Faith in Action: Leading with Purpose in a Divided Culture

This special episode of the Engage Church Network Podcast features a powerful message from Pastor Darren Tyler, recorded live at the Identity Conference. In this bold and timely talk, Darren challenges pastors and church leaders to step beyond the comfort of their buildings and into the real work of gospel-driven ministry. With stories from the mission field and deep insights into the cultural moment we’re living in, he reminds us why the Church exists — to be the hands and feet of Jesus in a broken world.

• Transcript

  Mike Glenn: I tease Darren Tyler, uh, because he built the church backwards. Most of the time you start off with a group of people, and then you find a mission later. Darren got involved in mission work with the Haiti earthquake, and then got a group of people together to fund the mission work. And since then has started, uh, what, 50 churches or so all over the world.

  He is in between international trips right now, having just gotten back from Israel and is now on his way to Pakistan. Uh, usually when he answers my email, if he does, uh, it is-- it comes from Nepal or Africa or some airport somewhere. Uh, but, uh, Darren was involved in the music scene for about 20 years here.[00:01:00] 

  Started a small group, and from that came Conduit Church in South Franklin. Because of this, uh, Darren has a real connection and a real sensitivity to real people in real life and the application of God's Word in that moment. So, uh, I was honored to have him, uh, say yes to this moment, and I welcome him now.

  Darren?

  Darren Tyler: I mean, in fairness, when you're in an area, in the Himalayas, you don't have a lot of cell phone access. We can hear you back here. Yeah, fair enough. Um, I'm glad to be here. It's, uh, humbling to, like, think I'm in a room full of people that have been at this longer than I have. Uh, I feel sometimes like I'm just a washed-up rock and roll manager that somehow stumbled into being a pastor because God thinks that stuff's [00:02:00] funny.

  And, uh, here I am fifteen years later realizing that being an artist manager, uh, in the music business turned out to be, like, the perfect training 'cause I was dealing with a lot of, uh, brokenness in the nineties. The amount of tours that we had to cancel, uh, I wish we would've had your book in the nineties.

  I had an office, it was literally about a block from here, and I remember, uh, at one point thinking, "Do these young, uh, artists, uh, have they read the Bible?" Like, like, not having, you know, uh, private relations with someone who's not my wife is not a big ask, I didn't think. Uh, and at the same time then I got to realize, oh, it is apparently, there's some complexities to this that, uh, a lot of lives were upended.

  And I came into being a pastor with a, a really pure fear of the Lord because I saw the, the consequences of it. And so 15 years in, I mean, I'm probably one of [00:03:00] the guys that have been here, a pastor, uh, the shortest amount of time in here because there's so many veterans sitting in here. But I don't know if you've felt this, Ruble, but like from 2010 to, to today, there's been a change in the cultural zeitgeist.

  Like it just happened. It felt like just like that. And it, it, it was, um, three years ago that a, a guy wandered up into our church. He's a, a fairly well-known podcaster, which I guess is a, a job now. One of the jokes is if, if you don't have a podcast, I'm surprised, right? Like it's-- they're everywhere. But this guy, very successful podcaster, and he had wandered in with his wife and his new baby.

  Uh, he, he, if you've seen, I won't say his name, but if you s- see his show, he uses a, a lot of, uh, colorful metaphors. Um, you wouldn't think of him as a guy that was seeking Jesus, right? But Over the years, uh, that he had been interviewing people, he said, "I noticed something," and that was that, uh, the people that seemed to have the [00:04:00] most, uh, g-r- uh, grip on reality, I think was the word he used, uh, there was one common thread, and that was they were Christians.

  Uh, maybe not publicly, but Christians. So one of them too, who was just happened to be a mutual friend, said, "Well, yeah, that's because Jesus is the way, the truth, the life," and then he recommended that he tried our church. And so what he wandered in and said that day, uh, he pulled me aside, was, uh, and I just happened to be talking about some identity and sexuality things on that day, and he said, "I just need s- I just need to know what the truth is, and then I need to know that I-- who's gonna help me fight for my family?

  Like, who's gonna help me tell my little boy that he can't be a little girl?" Who, like, my, and my point of all that was the shift seems to be from the '90s to the 2000s to today is that there are still seekers out there. They're everywhere. It's just that what seems to be they're seeking, there's the cultural zeitgeist of this, is they're seeking truth.

  Um, I'm barely old enough [00:05:00] to remember the Jesus movement, right, of the '70s, um, where s- amazing music came out of. Uh, but what happened in the '60s, right, was the sexual revolution. By the early '70s, it, the bills were coming due on all those promises of here's, you're gonna find all this freedom in feminism.

  You're gonna find all this freedom in f- free love and sexuality, and the bills came due, and it didn't work. And so the Jesus movement, if you remember, uh, or if you've e- the film The Jesus Revolution that just came out was a reminder of it, that peace and love was the, the, the revival that came out of that.

  Like Chuck Smith, right, with Birkenstocks baptizing in, on, on the beaches of, uh, San Diego, Pirates Cove. And but it was peace and love because the bills were due, and they weren't there, and Jesus was obviously he's peace, he's love. I have a it's anecdotal theory that the next revival that we're e- uh, experiencing right now is gonna be about truth.[00:06:00] 

  And love. Not truth divorced from love and not love divorced from truth. And, uh, I appreciate Rubel giving the theology of, uh, o-of why the baseline, as Mike calls it, that this is the foundation we're gonna work from, 'cause I, I've let the professionals handle that. And I'm here just to share with you, not as an expert, I'm just here to share with you 15 years of playing G.

  I feel like sometimes like Jesus' pinata. We're just swinging and hoping we hit the right thing, 'cause it's... There hasn't been a clear map for this. Um, but that answer that day when, when that guy came in, uh, and by the way, he's following Jesus now. He, he's... Still uses the F word more than he probably should, but he, uh, he's following Jesus because he's continuing to go back to the one place that he keeps finding truth.

  And I believe with all my heart that, like what Rubel has said, that the truth is, is scripture. That's the foundation of it, and so our job now is to, how do we communicate that in a way that is, um, [00:07:00] truthful and loving? Uh, because i-in, in the truthful world, uh, I grew up under the hellfire brimstone. Uh, I had people that would picket concerts.

  We'd go on tour, and there were... It, it just never failed, you know? Here's this Christian band about to do an altar call, and there's a guy out there with a sign that says, "Repent, you're going to hell." So on one ditch, there's that, and then there's this other ditch, right? Which is we've-- if you're from the Nashville area, you maybe remember, we've had a few churches that, uh, the pastors decided that they've discovered something brand new that we'd s- we've somehow missed from 2,000 years of Orthodox Christianity.

  We somehow missed that Jesus was totally okay with, uh, whatever you wanna do with your sexuality. And, and pastors burned down churches and their lives and their private lives with it. So the truth is important, and love is important, and that's what we've been discovering here. Um, how many of you have heard...

  I just wanna be- so I don't wanna waste your time. Uh, Aaron [00:08:00] Renn, has anybody heard of that... Okay, I'm gonna do something really quick, 'cause this helped, this is what's helped us. I'm not gonna tell you how you should do this. I'm just gonna say this is what's helped me, helped our staff and our team, which was to understand the cultural moment that we're in.

  Aaron Renn, it's, uh, A-A-R-O-N-R-E-N-N. Um, I don't make any money off of this. I've never met him before. But highly recommend that you, if you get a chance, just read, uh, just, you can just Google it. But he, his theory was this, uh, and this helped me so much 'cause it's, okay, this is where we are. That before 1994, that in the...

  And I'm speaking specifically, and I, I wanna make sure I say this because I travel in a lot of cultures. I'm just speaking of Western culture at this point. East Africa, they're not having this debate. Uh, they're not asking, "Can a man be a woman?" They're like, "How did that even come into your mind?" But- [00:09:00] I will say that here's why it matters for us, because where, the way that so far that the West has gone, eventually it affects what happens in Africa and Asia.

  And because of the internet, uh, the amount of voices that are being amplified, they're now beginning to experience that. I'll be in Uganda in June, and they're beginning to experience, quote-unquote, "theologians" who are affecting their people through TikTok, through Instagram. And so it's important that we get this right.

  But he-- So here's what Aaron Renn's idea was. By up till 1994, which most of us can remember... Oh, I've got this completely backwards. I'm sorry. You're getting what you paid for right now. Uh, up until 1994, this is the world that I, uh, my formative years, my formative teenage years were, um, positive world, meaning that people thought that Christianity was a positive for, a, a net positive for our society, okay?

  That was the theory. Uh, this is the zeitgeist. Obviously, there were still people out there saying it was [00:10:00] bad, people. But at the end of the day, if you're a Christian, there was a very positive, uh, every ch- every little town had a bunch of churches, you know, a, a bunch of bars. But there was a, there was not a hostile relationship to the body of Christ, right?

  So, uh, that was the world of Christian music. Again, you know, so and even back then, it was like, if you love AC/DC, you'll love Petra. Do you remember? Anybody remember? You, anybody grew up around that? Right. Except for that I really did like AC/DC, but I didn't, I didn't need Petra for that. But, but there was a positive, the idea of being that where there's a positive thing, and then what Renn's idea is this taxonomy says that somewhere around between '94 to 2014, that it became, uh, neutral, neither positive nor negative as far as to Christianity.

  I, I promise I'm gonna make a point here. So neutral, and again, these are not hard and fast dates, but when you start to think back, you're like, "Oh, I, I, I f- I can see this." Uh, 'cause I started a church in 2010, [00:11:00] right? And so we were still in the neutral standpoint. Now, in the last, uh, 2014 till to today, um, is, i- is negative.

  This is where right now the, the, the cultural zeitgeist up until today that if you're a, a Christian, that it is hostile, whether it's in politics, whether it's in media, it is hostile to the gospel, hostile to Christianity. Now, here's why that matters, and this is what Aaron Renn said, and this has helped me.

  The tactics we used in the, in the positive world are not working in the negative world. It's not working because we're assuming that we at least all agree that the Bible was something positive for our society. So if I start even using the Bible, it's like going to Morocco to talk about Jesus to Muslims.

  I actually start in the Quran and reverse engineer to Jesus there. Because that's what they would start. They would at least view that as, so you can then begin to go backwards for it. It's very complex. [00:12:00] It's not easy. The neutral world, by the way, that was where the seeker-sensitive movement, we saw a lot of that happen.

  I'm not here today to debate what was successful tactics, what was not. I can just tell you that by 90, in the 90s, most of the clients that I had who were musicians, maybe they were making bad decisions, but they, by the way, most of them weren't. I should be very clear about that. It's easy to throw rocks at Christian artists and say they're all of the devil.

  None of that. But the ones, even the ones that were naughty, they at least knew the Bible. By 2001, 2002, and 2003, the fruits of this seeker-sensitive movement were coming home to roost. And I had artists who were selling millions of records and did not know the difference between Jonah and Noah. Like, well, there was water in both, but only one there was a boat and one there was a whale.

  Like, I'm like, oh, I got to whiteboard this whole thing out, which is where the little Bible study was born out of. But what I'm getting at is that they grew up in a world where they didn't have a foundation of that. And what I think is happening, I think [00:13:00] theoretically, is that in the negative world, we're still seeing a lot of neutral world tactics to try to reach negative world culture.

  And it starts and ends with me saying, well, the Bible says this, and them saying, well, we don't even believe the Bible. We think the Bible's garbage. But, you know, there's a point where you have to start with where they are and lead back to Scripture. I'll tell you, our tactics, our plans, our strategies just for today, just super practical, has been that we start with the idea that, and it's helpful.

  I mean, I'll be in Nepal again, very hostile to Christians. It's very helpful to have spent time in hostile cultures because we still deal with the same trick. It's truth and it's love, right? We still have to tell the truth. And so for us, I remember 2010 Maybe two, actually 2012, Edie [00:14:00] Bisagno's here, which is awesome.

  Tim, Tim and Edie Bisagno have been with us at Conduit for years. I learned, uh, so much from Tim. Uh, her dad or father-in-law, John, uh, he forgot more about the Bible than I've ever known. But, uh, I-- we're just this little high school church. There's maybe about 100 people on that Sunday in 2012, and I was teaching.

  Uh, and I just said something in passing, which was that, uh, you know, in Ezekiel where, uh, it speaks of Satan and, and, and it was pride that filled his heart. And then in Isaiah where he says, "I will be like you," like I wanna be equal with God. Equality and pride, if those are your two calling cards, you're not the first.

  I, I think it was something like that that I said. And afterwards, uh, this girl who couldn't have been more than, I don't know, 24 years old, comes up with a camera on her phone. 2012, right? We've moved, we're moving towards negative world, right? Uh, and she's wants to do the gotcha moment for her 44 followers on Instagram.

  And she's like, you know, "Gotcha" with... And, and [00:15:00] I-- it's interesting that Ruble says that it was about consent, 'cause what my response was, "First of all, I'd love for you to come to coffee with my wife and I. We'd love to..." And her response was, uh, "No, thank you." And then I said, "Look, I'm a, I'm a heterosexual male.

  The, the struggles that I have are heterosexual male struggles. But if I went home today and announced to my wife that because I was, quote, 'born this way,' right, I want to invite more women into the marriage, like West Africa," right? And she's like, "Well, as..." This is her exact words, "Well, as long as your wife's okay with that, then it's okay."

  And I'm, it, I'm twen- at this point I might be 40 years old. I'm like, "Wait a minute. Did she just say that out loud? Like she just said the quiet part out loud?" But that was the shift that was happening in the culture, right? Was that she was no... She wasn't looking... And by the way, she was born and raised in the church, and it turns out she was on a tour from California to North Carolina to visit churches to prove that we're all hateful bigots.

  That was her entire thing. And somehow she stumbled into [00:16:00] our little church of 120 people in Independence High School. Have no idea how she even found us. Uh, I never heard from her again or her 100 or 44, whatever Instagram followers. But there was a moment for me where I realized that something was shifting in the culture.

  I wasn't sure what to do with it yet. Uh, 2014, I started hosting once a year. I don't know if you guys are familiar with, uh, Lisa Childers. I know Jay is. He's been her pastor for years. But, uh, I knew her 'cause she was a, a, a worship, an artist from the music business. I knew her as a girl from Zoe Girl, and I knew her dad from, uh, the group Love Song.

  He was part of the Jesus Revolution back in the day. She started a, an apologetics ministry that if you have not accessed her, uh, content, it's, it's so helpful. Uh, but back then she was just getting started, so we would give her a month th- in October to spend with our teenagers, one Wednesday a month. Uh, in 2012, '13, '14, that range, and she would talk about one Sunday-- or one Wednesday was, uh, [00:17:00] gender, uh, sexuality.

  And here's why I bring that up, because around 2012, '13, '14, the teenagers were mad when we talked about homosexuality, when we talked about same-sex marriage, that that would made them angry, and they would, like, write hate notes. In 2014, it switched, and it was gender. She said the exact same stuff she'd said the years before, but in 2014, '15, '16, all of a sudden, the, the little hate letters we were getting were two things.

  One, they were about gender, not about sexuality, and the other one, they were primarily from females. In fact, when I say primarily, I mean 100%. It was young girls, "You can't tell me that I can't be a boy. You can't tell me that I wasn't born in the wrong body." W- my point is, is that the neutral world, we've gone to negative world now, so we had to handle this completely different because she's not coming...

  Uh, Elisa's coming at it from a, a, a Biblical worldview, but if you're 14 and you don't believe in the Bible, w- there's gonna have to be some other... And I, I love the fact that what Ruble said is that we have to lead with love because that's so [00:18:00] ch-- the old, old, old cheesy saying, they won't, uh, care how much you know until they know how much you care turns out to be very true.

  Uh, and, and it doesn't mean that they're not gonna be angry. It doesn't mean that even, like, the, the gnashing of teeth, like, which is the anger, right? That they've, there, there's gonna be anger. Uh, that's not the gauge of whether we were in love or not is w- how the response is. Uh, for us it's about knowing that we've communicated it in love and let the responses fall to, uh, to their hearts.

  We're planting seeds, right? And even Jesus only promised a 25% success rate, right? With that. Like, there was only one type of soil where it fell into, where it grew. So for us, here's the practical. We've had to start with our elders. I, uh, make sure we're all on the same page, and not just elders, but our spouses of them because what I've learned is when you start speaking from the pulpit about these things, there's- Uh, the bitter Twitter, uh, the Twitter, the misery theme park that exists seemingly only on Twitter.

  They [00:19:00] open a new ride every week it seems like with what they're angry about. You have to be prepared that, uh, your s- your elders are gonna need to be there and see, "Gosh, they're really mad at, at Darren right now. I wonder if we should do s- quote, unquote, 'do something about this.'" So we make sure we start with our elders and their spouses, that we're all on the same page together.

  I can no longer assume that they are. And then it's our staff and their spouses. We've invited them into the conversation. I don't know about you, but our team is the- we m- we got a lot of 20-somethings around. A lot of 20-somethings because they're, uh, there's a whole generation right now that's coming back to faith for the first time.

  You've probably seen the headlines. But we s- we go to them, and we make sure that we're all on the same page, and that means once a year, once a year... I used to think it was we set it and forget it, and now it's like we come back and we visit every year because every time I say, "In Jesus' name, amen" on a Sunday morning, they go to their car or to the bathroom and start hitting TikTok, and I've got [00:20:00] counter-narrative hitting them.

  So once a year, and part of what we... We've called it the Conduit Creed, which kind of sounds cult-like, and I don't really like it, but we couldn't come up with a better word. It's just a simple thing of saying, "These are our primary beliefs. If, if you have a microphone and you've got influence, I need to know that you believe that marriage is between a natural-born male and a natural-born female."

  And we've added the words naturally born, biologically male, biologically female, because I had to learn the hard way that just 'cause I said male and female, that we don't all have the same definitions anymore. And it was important because if you've got an eighth-grader struggling with their identity, what I don't need is a 22-year-old saying, "Well, you should explore that."

  And we have to be careful when it comes to counseling. Uh, with the, the APA, all these things that are out there, they're putting standards in place right now where there are counselors at Christian universities in this town that I know personally encouraging people to explore their sexuality. Exploring it.

  You know, I, I've, uh, the first time I had that happen with a [00:21:00] young couple, came back, and I don't know if I should say names, but this counselor said to this young lady, you know, she was wondering if she's a lesbian. She's 22 with two kids, and this counselor said... By the way, a professor at a Christian university, almost said the name, Christian university here in town said, "You should explore that."

  And the husband calling me going, Darren, who did you send us to? Who did you recommend us to? So you have to be very aware that maybe not everybody's going to believe this and including and especially on your staff. And then we go to leaders and the same thing. If you've got a microphone, we don't necessarily enforce it if you're a parking lot attendant, right, where there's room for you here.

  But if you're going to be influencing at all, then you've got to be on the same page with us as it relates to sexuality, to gender, to theology. And we've used and obviously stolen a lot of stuff from Ruble's work as far as even the definition and that the marriage bed is pure and what all that means because we've also learned that it's no longer just about same-sex marriage.

  We've had a whole generation that grew up in this world [00:22:00] and this world. Like when I started talking about marriage and heterosexual marriage and if you're just living with your spouse, we had eight couples. Our church is not that big. Eight couples that I didn't have no idea had been living together eight to 10 years.

  None of them even occurred to them that, oh, this is a biblical thing. We shouldn't, you know, we had a bunch of weddings just like we did in Haiti because they didn't know. So it is about the marriage bed. It is about discipleship. So for us, the staff, the leaders, volunteers, and then the pulpit itself. I think one of the things that I realized was that I can't be standing up on a Sunday morning answering a bunch of questions and nobody's asking, right?

  And what our people are asking now is what's true. We've seen it over and over and over again. The baptisms we're having now, people coming out of stuff I thought we've long left behind. The New Age movement, right? And I'll say we've got a [00:23:00] few in our church right now that were on the path to quote unquote transitioning that have repented.

  And, you know, we're going to have to as a church family, like what do we do with someone who has been lied to, who went down the road even for surgical transitions? We're going to have to make room to love. To welcome them, uh, and to tell them the truth, which is that God loves you just the way you are, and he loves you way too much to let you stay that way.

  The worst possible news I could have gotten when I was 16 is you don't have to change a thing. You're just fine the way you are. That would have been terrible news for me. This is all I have to look forward to in my life, is depression and poverty and y- be- being obviously this little white trash, scrappy, druggy kid.

  Like, that's the best I can hope for? That, that He, He'd let me stay that way? That's not hope, right? That's, that's terrible news. The Gospel is great news. He does love us just the way we are, [00:24:00] and He loves us way too much to let us stay that way. He created these designs in the same way that West Africa, that polygamy is destroying people's lives, same-sex marriage is destroying people's lives because God's, uh, commands around love, around marriage w- were not arbitrary.

  They're not capricious. The-- He designed us. He gets to define us, and if we operate within those confines... So practically speaking, we start with our core. If, if I had more time, I'd show you we have concentric circles. We start with this. This is the core. These are our elders. These are their spouses. And then we move out to our staff, and then we move out to, like, leaders, volunteers, and then we go to the church at, at large, and all four of those have to be hit.

  Uh, all four of those have to be communicated. But I can't rely any longer on just the pulpit, right? Because the pulpit is just one of the tools in our arsenal. The f- the pulpit is just one of the voices that are speaking into our church family and modeling for them truth [00:25:00] and love. Uh, one of the things that I remember from my Christian music days in the Positive Neutral Negative, whatever, is Christian music, we were always felt like about five years late to the party, right?

  By the time we released our version of Coldplay, Coldplay had already crested in the general market, right? We were, we were too late. And, uh, uh, I think Tony said, you know, from K-Love, like that's changed a lot in the last couple of years. Like we've had a lot of really great music coming out. But my point is, is culturally Christian music was often behind and not ahead of the curve.

  This is a moment where the church cannot afford to be behind the curve. We gotta be ahead of the curve. And right now what's on the front end of that curve, we have what Ruble's talking about, which are young men and young women. We got grandparents trying to figure out how to manage and how to navigate the identity issues, and we've got a large number of young male and females who are searching for truth right now.

  My son, when he was 14 years old, I'll never forget it, we were watching some, this [00:26:00] is only like six years ago, controversy of a male competing in a woman's sport. And my son at 14 goes, "But Dad, that can't be a girl. He's got a thing. I was like, "Yes, that's true. He does." But my son now at 19 years old, uh, when we went to Nepal to hike the, uh, hike Mount Everest back in September, you have to-- every, every ounce counts 'cause I can carry, uh, I can get a yak to carry, right, a bag, but not my fat butt.

  So I had to get... Every, every ounce counted, and my son, I'm so proud to tell you, took out a pair of shoes that he really wanted to took, take and put his Bible in because he's 18 years old at that point. He had his 19th birthday on the face of Mount Everest. But he took his Bible because he has been searching for truth, 'cause every time he turns on TikTok, every time he turns on Instagram, every Netflix special, he's been told as a young man, "You are the problem.

  You are the poison. It's your toxic masculinity. Y- a man can be a woman." He's literally being told [00:27:00] th-that lies are true and truth is lies, that evil is good and good is evil, and who is gonna tell him now as he's searching for truth? We've got it on tap, the truth, right? Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

  And when you see these articles coming out, for the first time in history, the research is showing that not only is there an upswing in Christianity, right? It is, uh... New York Times, I mean, so if, if it's that obvious that the Times has to report it, then it's incontrovertible. It has to be that young men, there's actually more young men right now that are pursuing after Jesus than young women for the first time ever.

  But the point is, is that as a church, while we're loving those that are struggling and questioning, we need to love those who are now seeking truth, who have been told to believe something that is not true, and that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. So take that for what it's worth 15 years later.

  Uh, I will say that when we started Speaking Truth, it didn't seem immediately obvious that this was a good [00:28:00] idea based upon my inbox, uh, based upon the f- the dumpster fire that became social media for us. But I can tell you that, uh, uh, there are faithful pastors here and around the world, and those that are leading with truth and love are the ones that seem to be seeing a bunch of growth and a bunch of impact in the culture, uh, specifically as it relates to young people.

  So, uh, that's, that's what we're doing is truth and love, and I know that in this world here, you're gonna hear a whole lot more wisdom today than what I just shared with you. But it's working for us. It's working because it's true, and, uh, and what's true will always be what works because Jesus is truth.

  So thank you for your time at 

  [00:29:00] lunchtime.