re already in trouble. If you think you can nurture the desire without getting hurt, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s already hurting you. And then, if you think about it long enough, it’s going to infect your behavior, one way or another. The same lies will still be with you: “It’s not hurting anybody. Besides, who’s gonna know?” If you think you can play with the sin a little bit without anything serious happening, you’re wrong. Desire conceives and gives birth to sin; sin matures and gives birth to death. So the thing to do is address the desire.

Let’s take an example. Say a particular couple’s sexual relationship is on the rocks, no matter why. He’s out there in the working world, he’s sexually hungry, and an opportunity—a willing coworker who’s particularly interested in him, say—crosses his path. What is he supposed to do with this situation?

Say no, of course, but that’s not nearly enough. He needs to kill the desire. His desire for sexual communion is a good and godly thing, and there’s exactly one person he’s to fulfill that desire with. When that desire gets misdirected onto anybody else, the thing to do is starve it ruthlessly. Don’t toy with it; don’t think about it. Give it no occasion for expression, and pray until it dies. He should turn his attentions to his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 7:2-5), and if for whatever reason his wife cannot or will not meet his legitimate needs, then he should embrace the ascetic struggle and suffer like Jesus would rather than give the enemy a victory. Jesus’ legitimate human needs were going unmet in the wilderness (food), in the Garden (companionship and emotional support), and on the cross (physical safety). We should be prepared to follow Jesus; a servant is not greater than his Master.

But this is not to say that the man has to go it alone. Christians are meant to live giving and receiving daily encouragement. Particularly in times like these, a believer needs the support of his brothers and sisters. How does that work? Stay tuned.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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