Bridging the Gap Between the Pulpit and the Workplace

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0:00:00 – (Mark Vroegop): I think what we’re going to be able to do by God’s grace is put people in front of other people through this podcast and say there’s wisdom here and experience, knowledge, expertise and biblical wisdom. And I just think that’s really important and really rare.

0:00:20 – (Dan Doriani): Hello, friends. This is Dan Doriani with your Corner of the World, a new podcast on the Gospel Coalition Network. And I’ve got my friend, my co host, Mark Rogop, with me. Mark, say hello. Yeah.

0:00:33 – (Mark Vroegop): Hey, Dan. It’s great to be on this program together with you and excited for what the Lord has for us in this journey together.

0:00:39 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah. So this is the initial episode of a. I’ll say renewed, now in its sixth year, but getting a new start, a podcast on faith and work and the Lord’s truth, the way it guides us, God’s grace in the realm of work. So we’re right around 100 episodes. And it really seemed to me, Mark, as we have this introductory conversation, that I’d finished interviewing all my famous and hyper stimulating, fascinating, articulating friends and I needed help and I thought, I’ve used up all my ammunition.

0:01:20 – (Dan Doriani): What can I do? And I thought, I have some friends who care about this. And I thought of you, Mark, because you’ve also been part of the faith and work movement. You’re pastor of a large church and that became a part of your ministry for a while. And I thought, man, I just need help getting bright. Quick. Interesting Christians who are endeavoring to apply their faith, live out their faith in the workplace.

0:01:47 – (Dan Doriani): And I said, mark, would you like to be my partner? And you said, yes. Why did you say yes? Why do you care about all this?

0:01:53 – (Mark Vroegop): Well, I like you and I think you’ve helped the church in the subject of work. You’ve been to my local church and did a great job when we talked about this. So I’m very familiar with your body of work. This subject is really important to me. I think it’s a really important moment. And I just also am really curious to learn from the people that we’re going to have on this program who just are really interesting people.

0:02:15 – (Mark Vroegop): And so you got some pretty cool friends that I’m really interested in knowing more about. And I just think this is a really great conversation to have.

0:02:23 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, that’s. Somebody asked me a while ago, why do you do this? I said, because I get to interview fascinating people who are trying their best to apply their faith in an immense diversity of jobs about which I would know nothing if I didn’t get a chance to talk to them.

0:02:39 – (Mark Vroegop): Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it? People are doing amazing work all around the world. It’s really crazy.

0:02:44 – (Dan Doriani): It really is. Absolutely.

0:02:46 – (Mark Vroegop): So, Dan, when you started the podcast and your book on work, what led you to step into this space? You’re a seminary professor and you’re really interested in faith and work. Why?

0:02:59 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, that’s. Thanks for that question. So it goes back a ways. I had two grandfathers I really loved, and they’re very different men. The one was basically a highly educated but very unsuccessful farmer. A man of great faith and admirable in so many ways. But I also noticed how very hard he worked with so little effect. He was really poor. And I had another grandfather who was an opera singer and an artist, a painter of some note.

0:03:29 – (Dan Doriani): And, you know, it just struck me how totally different these jobs were. And when I became older, I realized that he actually, he almost lost everything because he was willing to stand by his convictions and pay a price for those convictions. And then my father was one of these people that just wanted to know everything all the time and would, if he’d meet an astronomer, he’d want to talk to them about astronomy for an hour, and if he met a metallurgist, he’d want to talk about metallurgy. And so I think I caught that from him.

0:03:59 – (Dan Doriani): But to move it forward, it partly had to do with the people who nurtured me when I was a new believer, which I now know the term for them is Neo Kuyperians, which means they’re really serious about the idea that whatever we do, we should do it to the glory of God. And that includes making hamburgers or, or space shuttles, whatever you’re doing, working as an ambassador, working as a librarian, and after 17 years as a professor, mostly teaching New Testament and just being an exegete and studying the life of Christ and the teachings of the New Testament. For a variety of reasons, I became a pastor of a very large church, right by a major university.

0:04:42 – (Dan Doriani): And so the church had all sorts of fascinating professionals. And, you know, they recognized me as sort of one of them. You know, I have a PhD. I’m a Prof. And so they would, they would seek me out one by one for guidance. And they had really complicated questions to which I didn’t have the. The answer by any means. This would be surgeons doing experimental things. This could be someone who’s making multi billion dollar financial deals, lawyers with very difficult, complicated cases in front of them. And I started slowly, but actually, I quickly decided that one of the best things I could do was to have some level of focus on how they could practice their faith.

0:05:26 – (Dan Doriani): And you and I are both men who try to emphasize God’s grace. It’s also very clear that they thought they made mistakes. And in fact, they probably did make mistakes. And so they needed not just to hear my idea about guidance, but they also needed to hear about the grace of Christ. It both empowers them for their work and forgives them when they fail at work or when perhaps in the middle of a huge project, they realize they’ve maybe been neglecting their wife or their children or their husband.

0:05:55 – (Dan Doriani): So it was a matter of pastoral interest. And if I can keep going for a couple more minutes. Of course, when you’re a professor, you have to read widely. That’s part of your job. And I read Martin Luther and his Address to the German Nobility in which he stresses the priesthood of all believers and tried to break the grip of the clerical powers is the only word for it in the late Middle Ages, Reformation era.

0:06:24 – (Dan Doriani): And say, listen, you’re responsible for the guidance of your society and the priests actually, and the bishops and the cardinals don’t know everything you do, you know, you know what your people need. And of course, that’s a powerful principle. That means that the pastor doesn’t get to tell the merchant what to sell and the price to sell it for. They kind of stand back. And this is Kuyper, you know, the theologian is not the guide, but the theologian and the pastor do offer guidance for people. And when we approach somebody, this is now Kuyper, Abraham Kuyper, who’s maybe got expertise in government, let’s say, or in publishing, we have to understand that we have vastly less knowledge about government or publishing newspapers or magazines, whatever the case might be, vastly less knowledge than they do.

0:07:18 – (Dan Doriani): And yet they do need guidance. They need as believers, they need the big principles that can shape them. So those are all the factors that ran together. And I did have a little period of time when I started to teach biblical ethics. And it seemed this was my great opportunity to dig into the question of work. So I wrote a pretty serious book called Work Its Purpose, Dignity and Transformation. And then a lightweight book that people can use in Bible studies here and there called Work that Makes a Difference.

0:07:52 – (Dan Doriani): And that’s meant to be a book anybody can pick up and say, hey, let’s read this with five friends and talk about it. So I could keep going. I’ll stop right there. You want to probably ask a follow up question. That’s what got me started.

0:08:04 – (Mark Vroegop): That’s amazing. I got lots of questions for you. So you started off in this journey. You’re doing the podcast, you’re writing the book. And then I think you begin to notice, which is you and I have talked about this, this gap between business leader experience or marketplace leader, just work experience and church experience. Can you just diagnose that? Because part of the reason that we’re doing this podcast is actually to try and speak into that gap. So could you define for our listeners what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve, if you will, or just try to help with?

0:08:38 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, sure. And I want to kick it back to you because you have a lot to say about this as well, but I’ll start us off. So. So you and I both talked about level 100, 200, and 300, and I want to hear you about level 200, which is what we labeled yours for some reason or other, not because it’s inferior. If you just called it that one

0:08:56 – (Mark Vroegop): day, hey, I’m good with it.

0:08:57 – (Dan Doriani): I’m good with it.

0:08:57 – (Mark Vroegop): You’re the Prof. I’m just the guy along for the ride. So go ahead.

0:09:00 – (Dan Doriani): But level 100 is to say, listen, all of life is redeemed. Jesus is not just Lord of your soul. He is. He saved you, but he didn’t just save you from destruction, death, judgment of God. He also saved you to serve him for the common good, to love your neighbor as yourself. And we work 10,000 hours easily in a lifetime, probably much more than that. And therefore, the most obvious place in which we love our neighbors ourself is probably the workplace, because we have training, we usually have capital, we usually have a team. So if we have a defect, we all have defects.

0:09:40 – (Dan Doriani): If we have a defect or a gap, we have a team of five or ten people. And together we can accomplish things that we could never accomplish by ourselves. And so you say that to people. And some people are blown away. I mean, they think, look, on Monday, I do what I’ve got to do. I got to make a living. I got to cut off my competitors at the knees. I’ve got to do what the boss says, even if it seems immoral, if not possibly sometimes illegal.

0:10:08 – (Dan Doriani): And you say to people, listen, it’s all the Lord’s. And they’re struck by that. And you also tell them, work is good, it’s not evil. It’s not a punishment for sin. It feels like a punishment sometimes because it’s fallen now. But work is not evil. And that’s all number 100. And you and I both have to repeat that over and over and over. And people often will say to us, okay, we got it, we got it. Stop. We’re done with that. Move on.

0:10:32 – (Dan Doriani): So then you’ve moved on to 200. I’ve moved on to 300. Let me throw it to you. What do you do in level 200? We both do level 100, the basics, which all the good books, so many good books, have the basics. What do you do at level 200?

0:10:46 – (Mark Vroegop): Well, at level 200, it converges with both my experience and the TGC Theological Vision for Ministry, which first. Theological Vision for ministry. One of the key elements of that on our foundation documents is the idea of the integration of faith and work, but yet also in the context of local churches. So while the 100 deals with work is good, the 200 level is, well, how does this actually integrate into your church experience so that there isn’t this divide between laity and clergy, but also not a divide between Monday through Saturday and Sunday?

0:11:22 – (Mark Vroegop): And so as a local pastor, in my experience at College Park Church, it was marketplace leaders in particular who were extraordinarily helpful at very particular moments in the church’s life. And as they found community in the context of our local church, they realized, oh, these gifts that I have that I use Monday through Saturday actually can be used to serve my local church. And I saw business leaders, marketplace leaders, really come to life in terms of the integration of their whole being.

0:11:52 – (Mark Vroegop): And then I’m compelled by the vision in Exodus 18 where Moses is doing his thing and he’s judging the people and he’s got a particular system. And Jethro shows up and he’s like, you can’t. You can’t keep doing it this way. So somebody who’s not doing what he’s doing is seeing what Moses is trying to accomplish. And I love. This is what Jethro says to Moses if he takes his advice. He says this, if you do this, God will direct you. You will be able to endure. And all this people also will go to their place in peace.

0:12:23 – (Mark Vroegop): So I have found in my life a lot of Jethros, a lot of folks in ministry leadership, but specifically in marketplace leadership, who have said, hey, have you thought about. Or, we did this? Or I’ve had this experience, and I found them, their general knowledge of how to be able to lead and think of people to be extraordinarily helpful for local church ministry and particularly for my life as a pastor. So that’s the 200 conversation. How do we bring this into the Local church. And now for the 300 conversation is what?

0:12:53 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, let me go back to 200. So you. You know what? As some people point out, one of the sad things is when somebody who has tremendous gifts, which they’ve honed for years, Monday to Friday, is told, hey, why don’t you spread mulch around the building on Saturday? And there’s nothing wrong with spreading mulch, but if someone has legal expertise that the church desperately needs. Right, let them use it. In fact, one of my friends, a lawyer friend, has helped immensely with our very integration of my podcast that’s been going for five and a half years over to tgc, because, believe it or not, there’s a lot of work doing that, and you and I know nothing about it.

0:13:31 – (Mark Vroegop): Nothing. Praise God.

0:13:32 – (Dan Doriani): We don’t know anything. Yeah, but there are people who do. So level 300 is trying to get leaders together to talk through the ways in which they would apply their faith in their complex situations. So if you get a bunch of people, a group of men and women in the medical field, you and I can get them started and say some things about medicine, about caring for the weak and the poor. And then there’s a sense in which we drop off.

0:14:00 – (Dan Doriani): They just know so much more that we’re catalysts and we get a conversation started and we fall silent. I remember I was doing a cohort with a group of leaders at one point, and I said, here’s some principles we all need to consider. And then they just took off. And, you know, I was no longer. For a while, I said, oh, I’m no longer the spoke of the wheel. They’re not talking to me. They’re talking directly to each other.

0:14:25 – (Dan Doriani): And then I became the moon off, drifting off into another solar system. I’m saying. And doing nothing. They said, hey, Dan, you haven’t said anything for a while. I said, I don’t even understand what you’re talking about anymore, but you seem to be doing great, so keep it up. And when you’re done talking about this, you tell me, and then I’ll, you know, I’ll listen to you tell me how I can possibly help you with this.

0:14:52 – (Dan Doriani): Good Christian men and women in business have immense expertise. They’ve earned the hard way about the way their realm of life works and how they can bring life and gospel and healing and truth and justice. It’s so much deeper. But they also. They’re not theologians. They can get. They can have areas of ignorance, and they can get stuck when they have. Maybe. Here’s a simple one. I Had any number of conversations. I’m sure you did, too.

0:15:20 – (Dan Doriani): With business leaders who feel like they’ve sinned when they dismiss somebody, when they fire somebody.

0:15:28 – (Mark Vroegop): Oh, yeah.

0:15:29 – (Dan Doriani): And you have to walk them through that over and over again and say, it’s actually an act of love to the whole team. And possibly an act of love. We’re not going to get into this right now, but it could be an act of love and grace to the person who’s performing really poorly. But to keep someone on indefinitely is to harm many people, maybe even risk your entire enterprise, so you have to go through those things with them. Or a banker who thinks, I’m sinning every day because I charge interest.

0:15:57 – (Dan Doriani): And the Bible says, don’t charge interest. And I mean, you know, the burden lifts when you say, no, no, it’s interest free. When it’s a needy brother, it doesn’t mean you never charge interest ever. And the man just relaxed and says, so you mean I haven’t been sinning every day for the last 27 years? He’s a dear man and a godly man. I said, that is correct. You have not been sinning every day for 27 years.

0:16:26 – (Dan Doriani): So that’s level 300.

0:16:27 – (Mark Vroegop): Yeah, it’s remarkable. It’s so cool when the church or our relationships become the means of additional amplification or discipleship. Conversations that expand beyond us. And I anticipate that happening through this podcast. I have two sons that are in the medical field, and one of them had a particularly challenging question, and it was just above my experiential pay grade. It wasn’t above my theological acumen, but it was outside of my applicational wisdom. I didn’t know how this text applied to that, but by God’s grace. We had an elder who is a.

0:17:04 – (Mark Vroegop): A faculty member of a major medical school, and I was like, hey, you need to meet so and so. I think he can really help you because. And sure enough, he did. So in some cases, it’s just finding the connections that are necessary, and that’s a really powerful thing. And, you know, when you were at our church for that theology weekend, not only did we have your plenary talks, but we had breakout sessions for people with.

0:17:30 – (Mark Vroegop): By their profession. It was remarkable because I saw with my own eyes what you’re talking about. You got lawyers, doctors, government workers, teachers. Like, they have unique applications and unique struggles as it relates to the gospel. And when they found each other in the same church, it was powerful. I just stepped back like a farmer, like, the plants are starting to grow. Let’s just watch what happens. It was amazing.

0:17:53 – (Dan Doriani): Absolutely right. Absolutely right.

0:17:55 – (Mark Vroegop): When you think of kind of what your hopes and dreams are for, where this conversation goes, in light of your, you know, experience with, you know, 100 plus episodes, what do you. What are you hoping happens next with this conversation?

0:18:09 – (Dan Doriani): One of the things that I’ve thought about a lot is the way in which these things grow. And so it goes something like this. I’m a. I’m a teacher. I’m a professor. I’m a pastor. You are pastor and teacher and a leader. And so we have cortex that we think of. Whatever we do, do it all. The glory of God in all things. Christ should be preeminent. The days are evil, therefore, make the most of the opportunity. So we have these core texts in our mind.

0:18:41 – (Dan Doriani): And I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite passages is Job, chapter 28, verse 12. It’s where Job is talking about the technology of his day. It’s mining. And he’s just astonished that people are building these shafts into the earth and they’re dropping down on ropes and they’re. They’re damming up the water so they don’t, you know, get water on their enterprise. And they’ve got candles attached to themselves and they’re finding gold and silver and sapphire and copper and iron.

0:19:09 – (Dan Doriani): And then he says, but where can wisdom be found? And it’s one of those questions that is, it is not answered by the text. It’s supposed to linger with us. And the answer, I think the answer is the answer is found in Christian community through prayer, searching out the key scriptures, but then meditation and prayer on those. And that’s one of those things that occurs best and most when brothers are working together. You know that passage In Ecclesiastes chapter 4, one will fall down, the other will pick him up. A cord of three strands is not easily broken. When one person falls down in the workplace, who’s going to pick them up? If the field is engineering, probably another engineer who’s a believer. Right.

0:19:54 – (Dan Doriani): If there’s a cord of three strands trying to change something in a, let’s say, a corrupt or extremely hostile workplace, one person alone is not going to do it. It’s going to take a team. Well, who’s that team going to be? In a sense, what I’m trying to do. To do, and I think you’re trying to do, what we hope to do is bring in guests who are talking about things, people who have deep Christian conviction and have been sort of probing an area of life.

0:20:21 – (Dan Doriani): For years, according to the best light they have. And they’re articulate and they can tell their story well. And then the person who’s listening to us, to them, says, oh, because we’re creatures of story. And when we hear. We’re going to interview shortly a woman whose field is exercise video. She’s wonderful, but especially postpartum. And she’s going to tell her story about postpartum depression and how regular exercise helped her come out of that.

0:20:53 – (Dan Doriani): That’s a powerful story. That’s a powerful story. When people are suddenly depressed, they. They heard about postpartum depression. It’s what happens to other people. Oh, now it’s happened to me. Now I can listen to somebody who worked through it, through their work, in part, not by seeing a counselor or something. I don’t know if she saw a counselor. Maybe she did. But the stories about people who took an idea and made it powerful and took it from a curiosity to something that was beneficial or entertaining or delightful for hundreds of thousands or millions of people. That’s another podcast coming up soon.

0:21:31 – (Dan Doriani): And those people are going to inspire others who are believers to apply their principles to the workplace when maybe they’re stuck. They want to be disciples, and they don’t quite know how. So that’s my hope. What’s your hope?

0:21:46 – (Mark Vroegop): I mean, I just am excited to hear the learnings and wisdom from the people who are on the ground in the marketplace, how it connects to the local church. My end game, and I think some of this is just because of my experience in the local church, is to hopefully help marketplace leaders not only know how to engage in their church, but how to actually engage in a better way with their pastoral staff.

0:22:09 – (Mark Vroegop): I find that a lot of marketplace leaders don’t quite know how to engage. And I think the other is I think there’s a lot of pastors who don’t know how to engage. And I think a lot of our listeners will be marketplace leaders. I hope eventually there’s more folks on the pastoral side, because I think sitting in the seats in our sanctuary are some of the most unbelievable resources for learning, for wisdom, even for future ministry positions potentially.

0:22:36 – (Mark Vroegop): And there’s just this gulf that exists between pastoral staff and marketplace leaders. And I just want to see if we can kind of bridge that gap a little bit, maybe give them some tools. You know, we did a survey at TGC of some of our churches in this space, and it’s remarkable and a little concerning. Marketplace leaders don’t feel like the church is doing a very good job in talking about this issue.

0:22:58 – (Mark Vroegop): But pastors think they’re doing a great job talking about this issue. And so I’m like, wait a minute, what’s going on? Something’s missing here. And I’d like to, you know what

0:23:07 – (Dan Doriani): the defensive pastor says? He’s talking about it every four weeks and they don’t come those weeks. If you would just come to church all the time, you would hear me give my wisdom. But you’re absolutely right.

0:23:16 – (Mark Vroegop): Yeah. And the other thing that they say in the survey and when we did some follow up interviews is they said, no, I mention work all the time. And what they think, what we think, pastors think, is when I say, so when you’re at work this week, think about how or when you’re at work this week. But the person in the seats listening to that thinks, you don’t even know what my work is like. And so it’s like a guy who’s been married for 30 years talking to singles like he was single in the 90s when he was 19.

0:23:51 – (Dan Doriani): I’m going to reflect on my experience as a single college sophomore. Not very helpful. No.

0:23:57 – (Mark Vroegop): And so there’s just, I think there’s some opportunity to bridge that gap. Can I go back to the wisdom thing that you mentioned?

0:24:05 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, sure.

0:24:06 – (Mark Vroegop): So we’re in a moment technologically and in the marketplace and in society where, man, there’s just a lot of information and a lot of fast information coming our way, even through artificial intelligence. And yet wisdom, wisdom is different. So can you just unpack that a little bit of kind of why this moment, this conversation could be more helpful maybe than even five years or 10 years ago because of what’s happening in the marketplace.

0:24:39 – (Dan Doriani): Probably the most important thing to say is we’re inundated with information and we don’t know what to do with it. The temptation when we need information is to go shallow, be contented with a quick search via AI or Wikipedia or whatever modality we’re using, and then move on. And so what we have is somebody called us pancake people. That is to say, we’re very flat and spread out. And I’ll add, you know, it’s basically flour and a little bit of milk and some water, not a whole lot of substance and very shallow.

0:25:15 – (Dan Doriani): And so what we need to do is go deeper. And I have this conversation. I’m sure you do too. I have this conversation all the time with my seminary students. I’m currently a seminary Prof. Again. And how you need to have what people sometimes call an architecture of ideas and know some things extremely deeply and out of that depth. You don’t try to know everything. You go very deep. You could become truly expert at something like, say, accounting.

0:25:43 – (Dan Doriani): And then you can do great good in the world because you have true expertise. And you can address things like a few episodes ago on the previous version of this online gambling and what it does, what the stats are, how addictive it is, how it’s different from Las Vegas gambling, and so forth. The man who wrote that is a Regents professor at one of America’s leading universities. He is a big time expert in economics, calculation and accounting.

0:26:12 – (Dan Doriani): And therefore he can speak off the top of his head on this with great conviction with massive amounts of data. So what we want to do is help other people lay hold of people who have massive amounts of information. And to be honest, you and I have talked about this. People who are good at articulating what they’ve learned over a span of years in honestly, two or three minute bursts, that will be extremely influential to people in that field. But it also represents how expertise operates and how a Christian who’s seeking to apply their faith graciously and with depth and with justice in their field goes about doing it.

0:27:00 – (Dan Doriani): So to a certain extent, it’s inspirational. We want to inspire you to go deeper. That’s one answer I could give. You have an answer, I’m sure, and there are many other good answers.

0:27:11 – (Mark Vroegop): I just think that judgment and wisdom is going to be the new, very valuable resource, information you can get all over the place. You can have AI write you an article. You can AI give you advice. I mean, our research at TGC about the use of AI right now, number one use is therapy. Number two is relationship. I mean, if you want just someone to tell you what to do, you can ask an artificial intelligence program and it’ll give you an answer.

0:27:40 – (Mark Vroegop): If you want wisdom, if you want judgment, if you want discernment, that’s going to require something else. And I think what we’re going to be able to do by God’s grace is put people in front of other people through this podcast and say there’s wisdom here and experience, knowledge, expertise and biblical wisdom. And I just think that’s really important and really rare.

0:28:02 – (Dan Doriani): What happens when somebody’s been working long and hard and praying and searching scriptures and spending time with other intelligent and thoughtful people is they accumulate a reservoir of wisdom. That’s that architecture of ideas. So you give them a question they’ve never heard before, they’re not flummoxed by it because they say oh, I’ve got five principles that address this, and I can’t give you a complete answer off the cuff, but I can sure give you some help.

0:28:28 – (Dan Doriani): So, for example, when you talk about AI being used for counseling, certainly I’ve heard the same thing. It takes somebody who’s a counselor to say yes. And AI’s goal is to make money. And the way you make money is keeping the person using it, which means an AI counselor will not challenge you the way a human counselor will. Boom, boom. And, I mean, that’s common sense, maybe to some degree.

0:28:56 – (Mark Vroegop): Yeah.

0:28:56 – (Dan Doriani): But when a counselor says it, you go, oh, of course.

0:29:00 – (Mark Vroegop): Of course. Yeah.

0:29:01 – (Dan Doriani): And good counselors fire their people who won’t listen. They. They say, oh, you don’t want any help. Actually, you don’t want any help with your marriage at all. You just want your husband or wife to behave better as you understand it. So, sorry, you’re fired. And they. Some of them shape up when they hear that, others don’t. They say, you’re right. You got me. But AI will never tell you you’re fired.

0:29:24 – (Mark Vroegop): In fact, it keeps telling you. That’s a great question. That’s a great question. I was at a Nate Bargetzky comedy event, and I knew we were in trouble with AI. When AI made it into his bit, he was like. It told me I was asking really good questions. And that tells you how unintelligent it is, because it was not a good question. So I think the intersection of what is really going to be important in the next number of weeks, months, years is.

0:29:49 – (Mark Vroegop): I think the canary in the coal mine is going to be what’s happening in the marketplace. And maybe before it was college campuses. It still may be that to an extent, but I think pastors need to be attuned to what’s happening in the marketplace because of what’s particularly taking place in the artificial intelligence revolution that we’re in the middle of.

0:30:08 – (Dan Doriani): Absolutely. And I have had, and we will have AI, people of faith, helping us work through some of these issues. And of course, they’re working through it simultaneously. So, you know, there’s. Where can wisdom be found? The answer is. Good question. Yeah. Wisdom doesn’t arrive because you seek it. Lord, make me wise. You don’t get wise tomorrow. It’s kind of like starting a business enterprise. It takes years to build it up.

0:30:34 – (Dan Doriani): And wisdom on AI is one of those things. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

0:30:39 – (Mark Vroegop): It is. Yeah.

0:30:40 – (Dan Doriani): Hey, speaking of wisdom, can I ask you a question? I know we wanted to talk about this together. Who Are your most wise mentors who formed you? And maybe we’ll start with that. Who taught you how to work a little bit? And why were they effective? What makes a good mentor? And maybe we can take a separate question. You know, we could talk to each other about good mentoring, but who are your best mentors? What did they teach you about work?

0:31:10 – (Mark Vroegop): It’s interesting. So my father would be the one I would say would be first and foremost in terms of work and work ethic. So he is a Dutch immigrant, so was born in the Netherlands, came here when he was three years old. My grandfather came to the United States with and a slew of kids, five kids. I think he was age 46. So working hard was an assumption, part of our just DNA. Even my last name, vrogop in Dutch means early up. So, like, I’m up early. It’s just like, I have to. It’s my last name.

0:31:42 – (Mark Vroegop): And, you know, there was no class on work. It just was how we rolled. And we also had a lot of fun, but we had a phrase in our family. It was work hard, play hard. And there was just a sense of that. I think of a mentor in seminary, Dr. Jim Greer, who was the dean of the seminary that I attended. Remember at my ordination, literally, he grabbed the lapels of my jacket, and he was like, mark, you need to know that to whom much is given, much is required.

0:32:09 – (Mark Vroegop): You need to be a steward of your life both in what you do and where you do it. You know, so those are. Were two people pretty instrumental in terms of my understanding of how to think about work. And the thing is, Dan, is they didn’t. There was no class. It was modeling. It was caught. It was just part of it. So those were two. I could talk about other business leaders who mentored in other areas, like, how do you think about staff culture, morale?

0:32:38 – (Mark Vroegop): How do you think about making decisions when you can’t make them by the consensus anymore? But you have to get people to give input. I mean, there’s all sorts of folks who had very specialized sort of mentoring things. I had a regular sort of Rolodex of guys on particular subjects that I would go to. Hey, I got a question on this. You’re an expert here. Can we talk? Because I just. I’m trying to figure this out. And I was really thankful that in both my church settings, one, you know, a church of about 400 in Holland, Michigan, and, you know, a larger church in Indianapolis, I had those people that I found and sought out intentionally because I needed help.

0:33:14 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, absolutely.

0:33:16 – (Mark Vroegop): What about you?

0:33:18 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah, so I wrote the question, so I figured I better have the answer to it.

0:33:21 – (Mark Vroegop): You should.

0:33:22 – (Dan Doriani): Yeah. I mean, certainly both my grandfathers were hardworking men, and so that was a good example. My father, not as much he wasn’t as disciplined as my grandfathers were, but I would say I would fit in that category of people who didn’t have folks who necessarily thought to themselves, I better mentor this guy. It’s more like you just hang around, you talk, they teach you things. So when I was in college and grad school, I had a lot of jobs and you meet people that are smart. But maybe the thing I learned the most from one was that I don’t know as much as I think I do. I had a boss who put me into a quasi minor leadership role really fast.

0:34:05 – (Dan Doriani): He was that desperate. I was, you know, 20 years old, was leading a small team of people even younger than myself. And I thought, oh, man, that is the dumbest, the worst possible decision. What is he thinking? And then about three weeks later, I realized, no, I’m the dumbest possible person. He’s made a brilliant decision. And I. Fortunately, he explained why. I said, you got to tell me why we’re doing this.

0:34:29 – (Dan Doriani): I don’t understand. He said, oh, here’s the reason. Ah, thank you. So just assume you don’t know as much as you think you do. There was a moment when I was working on my dissertation. My advisor was a truly brilliant man, and I had access to some extremely rare documents for my dissertation. And at the time, you couldn’t. You had to view them in a room that was temperature controlled and humidity controlled, and you had to be searched in advance and so forth.

0:34:59 – (Dan Doriani): So when you took notes, you had to take them with a pencil, not even a pen, because you could mark them accidentally. And I was reporting on what he was finding. He was interested in what I was interested in, or he sold me on his project, and I loved it. And I gave him a quote. And he said, oh, that’s interesting. Where does that appear? And I said, well, you know, it’s right here in my notes. And I had quotation marks around it.

0:35:25 – (Dan Doriani): And I went. He said, well, find that for me. That’s a really good quotation. And I haven’t, you know, I hadn’t seen that one from this original source. And I went back and I came back. We had weekly meetings. I came back and I said, yeah, that was my paraphrase. That was partial quote and partial paraphrase. And he just nodded his head in silence and he knew perfectly well it was a paraphrase. And he wanted to send me back. And he wanted to say, listen, these are the standards we have.

0:35:52 – (Dan Doriani): We’re not sloppy around here. If it’s a quotation, it’s a quotation. If it’s a summary, it’s a summary. And, I mean, that was a good wake up call for somebody who was perfectly willing to get by on verbal proclivities and capacities and just stand up and talk. I also had a professor. I taught myself Greek fundamentally. And he said, hey, listen, nothing unusual about that. Everybody’s ultimately an autodidact.

0:36:23 – (Dan Doriani): Which I thought was great. We’re always teaching ourselves with guides. But in the process of these conversations, when I would get stuck on Greek, I would talk to him. He said, hey, just come see me when you get stuck. And in passing, he said, once, you know, I’ll work. I’ll work 40 hours on a lecture. If it’s an important lecture that blew my mind, I’ll go that deep, if necessary, just to talk for an hour to college students.

0:36:53 – (Dan Doriani): And I mean, I meditated on that. I still meditate on it. There is a time to go ridiculously deep and to become so knowledgeable because you’re called to it, you need it. The world needs somebody who knows what they’re talking about here. So those are three examples. I didn’t have anybody who said, hey, Dan, I’m going to take you under my wing. I had a bunch of people that were willing to tell me where I had a gap, and they were willing. They would gently see the hole in my life and give me some counsel or ask me a probing question to let me go figure it out, that I just made a mistake. They trusted me enough to realize I’d been a buffoon, and I would come back in a week and recognize that, which I think is great mentoring.

0:37:37 – (Mark Vroegop): It is, it is. So, as we start to wrap up here, who are some of the guests that we’re going to have on? What are some of the subjects that we’re going to be talking about in the next number of weeks or months? You and I have already recorded a few podcasts that are coming down the line, and, man, they’ve been some pretty amazing conversations. I’ve learned a lot. In fact, I was thinking the other day I was having a conversation with someone. Yeah, I know about that now. But it was because of a guest that we had that I had no idea about it before interviewing that person.

0:38:04 – (Dan Doriani): So. That’s right. Hey, this gives me a chance to pick up a thread. The question you raised, a very important question, is do pastors really know what’s going on in the workplace? And you and I both agree that the way to find out is to go visit people in their workplace and not for five minutes before going to lunch, but actually be there for an hour or two hours and let them give you a tour and meet some people and find out what’s going on.

0:38:31 – (Dan Doriani): Some of my most memorable experiences are doing that. So I have a friend who ran a multi billion dollar construction firm and just going into his workplace was so instructive about how a really big firm operates. But one of the people we have coming next, just a segue. One of the people we have coming next is a man named Landon Hobson who is a trained theologian who runs an assembly line that creates cleaning products for people and for animals.

0:39:08 – (Dan Doriani): And I visited his assembly line a few years ago and he’s going to tell us about assembly lines and how it works and how you manufacture things and how you get to the point that you manufacture things all over the world and why a Christian would be interested in making products for pets as well as people and so forth. I mentioned a woman earlier today who is a fitness instructor who really, I mean, anybody can listen to her, but she has thought long and hard and experientially about the role of fitness in a holistic life we had. Her name’s Lindsey Baumgren. She’s coming up before too long.

0:39:48 – (Dan Doriani): Man named Tim Addy, who, I’ll use this word, he weaponized the Savannah Bananas. So I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing about the Savannah Bananas for a number of years. You know, stilts and silly things and grown men having counseling sessions after they strike out while everybody is listening to the counseling session occur. It’s great stuff, but it was really an idea that needed to be made into a business enterprise.

0:40:14 – (Dan Doriani): And he did that by God’s grace, and he’s done it. That’s his life’s work. And so he’s going to talk to us about how you take an idea and actualize it, which I think is such an important subject. And he does it for the for profit world. But he also has set up a 501C3 that enables young adults who don’t have access to people that can’t hire people like him, but can gain ideas about how they can go ahead and take an idea and make it into an enterprise that can reach many, many more people than you reach when you’re sitting on the sofa. Talking about a great idea you have.

0:40:55 – (Dan Doriani): So those are three examples of people coming up. We have all sorts of others. You know, we’ll have politicians. I think we’re going to get an ambassador. I hope we are. We have somebody who was a trial lawyer and so forth. So, Mark, do you have any friends that you’ve recruited that are coming?

0:41:16 – (Mark Vroegop): Who do you have? Well, I haven’t asked yet, but I have a couple that I have in mind. So we wanted to get your guest list in first, but I’m. In fact, I keep meeting people and I’m like, oof, I gotta follow up and ask this person. Because once you find some folks who are doing good work, you really want to hear their story. And they do want to hear their story. Yeah. So. Yeah, so we’ll work on. Fill in the. The guest list in.

0:41:41 – (Mark Vroegop): In my little circle of the world, so.

0:41:43 – (Dan Doriani): Well, remember, I’m desperate. That’s why. That’s one of the reasons why I’m a co host. I’m running out of famous friends.

0:41:50 – (Mark Vroegop): I got you. Your corner of the world has a lot of friends, Dan. So we’re going to be just fine. But I will, I will add people in our corner.

0:41:56 – (Dan Doriani): So, hey, speaking of your corner of the world, why do we call it your corner of the world? What’s the deal with that? Where did that title come from?

0:42:02 – (Mark Vroegop): Well, it came from just the idea that we’re all doing our thing and we kind of have a little corner of the world that we operate in and we just want to shine a spotlight and just say, how do you use the gospel and faith and work in the context of your little corner of the world? So we want to take that corner and help people know what’s going on.

0:42:21 – (Dan Doriani): Thank you for that, Mark. And the idea is that we’re not trying to be grandiose here and say we’re going to change the world. That’s not our job. You talked about the fact that we’re probably going to have a lot of listeners in our audience, and we hope for that. We hope for everybody. But we have leaders. But leaders include people, have a team of five, and they can make a huge difference with those five people.

0:42:47 – (Dan Doriani): And those five people can have a little ripple effect. They’re not going to change a giant workplace, but they can. They can change a piece of even an enterprise that has 10 or 20 or 30,000 employees. So we’re not going to despise small things and people who are. Who are respected and listened to, whether they have a title or not for me. That’s crucial. When we say leaders, we don’t mean people with a title and a place on the org chart that’s exalted. There are many ways to lead.

0:43:18 – (Dan Doriani): Lead in our corner of the world. Yep.

0:43:21 – (Mark Vroegop): There we go. It’s going to be a fun journey, man. Grateful to be on the road with you in this great conversation.

0:43:26 – (Dan Doriani): Well, I’m so glad. I’m so glad you agreed to be my partner. I hope we’re going to have it. I. I not only hope, I expect that we’re have a good time together. We are. We are.