Are The Turtles Beating Us?

Grace to you and peace be multiplied through Jesus Christ our Lord. It's a delight to be here with you.

My mother does not care for the plain suit what I'm wearing here this morning, but I am wearing it in part to honor her.

I'm a paradox, aren't I?

The title of the message today is, "Are the Turtles Beating Us?"

I can do that.

Are the Turtles beating us? And I'm particularly, if I might say it, gunning for the young men who are largely in this section: Montes back there, Neil, Lavon, Carter, Edward, Bradlyn. It's for all of us. But as young men, you are on the verge of the critical decade.

You're on the verge of making choices that will have giant impact for the rest of your life in the years to come. Several years ago, I listened to a book by a man named Daniel Coyle, not a believer that I know of, not even necessarily a religious man, but he asked this interesting question that piqued my thoughts: why, he asked, do certain groups add up to be greater than the sum of their parts while others add up to be less?

Why are some groups able to affect some influence way out of proportion to what they are while others who are larger actually have less influence?

He went on to answer that question with this observation: group blank is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. What do you think that word is in that blank? Group blank.

Unity. Unity?

Group culture. Group culture is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. So what is culture, and why is it especially powerful as it's lived out in a group? I like a definition of culture that Andy Crouch adapted from Ken Myers. He says, "Culture is what we make of the world." That's a very broad definition, of course. Culture is what we make of the world.

Culture brings together our beliefs, our values, and our practices to shape us into the kind of people that we are, both individually but especially corporately. The culture of Shippensburg is different than our sister church at St. Thomas, and it's different than our sister church at Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, and our sister church in Chile, and our sister church in West Virginia. Even though we are related churches, every one of our groups has a unique culture.

Is it possible to live culture-free? That's a question that has been raised over the years. Is it possible for a church to be culture-free?

I don't think so. I believe that culture is pervasive and invasive because God has created the reality of culture.

Culture is everywhere.

Is it possible for a church to have too much culture? Some people probably think so.

The reality is culture is never thin. In other words, culture always has a way of doing things. There is no culture where people end up experiencing the color yellow and they don't have a word for it.

Culture fills in all the gaps. It helps us to make sense of the world.

Somebody somewhere will always create culture, and so it is always full, you could say. We never experience culture as thin or lacking. So on the bigger scale, when we talk about group culture, it is what we are making of the world together. What, brothers and sisters, are we making of the world here at Shippensburg Christian Fellowship and in the surrounding area?

Whether we want to or not, no group can avoid the materialization and manifestation of culture. It's going to happen, whether you want it to or not. Jeff Henderson has noted that your culture is determined by default or by design.

It'll happen accidentally, or you can make it happen on purpose. I think that group culture is a part of God's good design for His world. And I think that a good, strong group culture confronts one of our biggest struggles as human beings.

It's a struggle that was alluded to in Sunday school. And this is the main drive this morning, the main thrust. Our biggest problem, brothers and sisters, is not an inability to conform. It is an unwillingness to yield. That's our problem. It's the I. It's the self. It's the insistence that I must have my way.

Our main problem is not an inability to conform, but an unwillingness to yield.

Now, my interest in culture goes back at least 12 or 13 years to my opportunity to meet Andy Crouch, who wrote the book Culture Making, and to hear him give a lecture on it. But since that time, of course, I've done other reading and listening.

And of course, John Dee, being my father-in-law, has only added wood to the fire and fanned the flames of thinking about the importance and power and inescapability of culture.

In fact, how many of you are aware that John wrote a booklet within the last year or so on culture? How many of you raise of hands? Okay, I'm going to say 65.3%. How many of you have read this booklet?

Okay, that's about 43.2%.

There are some extra copies here if you're interested in taking a look at it to find out what all the hubbub's about. I was asked to give four sessions on culture back in January to a men's conference, and those messages can be found at Living Hope Christian Fellowship website.

We have all been influenced by group culture. We experience life typically in groups: family groups, civic groups, national groups. And so I, of course, have been influenced in how I see culture as a group. I wanted to give you a brief autobiography of me, where I came from, how I've been influenced by culture, and hence some of these pictures that you have today.

I'm going back to my grandfather, my dad's dad, Alan Byler. He was raised Amish in the '30s and '40s in Central Pennsylvania here in Big Valley, about an hour and a half north of here. And as an Amish man, his mother led him to the Lord.

He had a relationship with God, and he developed an interest in mission work, which the Amish at that time were not engaged in. My grandfather never joined the Amish. He took some drafting classes to learn how to draw blueprints, and he had an interest in doing building on the mission field.

Eunice Hartman was a young lady who grew up in northern Indiana in the Goshen area.

She attended the Goshen College and graduated with a four-year degree in teaching in 1948. She then applied for mission work in Africa under Mennonite missions. She boarded a ship called the Kota Getty, and it was a, I forget, four or six-week voyage across the ocean to go to Ethiopia where she taught. And she had other co-teachers, of course.

One of her co-teachers was the emperor of Ethiopia's daughter, Haile Selassie, one of his daughters. And Haile Selassie was very favorable toward mission work among his people, or granddaughter, I should say, of Haile Selassie. And so they had that connection.

Meanwhile, my grandfather also went some months later, not knowing my grandmother, and began building schools and clinics for Mennonite missions. In the course of time, they met and started dating, and they decided to get married there in Ethiopia, the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, in 1952.

My grandmother coming from a Mennonite background, my grandfather coming from an Amish background.

They took their honeymoon in Yemen. They proceeded to do several terms of service there in Africa. They had a number of children, and then eventually moved back to Big Valley, Central Pennsylvania here, to take over the home farm, my grandfather's home farm.

In the course of those years, my dad and his whole family were going to a small Mennonite church where there weren't any youth. And so my dad and his brother, somewhere around the ages of Carter and Edward, began to run with the Brother in Christ Youth Group and do things with them.

And eventually, the whole family joined the Brother in Christ Church there in Big Valley.

My dad met my mom through different connections. She was raised Brother in Christ in another place, and they ended up getting married in 1978. And then I showed up on the scene in 1979 as the oldest grandchild on that side of the family.

We lived in the Big Valley area for the first four years of my life and were part of the Brother in Christ Church there, which I don't have memories of. And then my father was interested in mission work as well and decided to go to Mennonite missions in northwestern Ontario. So from Central PA to northwestern Ontario was a trip of 1,500 miles, 30-some hours driving.

We traveled. I was four years old. I had a brother two years younger than me. He was two, and I had a sister who was, I believe, eight weeks. And we traveled all the way up to Red Lake, which is the end of the road, and then flew another 80 or 100 miles north to Poplar Hill Development School, which was a school for Indian children, or as we call them now, First Nations children who were brought in from various reservations to be there at Poplar Hill for the school year. They would go home over Christmastime. They would go home over summer break in the summertime. But we were there with a group of about 50 staff and about 50 students from the time I was four years old till I was 11, seven years that we spent there at Poplar Hill.

It was a tremendous experience. Even though it was isolated, there were no roads there. Everything had to be flown in. We had our own sawmill, our own school building, and also our chapel area, a shop fully equipped, a gymnasium, a dormitory, housing for the staff, and one of the best things for a boy, a full-size regulation hockey rink, which we actually could use six months of the year because they actually have winter up there.

And of course, we could skate on the lake as well when it froze over. There was all kinds of activities to do. But this was a tremendous group culture experience. You talk about isolation. We had our own generators for our power system, but we couldn't power anything real heavy-duty. So all the staff were limited to things that were 1,500 watts and less. That ruled out a lot of your hair dryers.

The dormitory did have refrigerators and freezers, but in our homes, we had ice boxes, and the water was carried from the dormitory to the various homes. So we had our bucket for water. We had outhouses. We had electric lights in our homes. We had our own telephone system. We had the old crank phones, and our number was one long and two shorts. And of course, everybody on campus knows who's being called when they hear what number is being rung.

And if you wanted to get everybody on for an emergency or something, I forget what it was. It was 10 longs. But anyway, that was a way to be connected. It was a tremendous place to grow up as far as the interactions, being friends with the First Nations youth, going to school with them. Everything came in on planes.

When the lake was open, it was float planes. In the wintertime, when the lake froze over, it was ski planes. And so we had as many as five planes a day that were supplying our mission. Not big planes, mind you, but Cessna and a little larger sizes. The mail, our food, visitors, everything had to come in on planes.

There was in the wintertime a winter road that could be built, and a skitter or a tractor could drive out across there, but we had no cars where we were at. There were about 50 students, which included the staff children as well.

And so we made friends. I went to school with young people my age by the name of Jeanette Wesley and Renaldo Kietish and Ruben Neekon and Grace Umbosh. And it was an interesting time. We had a lot of activities together as a group. There was every day after school. When I was done with school, I would go out to the hockey rink with my friends, and we'd play hockey, go ice skating. There was sledding. There was snowshoeing. There was snowmobiling. There was ice fishing. And that's just the winter sports. And there were times that we would get together as a whole school, and they would do snow sculpturing. And we would have bannock bakes where the girls would have to get the wood and build the fire and see who could be the fastest to get their bannock from mixed up with the fire going and made to being able to eat it.

Just lots of enjoyable things. We had track and field day. We did various things. Once every Friday night, we did something together as a group. It might involve going to the ice rink. It might involve having real-to-real films, watching Anna Green Gables or whatever. But it was group involvement. It was togetherness, and it was having fun together in the midst of all the work that entailed as well.

The men would go out. The ice on the lake would often yet to be two feet thick. And so they would go out and cut blocks of ice for our ice boxes. Remember, we had a sawmill. And so they would take the sawdust from the sawmill, take it to the ice house, a little house that was there on the campus, and they would pack those blocks of ice in there with the sawdust, and it would keep the blocks of ice all year until the next fall, late fall, when the lake would freeze over again and we could get more ice. But I remember my dad would go up and get a block of ice about once a week to bring down to our ice box.

We went through a lot of wood. All of our buildings were heated with wood. I think it was about 200 cords a year. And so there were firewood crews that would come up and help with that cutting process. A number of the bigger stoves would take the four-foot lengths, and so they could just throw that log wood in whole, and it would last quite a while. And we had a specific man. He was called the freight and fireman who would make the rounds, making sure that the gymnasium, the shop, the school, the dorm were all taken care of as far as the fires. And they would also meet the planes and deal with the cargo, the freight that was coming in, the freight that's going out.

When I was 11, we moved back home to Pennsylvania to take over my dad's home farm there where my grandparents were. A number of you are familiar with Big Valley, probably all of you. And so we moved to between Bellville and Reedsville there in Big Valley.

My grandparents had a farm that wasn't quite 100 acres, and that's where I spent my teen years and my early 20s. In that context, we were again with the Brother in Christ Church. I was growing up, my brother and I, with the youth there, but we didn't feel like we entirely fit in. The church had acculturated some. And so Laurel can tell you this. She was very young. And anyway, we started to run with her youth group, with the Beachy Amish youth group there in Big Valley. And my brother and I found a real camaraderie with them.

Yeah, we were engaged with our youth group, and we were doing things like Bible quizzing with the broader Brother in Christ denomination. But that was putting us into interaction with girls that were quizzing with shorts and T-shirts and things that were just very different from how we were growing up. And so there again, we experienced the power of group culture in this sense in a Beachy context.

And it was a very beneficial experience for my brother and me. If you're familiar with the Brother in Christ at all and you know there are some around here in this area, they have three mainstreams of influence in their heritage. They have the Anabaptist influence, the Pietist influence, and then later in their history, the holiness influence. In the 18 they developed around the late 1700s is when they arose somewhat organically and became they were known, first of all, as River Brotherhood. In the 1860s, there was a three-way split, which resulted in the more liberal group, which was the United Zion, the more middle of the road, you could say, the Brother in Christ, and the more conservative group, the River Brotherhood.

So bookmark River Brotherhood in your mind.

So we moved to the farm. We tried to find our identity as young people with a youth group that was different than we were, but very similar in values, a little bit different in practice in some things. And what to make sense of all that. And I'm talking to you young men. You're thinking about your future. You're thinking about your identity. You're thinking about where will I commit myself? Where will I give myself to? Who will I become? I went off to a conservative holiness Bible college. Oh, yeah, I did want to show you in Big Valley, there's lots of culture in Big Valley, cultures.

So I grew up with three different colors of buggies. There's the black buggies, the Amish, and then there are yellow buggy Amish, which incidentally are called Byler Amish. And then there are the white-top buggies. The white-toppers are Nebraska Amish. And I actually worked at a Nebraska Amish sawmill. I drove the loader in my mid-teens since they weren't allowed to, and I drove that for my father.

And then I went off to a conservative holiness Bible college when I was 19. Penview Bible Institute is located also in Central PA here. It's close to Lewisburg. It's in the town of Pens Creek. And the conservative holiness have a spectrum or the holiness churches are on a whole continuum, much like the Anabaptist churches, okay? So we know that we have conservative Anabaptists all the way to liberal Anabaptists. There are conservative holiness all the way to liberal holiness. There's just a wide range of holiness groups.

But some of the cultural things about the conservative holiness would be the wearing of the tie and the wearing of the suit, dressing up for preaching and for ministering and even for going to class. As a student, all young men were required to wear at the least a shirt and tie for class.

And I didn't have any conviction against it. And so I wore a shirt and tie. In fact, it was often encouraged for special meetings, revivals, and whatever for the young men to wear suits as well, coats or entire suits, and dress up for those occasions and for those events.

As you may well know, the women do not wear a material covering, but they consider the long hair up, typically worn up, as the covering. And I heard a lot of good messages about keeping the scissors out of the hair. I think that's a very important thing. Keep the scissors out of your hair. It is a glory. It's a beauty. And that is something that God has given to you as a blessing.

Another thing that they're also very strong on is three-quarter length sleeves or longer. No short sleeves, but the wearing of something that is appropriate in length so that one cannot see into the upper torso in any sort of engagement, whether it's work or worship or whatever it is.

And so that was, of course, required for class and for being there at college.

They're very big on music and singing and playing instruments. A friend of mine who moved from a Brother in Christ setting to a nationwide setting, he made the observation. He said that the holiness style of singing is very triumphant, and the Anabaptist style of singing is very meditative. And there's value to both of those. And he wasn't trying to pick any bones.

One of the things that was really stressed, I did not major in ministerial studies. I majored in missionary studies, the four years that I was there. But I had a my best friend was a ministerial major. And so he would bring back all that he was learning from the man that was leading that department. And the man who led that department was very strong that all the Penview preacher boys should look a certain way.

They needed to wear an appropriate suit. They needed to have a proper tie, not too flashy. They needed to have black shoes that were shined. They needed to carry with them into the pulpit a black Bible. They needed to have a certain sense about them of the seriousness of God's word.

That made an impression on me, even though I wasn't one of the preacher boys. But it impressed on me the power, the importance of group culture. It was over that time that I developed my conviction to wear sleeves that were three-quarter length.

And I still do that as a construction worker today. Now, I roll my sleeves above my elbow when I work, of course. But that conviction not to be able to see into the upper torso, it developed under the auspices of a group culture, a very defined group culture. And I'm not putting that on anyone else. I'm saying it's a good way to go. When I was 24, I began pastoring a small Brother in Christ church. And I pastored that church for 10 years, from the time I was 24 till I was 34.

The church had about 20 people when I went there and about 40 people when I left. It was a fairly diverse group. All of the ladies in my church who were members wore some sort of covering on their head. And of course, I preached it. I felt very strongly about it. But I also regularly, when I preached Sunday morning, Sunday night, suit and tie, suit and tie. And when I conducted the Wednesday evening prayer meetings, it was always a shirt and tie, always dressing up, always wanting to make sure that I am giving a proper presentation for what I was sharing.

It was during my time there at Pleasant Valley, I began to dig into the Brother in Christ history and all the things that had been jettisoned as unnecessary and arbitrary and legalistic and where that kind of thinking ended up taking the Brother in Christ. And I don't have any bones to pick with the Brother in Christ. I love them. I left on very good terms, but I learned a lot. And there's a lot of sorrow about what took place there.

When I speak to you about group culture, I'm not speaking out of a vacuum. I'm speaking out of something that is personal to me and a desire for us as a group of people here to do well. It was during those years I began to hear teachings about the kingdom, and I heard messages from David Burceau and John D. Martin that started to shape my thinking.

And I developed a personal mantra that said this, "I want to embrace truth no matter how it changes me.

I don't care how it changes me. I want to embrace truth." I also began to think about an eight-generation, 200-year vision for my family, even though I wasn't married. That may sound audacious, but I'm challenging you young men to think about that. God willing, someday you're going to lead a family. And I'm challenging you to think about the eight generations as the Lord carries the 200 years in the future. And what that does is it helps to sharpen your focus about the choices that you are making today, the places you're going, the people that you're associating with. It was at that time I began casting vision for the church, the Pleasant Valley Church, to leave the Brother in Christ.

And in the end, they voted to stay, which was fine. But I realized I had to leave. And we had parted under very good conditions.

Nine months later, Heather and I were married. And there's a whole story related to that. Many of you are part of that story.

I should say that toward the end of my time at Pleasant Valley, the last year that I was there, I took off my tie as a desire to identify more closely or moving in the direction of identifying with the plain people. And that's what I was casting vision for my church to become was to leave the Brother in Christ and become more purposeful in their attire. So I'm still wearing the lapel, and I did that until 2018.

Heather and I got married June 28th of 2014. Again, many of you were part of that. Thank you for all the work you put into it. It was a tumultuous time because we're bringing two worlds together. If I'd had my druthers, I would have gotten married in a tuxedo.

But that was not to be. And I look back on that, and I don't really care. Actually, I appreciate the things that the changes I had to make in relation to that time. But we did have lapel coats at our wedding. We didn't do it in a corner or secretly. I met with the brothers here at Shepherdsburg. I had no concept of a church wedding. I didn't understand why two people who are committed to Christ can't have their own wedding. Why does the church have to meddle in this sort of stuff?

But I didn't want to just stick a finger in the eye either. I wanted to be open with there are things about our wedding that aren't going to be Shepherdsburg because I'm not Shepherdsburg. I'm me. I was raised Brother in Christ. I'm Brother in Christ pastor.

After we were married, we moved to the Lewisburg area where I had work, and we began attending a small church there.

I was brought up short while we were there by some of the casualness that was represented in that congregation. It's a church, again, of dear people with whom we are friends. It was made up of people that I would call families, disaffected conservative holiness and disaffected conservative Anabaptist people coming together to do a church plant. Let's have church together.

The families were conservative by and large. And it worked because every father had a vision of what a conservative family in his mind should look like. So he knew what he expected of his wife. He knew what he expected of his children. And they pretty much towed the line.

What came quickly to the surface was the fact that these fathers, as strong as they were with their various ideas of conservativism, were not willing to demonstrate to their wives and children the very yieldedness that they expected of them.

What do I mean by that? I think every father should be strong about what he expects of his wife and children, but he also needs to be willing to demonstrate yieldedness by coming under a bigger group than himself and joining himself to a brotherhood.

That could not happen at the church that we were attending. We tried. I tried. I tried to call them to come together to unity, that we would come together and yield one to another. And it couldn't happen. I got so frustrated. But you know what? It was so good for me because it helped me to start grasping a sense of what it means to be a church. It's not just the preacher standing up and preaching. It's brotherhood. It's important to have this group culture. And I was forced to reckon with that.

In the midst of that, we had a couple from a conservative background, old order background. And he was regularly coming to church with T-shirts that had big pictures on and sometimes in shorts. And she's wearing a black veil and skirts and blouses.

Is this who we want to become? I'm not judging them on their spiritual condition, but I'm saying these things had an effect. There's no way to bring unity when there's that sort of intentional self-willedness.

During that time, I was driving a choir bus for faith builders. And one of the services was at a Mennonite church in Big Valley at Bethel. And they had asked me to preach the Sunday morning message.

At that time, I didn't have any plain coats. All I had were lapel suits. And so I asked them what I should do about this. They said, "Well, if you just wear a white shirt, that's fine. That'll be appropriate. And that won't be any offense to us."

And so I was willing to do that. And my parents came to hear me preach that Sunday morning. And some time later, after everything was all over, my mother came to me. My mother does not like the plain suit particularly.

And she said, "If what it will take for you to wear a suit when you preach is to have a plain suit, I will give you money to have a suit changed over." I was floored. I could never have seen this coming.

That was a shocker.

But I was raised that when we come to church, we give our best. We present our best. It's not because we think we're better than somebody else, but it's because we recognize that what we wear is saying something about us. And my dad, to this day, he's not ordained. He's not a preacher, but he wears lapel coats almost every Sunday to church.

He dresses up. He's giving his best. So in the midst of this swirl with the church that we were at there in the Lewisburg area, Craig and Anne, out of the blue, called and asked, "Would you be willing to house sit for us? We'd like to go to Ireland and oversee the boys' camp there."

And it was a very surprising offer, but it really did seem like the door that God was opening for us. And so we moved to the area here. We visited each one of the sister churches for a month at a time to get a feel for the culture of each one, to get a sense for where we might want to land. I told people that it's highly likely that we'll come to Shepherdsburg because this is Heather's home church and this is where her parents are. And it's in close proximity to where we are house sitting for Craig and Anne. And of course, that's what happened. I also got a job working for a river brother and man.

Remember that word, river brother?

I didn't know much about them, but I started working with a crew that is entirely river brother and a construction crew. And we do barn rules. We do house rules. We do pole barns. We build different things. And I'm still working for the same man. The employees have changed, but I'm still the only river brother and non-river brother guy on the crew.

What is so fascinating to me as I've gotten to know the river brother and more is to see the culture that they have. They have a group culture that goes back, of course, well over 200 years. And they haven't done things perfectly, but they have a group identity that is settled and that is established. And it feels to me as if because of that settledness, they know that nobody else is like them. I mean, who else is like the river brother? Nobody, okay? Nobody.

They can be mistaken for Amish and old order Mennonites, but they are unique. Because of that strong identity, they feel neither superior nor inferior. They just are. That's who they are. I love that. I think that we at Shepherdsburg could develop a strong group identity and it's just who we are. We don't have to be superior to anybody else out there or inferior to anybody else. This is who we are. It's a good way to go. It's not the only way. We're not the only church, but a group culture that is high definition, cohesive, and settled. It's a beautiful thing.

It's what I've seen among the river brother and people.

And then after being in the area for about a year, we indeed, much to my surprise, applied for membership here at Shepherdsburg Christian Fellowship. If you had told me we got married that Brandon in six years or so, you're going to be asking for membership at Shepherdsburg, I'd be like, "No way. That is those people are way too defined." I mean, they've just got way too many, too much culture, too much culture.

So this is my first experience with intentional brotherhood.

And I have really appreciated it. Thank you. Has it been hard? Oh yeah, absolutely. Are there disagreements? Pretty much every day.

One of the things that I feel like I've learned while I'm here, and I'm offering this as a challenge, you remember I talked about these fathers who were unwilling to submit to something bigger than themselves, a church brotherhood?

I think it's important, brothers and sisters, for individual churches. And we are independent. We are non-denominational. We are unaffiliated, whatever word you want to use. It is important for us in this position to be willing to yield to something bigger than ourselves.

Shepherdsburg doesn't have it all. We don't have a corner on perfect. We need a bigger movement. And that's one of my concerns, that we not go off into a corner and assume that we have it all. Just as we as fathers need to yield to a brotherhood, brotherhoods need to yield to a movement. I'm convinced of it.

I'm not saying it has to be a denomination or a conference, but a willingness to consult with a broader movement when we make decisions because we will influence them and they will influence us. That's the power of group culture.

And when we tap into a broader movement, what that does is it opens up a whole new world for us. We have opportunities that cannot be offered simply here at little old Shepherdsburg.

Now, because John is my father-in-law, I have access to somebody who's been swimming in the Anabaptist waters for almost 80 years. And I have been tapping his brain about this church and that church and that group and that movement because I want to see how this picture fits together. I want to analyze where things are going. What is the trajectory? Where are the things that are healthy? Where are the things that are unhealthy? Where is their life? Where is their death? What is happening in the broader Anabaptist church family? Are we taking group culture seriously enough? There are so many questions, so few answers.

Does the Bible have anything to say about this topic? There are three things I'd like us to consider. One is I really believe that Jehovah legislated group culture. You see that there in Numbers 15 as God was talking to Moses.

He comes there in verse 37. Again, the Lord spoke to Moses saying, "Speak to the children of Israel. Tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue thread in the tassels of the corners. And you shall have the tassel that you may look upon it and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and that you may not follow the harlotry to which your own heart and your own eyes are inclined. And that you may remember and do all my commandments and be holy to your God, holy for your God. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God.

I am the Lord your God."

Through the truth that God has legislated culture, we see a sense of how God has designed us. He has not designed us to be only thinkers. You're not a brain on a stick.

We're not made to just think our way into doing truth. We're not just believers. We don't just believe our way into the truth. That's the evangelical concept and model. If you just have all the right beliefs, then you'll live the right life, except when that doesn't happen, which is a lot of the time.

Lots of people have all the right beliefs, but they don't do it.

We are not primarily thinkers. We're not primarily believers. We are made in God's image, which means we are primarily lovers. We're lovers. And what we have to ask ourselves is, what is it that will direct or misdirect my loves?

The things that direct or misdirect our loves are practices. I know it sounds very earthy. It sounds very material. It sounds very unspiritual. But we live in bodies. And these bodies do things every day.

And what we do every day affects our loves.

You're not going to think your way into doing the right thing and believe your way into doing the right thing, but you will act your way into doing the right thing so many times.

This is why we need to consider our practices and evaluate them.

You'll notice that when God gives this tassel of blue here, he doesn't present a false dichotomy. He doesn't say, "Well, you can be spiritual or you can wear the tassel of blue." No, he says, "You must wear the tassel of blue so that you can be spiritual, so you can remember who you are and whose you are."

A very formative thing for identity and for spirituality.

Sociologists speak of thin practices and thick practices. Thin practices are things that you could do every day, but they don't necessarily shape you as a person. I'd be tempted to ask everyone, how many of you brush your teeth once a day? We don't do that. I think most of us do regularly.

Even if you brush your teeth twice a day, you probably don't think of yourself as a toothbrusher. It's a practice. It's a habit, but it doesn't really shape your identity, right? Oh, look at this toothbrush I got. It's amazing. I paid top dollar for it.

But there are other things that are formative as practices.

For example, do you think that owning and using a smartphone is a thin practice or a thick practice?

I don't think I want to say it, Brother Wendell. Yeah, I don't. I want it to be a thin practice, but it's thick, very thick. How many times a day do I pull that thing out? How many things can I do with it?

My life is completely different with all the options and apps that I have to make my life so much better.

Is the wearing of clothing a thin practice or a thick practice?

Every generation must deal with the cultural issues of their day. There are unique issues. And this message, I'll just be upfront with you about it. This message is timestamped. In other words, it's got an expiration to it. This message is specifically for North American people in 2024 because there are different cultures across the world that are facing different things. The truths that I'm sharing with you are going to be applied very differently in North Korea or maybe even Israel in 2024. But we're not living in those countries. We're living in America.

It's our responsibility to deal with the issues that we're facing right now.

And what we're facing is the pressure of the group culture around us that is pervasively and invasively persuading us into becoming different kinds of people. Now, I think God's the one who designed group culture to work that way, that we would influence and be influenced within a group. And I think we see that demonstrated as we've looked at in Numbers 15.

Secondly, Jonadab leveraged group culture. Somehow he was aware of this thing. And Jonadab, as you may well recall, we find a story about him or his offspring, actually, in Jeremiah 35. He was concerned about his family staying faithful, not just the immediate family, but generations. I'm assuming that he had maybe a 200-year, eight-generation vision for his family.

And you recall that there were certain things that he, you could say, arbitrarily required, commanded of his children. Those things were no wine, no drinking of wine, no building of houses, no sowing of seed, and no planting of vineyards.

And we find out as you look at that situation in Jeremiah 35 that it actually worked, shock of all shocks.

The family stayed faithful for generations. In fact, they wouldn't even listen to the prophet who took the alcohol and said it before him. They said, "No, we're part of Shepherdsburg Christian Fellowship. We don't drink alcohol." Well, not quite, but we're part of Jonadab.

And God praised them for it. An extra biblical command. God didn't say no alcohol, but Jonadab did. And God said, "You are blessed for following this 'arbitrary' command decades after it was given."

So why did Jonadab have these requirements? No building of houses, no sowing of seed, no planting of vineyards, no drinking of wine. He wanted his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to maintain a pilgrim mindset, to remember that they're strangers, even in the midst of a covenant people. We're talking about in the middle of Israel, to maintain that mindset, the power of group culture.

You're likely all aware that John, Dad, Martin is part of one about 30 phone team counselors that take calls from the CAM billboards that are located across the US. And I've asked Dad several times to clarify this, and he has done so. He says that different times when he gives a picture of the kingdom to the caller, they are enamored with that. That's beautiful. I never heard that before. That's wonderful. Is anybody doing this?

Is anybody? And Dad will say, "Well, have you ever heard of the Mennonites?" Most of the time, they'll say, "No, I don't know. I don't know the Mennonites." And then they'll say, "Have you ever heard of the Amish?" Most of the time, maybe 100% or at least most of the time, people respond enthusiastically and positively, "Yes, we know who the Amish are." And I've asked the Dad to say this several times because we have mixed feelings about the Amish. I said, "Are they 100% positive? Aren't there some that are a bit..." He said, "100% of the time, they feel positively about the Amish."

Jaw dropping.

So what that means is if you're not Amish, and we aren't, people by and large have no idea who we are. We're not making any effective change.

But they know about the Amish. Now, I could be cynical and say we don't have the Mennonite romance novels, but I actually feel somewhat kindly about Amish romance novels. I believe that it is tapping into a deep desire that people have for innocence, for intact families, for beauty, for wholesomeness. I'm not saying those books are wholesome, but you look at what the world's got, they don't have anything close.

So here are people, the Amish, older Mennonites, older River Brother, who are simply living the life. And you talk about a high definition culture, high definition.

And they aren't even trying to reach out.

At least that's the charge.

So here the Amish are, not trying. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the evangelical church with their tongues hanging out, trying to be relevant, trying to engage the culture, trying to affect change, trying to make a difference. What's happening?

Nothing, virtually nothing, virtually no change, no impact.

Can't move the needle one bit. Meanwhile, you have this group of people who don't give two hoots about culture, who are affecting change way out of proportion to what they're not trying to do. It's not fair.

So when I talk about the turtles beating us, I'm talking about, of course, the well-known fable by Esop, the tortoise and the hare.

You remember that the rabbit, as we would call the hare, he was quite confident that he would just beat the tortoise or the turtle if they were to race.

And it was due, of course, to the rabbit's overconfidence that the turtle ended up winning the day.

So I'm largely speaking about the old order groups when I'm talking about the turtles. And I'm talking about the rest of us in the conservative Anabaptist world when I'm talking about the rabbits. What I'm asking us is, are we willing to wrestle with the implications of group culture?

When I talk about the Amish as turtles, I'm not speaking about them in a demeaning way. I have a lot of appreciation. That's my heritage.

Probably the reason I know God today, I'm a follower of Jesus, is because of a lot of faithful Amish people.

You've probably heard Dale Heisey say, "You can have structure without life, but you can't have life without structure."

And you can have a shell without a turtle, but you can't have a turtle without a shell. And I'm afraid that too often we've been trying to do that.

And while you may think that the old order groups are all shell and no turtle, the reality is there's more life there than you probably think. Like I said, I grew up in Big Valley with all sorts of old order groups, the yellow top, the white top, the black top. And the white toppers, the Nebraska Amish, were considered the most spiritually dark group, superstitious, uninterested in spiritual things. But I could take you to an old white topper man who had been changed by God, and he was still a white topper.