“What? Another post from Tim? I forgot about this project.”
haha I know. It’s been a while.
The last thing I posted here was back in April. It wasn’t because I ran out of things to say or lost interest in any of this. Actually, the opposite happened. I had plenty of ideas. I just became more interested in doing something about eldership in our city than in merely talking about it.
I did a few things since April that made the whole “father in the home to elder in the city” thing more tangible for me.
I started with about ten guys
I feel like I understand the “father in the home” part of this progression better than the “elder in the city” part.
Not that I’m a perfect father. Definitely not. I just know a bit better what that looks like. I want to be a good husband and father and lead our home well spiritually, relationally, emotionally, financially, all the different adjectives you can use there.
But elder in the city?
I don’t really have a clear picture for what that looks like.
I can’t point to a guy around where I live and say, “That’s one of our city elders.” We have elders at church, but that usually means board members who serve for a term and then rotate off. That feels different from Boaz knowing where to find the elders at the city gate in Ruth 4. And it’s different from what Paul tells Titus in chapter 1, which is to appoint elders in every city. He doesn’t say to appoint an elder in every church the way we tend to think of it today. He says, “every town” (Titus 1:5).
I have ideas about what that could mean, but I don’t want to settle for theoretical ideas.
So I invited some local men to get together and read Scripture.
I’ve been calling it a “midrash,” which is derived from the Hebrew root meaning "to seek out" or "investigate" the deeper meanings of Scripture. We read a couple of chapters together, ask questions, push back on each other, make connections, and try to figure out how the text should change the way we lead our homes and live in our town.
There are already good men’s Bible studies and breakfasts around here. I attend some of them. I learn from them. I like the guys and usually the food is pretty good, too.
I just wanted something more intentional.
What would it look like for men to read Scripture together because we want to become better husbands and fathers now, and maybe the kind of men who can carry responsibility in our city later?
About ten guys started showing up pretty regularly.
For our first six weeks, meeting every other week, we read through Abraham’s life in Genesis 12 through 25. We asked what we could learn from him about marriage, family, business, faith, leadership, and failure. Now we’re working through Proverbs.
Most of the guys don’t know that I’m thinking about our group this way, but I’m sitting there wondering what happens if the same group of men keeps doing this midrash thing for ten years. Right now we’re just trying to grow as husbands, fathers, leaders, and business owners, but something has to be different in our homes after ten years of that, right? I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t impact our town in some way, too.
So that was step one. Stop only talking about this and start exploring it with some other guys.
Then I met an actual city elder
This summer my wife and I took all seven of our kids to Israel.
Our guide was an 80-year-old man who had lived there since he was two. He knew the land better than I know my own backyard. He had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, many of them living close to him in a village of around 150 people.
At some point he mentioned that he and three other men were the elders of the village.
I was like, “Whoa! Hold on. What does that mean?”
I had been trying to picture what this looked like, and now I found a guy who was actually functioning that way.
I wish I’d had more time to ask him questions. From what I understood, the elders met regularly, helped settle disputes, organized some shared needs, and looked after people in the village. It wasn’t a legal government position, at least not how he described it to me. But I could tell it was a responsibility that he took very seriously and that people in the village depended on him to do it well.
In this village, people lived close together and shared things. Everyone still had their own income, so I’m not describing a common-purse arrangement. It was more like, “I don’t need a car because my neighbor has one and will share it with me when I need it.” It had this Acts 2 kind of feel to it.
They also gathered as a whole village for worship, not like our non-profit church structure in America where a church is mainly an organization or building people drive to. It was more like the city church you see in the New Testament. The church in Thessalonica. The church in Corinth. The church in Ephesus. Those letters were written to a body of believers in a geographic place. This village gathered in one synagogue and shared life so close that neighboring villages noticed and are, even today, impacted by it.
I don’t want to make their village sound perfect. He mentioned problems he was working through. Although he didn’t share the details, I could tell they required his attention.
But I saw enough to think, “Okay, this isn’t just some dream. This city church and eldership thing can actually happen.”
Can that happen here in America? I don’t know.
My family lives on five acres. Our neighbors are more spread out. Our churches, work, schools, and friendships can pull us in a dozen geographic directions. Proximity works differently here.
I came home thinking this is worth pursuing, though. I don’t see it around me right now, but I want to explore what it could look like with actual people where I live.
There was another reason I went quiet
This part has less to do with city elders and more to do with whether I should be making content at all.
For a long time, content creation was how I built a business and provided for my family. I’ve been doing this since 2006. Somewhere along the way, without really noticing it, this became less about feeding my family and more about feeding my ego.
Obviously, I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to do that. It happened one small step at a time over two decades. But it changed me, and then it started changing my family and my marriage.
So after selling my company in 2022, I mostly stopped creating for about four years.
I wasn’t sure I could trust myself with it.
Then last week I spoke at the GodMade conference for Christian creators. I told more of that story there. When I finished, people came up and told me the talk helped them. They thanked me. They told me I did a good job.
I call that the “attention bomb.”
Past me would have looked normal on the outside, but inside I would have been like, “Yeah, I did a good job.” This time I was trying to receive the thanks and the compliment without letting it go any further than that.
I’m honestly not sure I know how to do that yet. On the drive home and for a few days afterward, I kept asking, “Okay, how did I handle that? Did I pass that test, Lord? Did speaking pull me back into the old place? Would making content start costing my wife and family the same things it cost them before?”
Thankfully, I think I handled it differently this time. I’ve had four years to get to a healthier place with content creation.
There are two ditches for me here: I can go back to chasing attention and letting my family pay for it. Or I can decide that because I used this gift poorly in the past, I must stay away from it completely.
I don’t think either one is right. I like making content. I think it’s something I’m good at, and I think I can use it to help people. I just need to keep it in a healthy place.
So I think I’m coming back to it, but I don’t want to keep talking because I need another post. If I go quiet for a while because I’m actually doing the thing or because I need a heart-check, that’s okay.
Right now I’ve met one elder in Israel, I’m reading Scripture with about ten local guys, and I have a lot of questions about where any of this goes. I want to keep wrestling with it with you all.
So, that’s where I’ve been since April.
I’d love to hear your reactions, questions, or anything that came up for you in all of this. I really don’t want this to become a one-way thing.
Leave a comment, or send me a voice message to use in a future podcast episode. Let’s figure this out together. I don’t know how to figure it out on my own.
