Tom Tarrants on Christian Discipleship, Radicalization, Truth & Hope
Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/Following-Jesus-Christ-Authentic-Discipleship/dp/1737854368
Cameron (00:02)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co host, Cameron McAllister.
Nathan (00:07)
And I'm your co host, Nathan Rittenhouse.
Cameron (00:10)
Today we have a special guest, Tom Terrence. This is a real joy, and we've wanted to have Tom on the podcast for a long
Nathan (00:19)
Well, I mean, we quote him periodically, so
Cameron (00:21)
we do. So it's only right that we actually feature the man here in person. I've known Tom for for several years now. I began I first met him when he was a chaplain to our speaking team when we were at RZIM and we we forged
A friendship. Tom has a life in ministry. He has quite an interesting background. We'll talk about that in a second. But he's written many books. We're going to talk about one of those books today. But I just want to say on a on a personal level, Tom is just a joy to be around. He is a very deep person. He is deeply committed to discipleship. That's something we talk about a lot on Thinking Out Loud. And he was really.
an instrumental part, if not, I mean, he was really the man who worked on and designed the fellows program at the C. S. Lewis Institute, where I now serve as director of apologetics. This is an amazing program of discipleship and it builds a community. It's so well put together. Incidentally, on that note, Tom is really the person who began scheming to get me that job in the first place. So he's just been an all around very important person in my life.
And really grateful to know him and have learned and continue to learn so much from him.
Nathan (01:44)
Well, and I'll just th throw my hat in the ring here and say, Tom, I think that if you think of a stack of papers on a windy day, you've often been a good paperweight there to just kinda hold everything in place spiritually and ask me some good soul searching questions and you've been a good cheerleader of this next generation and keeping an eye on these young Wiker Snipers out there. So thank you for your personal ministry in our lives.
Tom Tarrants (02:09)
Well, it's been a great blessing to me and a great encouragement to know you two guys and to have fellowship and to be able to talk about things that matter and to encourage one another. So th thank you for having me on your program. I hope you won't later decide you at a lapse in judgment. Hopefully people won't throw things at you.
Cameron (02:34)
All right, well that remains to be
seen.
Well, Tom, on that note, your tell us a little bit about your your background and where you're coming from because it's a little bit unique and it will provide some context for the ministry that you do and your points of emphasis.
Tom Tarrants (02:56)
Okay. well probably the best place to start is at the beginning, right? A a good
Cameron (03:04)
I think so.
Tom Tarrants (03:04)
story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And to go way back, I was I was born in Mobile, Alabama, which is down in the very deep south, and
Mobile has been around quite a long time. It was founded in seventeen two by the French. And when I was growing up, it was a very traditional southern city, still is actually. And it was segregated. It had been since it was founded, and so
your listeners will probably find this hard to imagine. But the neighborhoods were segregated. Black people had their part of town, white people had their part of town, and there was no crossover unless it was domestic help coming from the black community to white homes or something like that. Some but there was there was no fraternizing.
Shopping was segregated. There were black stores and little shopping areas. and then the whites had theirs. public facilities. if you went into a public building, you would have water fountains and bathrooms that had signs over them, white and colored. And so that
That gives you a sense of how things were. And of course the schools were completely segregated. white people I think just I don't know that that there was a lot of discussion about this before the civil rights movement, but the assumption was that it was baked into the cake, so to speak, that white people were superior. That was
pretty common throughout the United States for a very long time, and that black people were inferior. I never knew a black person who had gone to college. there there weren't that many, I suppose, down there at that point, but I certainly never never met one.
We had a a really large Air Force base there and that kind of helped to set the tone of the culture too. my family, kind of middle class people, parents were good good folks. they loved the kids. There were three of us. I was the oldest. my dad was a hard working guy, my mom stayed home and took care of us and so
Pretty typical, I guess you'd say, at least up up to a a certain point. And had lots of extended family around and we had family gatherings for meals and that that kind of thing. so that's a little sketch of of the background. For me personally, I
I spent a lot of time, too much time, watching television. And particularly since the I grew up in the fifties and early sixties, it was war movies, World War Two, fresh in the memories of adults. And so I
I did a lot of of that kind of thing and watching Westerns. so John Wayne, he was my homeboy, as she would say nowadays. I love John
Nathan (07:24)
Thank you.
Cameron (07:25)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (07:25)
Wayne and Matt Dillon and you know, all of this kind of stuff. you know, it as I've reflected, thought back I mean television movies, the media has a really strong impact on people that they don't
recognize. Television isn't prob probably isn't considered to be so influential, but it it certainly was with me and I I think it is with people now. These these various things shape and mold our thinking as we grow and as we are formed in our earlier years. so you know it's the it's the
the family that we're a part of that shapes us most profoundly, I think, in the early years. And then the the community, maybe the extended family, and then the kind of community you're a part of, and the culture of of the area where you grew up, all these things enter into it. And certainly television and the media now play a a huge role. So
Those things were operating in my life as they were with everybody else. So that's just a a kind of quick sketch. If you have specific questions, be happy to
Nathan (08:53)
Well well, I I wanna jump in here because you've outlined a very nice sort of other than the massive cultural blindness going on there. Home life was pretty good. At some point this goes all off the rails for you. Maybe give us a little bit of details on how things turn sour there.
Tom Tarrants (09:17)
Good question, Nathan.
I should have mentioned that we were my siblings and I were in church almost every Sunday. My mother really thought it was important for us all to go to church and she took us or either delivered us, depending on circumstances, and my father never went, but the rest of us did. So that was
s significant part of life and it was a bible believing church. Baptist there are more Baptist than people down in the South. So I was amongst the great unwashed, I guess you'd say. and that c culminated in making a profession of faith at age thirteen. I thought, well,
I've heard enough of these sermons and these Sunday school lessons to know that hell is not a place I want to go to. And and so I made a profession of faith, I think largely to deal with that issue, you know, to ensure that I was not on the losing end of
of the stick, so to speak, short end of the stick, spiritually. But you know, it's an interesting thing, and this is not uncommon in the South, in the Bible Belt, or at least that was true in those days, and to some extent I'm sure it still is. you make a profession of faith many times without actually being born again.
And you get baptized and you think you're saved and you're a member of the church, but then you carry on life as as you did before. And that's what happened to me. Now, I I should say that there are people who do make professions of faith even at young ages. can be very young and and that are truly born again. But there is also this
confusion that enters in when you know the gospel is not preached clearly as it should be where you have this message of just believe in jesus as your savior and you'll be saved. Well that's not really doing justice to what the scripture says. Jesus himself said repent and believe. I never heard anything about repentance.
It was all focused on believing
Cameron (12:20)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (12:20)
that Jesus was the Son of God and died for our sins, which I totally believe. But but believing without repentance leaves out a crucial element and you wind up unconverted in spite of being baptized, but self deceived, think thinking that you're on your way to heaven. And that was the case with me.
Well, what's in you will come out of you, and the fact my unconverted heart was stirring and moving in in ungodly directions began to emerge particularly strongly when the desegregation of the public schools began. That was in my school, it was nineteen sixty-three.
And that's where I really faced a challenge to my beliefs, the beliefs that I had absorbed. I hadn't really s sat down and developed any kind of philosophy of life or ideological
Cameron (13:32)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (13:33)
commitment at the age of the ripe old age of seventeen. I had been exposed a few months prior to starting
school when I was in my junior year of of high school, to some conservative thinking and groups. but, you know, I I hadn't really become a an ideologue yet. but anyway when this desegregation began, I mean it was a great commotion
all over the state. And what was happening, it I didn't have words for it. I didn't really understand it at the time. But you had the the governor of Mississippi or of Alabama saying that this whole desegregation thing was a communist plot and that communists and liberals were trying to overthrow
society and he really hammered away on that and others picked that up and other groups in the state groups like the Ku Klux Klan reinforced all of that. Well the the whole state, because a federal court order had required desegregation, was
in an uproar because of not only the desegregation but also the fact that the federal government, according to general opinion, was interfering in the rights of the states and state of Alabama in particular. And so there was a lot of upheaval, a lot of
Well, it was I've described it in one of my books as a swirling vortex of racial and political and social upheaval in the society. And what happens when when that is going on, it you have a a state of what sociologists call anomie. It's it's a an upending of the norms of society. it's like having your your
Thanksgiving table all set with all the the plates and silverware and all the f dishes of food on the table, and then somebody comes, some strong character comes and just flips the table over and everything hits the floor. it's that kind of chaotic situation that disorients people.
Cameron (16:42)
Hm.
Tom Tarrants (16:43)
They knew.
before in as we say now, in the before times, everybody knew what to do. They knew what to expect. They knew what normal was. Now there is no understanding of that. Everything is up in the wind, or like you were saying earlier, Nathan, a windy day blowing away a a stack of papers.
Cameron (17:06)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (17:07)
well, that's when things can go horribly wrong. And they did in the South.
And it wasn't just Alabama, it was Mississippi, which was even even more reactive against all of this. But the the states in the South, and this wasn't confined simply to the South. There's a lot of racist sentiment and upheaval all over the country. And if you talk to black people, they'll tell you there's as much racism in the north as in the south. It just comes out in a different way. but anyway, I got
really aroused by all of this in my high school there. My school was the largest in in Mobile. And we had I don't know we had about two thousand students I think and an enormous campus that took up a number of city blocks really. and so the
The campus was surrounded when I went to start school in September by National Guard troops that had been federalized. And they were there to make sure that everything went smoothly when US Marshals brought in two I think it was two or three black girls. And there was literature being distributed and I read some of it.
racist anti-Semitic literature and one thing led to another. I met the people who were passing this out and began to get books to read and go to meetings and hear the teaching. And so to to make a a long story short, I I became indoctrinated.
Quite willingly. Th there was no there was no deception about it or no force involved in it. I became indoctrinated and then soon after I became radicalized. So that this is all in my teen years.
So it's a very s sad and dark period in my life that I'm really very, very sorry about and I wish I could go back and roll the roll the tape back and do things differently, but that's not the way life works. We make our choices and then our choices make us.
Cameron (20:00)
Hm
Nathan (20:00)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (20:01)
And that's what was happening in
my life. I was being made from
Kind of a ordinary
school student t into a real extremist. so
Nathan (20:25)
Tom, if I can yeah.
Cameron (20:25)
Thanks for sharing that. Well,
one one real quick note to the listeners. If you want that full story, you can find it in Tom's book, Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love, with which both Nathan and I would highly recommend. It's
Nathan (20:38)
Mm.
Cameron (20:39)
a riveting story. It's also a very spiritually rewarding book and Tom's honesty in that book is is so commendable and powerful. And we'll come back to I have a a follow up question at some point w which will touch on some of these themes again. But
Yeah, just wanted to put that in there real quick.
Nathan (20:58)
No, and and that's what I was gonna say too. I think, Tom, for somebody listening at this snapshot of what you've shared over the last five minutes to think about, somebody who then went on to work, well, after a whole round with the Klan and the FBI and prison and all that, details, you know, in the book. you you really did make a real transformation. And so to bring this back into the kind of the spiritual thing that's happening there, and we want to talk today.
about Tom's most recent book, Following Jesus Christ, A Guide to Growing in Authentic Discipleship. And so if I can kind of preemptively guess where this is going, the real question that I wanted to ask you is so, so why did you write this book? And and I think maybe we started to get some of the glimpse of the answer to that in the lament that you ended sort of the story of your your younger life. But give it give it to us why why did you write
Yeah, yeah, well you just spent decades working on this type of thing, but why this why this book?
Tom Tarrants (22:02)
Well
Answer that by starting where I just left off about how ideology shaped me, the choices I made made me. And an very important principle in all of this is in the title of a book by Professor Richard Weaver from the University of Chicago. Ideas have consequences.
ideas have consequences. And so the ideas that I took on board had terrible consequences in my life as they worked themselves out.
w however, through a tragic set of circumstances, I eventually came to the place of seeking truth.
seeking truth. And I came to find that truth with a capital T, which was not where I started. I I wasn't I thought I was fine in terms of my Christian life, although I was totally blind and deceived, dead in trespasses and sins, as Paul would put it.
I was seeking truth and I didn't know exactly why. I just knew I'd come to a place where I I believed that there was objective truth. And that as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. And so I was seeking to examine my life and and to find truth. And that ultimately brought me to Jesus. and so
That is what turned my whole life around as a an encounter with Jesus Christ. and so now I look back, that was fifty-six years ago, the summer of nineteen seventy.
Cameron (24:31)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (24:32)
And I've made lots of mistakes. I've had my ups and my downs, my twists and turns.
following Jesus. but he has been faithful to me and helped me to grow and I'm still growing, very much a work in progress. But I came to see that there are many others in in the church that need to have this kind of encounter with Christ. And also others who have had it
but are not really growing as they
Cameron (25:15)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (25:15)
could be and should be. They're stuck in some kind of rut somewhere. Or they've been growing a little bit and now they're they've plateaued. so I really wanted to put together something that could help people to see these essential
truths that bring transformation of our lives so that our lives begin to resemble our confession of faith, our testimony. When we say we're a Christian, people see s at least something in us that resembles Jesus in some way. And hopefully the more the better. But there's a path to for this to happen, a path to follow. It's laid out
in in the New Testament. And so that that's really the the idea behind behind getting to this point of writing this book. And I've got this one here, this this first segment, I guess you'd say, following Jesus Christ, a guide to growing and authentic discipleship. And then I have another one coming out
Shortly, Abiding in Jesus Christ, a guide to maturing in authentic discipleship. So the the companion volumes and the two of them together really help to provide some guidance for people about growing and maturing in Christ and becoming more Christ-like. That's the ultimate goal of it, and glorifying God, bearing bearing fruit. So
Cameron (27:08)
That's very helpful, Tom. And I think this is coming at a very timely moment. And you what you described, you said fifty-six years ago. But what was interesting is you were talking about your own radicalization, you were talking about cultural anomie and the subtle insidious process of indoctrination that often takes place.
As you were describing your own turbulent times, you know, we're not dealing with so so we didn't have segregation or some of those those issues that you were dealing with at the time, but I think a lot of people would probably resonate with that sense of upheaval and turbulence and that just that feeling of things being out of control. Yeah, the the the tablecloth cloth being ripped out from under the the Thanksgiving table. I'm wondering.
If you see well, I'm I'm wondering about the parallels that you see between the nineteen sixties in particular and our own cultural moment.
Tom Tarrants (28:24)
Was it was it Yogi Berra who said, this is deja vu all over again? it feels that way. there are differences, but
There is
Just a a lot of residue from years past, things that many white people thought were taken care of. go ask the black people and see what they tell you. So yeah, there are there are issues there related to race, that's that's part of it. but I think
Now as back then, you know, the the concern that was articulated in the sixties was that the civil rights movement, as I indicated earlier, was labeled as a communist movement to undermine the United States because there was a great fear of communism.
in those days. communism was on the on the move globally. And and so that was one component. and then there was the racial angle the way they are trying to undermine us is to bring about this desegregation that will result in
the mixing of races and that will lower well
low lower the IQ of white people and make them more docile and more easily subjugated by those who wish to rule over them. so that that was part of it. And then the other part was n not only undermining America, the greatest nation in the history of the world, but the white race
and the Christian religion. So it was it was this thing of undermining white Christian America.
Cameron (31:02)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (31:04)
And
Nathan (31:04)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (31:04)
well, we see some of that emerging again. and so, you know, th these things are there's a lot of similarity between the two, a lot of differences as well. But that is sort of where we're going, and a lot of people today are particularly alarmed about
The
the l loss of patriotism and American values and as they experienced them and believed them over the years and it's like America is
In in a crisis. It's a an apocalyptic moment. All all that America once was is in danger of being lost. And so that tends to motivate a lot of people. fear, of course, is one of the most powerful motivators
Cameron (32:23)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (32:24)
that there is. Fear and guilt. They're those are two very strong motivators.
And so people are fearful and and there's good reason to be concerned about the downward spiral of our culture. I mean, there's no question that that's a part of what's going on. and so people I think are seeing this, and they're feeling the effects in other ways too economically.
All these things kind of feed into a a soup that
Cameron (33:03)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (33:04)
influences folks and a l I think in many, many cases, most cases it's not that people have sat down and thought through and analyzed and all the rest. They they they just see this, that and the other and they have a gut feeling.
Nathan (33:19)
Well,
Tom Tarrants (33:20)
Not a lot of rational analysis.
Nathan (33:22)
Can can I jump in here? Because I I was actually formulating a question along those lines of, you know, you're you're analyzing the sixties in our present moment, maybe from a a nationalistic vision of a of a type of a culture, and who's the boogeyman who's gonna come upset the Thanksgiving table? you know, now it's you know, the Jews or the, you know, pick whoever. But at you know, at 17, 19 years old, you are also trying to bomb Jewish homes and
Like you were committed to an idea to the point that you were willing to die for it, even though you didn't believe in objective truth really at the time. And so we I think Cameron and I, you know, hearing the stories would think of the sixties as a time of great, yes, cultural turmoil turmoil, but a lot of spiritual confusion too. And I'm just curious about are there similarities in the way in which people are processing information? I mean, yeah, you had literature to go to, but what I what
Where was this actually coming from? Was there like hard evidence? Were were was this coming out of the the academy and were the experts saying these things or who were the voices that were actually shaping the narrative about quote unquote who's the bad guy or who's coming to get you like who who was driving the fear narrative and why were they persuasive at that time?
Tom Tarrants (34:42)
Great question, Nathan.
They
The extreme right wing, and by that term I'm not talking about conservative Republicans. I'm talking about people that are far out neo-Nazi kind of thinking.
th they've always been around and it it they become more active and more impactful in times of social upheaval. And then when things settle down th they sort of lose their lose their strength. And it's been that way for a very long time.
you see the rise and fall of Ku Klux Klan, for example, out of the chaos of post civil war times, and reconstruction and rose and then then it kind of settled down and then back in the early nineteen hundreds the immigration coming in, you know, that started up again with different ethnic groups. then it settled down a bit and then in the fifties it began to
rise again particularly around the civil rights advances and well I guess with Brown versus the Board of Education but really got a a great tailwind in this in the sixties. there is this kind of a core of people who produce
literature and they they draw on people from the past. and there are some new ones, new voices now in this this version of it, but back then you know there was the the old standard book that was widely used by the by the anti-Semitic groups
called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And this supposedly was a a recording of the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders and outlining their plan to take over the world. And so that's that's been, of course that's been debunked. a lot of research went into it.
It was something that the Tsar back in the early days when when the Russian nobility was in control over in in Russia. something that they and I think it was the Ru the secret police, developed this to serve their interests, but they were very anti Semitic. But
that has been a staple and it's widely used and very much in use by Islamic pe people that
Cameron (38:29)
Hmm.
Tom Tarrants (38:30)
are politically oriented. I mean that's kind of the Bible, you know. So you you've got things like that. a book, for example, by Henry Ford. We've heard of Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company. He was very anti Semitic.
And he wrote a book called The International Jew. well, you know, when you ha when you have a book written by somebody as prominent and highly respected as Henry Ford, it conveys a certain credibility to the ideas. unless you're a more analytical and thoughtful person. I mean you can easily
Cameron (39:11)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (39:11)
be influenced just on a superficial level. so things like that.
Mein Kampf was a favorite, although I'm not sure how many actually read all the way through. And you know there were a number of of books. The Inequality of the Human Race by Count Arthur De Gabineau, a Frenchman. books that had been written by first this this one in
that one over the years that seemed to convey some kind of credibility to the ideas. So that sort of stuff was around and people
Nathan (40:01)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (40:02)
people would read that. And then the a lot of it though was just at a much more mundane level that recounting
Cameron (40:10)
yeah.
Tom Tarrants (40:11)
the Jews involved in the Russian Revolution and this
that and the other. So and then all
Nathan (40:18)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (40:19)
the stuff about the how black people are inherently inferior to white people.
Nathan (40:29)
So can is it is it fair to say here, and maybe to make a parallel and then get us back into your thinking about your book here for a minute, that we're talking about structures of authority. Whose whose voice counts as truth, who directly or subconsciously influences and, you know, from your own life, and I think the the world that I I can say from my own life and looking just around me, what we see is a a lot of Christianity. so I believe in Jesus and
What the Tech Titans think, I believe in Jesus, and what the governor says, or the political authority, I believe in Jesus verse, you know, and what this book says, that there's a a weird hybrid that was going on, or always has been, I think to some degree, in in the Christian mind of here's my faith, and then here's the rest of the the voices that are influencing me. And in the attempt to make a hybrid out of those two, usually destruction and chaos ensues.
And so why do you think, and and so obviously there's a vacuum for the need of the type of work that you've been doing for the last decades, and then in this book, a guide to growing an authentic discipleship is is stepping into a vacuum. So so why do you think, from the church's perspective or your perspective here, where why has why hasn't discipleship been emphasized as a core part of a simplicity of saying, I mean, we sing the little song.
the world behind me, the cross before me, though none go with me, I still will follow like any th there there are there are these ideas in our language of
Cameron (42:05)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (42:05)
Jesus is king, he's the only one we're going to follow, and then we turn right around and then add in just some vibe vibe-based emotional ethics off of a YouTube video. How how did we lose the plot there on w where discipleship and the actual way in which we want to talk and think about truth
i surely this isn't unique to our time, but but we have to answer for our time of where has the discipleship part gone?
Tom Tarrants (42:38)
Great great question, Nathan. I I have observed that
Generally, people believe what they want to believe.
what resonates with them based on
Cameron (42:59)
Hmm.
Tom Tarrants (43:00)
where they've come from in life. And I think a lot of people today now h here's another thing to say too. Generally Americans don't like to think. And if you try to push them that way, they are unhappy with you. They like to live at the level of slogans and
whatnot. there's there's not a lot of from what I've observed a a lot of serious thought put into this with many people. and it's just how it I mean they they they have absorbed a uncritically a lot of the things they believe. And these new
developments strike them as somehow a threat or a challenge to what they believed and and so they're alarmed and then they hear people rising up against it and saying XYZ and they just uncritically take that on board. See the s most people aren't intellectuals like you and Cameron. You know, you're asking different
Cameron (44:19)
Yeah.
Nathan (44:20)
Yeah, well.
Tom Tarrants (44:21)
questions. You're thinking differently than
Cameron (44:23)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (44:23)
than
most most people and we need intellectuals but it's you know kind of down home type stuff and i I have observed I n I know for sure a lot of the people that
ha have been drawn into some some of this
troubl troubled thinking, I guess you'd say, are real Christians, but they're not mostly they're not really that mature in their faith. And they are subject to being influenced by well, all of us are have to contend with
the warfare that we are in. When you become a follower of Jesus, you are leaving one world and coming to another one. You're leaving the kingdom of darkness and coming to the kingdom of God. And so you have an enemy. The devil is wanting to r retrieve you.
Cameron (45:50)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (45:51)
you have the fallen world that you have to live in and then you've got your own
fallen nature that rises up and tries to influence you the world, the flesh, and the devil. And so a lot of people are influenced by values of the world, and they don't realize what's happening to them. And they just absorb this sort of thing. And you know, the the crucial thing for us is to have some standard of truth.
some way to know what is right, what's wrong, what's what's up, what's down, and the scripture is right at the heart of that. And so we've got a lot of people who are not really as biblically literate as we might wish. I mean the it's a commonplace that biblical illiteracy is a major problem.
in the church and so people don't really know
what they need to know to properly discern and deal with basically non-Christian or anti-Christian ideas that they take on board and that really compromise their their witness, their testimony for Christ. We we must become we must be to others what we're calling them to become.
So how are you going to share the gospel with people when you are just greatly influenced by a lot of worldly non Christian ideas and values and behavior? Well, you're totally shooting yourself in the foot, you know.
Cameron (47:48)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (47:49)
So
Nathan (47:51)
Tom, your your book has an interesting feature here. It has two subtitles. So th the title is Following Jesus Christ, subtitle, A Guide to Growing and Authentic Discipleship. But then down here at the very bottom, it also says on the front cover, Building a Faithful and Fruitful Life. And so I think one of the things that I appreciate about your tone is is you do have an analysis of here are the things that have gone wrong, but unlike a lot of books today that are like, well, here's what's wrong with the world.
Yours actually has following, growing, authentic, building. It is a a vision of of moving forward. It's maybe some of the things that we've talked about sound a little bit heavy here, but can you say something about the levity of the faithfulness and the fruitfulness and the hope that you have, you know, decades after you know, some of the chaos that you've seen unfold. Here you are. God's still good. The church is still there, people are still being faithful. What?
What what keeps you going here these days? Is it is it fear or is it a love of something else that should orient and motivate us in life?
Tom Tarrants (48:59)
Well
I am very hopeful. I'm I'm a short range pessimist and a long range optimist.
Cameron (49:14)
Yeah.
Tom Tarrants (49:15)
And I think we're going through some very troubling times. I think they're gonna get worse, much worse, not just in terms of domestic politics, but geopolitical issues as well and economic issues.
However, we have hope. We have hope. Not that somehow some man in on a white horse will come and fix it all and make it go back to the way it was years ago and there'll be peace and prosperity. no, it's in a current living relationship with Jesus Christ, he will give us the power.
To live the way he calls us to live and to bear fruit that honors and glorifies him in the midst of a world that is in chaos and running amok. Now that doesn't really comport well with our desire for the American dream and a nice peaceful existence and prosperity.
you know, retiring living on a golf course and all the kind of stuff that inhabits our minds many times. but we're we're in a r r a r reversion to the mean. We you know, what we went through what we've been through the last seventy five years or whatever, post World War Two, that's that period was an anomaly.
in terms of world history.
Cameron (51:04)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (51:05)
We're going
Nathan (51:05)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Tarrants (51:06)
back to what is the norm and it's ugly. We're reverting to s second century conditions, I'm afraid, in the West. so
Get used to it. It's coming at a high rate of speed. But don't let that overwhelm you or I mean it's it's a time when our light can shine brightly. And that's exactly what happened in the second and third and early fourth centuries, where the Christians were not in the minority or in the majority, where they did not
Cameron (51:48)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (51:49)
have power, where they were persecuted, where they were
really subjected to terrible indignities. but they were faithful, faithful to Jesus, and their light was able to shine in such a way that by the about three hundred about three hundred AD, the scholars tell us that the cr the Christians, the real Christians,
constituted about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire, which was 60 million people at that point. So that would have been, you know, maybe six million people, before the Constantinian revolution occurred. yeah, so you know, w we shouldn't really be overwhelmed by things getting worse. It it creates
And who would want things to go worse? Well, none of us, but we aren't in control of all that. And so when we enter into dark days and hard times, it's an opportunity for us to be faithful to Jesus and let our light shine in the darkness of this fallen world to glorify him and to reach people who need salvation. So
now you say, How in the world could I do that? I'm I'm weak and I I don't know what to do. I'm well, two things. Three three things, I guess I'd say, but the word of God will show us the way to go, the Spirit of God will empower us to go, and then the family of God will be with us as we go.
You've got to be rooted and grounded in a real congregation of born-again believers who share this love for Jesus and devotion to him and to the kingdom. And you can't make it otherwise. People that are trying to be lone ranger Christians, solo operators, are destined to fail and
Cameron (54:20)
Mm.
Tom Tarrants (54:20)
to fail badly.
2,000 years of history can show you that. but when we're together with a group, even just a small group, I mean a dozen people, or even smaller, I mean, we've got to be with like-minded brothers and sisters, and then we've got to be grounded in scripture, and we need the power of the Holy Spirit to understand the scriptures rightly and
to apply them to our lives and then to be able to share with others. So
Those are just a couple of thoughts rambling around
Cameron (54:58)
Wonderful.
Tom Tarrants (54:59)
in my head.
Cameron (55:00)
A a very fitting note of of closure and a and a good robust word of encouragement. It is very on brand. If you know Tom at all, it's very on brand for Tom to say, yeah, I'm filled with hope. Things are gonna get drastically worse. But very but very helpful. You're looking I mean, again, it's possible to be filled with hope and still be realistic about the wreckage that we're surveying.
And once again, just I'm gonna give the name the title of your book one more time for our listeners, and that is following
Nathan (55:31)
And tell people where they can find it.
Cameron (55:32)
right, yeah. So f following following Jesus Christ, a guide to authentic discipleship. You can find it wherever books are sold. You can find it on Amazon. By the way, I also wanna wanna give a plug for this as a a wonderful tool that you can use in your churches. You could you could
have a have a book club with this as well, but it's it's designed to be interactive and it's it it serves well as curriculum as well. So if you want to grow with others, this book is is very, very helpful for that kind of endeavor. Thank you, Tom, for being on Thinking Out Loud. It's been a joy having you. And for everybody else, if you have if in case you missed it somewhere in all of this, you've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where you think out loud about current events.
And Christian Hope. If you like what you hear, you want to hear more guests like Tom Terrence and all of that, well, like, share, and subscribe. What's stopping you? Why why are you waiting? Go do it, my friend. And if you'd like to support us financially, you can do that as well by going to www.toltogether.com.