Modern Missionary: From Engineering to Kingdom Mission with John Mullen

St. Paul’s Outreach missionary John Mullen joins First and Focused to discuss leaving behind a successful engineering career to pursue full-time ministry, the spiritual hunger emerging among young adults, and why he believes the next generation may be more open to the Gospel than many realize.

John shares his journey from mechanical engineering into missionary work, the influence of his father, the progression of his faith over time, and the vision he has for a restored Christendom in Columbus and beyond. This episode dives deep into purpose, surrender, leadership, discipleship, and what it truly means to go all-in with Jesus Christ.

Key Themes

• Faith and intellect working together 
• Leaving career security for Kingdom mission 
• Evangelism and discipleship 
• Young adults and spiritual hunger 
• Modern missionary work 
• Hope for the future Church

To connect with Jon click here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-mullen-a9302776/

To learn more about St. Paul’s Outreach click here: https://www.spo.org/

To connect with Mark click here: https://www.markgreaves.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Like without God, who am I? And what's your answer to that question? Boom. You're not gonna marry this girl. She doesn't want to marry you. God told you to go pursue her, and now your life is over. God's a tyrant, God's a traitor, God's not trustworthy. God allows it. Yeah. And he uses it. My life became about me. And I hated it. And that was it, man. I was living a life of confusion, anger, and despair.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

And my actions and my thoughts and my words, if played out correctly in and amongst humanity, can impact eternity right here and now.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

There's nothing outside yourself worth striving for, worth sacrificing for. Life gets so small.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Welcome to First and Focused, the podcast where faith meets leadership. I know you're going to put me on the spot. I don't know what you're going to ask me to say. I'm Mark Greaves, and in each episode, I sit down with business and industry leaders who put God first in their work and stay focused on building his kingdom through their calling. I can sit here and talk with you all day. Keep up the great work, brother. Lord is using you powerfully. I love you.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

I love watching what Jesus is doing in your life.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

All right, everybody, welcome to the first and focus show. This is where we interview leaders from various industries who are putting God first uh in their work and then staying focused on spreading the gospel and the love of Jesus through their calling. So today we are here with my friend, Mr. John Mullen. John, welcome to the show, buddy. Glad to be here, brother. Yeah, I'm I'm pumped about this. Yeah, been a long time coming. For sure. I've always uh just for reference here for our listeners, if John says something where his vocabulary outpaces what's I'll do my best to rephrase so we all understand what what John's meaning here. But um yeah, you got a deeply intellectual mind, and I've always just been fascinated by the way it works. So pumped up to pumped up to interview you, man. Yeah, glad to be here. Yeah, cool. Well, let me hit your intro real quick. For sure. And then we're gonna get into it. All right, John Mullen, you are a full-time missionary and chapter leader in Columbus, Ohio for St. Paul's Outreach, a college and post-college ministry focused on spreading the gospel and mission of Jesus Christ within the Catholic community. You earned your undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in 2014 and your master's in mechanical engineering from Ohio University in 2017. Priority new role in missionary work, you spent eight years in engineering consulting with Quartus Engineering and later priority designs. You have a deeply intellectual mind, I already said that, and a love of learning, uh, a gift that has allowed you to explore concepts that ultimately help shape your faith. Your long-term vision is a restored Christendom in the city of Columbus. Let's go. Yeah. And obviously a lover and follower of Jesus. So yeah, it's it's quite the uh quite the bio you've got. It's been an interesting life so far. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

I'll say it's atypical, very atypical life.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

But one of my greatest fears growing up was that I would be boring, so I think I've avoided that.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

So far. So far. Yeah, I would so far. Yeah. Yeah, you've uh you've definitely led like you've dabbled in a lot of of interesting ponds that not a lot of people uh have experienced. So yeah. Well, question number one is just I I've kind of admired your willingness to kind of leave the the world of engineering, the the path that you thought that you'd go. You've really shifted gears. Obviously, you've leaned you know far more into your faith. Um, but I kind of want to just kind of like origin story. Like growing up, I mean, what were you like? Was engineering always the path you thought you'd be on? Just give us a glimpse of how you were as a kid.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Well, if you know anything about me, um you know that I'm gonna mention my dad pretty early in that. So when I was six, I was in first grade and wrote down when asked uh on some sort of school homework slip, what do you want to do when you grow up? I said, I want to be an itchineer, which was my attempt to spell engineer. An itchineer? Yep, yeah, pretty itchy, because my dad is one. That would be Dan Mullen, the one and only.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Uh that was I mean, that that was so early, and I never deviated from it. I just decided as early as I knew what dad did, that I was gonna do that.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

And I never really questioned that at all, from age six at least, all the way to 18 when I was starting to pick schools. Well, finishing picking schools. And I had a lot of robotics experience in middle school, high school. I was one of those nerds in a white lab coat running around a robotics competition with a bunch of other nerds trying to get a home-built robot from a kit, you know, to put like little hockey pucks into a basketball hoop. Like that was me. That was that was me. Homeschooled, bad hair, the whole nine yards. Uh grew up Baptist, loved it.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

That was immensely beneficial for me, huge blessing. Uh, my dad grew up Catholic, left the Catholic Church in college because Campus Crusade got him. And that's where he met mom, who was born and raised Baptist. Mom likes to say that she was Baptist before she was a Christian. So to her that's funny. Deep Southern Baptist roots, deep Southern Baptist. Um, and they raised me in Southern California, a place called Lancaster, which was a dry, windy desert town in the middle of Southern California, LA County, because dad worked for NASA. Uh, worked there for gosh, 30 plus years. Yeah. Incredibly faithful man. Mom homeschooled me and my brother James after I was, I think we did, we started that in fifth grade. Yep, got through fourth grade in public school. And after that, I was so socially popular that I begged mom to go home so I could never have to deal with other kids again. So social skills were not my forte. Yeah, knowing how things worked and wanting to figure out how things worked in the mechanical realm, forte.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Figuring how people worked, why kids on the playground would say one thing and mean another, not my thing. Way people are way more complicated. Yes. Yes, and way less straightforward.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Like a machine will basically tell you what it's about.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

A person really will. It's true.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Very true.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

So to me, like straightforward, linear, honest, intense, like I've always kind of been direct. Don't have a lot of time to beat around the bush. I want to get to something.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

So that was just not really gonna be successful in third grade. I talked more or less like I do now. I just had to wait like 30 years for my peers to like like for me to be able to connect to my peers, more or less. So it was a lonely time uh outside the family circle, outside the friends' circle of fellow homeschooled nerds. But it was an incredibly protected, some would say sheltered. That's a pejorative. I just say protected. Yeah. Um upbringing home life stable, safe, calm, loving. I was I was raised to love Jesus. I was raised to read the Bible. I first made a profession of faith in the Lord when I was five. So from the get-go, like God has gotten my attention. Yeah, that's who I've been. And when my faith in God is is firing on all cylinders, I know who I am and what I'm supposed to do. And when that wavers, I have no idea who I am or what I'm supposed to do.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

So really that was me from like five through eighteen. Pretty consistent. You you know what you're gonna get if you're talking to me.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

It's interesting on your identity point. You figure that out so early. Like without God, who am I? And what what's your answer to that question?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Um well, I'll put it this way. When I was seven, when I was five, I made that profession of faith. When I was six, I began to be caught up with internal questions of am I really saved? I started the doubt phase pretty early.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

I feel like everybody goes through that in in some sort of a way. Like, how do I how do I know? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

How do I know? When I was seven, the question became, how do I know God is real? So I was questioning and testing pretty early. And eventually, about age seven, after a lot of months of trying to figure out the answer to the question, I came to realize you don't have a guarantee. Um, but the act of faith is what allows you to live in the joy of God. So you you may as well do it. Yeah. Not that I would have made the terms like in Pascal's wager to myself at that point, but I was essentially understanding you don't get a guarantee.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

So my personality type loves black and white and and guarantees and like strong yeses or strong no's. So being able to kind of play in the ambiguous, like you don't get a super solid hundred percent proof, but if you trust in this, then the rest of your life unlocks. That's that's what I was as a boy, and that's really how my faith looked as an adolescent.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Yeah, that's really cool. So you mentioned your dad already, yeah, which is my second question, because I've known that he's meant a lot to you growing up. So what do you think it was about him? And then what what is having a strong father? What has that meant for you in the development of your life? Was it about Dan Mullen?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

So when I think about who my dad was to me at that age, I think of um when I was five, my parents my dad took a half day off work, and my parents took me to public kindergarten, starting elementary school, and I was so scared of being alone in that classroom with the other kids and the the kindergarten teacher, who was delightful by the way, not fair to her, but I was I was terrified of being left. And it was long as dad was in the room, I knew I was gonna be okay. But I think it took like an hour for him to leave because I would cry and run to him. Yeah, you're like eventually they had to distract eventually they could play with something for a minute. Eventually, the kindergarten teacher graciously took my parents aside and said, You guys actually need to go.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Because John needs to be free of the you know the loneliness here. And she knew because she'd been she was an old pro. She'd been through it before. She knew exactly it would take like five minutes and then I'd be fine. Yep. But I remember that Liz burned into my brain because I knew that if dad was in the room, I was gonna be all right. That's who dad was to me.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

His solidity, his dependability, his steadfastness, and his tender father's heart for me. I knew so growing up, he said uh a lot of good things, but one that stuck with me, um, it helped that he liked to repeat himself at key moments, so the consistency is a great piece of that. I picked that up from him. He said, John, a man needs to know when to be tough and when to be tender. And maybe the alliteration made it stick.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

No, it does, yeah. I've heard that before. Yeah, and it's uh man is true. Yeah. You know, because the he had both. Yeah, if you're only one or the other, you're not properly forming your sons into uh the men that they they need to become. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Because some sometimes there's there's different needs, um, there's different lessons that need to be learned, and you can't do the learning with all one or the other.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

You gotta know when to be both. I think that the interesting thing about becoming a dad, because I am one, is nobody tells you which situation demands which. Correct. You kind of know with some, but there's a bunch of them in the middle that you're like, is this tough love or is this uh do I need to bring you under my wing here? Like you don't really know. Yeah. So you just gotta do your best to navigate it.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Yeah. It helps that that dad and I were always pretty much on the same page. Like we our emotional clocks are kind of set to the same time zone.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

So we just kind of know what each other is thinking, more or less. Like he's intense, introspective, analytical, focused, disciplined, steadfast, a little moody. And I picked up all of that.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

I'm a little bit more up and down than he is. He's more steady as she goes, but with that exception, I am my father's son.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

I didn't know he worked for NASA though. Oh, okay. So so you were all in on engineering from the get-go. Did you did you think that you would go into NASA stuff? Because I was your time at Quartus and then priority design. I know you liked your time at priority design. What what were you doing for these places?

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Yeah, good question, man. Um yeah, my first internship actually was with NASA when I was 16 or 17. So I I was well immersed in the world of engineering from the earliest days I had. And I chose engineering initially because I thought I was going to go be a missionary engineer, which is like this tiny little sliver of of subset of people that go and do that. But like I wanted to go like build roads and bridges and and sink wells in Africa. That was kind of my undergrad and pre-undergrad desire. Yeah I want the technical training, and then I want the like the socialization and the like the religious formation of those around me through the gift of my technical expertise. An an engineering missionary, though. There are a few. There are a few. Uh actually, the the school I went to, Laterno University, went there for undergrad, middle of East Texas, middle of nowhere, like a thousand fifteen hundred on campus population, tiny, founded by RG Laterno, who was the inventor of a lot of earth-moving equipment. Patents were later sold to companies like um Caterpillar. So big, big stuff. Yeah. RG started the school to be like a Christian trades and engineering school. So this dream of kind of a reintegrated like God and work in the same community, this is not new.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

This is not even new in the Baptist world. Like this is a vision that we've been trying to get back to in America for a very long time. So my passion is an old passion. Um, but that kind of looking for the spiritual and the economic interweaving of a single life was my passion. And then I went to grad school at OU, as you mentioned, and then I just got nuked by by doubt and by bitterness. There were there was um just uh an increasing hollowness to my spiritual life all through the the end of undergrad, with the exception of this crazy like charismatic awakening that I had in the vineyard church in Illinois one summer in 2013. Hugely impactful. Shout out to my uh my good friend uh who may or may not listen to this. But he so Sergio helped me find the fact when I was about 20, about to be 21, interning in Illinois for a summer, happened to walk into a vineyard church, met Sergio like the first time there. He kind of took me under his wing, mentored me in walking with the Holy Spirit that summer. He's just a couple years older, so he kind of a few steps ahead. Still in touch, great guy. But what that showed me was God is father, God is near, God desires to fill me with the power of the Holy Spirit and to raise me up to walk in the ferocity and the power and the tenderness of his son. And so Dan Mullen's training met this charismatic awakening, which made me hugely impactful at the end, like senior year of my Laterno experience for about six to twelve months. And then as I entered grad school, I was still kind of coasting on that high and not replenishing the tank.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

I was six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months into no consistent prayer life, besides like, hello Lord, thank you for this day. I would like to read the Bible for five minutes, and now I'm off. And I was hanging out with all Christian people. I was in Campus Crusade, I was on their crew as I like to be called. You're around it. I was around it. I was immersed in it, but I was not internally resilient.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

And I was also naive enough to think that my life would never contain suffering. And I picked a little bit up from maybe from my my naivete, just upbringing, very sheltered, protected, whatever you want to call it. And then my charismatic exposure picked up a little sliver of Pentecostal triumphalism, just enough to have a bad theology of suffering, combined that combined those two things. And the first like bad breakup I had that was unexpected. Boom, you're not going to marry this girl. She doesn't want to marry you. God told you to go pursue her, and now your life is over. It's like God's a tyrant, God's a traitor, God's not trustworthy. I'm way outside my spiritual cover. It's the black and whiteness of black and white. It's like, all right, I guess we're done. Yeah. So I didn't walk away, walk away, but that opened up this massive wedge of bitterness in my heart for the next half decade. I could not get over it. And I I know that was some combination of mental, emotional, uh like brain chemical like depression, and then spiritual. Yeah. There was a there was a fair amount of spiritual oppression that I that I semi-knowingly welcomed into my life in sheer rage at the God that would thwart my will.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Basically. So it revealed me to myself in a really nasty way. It's interesting though, because God allows it. Yeah. And he uses it. He did. Yeah. He did. But what that did at because hitting it when it did was it nuked any desire to go be a missionary engineer.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

So I limped through grad school, found my first job in San Diego. Quartous engineering shout-out. Grateful for them. Um, gave me my start in the professional world. I thought I was gonna reinvent myself, dude. I thought I was gonna be this like this kind of edgy surfer, rock climber, like cool guy who went like camping out in the wilderness and was awesome, and all the girls wanted him. And like, turns out that's just not who you are, John. Like, you're not gonna be the surfer bro. You're way too unrelaxed. Like you've you've never been relaxed in your life.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

You're not gonna start now. I can't imagine it personally. You know.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

It's like I had nothing to drive to. Yeah, my life became about me, and I hated it.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah, I had nothing bigger to shoot for. Very common theme. Yeah. When we make it about us, it's kind of miserable.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

So when we talk about like the the the meaning crisis in young men, dude, I lived it. I lived it for long enough to know the bitterness of the taste. And it just saps your vitality.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

When there's nothing outside yourself worth striving for, worth sacrificing for, life gets so small.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Well, I can't wait to we we'll we'll get there in a few questions. Yeah, but um it's probably why you're uniquely equipped to be leading some of the things that you're leading today. I'd like to think you you've been there, you've felt it, you've been in the depths of it. Yeah, so you can reach down and offer a hand to people that are in the pit.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah, there's there's nothing that a dude who's doubting his faith can say to me that I haven't thought.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Zero.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Well, before we get to that point, you wrote this. Yeah, you said coming to Christ, I already heard you're five. You said you were five, then you were 20, then you were 27, and then you again at 31. That's what you said. So we covered the five and the 20. Now here's the thing: you're you're a smart guy, you're a fast learner. This might have been like the one thing that you're a slow learner at, is what I've uncovered. Yeah. So learner. Give me the progression. We've covered the five and the twenty. What happens later? So 27 and 31, this discontinued coming back to Christ.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

23 life collapse, grad school. Total, just like punching in the tin can, um, totally crumpled, angry at God. Four-ish, five-ish years later, four and a half call it. Um, I never stopped going to church. I went to evangelical churches, I went to a vineyard church in San Diego. Um and then I I bounced around a little bit and wound up at a church planted by Phil Wickham's brother, which is interesting. Evan Wickham. Yeah. Is that Park Hill? Park Hill Church out in San Diego. Beautiful venue, beautiful white building. Um that was the place where I would go to wrestle with God for an hour and a half every Sunday. And sometimes I would be so in inner turmoil and angst about whether or not he was real, whether or not I could trust him, that I would go and essentially probably just have a low-key panic attack for like an hour and a half. Um But you kept going. I kept going, because I knew if I'd stopped, what was I gonna what was I gonna be? I was I I was raised to be a man of God. I had no other way to be. So I was gonna be an angry one or I was gonna be dead. Those are kind of my mental options. Like I knew that if I went full into atheism, then the last little thread of hope I had would sever and I'd be an intellectual free fall. I would have nothing to anchor me. But I was I was also not able to let go of the bitterness and the anger or in the doubt, the the the ravenous doubt enough to stabilize back into the kind of the simplistic evangelical faith I'd had before. And so I was stuck on the edge of a cliff, is how I thought of it to myself. Like trying to camp and build a house on the edge of a cliff face.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

It's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

No, it's just like the yeah, the the fact that you had the awareness to know that. Yeah. Like I can't sever this last cord. Yeah. Or else I'll I'll die intellectually. Yeah, what's the point? Nothing will hold me together. None of it matters. Yeah. But then also wanting something deeper and being stuck in the middle, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Yeah, tormented. It it felt like being in a holding pattern in my own life, like a a plane waiting for the traffic controller to wave him down to to make a I couldn't touch down, or it felt like being locked out of my own house. Like I'd lost my keys and I could go up to the door, look in the window, and see all my stuff in there with the lights on, the heat on, but I'm outside in the cold, can't get the knob to turn. It's like I know, I know what it's like to be close to God, and I know what it's like to be outside here in the cold, but I can't figure out now that I've stopped believing in the in sola scriptura, and I can't just read the Bible and have it just make sense to me anymore because I've doubted too much. I have too many unanswered doubts. Historist of the Old Testament, like what the heck was the deal with the ancient Israelites, the the jump from the old to the new testament, like did Jesus really rise from the dead? How do we know? If he did, then how do we know that means he was who he said he was? Maybe he was just some guy that resurrected. We don't know. Like, okay, maybe the apostles had a collective psychotic vision. We don't know. Like all the things swirling, swirling. I couldn't get into my own house of faith.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

And I was in hindsight wrestling with two things. One was an intellectual lack of foundation, the other was spiritual oppression. I was being continually smacked around by by spiritual forces that I could not recover from and could not anticipate.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Did you recognize that at the time or is it only in hindsight?

SPEAKER_00 20:38

I did. But recognition does not equal freedom.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

So I knew my chains very well. That's good. I could articulate them very clearly and crisply and passionately, but I could not free myself. And so one day in church, I'm sitting there, I'm 27. It's 2019, I think. I think I have that year right. Sitting in church, this one had such a weird morning. This Anglican, this this like lay Anglican, charismatic, uh itinerant preacher, go figure that out, uh, was invited in to give a talk about his life and about the power of Jesus and the Holy Spirit in into Park Hill. Um I think I have that name right too. And I was sitting in the audience, I was like, okay, this guy probably has a gift. If spiritual gifts exist, and if God is real, and if Jesus is good, and if God the Father is good, and if this guy knows him, and if the Spirit's real and the Spirit can free me, then if, if, if, and he's he is not full of crap, I think if this guy offers to take a prayer call at the end of the service, I should probably go up because I was desperate enough to take anything. You know, like Jordan Peterson lectures can only get you so far, man. Like you can feel okay, like you should do something with your life, man. It's not so well. You can only listen to it for so long before you're like, I gotta hear a different voice. Yeah, for sure. Kermit the frog on acid, but uh hugely impactful for me.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I actually think, yeah, it's his stuff is good stuff, but great stuff because he tells you about like the heroic masculine.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

And the need to order the chaos of your own life. Make your bed, Bucko. And to do the things like you can actually be a good man. That was an anchor when nothing else was an anchor. I will always be grateful before God, before man, to Jordan Peterson, but he's not enough to anchor your life to.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

No, or your eternity as much as well. No.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

It was an intellectual salve, but there was a spiritual bullet wound. And so anyway, I'm sitting in church this one, this one morning, 2019, and the prayer call is called. I'm like, all right, I'm in, I'm up, let's go. So I go up there, I'm the last one in line because I want to take a minute. And man, it was crazy. I was I was wondering, is this going to be a dud? Is this going to be a dud again? Because some days you go to church and you have some tantalizing whisper of God's presence, and the next week you go and it's just like oh, this is all BS. This is all just crap. And so I knew that I was opening myself to the possibility of that disappointment, but I knew that my life was one big disappointment so far anyway. So I didn't really have that much to lose. And I go and this guy begins to pray over me. And after a couple false starts, you know, if you've ever been prayed for by a prophetic man, there it can be a little like, is this what you're thinking? No, not at all. Okay, let me try again. But after one of those, let me give some vague intro and see if I'm on the right track. Exactly. But then he just like skewered me.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

And I had um I had a physical and an emotional reaction. It felt like something in me and on me that was hostile against God's word and God's people and me specifically. Something that hated me was just summoned to the surface of my brain where I could feel it, and then its claws were slowly dried out. And there were three things that he spoke against over me, prayed against over me that day. Um confusion, which was the biggest one, I think. Anger and despair. And that was it, man. I was living a life of confusion, anger, and despair.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Well, confusion breeds the other two.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

And the two, yes, and spend enough time in anger and despair, and they breed a lot of confusion. It was it was this perfect little web of interlocking, like demonic hate that I had given access to in my running from God by giving him the finger. I opened the door to being like just taken out of the knees for so many years. But that day, that morning, I could feel the claws just give me enough breathing space to think.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

So after a massive counterattack that afternoon, where I was just pummeled by something trying to tell me that none of that was real. But by that point I knew it was like, aha, the strength of the counterattack implies the reality of the attack. Yeah. There you go. You just revealed too much, dummies. Uh-huh. That's awesome, though, man. My brain began to stabilize after that.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

So between 27 and 31, 31 is where you find Catholicism. Is that correct? How did that all come to be?

SPEAKER_00 25:09

So once that that by the way, that was an engineer throughout this point. So they did all throughout this time.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

The funny part is uh we haven't even gotten to the most interesting part of your story. Yeah. So you're still an engineer. You're still in in San Diego.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Bored to death. Bored to death. It's 2020, COVID shuts my life down, California massively overreacts, and I just think I gotta get out of here. I hate this. And this is providential. I had a friend in Ohio from my OU days who was like, dude, just come back to Columbus. It's fun, we'll hang out. He said this for years. And I was like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. So, Wes, if you're listening, thank you for keeping on the offensive all those years. And then a sep second friend in 2020 said, Hey, my company's hiring, actually. And we kind of need an experienced mechanical engineer. You should apply. And I'll put in a good word for you. And some part of me knew at that point that God was gonna open that door. The night before I got the offer for that job at Priority Designs, I had this overwhelming sense as I climbed this little hill b behind my condo in San Diego to look over this beautiful little desert canyon. I knew that I was gonna get that job. I don't usually get pre-sentiments like that. There was nothing to indicate that I would I would get that job, really, because I I was not sure I was I was well qualified for the role, but um there was not like a there was no indication that they were trying to beat down my door to hire me. But I knew that I was gonna get hired. And I decided to trust God in us in this just lean in, lean into this faith. Take that take the win. Take the win, John. So I said, Alright, God, I can sense that you're opening up a new chapter of my life. I can sense that you have you are opening this door for I'm gonna trust that you are indeed gonna open this door to me. I'm going to extend vulnerability to you again, knowing that if this is a disappointment, it will wound me, and I'll be right back in the cynicism. And then the next day I got the acceptance offer. And so that was it. I drove away from California, never to return to live there again. And the the minute I drove across the border into Nevada in the middle of the desert, I felt this immense weight roll off my back. That that that was not a happy city for me. Yeah. It was not a happy time for me. But I was given a reset. I was given a new chance at something fresh. So I show up to Columbus, get an apartment, start working at PD, spend the next three and a half years there, and all the while I'm slowly discerning Catholicism. How did it start? It started with Jordan Peterson. And it started with the loss of faith in the we'll say the simplistic worldview I had been believing. I found that once my confidence in solo scriptura, and by that I mean scripture alone, that now the simplistic way that most Catholics think Protestants read the Bible is to have nothing else in your purview, no other scholarship to kind of inform how you read or interpret the text. That's a straw man. Almost no one does that except like three backwoods Baptists somewhere in Kentucky. Sorry, that's not that's not polite. Somewhere in some some state. But Protestant scholarship, as you know, is incredibly rich and meaty, but it rests on this foundation of assumption that the text alone is self-authenticated, self-authenticating, self-verifying, and to some extent self-interpreting. And when that was, and so that was cohesive, it was a small, but a cohesive and intact and very comforting worldview that if you're born in it, it makes total sense because every question has an answer. The answer might be 30 seconds long and it might be a little shallow, depending on who tells it, but there is an answer. And so it was convinced that was my house. That was my house of faith. But when I got pushed out of that by suffering and the world no longer made sense, I found that I was asking questions like, who am I? How does the world hold together? How does my body and my how do my body and my soul interact? And I had evangelical friends trying to tell me the good answers I grew up with. But remember, I mentioned like it was like my front door got locked. It's like the key won't turn, guys. That's not it's not letting me in the house. I can't just like say yes and move on. This is now causing me to get stuck. And I cannot move on, engineer. I can't, I can't move on until I figure out the mechanism malfunction. And so Jordan Peterson approached it from a different way, not from solo scriptura, but from like Darwinian evolution and Jungian psychotherapy and archetypal like ancient uh mythology and all these different like the humanities, basically, the the mythological frame and and neuroscience and his his training as a clinical psychotherapist. And so he was talking about how the brain works. And I knew that that was probably real because if you're not Christian in America, you're probably materialist. Like if you're an atheist, you're probably materialist. Now there's a new age wave and all this other stuff, but the two things I was wrestling between were conservative, Baptist, or non-denominational Christianity and atheism. Those are the two things that are the most compelling to me. And Peterson said actually, neither one of these is terribly complete. Because what you need to understand is that you do not go through the world seeking factual correspondence. You do not first ask yourself, now before I sign up for this faith, did Jesus really rise from the dead? And please tell me with what percentage accuracy you can confirm this. And now, which of the 12 disciples died in what way? And are you saying that their faith was probably sure? Because if they didn't really build no one thinks like that. Like, no one starts there. You start with, like, where the heck am I?

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

What am I supposed to do? How do I know that anything I touch and interact with is real? Like, how do what is this place? Like, I wake up in reality, I wake up in adulthood, and I'm like, what the heck am I supposed to do here? And what Peterson says is young man, you must choose a heroic ideal to aim yourself at the highest thing that you can envision. And that's compelling. That's good YouTube.

SPEAKER_01 31:04

That is compelling.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Yeah, still is.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

Still is, and it's not opposed to the Christianity. So where did you land? I landed getting the most value I could out of Jordan Peterson's call to heroism and then call to like the mythological view of the world, story and narrative drive it. And then I wound up listening to Jonathan Peugeot one day, who is an Orthodox convert, grew up Baptist, French Canadian, converted to orthodoxy, I think 20 years ago or so, and has been making YouTube content all the while he he's um carving icons like a good Orthodox man should. But his whole deal is okay, you've you've heard the Jordan Peterson stuff, you've gotten the heroic masculine ideal. What if you want something of a cohesive worldview? I can explain to you that what Peterson is hinting at the church, the tr the historic ancient church has a more cohesive worldview than even that which Peterson is offering you. Because Peterson is still offering you a worldview that is primarily located in the individual. The ancient church gives you something that is heavenly and earthly and communal. And within that, your individuality makes sense. Come embed yourself in this narrative mythological frame. There's there's this perfect example that Peugeot uses. He says, This is a cup, and of course this is a water bottle, but this is a cup. This is a cup-like object. When I say cup, I don't have to explain to you the molecular composition of the of the plastic in the bottle. You know it's a cup. You don't you don't ask me a series of facts first about the object. You ask me what is this for? And so you need to know the identity of bottle or the identity of cup, the spirit, if you will, is manifested in the body or the vessel of this material plastic that is by human agency put into the right form to bear this meaning and to be used in this way. And so it is not facts or molecules that are the basis of reality. They are merely the expression of the supernatural and spiritual realities that they show.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

So that moved me from a frame that was primarily materialistic, which may or may not have like some faith sprinkled on top. That moved me into a faith or into a worldview that was fundamentally about encounter and about the interweaving of reality, the spiritual and the material echo each other, and the material houses the spiritual. This is essentially Platonic philosophy, but he gave it to me in a mythological retelling.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

That was a natural bridge from Peterson to Peugeot to sacraments. Because sacraments are nothing less and nothing more than a material bodily object hosting or showing or being imbued with a power that is outside it. So in the waters of baptism, the water is just water until the spirit interweaves his being, his presence into that water, giving it power. Which is why there but there's always this like it's not the material alone of the water, as if water, like just by being dunked, you become saved. But the sacramental understanding of baptism is it it's almost like weaving different levels of reality at the same time into each other. And so and you believe that from from all the sacraments.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

Yes. So whether it's baptism, yeah, receiving the Eucharist, confession, especially the Eucharist. Yes, all of these things represent that for you.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Yes. So it was a sacramental worldview and reality that was being shaped for me because the um the archetypal and the mythological, the meaning and the purpose of an act is somehow more important than the materiality through which the act is expressed. Sure. So that's kind of I don't know if that's too new agey, but that that's kind of like a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

I know it's not like the Eucharist is another great example of that. Like this is not simply bread. This is not simply wine.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Correct. And you may participate in that meaning and so be woven into that reality. Right. Which makes this a sacramental worldview of encounter, not a material, materialistic worldview of like dead matter, and then you just a brain in a jar. It's more or less the realization that you, John, your brain is now a part of this same reality of encounter. You don't get the objective view from nowhere. So your desire for black and white like transparency of all things is not only misguided, but impossible. But if you humble yourself and leave that behind, you don't get trapped in your subjectivity. You actually get invited into a world of encounter where the where the things and the people and and the moments that you participate in, you get to be woven into the narrative, the sacramental Eucharistic narrative of God's plan for the world. And so I brought and so when that key turned in the lock, I could finally get back into my house. But it the furniture was arranged a bit differently than when I last left.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

Well, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, the other the other interesting thing too is like you start to realize, like, well, the who am I and what am I here for? That the this purpose, like what am I all about? I'm not just this body. I'm not just here performing physical material functions in a material world. Like I'm here that can have real spiritual encounters. Yeah. And my actions and my thoughts and my words, if played out correctly in and amongst humanity, can impact eternity right here and now. Yeah. Because in fact, we're already eternal. Absolutely. We're living part of our eternal life right now through a physical lens. Yeah. But I'm not just this body, just like this cup is not just this cup. I mean, it's uh there's a lot of different things there. So, how okay, let me ask you this. Yeah, everything that you just went through, I can see how like these collisions that are happening in your brain and these new things that are unfolding, like these new, I don't know if they're what do you call them, truths that you've unlocked and uh things that have made sense of the world around you. How does that take you now from all right, I'm no longer just going to pursue this engineering life? I'm literally willing to give it all up and become a missionary. Man. Because you're is you're a missionary with St. Paul's outreach, and we haven't even touched on that. So I want you to talk, maybe, maybe start with what is St. Paul's outreach? Yeah. But then you have to tell us, like, okay, that is a specific Catholic um missionary on campus and post-college grad. What do they do? But how do you how do you literally give everything up that you've worked for to go do this now?

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Yeah, well, well, the secret is that I never liked engineering that much anyway. I guess that is it. That helps. That's very helpful. But the other the other secret is that well, it's a story, man. It's narrative, it's what kind of life story you're living. So when I moved to Columbus in 2020, I bought a house in Reynoldsburg in 20 December of 2020. And then in April, I think it was Easter season, um, right before Easter of April 2021, I meet a guy named Mike across the street. And it turns out Mike is a graduate of SPO at OSU. And Mike is has been brought up in something called a charismatic renewal of the Catholic Church, uh, which we can get into at some other point. But Mike was also a totally like awesome masculine warrior, Marine, Marine Reconnor, which is basically the SEAL team of the Marines. This dude did not mess around. Like he was he uh he was fit, he was smart, he was quick, he was social, he was generous, and he was living on a mission, and he was my neighbor. God airdropped this dude into my life, and he was my I didn't know any Catholics in Columbus because this was 2020. I had not come close to landing the plane in favor of Catholicism. I was debating between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism and Lutheranism and like I knew something magisterial and something sacramental had to be in the cards, but I didn't know which one. And so Mike shows up because God put him there 2021. He invites me into his network of dudes he's running with, and these guys were elite. Like these men got it. They they knew the Bible as well as I did. Well, nearly, because you know, Baptists kind of on top. But anyway, it was close. It was close. Unlike most of Catholics, yeah, you know. Uh the joke is a lot of Catholics know more Bible than they think they know. That's I've dad's the second time this week I've heard that.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

It's true because uh I I mean I grew up Catholic myself, but I never really read much of the Bible, and then once I dusted that off and read it, and then I went back to Mass, I'm like, oh yeah, this is all linear. Now I actually know where these verses are all at. So you know it, you just don't know where it comes from exactly at the time.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Yes, yes, yes. I read it linearly for the first time through by the time I was 12, um, which really set me up well to understand the mass. Yeah. Because anytime a reference is made, I know where to put it. I have the conceptual frame within which to put that context. Yep. So I can't imagine the frustration of trying to figure out the story of salvation history in the Catholic Church growing up without anything but the mass readings because you know them, but it's like you can't summon them. They're not they're not l laid out in a way that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

It's just like, yeah, this it is said somewhere, you know.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

So anyway, I think there's a and we'll get to it, but I feel like there is a that's changing. It is.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

I have a sense that it's changing of people wanting both.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

Um, SPO leading the charge. Um, keep going with your story. Yeah, no problem.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

I keep cutting you off.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

No, I appreciate you letting me just go here. Um, so Mike invites me to his network. Mike begins to invite me to more stuff. Like, hey, dude, we should run a Spartan race half marathon. And I'd been waiting like five years, ten years for some guy to do it. Were you like a fitness guy at that point? I was fit. I've always been fit, but I was not like extreme. I'd never run half marathon, never run more than like 10 miles of my life, didn't want to do it. I said, Mike, that sounds awesome, but that would take a lot of training. I don't want to wake up at 4:30 to go train with you before work because he worked at 6 a.m. on a construction site. Um, he was a construction uh management guy. And so I said no. And then the next week he invited me again and he twisted the knife a little bit. He said, John, there are moments in a man's life when he can decide to level up the amount of intensity and the amount of discipline that he can bring. And that unlocks the rest of his life. Do you want that? Like, oof.

SPEAKER_01 41:03

You kind of feel weird saying no.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

Yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

It's like what are you gonna I kind of want to just feel pretty comfortable under my covers, man?

SPEAKER_00 41:10

I'm gonna say exactly. So covers got yanked off, man. It was it was a moment of it, it wasn't quite the same level as like the spiritual self-revelation of that moment in 20 you know, 19 when I was blasted out of my you know, uh demonic stupor. But it was it was a similarly call-on moment of like, oh, I've just seen myself in the mirror and I don't love what I see. If I say no to this, what does that say about me? And so it wasn't like he was twisting my arm in a in a bullying way. It was just like, John, you said you want to be well you say iron sharpens iron. Iron sharpened iron. You said you want to do this, like you want to be this kind of man. This is what these kind of men do. Are you in or not?

SPEAKER_02 41:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

So I said yes. And then the next week I found myself training with Mike. I think it was April of 2022. Uh hopped the fence, got into the local um high school track, and then carried sandbags around the track as we ran. And I've never been more fit in my life.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

Well, it's awesome. Yeah, the iron sharpened iron thing is qu is really interesting, but because it's like you have to ask yourself, am I iron? Yeah. Like iron can't sharpen butter. Exactly. Like what am I?

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Yes. It was a moment of the city. What am I made of here? Precisely. That's good. So, in the same way that my father had given me my identity as son, that was a safe and bold identity. And then my time circling the drain, then being yanked out of the deep waters, you know, spiritually in my late 20s had done. I was kind of given like a reset there spiritually. And now Mike was there to help give me the next piece, which was the fraternal and the missional. And so it began to invite me to more things like that. The the half marathon Spartan, which was awesome, by the way, finished in like the top 10% of all competitors. I got a taste of what it was like to face the fear of one's own physical weakness and to to triumph.

SPEAKER_02 42:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:58

And so that like everything that he invited me into wound up being a life accelerator because it gave me more of myself back and expanded capacity in a way. So the next year we flipped a house together. Uh, and that was like nights and weekends for 11 months, and it almost broke me. But it almost for a time strained our friendship as well because we were both like you know, the rub is real when you're six months in and your like nervous system is shot from holding a hammer for three hours a night, and you're trying to figure out it's 10 p.m. and you just nicked uh a water line and water's spraying in the face, and you're like, Why did I do this? Like, what am I doing here?

SPEAKER_01 43:33

Oh, oh yeah. But anybody that's you know over the age of 30 has probably had a moment where like, why did I want to do this? Like there's something in your life that is harder than it you thought it would be. Um, whatever the fantasy was when you set out to accomplish the idea quickly fades when the work in the reality hits.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Much like training for the Spartan race, Brotherhood with Mike got me through. We still co on that house. And that's how you got introduced to. The SPO and the in the start with because his network became my network. So by 2023, start of 2023, everyone I hung out with was Catholic. I was like the token Protestant who was somehow, by worldview, like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Peugeot, I was like spitting stuff at that point because it was fresh, man. It was all right top of the dome. But I was not yet committed. I was on the fence. And I that was a fun place for me to be honest, because I was able to critique everyone and accountable to no one. But you can't live on the fence forever. Yeah, true. At some point you have to pick something, which to be to for a moment of seriousness, um Jordan Peterson needs to pick something. And I pray that God has mercy on him that he's able to pick something and commit to something because he's been on the fence about are you gonna follow Jesus or not for like the past ten years. And he's so caught up in the intellectualization of every problem that it seems like he likes that. And it's fun. It's fun to be a man who can critique everyone and be accountable to no one, but you you can't live there.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

I don't know if this is gonna be uh offensive or not, but I feel like it's it's easier to sound smart critiquing everything. Yeah, which is because there's way more ways to pick something apart than there is to you know hold fast, hold fast to something that's tremendous vulnerability to believe in something.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

Correct. And what and even Peterson even admits this. He says, talking about uh nihilists, like, hey, just because you can take apart a couch with a hammer doesn't make you a good upholsterer. Like just because you can destroy a worldview with doubt doesn't mean you can build anything that holds water.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

And so I finally decided in 2023, because my network of Catholic men was so strong through this SPO crowd, because everyone, everyone I knew had graduated from SPO at OSU and stuck around and was living in the same neighborhoods, raising their kids around each other, it was awesome. It was like that they were living the charismatic renewal of the Catholic Church, which is what if, hey Catholics, what if we read the Bible and prayed like the Holy Spirit might show up? Whoa, that would change some stuff, wouldn't it? And they were living it, man.

SPEAKER_01 46:05

So how do you how do you say, okay, I'm a full-time engineer with a salary? Yeah. How does it get to the point where you're like, I'm leaving it all behind and joining this?

SPEAKER_00 46:15

Yeah. Oh, that was what does it even look like in 2024 for sure.

SPEAKER_01 46:18

Do you raise your own funds? 100%, dude. Yeah, 100%. How did it get to that point? Because that's a that's an all-in style commitment. So how does it go from I'm learning about this, I'm dabbling, I'm the token Protestant, to I'm literally leaving everything behind and I'm going all in?

SPEAKER_00 46:40

Pragmatically, I was given a moment of choice because I wanted to ask out a Catholic girl. And I knew that I would not be an honorable man if I were not at least moving into openness to Catholicism.

SPEAKER_02 46:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

And so it really was like a little bit of a catalyst, I would say. But the pieces were in place. It's like I had done the prep work, done the prep work, done the prep work, done the prep work. I needed something to kind of force my hand, and that was it.

SPEAKER_01 47:05

Had you gone through OCIA or anything?

SPEAKER_00 47:07

I did, I signed up for OCIA online the day before I asked her out.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

So that was the precursor, so you could say, Yep, I actually am in OCIA right now for the last 18 hours.

unknown 47:18

Pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 47:20

See, hey, you're thinking ahead though. I like the planning, that's the engineer background.

SPEAKER_00 47:24

And the honesty was there. I knew I had to have that internal alignment. And so I spent the next four months asking myself, Do I it was no longer, do I have a compelling enough reason to enter in? It was do I have a compelling reason enough not to enter in? And I asked Jesus consistently in adoration, out of adoration, everywhere, do you want me to do this? Like, Lord, I've come back to you through intellect, through spirit, through encounter, through brotherhood. You've found me again. You are finding me. Where do you want me? And it was interesting. It wasn't like I got a huge sense of you must do this or I will like not be happy with you. It's more of you can serve me here. Yeah, you should it seems like you want this, John. I think this like I think this I don't want to speak with so much confidence for the Lord, but in my spirit I seem to hear him say, Go and my blessing will be on you.

SPEAKER_02 48:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:20

And I did. That's good. And I entered in in August of 2023 on the day of the Feast of the Transfiguration, which is appropriate. And I picked two confirmation saints, both Johns, John the Baptist and John the Apostle, the two Johns who have always spoken into my life, because my dad um picked a life verse for me, which is taken from Luke, where John the Baptist is born. And people said, Who then shall this child be? Because the hand of the Lord is upon him. And that's always been echoing in my ears for the past 33 years. So my father's words spoken over me found a culmination and a fulfillment, I think, in choosing St. John the Baptist and St. John the Apostle as my confirmation saints. And so knowing that I had my father's blessing upon me gave me the courage to one wander in the wilderness all those years, two, change cities, three, change jobs, four, find a new fraternal organization like SPO, five, convert. Six, eight months later, left my engineering job. And all in. Because now what started is the arena. You call it the forum now, right? Well, we have we have a number of things. The forum is the the top of funnel digitally to get interest in the local expression. These are all things you've created since journey. The forum I've created the arena I did not. That was an SPO creation at OSU since before, since 2022. Um, I inherited that intellectual property and have uh inherited I inherited a a group of about I think 50 dudes back in 2024 that has now become somewhere between 80 and 100, depending on the night. So it God is blessing it, the spirit is moving amongst it because young men are hungry for fraternity and hungry for a missional all-in life. Yeah. And it's just the question of will you allow the same things that impacted my life to impact your lives? Which is like, hey, hey guys, you have all these needs and all these demands and all these hopes and dreams for your life, but until you put down the the the posture of this is me and what is God gonna do for me, you can't actually receive anything. So I had to be stripped of my pride and my certainty about my own life to receive the gift of brotherhood and and and a change from from Protestant to Catholic and the change from engineer to missionary. I had to receive all of that. I was given all of it. I earned none of it. And so in my in my new humility, I was able to enter into a rich life that was more about we than me.

SPEAKER_01 50:47

And that so give me a little bit of taste of this because most of these guys are young guys. Yeah, you don't got a lot of sixty-year-old guys in this. These are young guys. Where whether you it's economically, um, whether you just look at like the state of things in our country, I mean there's not a lot of unity, there's a lot of the polarization that's that's taking place. Um do you feel like the call back to this firm foundation and these types of roots? I don't know you talked about like the call to adventure is how is that playing out? Yeah, is that what people are seeking and that's why they're finding you guys? Like what's what's the story with why it's growing?

SPEAKER_00 51:24

Dude, so much, uh, so much is going on there. I think to summarize it, here's what I think is going on death of meaning, death of purpose, death of community, death of fraternity, and then death of father figures. So absent dads combined with absent fraternal organizations, bowling leagues are dead. Robert Putnam wrote bowling alone out of no win, decades ago. It's gotten worse from there. The 50s was the heyday of American fraternal organizations of every kind. Hate 'em, well, hate them or hate them, but the Masons had a lot of loyalty from a lot of dudes from a lot of years. Elk Lodge, same thing. Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Church's option, same thing.

SPEAKER_01 51:59

Huge.

SPEAKER_00 52:00

Everyone was a joiner. Everyone wanted to be a part of the lodge, the hall, the club, whatever it was, that's gone, utterly gone. And that died for a number of reasons. But one reason was the death of those tight-knit, if you're talking the Catholic Church in particular, the tight-knit little Polish and Italian and German and Irish enclaves that surrounded all those historic downtown parishes.

SPEAKER_02 52:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:21

And so when the industrial, like deindustrialization of America hit, when the suburbification of American cities hit, when the car triumphed over walking, like and when Americanization triumphed over familial and like kinship loyalty to the old ways, you just nuked. And so American Protestantism has a little bit of more of an a lot more of an immune system against that atomization. Because in American Protestantism, you have it's primarily attuned to win in an individualistic competitive market landscape. Protestantism mastered mass media decades ago. Protestantism mastered the call to adventure decades ago. John Eldridge wrote Wild at Heart decades ago. Like they've had the monopoly on this stuff. Catholics just got nuked by the like the decades-long total collapse of their cultural integrity. And the parish was the sacramental center of their culture, but the culture around that like sacramental hub was the thing that held loyalty to that sacramental sacred center. And so, whereas the megachurch might have everything you need for a one-stop shop for community in the same campus, the parish did not. The parish was not set up for the 60s. The parish was set up for the old ways. And so in the 60s, sexual revolution, abortion, divorce, no fault divorce, like the destruction of order. And then a couple decades later, the entry of women into the workplace and the destabilization that created, and like, how do we get married? How long does when does marriage happen? And then the like the crazy devaluation of our currency and the loss of ability to purchase a home. There you go. You know? Like, yeah, you know that business pretty well. You see it. And so that's that's the like everything hit at once, dude. It was like the 60s to the 90s were like, hey, can you imagine getting like 12 sucker punches in your left kidney at the same time? That was what happened to Catholic culture. That's what happened to fraternal culture. So of course, young dudes are lost. And then digital media, porn video games, deaths of despair. Like, yeah, more young dudes now commit suicide, whether intentionally by drug overdose, than old dudes. That has never been inverted before in the history of humanity. Is that true? Yes. I'd know this, I'd know the ratio, but it's not pretty, man.

SPEAKER_01 54:25

It's like the That's not good at all.

SPEAKER_00 54:27

No, no. And maybe it's like young through middle-aged, but typically you'd find, like historically, you'd find old, sad widows, you know, of a senior assistant age, you know, trying to end it. Now, it's young guys, up through middle-aged guys. Like something is dramatically off. And we are trying to put some of the wreckage together. And so, yeah, this is the Catholic Church with its sacramental clarity and its hierarchical order and its roots and tradition, of course, that looks like a safe harbor. And then you get a few talented apologists like Matt Fred and Trent Horn. And of course, it's going to take off an Instagram, which has the ability to use images and sound bites way faster than complicated like textual arguments. Uh so the old like tract-based evangelization that would have been popular in the 90s.

SPEAKER_02 55:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:10

It's just Instagram reels now. So you can you can share like a based crusader meme with a guy way faster than you can walk through a chick tract. You know, it's just this is the fast-paced nature of everything, the shortened attention span, the rise of visual learning once again, the loss of like deep written forms of communication, all of that means that this digital moment of oversaturation with hype and and sounds, but a yearning for tradition, Catholicism is actually pretty perfectly poised to enter that space and look really appealing. Now the question is, what are we going to do with these dudes in Gen Z coming into the church once we get them? Because we've got no answer for that. Not set up for them. Not set up for their flourishing. That's why we have to build, like I'm trying like crazy to build the back end infrastructure and like logistical support for connecting these dudes to each other and then through the generations all around the city of Columbus before this little Gen Z bump fades out again. Yeah. Because if you don't have the back end, then it doesn't matter how many guys you have coming into the church, five years later they're going to be gone.

SPEAKER_02 56:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:09

Because why would they stay? You know, people most people don't stay deeply converted for the theology alone. To most people, the theology is expressed again, this encounter theology in the community that they're a part of. You're right.

SPEAKER_01 56:22

You got to have the relationships and the mechanisms to foster it and keep it growing, or else it just dies. Yeah. Anything you feed grows, but if it's like if it's initially fed and then it's just left on its own device, yeah, it's it's not gonna last. Yeah. Wow. It's really, really good. So when you look out at the future, like what's the thing that you're the most optimistic about?

SPEAKER_00 56:42

Uh I'm actually the most optimistic that, and this might be a little spicy, but I think the middle class as we've known it is going to continue to fade out. I think we're entering a world of monopolistic consolidation of key economic players soaking up all the assets. And I think that's agree. I mean, yeah, accelerated during COVID. Yep. Uh 1.20% of all US dollars printed ever were printed in the 12-month span immediately after COVID was announced. So that's going to have some consequences. Um, I see there the only thing that is showing signs of technological innovation the past 50 years is the internet and now AI. The net effect of that is going to be marginal productivity gains and massive decrease in workforce need. So I don't see I see the old American dream narrative as becoming more and more untenable, which I actually consider to be a severe mercy because there is nothing that kills a culture like putting it to sleep with comfort. And being able to push the comfort button is going to only be possible at the lowest common denominator level. If you can only afford today's hit of drugs and afford this, you know, OnlyFans content and this video game, then you're either going to have nothing or you're going to be desperate enough to go seek something outside yourself.

SPEAKER_01 57:54

I do think that there's something interesting that you just said, because um most people see those things that I agree with you that those phenomena exist and that's probably where we're heading in a lot of ways. A lot of people think that that's bad and looks scary. But you just pointed something out that's very different. Like we've been conditioned to this level of comfort for a long time, which has really dulled our senses. It's kind of like lulled us to sleep and allowed. Yeah. Where it's it who knows? Maybe this is what's going to bring the next awakening and the next great revival in our country and people returning to real purpose and real hope in Christ, and not putting all their hope and their purpose and just like, hey, what's the next comfortable thing? What's the next thing I can place my own temporary security in?

SPEAKER_00 58:37

I measure richness in my network density and in my mission alignment with the men around me, not my bank account.

SPEAKER_02 58:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:44

My richness now is how many dudes that are all in can we run with? Yeah. That's it. That's that's because if I have that, that's what builds anything you care to name. That's that's the force that builds cultures and civilizations. It's not your bank account.

SPEAKER_01 58:58

And then how do we take that idea and then exponentially extrapolate that through good, strong families and fatherhood and everything else that you've already talked about? Amen. Amen. Without you can change uh honestly, you can change things pretty quickly if you look at the web effect of uh just one or two generations later, how quickly things can change.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

It is 20 to 40 years, man. So I I think in 50 to 100 year time horizons, I'm I'm gonna plant as many trees as I can in Columbus, spiritually speaking, whose whose shade I will never enjoy. And that's that's great. If I can just set up my grandkids for a renewed, rebuilt Christendom within Columbus, then I will have accomplished everything I hoped and dreamed for. And so that's really the question of how many different networks of Catholic men can I create so that no matter what kind of guy comes through my front door, I've got something to offer him. Because the arena is going to be the right fit for 80%, God willing, uh at least 50% of Catholic dudes in their 20s. That's just gonna be like, hey, brotherhood, mission, read your Bible, pray. It's pretty simple, dude. Yeah, just get your butt in the game. But if you need something different than that, if you're a young dad, if you're a middle-aged dad, if you're a senior guy, like if you're a whatever art student from Wisconsin, doesn't matter. I'm gonna have something to connect you to and something to plug you into. There's gonna I don't want to, I don't like loose ends. I'm a systems guy, engineer. I don't like having one thing that doesn't capture everybody. So it's gonna be like, okay, if you're talking the Apple store, the arena's the iPhone in the middle of it. But there's gonna be a lot of products around the perimeter of that store that if this is not for you, I hate to use such a consumeristic model, but you know, it makes sense. Whatever. I was gonna say ironic given the past hour of conversation. It really is.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:39

Hey, it's good though. Well, dude, I uh I I applaud the effort and obviously I applaud the willingness and the obedience that you've displayed in your life because it's not it's not normal. Thanks. Um it's been blessed though. I wish it would become more normal. You too. But I do think that uh the way that you've answered the call of God on your life and the way that you've been open to whatever it is that he's doing, even when it hurt, yeah. Um there's that's admirable. There's something to be said for that. So thanks for uh thanks for everything that you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

I'll I'll leave you with uh with a quote from Dan Mullen. When when he was raising me, he said, um probably while making this expression too, with a hand over his face like this John, whatever God tells you to do, you go do it. And so when I heard the knock of the opportunity that I thought the spirit was presenting to join SPO, I did it. Yeah. Because I knew that um my father's blessing rested upon me.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:34

That's good. Yeah. I mean, if if everybody would just listen to what they hear God's call on their life pulling them toward, yeah, the world would be a lot different place.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:44

I I am not at rest until my entire generation of Catholic men in the city of Columbus knows the voice of the Father.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

I love it, man. Yeah. Well, thanks for uh thanks for being here. We'll keep track of everything that you're doing. Happy to be here. I'll put links to uh all your stuff that's that's going on with the arena, the forum, uh SPO, I'll put all that in the show notes. So thanks. If you guys want to check it out, uh John Mullen will be all over uh the body of of the notes of this show. But uh if you want more resources, uh access to older shows, newsletter, uh books, or anything else, you can find it at markgrees.com. But we're over and out, buddy. All right.