CHURCH, COFFEE & CULTURE || Battle Ready - S04E04

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you were listening to the battle ready podcast my name is aaron mcmanus and i am here with my dad erwin mcmanus hey good morning bud good morning good morning good morning it's a beautiful day here in los angeles california it really is such a beautiful day and you came over the house that i'm renting and we watched the sunset yesterday and the nixon brooklyn game yep that was probably the most beautiful sunset i've ever seen i know we were both frothing it was it was gorgeous but it frog but i did think is it just rotting is a surfing term when you're just like yeah sick bruh the waves are smashing oh it's gonna be one of those podcasts over there no i just think the world is heavy it's it was a hard week we did the last pod we have we have gotten an overwhelming amount of positive response um and so i just want to say thank you to every person who listened who commented who messaged who shared who wrote letters thank you to to even like friends moms who reached out and were just like i wrote you a letter and notes and i just want to send this to you someone dropped off an anonymous typed out letter at our house yeah don't do that so encourage them and do that yeah just sign up sign it tell us who you are yeah yeah yeah let us know who you are if you know where we live [Laughter] but but um but beyond that i we wanted to change it up a little bit today i do want to give like a teaser because we do have some interesting topics we would like to talk about in the next few weeks but today we're going to keep it light-hearted well it seems like we've gone back and forth between politics and and church yeah and we don't want this to be only about politics and church we wanted to talk about so many other things and yes and you can only take the weight of heavy every single time where you need to just take a step back and take a deep breath and yeah so i do so let's tease the topics we want to talk about in the future that we're not going to talk about today i want to talk about stds okay i want to talk about socially transmitted diseases and how well i think it's interesting right yeah we'll do a sound effect there yeah yeah i do not want side effects to fcds no no i would prefer that but i do think that's an interesting topic to talk about how social media the social ramifications of the media and how it is a transmitted disease currently that's i think a huge conversation that we'll be able to have almost on any week because it's a systemic cultural problem i have another episode idea who is the dictator because there's been a lot of language that's been used that's it's like you know trump is the dictator but then i thought it was really interesting because me and brooke were arguing about whether she's the thought leader or not not brooke but the person we were referring to because but i'm not going to refer to her because brooke is a thought leader brooke is a thought but you're thoughtful and your leader and your leader i'll take those separately okay um but no no but we were talking about someone tweeted a really well known celebrity tweeted the who is the real dictator i want to pull the actual tweet up because i'm paraphrasing but who's the real dictator the person that was our former president or the people who censored him on twitter and are banning him and deleting his accounts this is very interesting and one thing you can know from latin america which is where i'm from all of it is that the choices you move you the choices you make to remove one dictator may be the actual material that costs you your free your freedom with the next dictator and so we have to be careful because we can be trying to right or wrong and we actually create wrongs by trying to do the right thing yeah and that that's a part of the dynamic that we're in right now we're looking at uh using censorship as a way of trying to stop more you know negative behavior negative uh actions but in the long run we've abdicated certain freedoms that we always considered to be really sacred and invaluable so that's i think a really important conversation to have yeah i also think that on a side note maybe having a conversation about um what do you do when you have a job that you don't enjoy yeah and how to make it enjoyable how do you make it enjoyable otherwise you can do that and right testing that would that be a good subject right dang you really probably really called you out by name you wanna jump let's get you another mic and talk to us um because one of the things that you know years ago i just really had to come to grips with when people would talk about my job as a meaningful and i go do you need to find a job with meaning or do you need to bring meaning to your job and i think we could have a whole conversation generationally about um i listen to people no one ever talks about having a career everybody talks about having a job yeah you know old school you had you went for a career yeah and it seems like now um generationally people what i'm doing right now is it's almost like it's it's a it's a parenthetical i don't like this job that's not going to do long term and so we never actually find a way to be content with what we're doing yeah and you've experienced that yeah like every day i've worked great i've worked really great horrible jobs where people would like people would love to have the job i've had and then i'm like just wait till you get it [Laughter] exhibit a i think there's a lot of you know so many subjects and right you know of course we have the first president who's been impeached twice and uh you didn't do it once if you can't get it right the first time try again he did and i i want to wait a few weeks maybe a few months to be able to look at this retrospectively and and make some assessments of where our culture is and where we're going yeah where are we going do you want to stay here i don't i would like to go somewhere yeah i i i'm really curious to see the information there was a season in los angeles where for every three people moving into la four people are moving out i think this year is the first year where the population of california has actually decreased wait but it would have been decreasing the other way too yes it was in l.a no no but yeah for every three people moving in four people were moving out so we were losing people in la yep but not california oh okay yeah this is the first year in all of history yeah that california's ever declined in population and so california's declining and you saw i don't know if you saw this but um the california legislature was talking about trying to find ways to tax people who live in l.a minimally have you heard about 60 days a year and also can they keep taxing people for up to a decade who leave california and move somewhere else and is there a way they could pass a law to keep taxing anyone who ever lived here and the reason they're doing that is they know that the i don't want to pay taxes no the you will the this that i'm supposed to pay we don't want to pay pose is relative there's some people who think you should you're supposed to pay 90 percent and uh some people think you you're supposed to pay fifteen percent uh it becomes the i like those people and so what's happening is california is losing its wealth and it's and it's one of the most enjoyable favorable places to live in terms of weather and oceans and mountains and it's beautiful it's a beautiful place to live um but the way california has been governed is driving out its wealth and this is what happened to detroit is um detroit basically established certain political frameworks and so the people who had wealth left detroit and and gutted it and had no um had no income base from which to tax people so you can keep taxing people until you drive them out and um and so unless all of the united states has an equal tax system they're going to move to wyoming or where's a good place the difference between detroit and california or michigan and california is the fact that california is nothing like michigan michigan is beautiful by the way no beautiful people what i'm saying but freezing in the winter which california is not right and we have a coastal line that is sprawling which i think is you know whether you want to look at it or not we are you pay for the nicest stuff i guess and and detroit was um built on the auto industry which you know was devastated and california or los angeles is built on the movie industry which probably will always have a future but but not but not necessarily the theaters yeah it's being devastated right now yeah and so in 2008 when there was a writer strike and then the recession we saw so many people living leaving los angeles so i'm going to be really interested to see what the percentage of of um temporary angelinos that have left in 2020 and we'll leave in 2021 i would like to go oh i know we talk about all the time like i love my friends here and i love my family here and that's why i like it here but i also like the mountains and i like the snow and i like less taxes but then i wouldn't have a job to pay taxes so we're in a cyclical but if we um i'm gonna catch 22 right there but if a guaranteed minimum salary for every american happens with the democratic party you won't have to work you can live in idaho and at least a a basic salary guarantee to you and you can live on that right brian isn't that one of the proposals uh andrew yang supported the university he's not the only one coming i actually uh first we said we didn't want to go about politics no no no we're just we're rambling right now just a sprinkle what if we did what if we what if we talked about we are rambling right now i like that conversation i'm just saying that i have so many interesting things to talk about i don't want the government money if i could grow a beard i'd be in the hills grow a beard okay on the hills i need to correct you on something with me and nine dogs okay well i gotta correct you something which i'm joking what the government doesn't have any money they only hold our money they actually don't have actually they don't have any money they have a massive amount of debt and which is our debt too yeah i'm just saying whenever we say government money i think we should say american citizens money that the government manages borrows for free what's that they borrow it for free they borrow for free that's right they don't have to pay us any interest rate yeah and but yeah and that's the part of the problem is that he's crazy that we say they don't talk about politics but well now we're talking about economics which is a different thing but there are political implications to the economy look i'm good if we if we're good we're going in but no we're 12 minutes in and i just wonder what the person who's driving their car right now is going what are they saying and what are they going to talk about well i think we're just previewing 2021 and saying there's so many topics that we can talk about this year and we're going to dive in and it's going to be a lot of fun and there's so much good there's so much good we're gonna talk about and and my mom is gonna do an episode she is she yeah she tried to get brooke to do it with her oh without us without us she really doesn't have any respect for our no what we bring to the table no so when you ask us why doesn't kim mcmanus do it because it was a hostile takeover and we just said no she was a coup and yeah i didn't even know it's being replaced no we found out this morning from brooke she was like brooke let's do the bad ready podcast together and she's like i don't know if it works like that i was like brooke you should have told her like i'm already doing the battery pack because your mom you're still 12. she says get out of the chair you get a yeah you guys are getting me in trouble you're getting we are she doesn't listen to it brooke she doesn't listen to the podcast it's fine no she was gonna listen for the first time this week i said don't start now she did yesterday apparently okay but i know she didn't because she didn't respond yeah and there were definitely some things that she probably would have wanted to respond to um i love my mom she's amazing she is and and one day we'll have her on the podcast and i guess brooke will be hosting um okay let's show we i don't know what we're gonna talk about what if we talked about the things we we could talk about like i know we don't wanna talk about like church but we don't wanna talk about because we don't wanna talk about drama what if we talk about this new initiative we're gonna do with this idea of houses oh that'd be cool yeah and even as we go there i just wanted to highlight something that isn't that culturally important but i thought it was interesting uh james harden has been traded from the houston rockets to the brooklyn nets and what came to my mind is they traded like half their teams i know and their future too with all these draft picks i know but the question came to my mind is um do you have um do you actually get better when you when you lose someone who doesn't create a great culture because one of the things we don't often talk about because in sports you look at talent you look at team chemistry but maybe the most important thing is culture because no one can deny james harden's talent and no one can um but you can't deny his leadership abilities and you can question whether he creates great team chemistry but you know for certain he creates a terrible team culture and so when he said uh you know he was complaining because he wanted to get traded and said i've done everything i can do immediately what came to my mind was no you didn't you didn't win a championship and you didn't create a great culture and you did not lead and you didn't create a a culture where people saw winning and coming together as a team as your highest priority and and i thought it was interesting because you can look across sports and then you look across our nation you look across companies culture is so important and one of the great challenges that we've had even as a church is um we have people all over the world asking us all the time please open up a mosaic in our city please open a mosaic in our city and and far more than um like talent we're really based on culture and one of the unique things about mosaic's culture is it's high value for for creativity for relevance for a conversation that um is relevant to an unbeliever and not just to a believer a place that really works on transparency and authenticity um a place that's pioneering and innovative and creative and it's it's more challenging to multiply a culture than it is to multiply a structure if mosaic was just about a structure here's how you do music here's how you do preaching here's how you organize your staff it would be easy to replicate mosaic that's why i think it's easier to replicate mcdonald's because mcdonald's has a system and so you can have a gazillion mcdonald's all over the world and this is what one billion you know customers served one point something billions serve daily but i can't imagine the central serve daily right daily or something like that yeah i think about like uh central and uh it was at lima peru this world-class michelin star restaurant it's not open anymore they closed well he he he shed it i think he shut it down to start something else yeah they they'll never get to one billion served daily and uh it's it's very few people and three and a half hour experience experiencing something that's life-changing life-giving extraordinary and in many ways a lot of churches that multiply a lot tend to be more like mcdonald's or like starbucks and if you want to create a chef culture then you're going to multiply slower and more with more intentionality and i mean years ago a church that is multiplying all over the world met with me and they as a staff they said you know how can we become more like mosaic we're more like starbucks and we open up franchises everywhere and you guys are more like this connoisseur coffee house and crafts coffee crowd coffee and i said well first of all um we would love for our craft coffee house to have more franchises across the world so don't don't demean yourselves because you're starbucks that's just who you are so do it really well yeah well it's been an interesting thing to watch like there's a local coffee company i think it's it's even like a very clear metaphor like now we're talking about something you love coffee i do love coffee i also do like basketball but we got it but yeah but um but no coffee there's a brand in la dom predominantly the the west coast but there is i think they do have a flagship in a few stores on the east coast as well but it's called blue bottle and blue bottle started really independent i think one of our friends sold them their first coffee machine and their first location was like a back house of like another restaurant so like they have a really cool origin story but as they sold to nes nestle company like five or six years ago i think it's like a 500 million dollar purchase they started growing rapidly and you know rapidly and and and aggressively and like i have a lot of obviously a lot of mosaic kids work for blue bottles i'm not you know it's still tested and your sister loves bloomberg loves it but it was blue every day but when yeah but it was pretty clear and they still do some things great so i'm not knocking it the branding is amazing but you can see the drop in quality because there's no way you can do coffee to that level at that aggression like level of increase in aggression so i actually honest question rapid growth what okay the moment so the quality has gone down the bigger they get no but but but okay i'm gonna believe you i don't know i'm gonna say i i'm pleased yeah but i think you stopped liking blue bottle the moment they sold even before the quality went down no no no no no no okay so obviously i'm asking i'm asking okay don't say it as a statement okay well the statement makes it more provocative all right why are we always cutting out my statement so so here is here's the question yes and i would ask that of all of you kind of listening do you have a psychological shift when a mom and pop kind of craft company sells out because it's like the band idea that the you know the musicians are great until they they signed a big contract then they sold out no longer worth your you know is there a correlation between finding something and evaluating something because it's local and then watching it become global and it losing its um relevance and value right 100 yes but with blue bottle i was actually a big fan it was never my favorite but i always liked blue bottle i went they created the best like they created the coolest little shops they always found great unique spaces they left them very raw and then brought like a modern aspect to it when five or six years ago when i watched it happen their growth wasn't expansion wasn't immediate so i was i like asked a few people being like okay let's watch and see what happens and see if the quality drops over time and i drink black coffee and that is i think the probably the best way to know whether they can do black coffee or do like straight espresso the most effective right because when you're drinking with oat milk and almond milk and all the milks like you're not tasting the flavor of the coffee the same way i don't know i'm not a pro i'm sure like some of our guys like ross and aaron sellers and all these dudes can probably tell you better than i can you and lake can probably tell you better than i can um but but my my point is this i yes there is a mental shift because when i read i was happy for them i was never mad i was like i'm happy they got their money so you're not against success no no i'm like happy they got paid but with that comes a diffusion in quality right right but is that necessary is it necessary i think is it inevitable well i think with something like coffee it it it is i think because i i think the things that like like coffee really only has a certain amount of chef a shelf life like after a certain point i'm like i'm always going to your house and throwing away mom's old coffee because at a certain point you can taste the difference of how long from the moment the bean was fired which means like roasted to the point that it was grinded and then at what what like coarseness love of course as it was ground and then it was so like so you're saying i shouldn't be saving my coffee beans no you should not and you can you can tell the difference in smell and i'm trying to be really conservative and save the coffee beans no you got to use it from like when you get it for the in the first two weeks in the first week okay first week first two weeks it's why it's small batch it's why it's given to you in that thing it's why you're not buying it in huge bags unless you're a huge place that's making tons of coffee every day but what i'm saying is this is that when when organizations when churches expand rapidly the quality goes down of course at some point it's going to and i think there's a breaking point in which you make you make the decision of going like is the quality gonna stay high or and we're gonna steer back to going like okay we need to get back into quality we've done expansion let me get back to quality or are we just gonna go for we want this brand to be the next starbucks and everyone drinking it because bluebell is a great brand and it is a great brand see like they didn't just create a great coffee they created a great brand and that is the fascinating thing so like we we always said that mosaic wasn't we could call the mega church we're really not we're like a boutique versus a you know uniqlo or zara or h m i'm like we don't have that level of copy and paste copy and paste copy and paste and when we try it doesn't always work and we've been realizing that but we go to large churches that have the copy and paste more mentality and i'm not belittling their culture but they're they the culture is strong so they copy and paste it yeah and we see the struggles we see them and they're on it like everyone's honest about like yeah this is something we thought was gonna work for us because this is what works for us there right but it doesn't because we're in a different city a different place different people different culture so i don't know what my question is but that yes it does there's a correlation and there's a value drop i think this one you don't have a question you actually have the answers i don't know if i don't know if i have the answers but what i say this thing i question myself on is is this the same way people look at church that they only value because it seems like there's two fields people who value the local church and a global vision right and if you're not just a local church you've sold out to being like you need one everywhere your mega church you want to be everything i don't know and then if you're the global guys you you know you value the local church but you're trying to bring them into this big global vision so like there's a value for both it i think your assessment and your connection of coffee to church is actually pretty accurate okay really interesting thank you and uh maybe we should send you on a tour to the best coffee shops uh across america i'm pretty and we'll do a battle ready on that i have my favorites i know what i like yeah so if you uh are listening and you own a great coffee shop and uh you want aaron to do a an assessment of your coffee send them a little bag i don't know i'm good no you can you can't actually coffee shops there is like christians love coffee churches love coffee coffee in america has incredibly upgraded because of christianity and that's one of the things that the church is really really done well yeah because they do because you know like coffee to churches is is is what alcohol is to a bar into a restaurant it is it's fellowship it's like which is the idea it's a swarm an upper versus a downer right like it is like funny like everything you're trying to do in like a in a church place is you know is bring the energy up and everything you're trying to do at a restaurant and a bar is like okay let's mellow it down. and it is interesting like we have these like social patterns right all right so i i cannot even begin to tell you how many decades ago people would ask me is what's going to happen you know is is mosaic going to become a mega church and i would i always ask them what's a mega church and but like mega church this phrase has all this baggage to it right and and and one of the things i would tell people is being a mega church is not about size it's about cultural values and the reason mosaic could never be a mega church is that it has mosaic has never had mega church values mega church values are very much like the uh the middle america kind of mall mentality one size fits all it's about standardization and conformity and mosaic has always been about uniqueness like has always been about the individual and uh being valued and seen for who they are and standardization would be the last thing that people would ever would attribute mosaic to but there was a certain uh keep going finish yeah and uh it doesn't mean you don't have some kind of continuity it doesn't mean that you don't have patterns that you um that you've identified that actually make things better um i mean even craft coffee has a process that is valued and followed and consistent throughout anyone who makes coffee yeah and so that's not it at all it's just it's just a different process and different values and and what i was interesting is that people would ask me that question about um is when mosaic becomes a megachurch i'd say well what makes a mega shirt you know when you're over a thousand and or when whenever whatever and we were always bigger than that people just didn't know that yeah and and the reason was because we've never had a value of uh a standardization of of being like seen as the the majority mosaics always had more value of its intimacy its uniqueness right community and um but i do think it's it's a challenge because you don't want to lose the culture uh when you're expanding and and i think that the dilemma you've talked about with coffee because you know i mean early on um starbucks was the break out company that really made america aware of a higher end higher value for coffee yeah and it's interesting right like starbucks like i i only i don't drink it now because i don't think the quality is it it doesn't i don't have a taste for it i don't think the quality is there but but i'm not knocking it because i because starbucks was the thing that like it was great at one point like it was the best and it was like the only it was the only best option like it was either starbucks or like 7-eleven like or mcdonald's and i'm not liking mcdonald's like i have a huge value for people who serve a billion and a half people daily like wouldn't it be great if i could do anything that served a billion and a half people at any point in time you know so there is like a huge value but i'm saying is for the highest for the best taste right um and for the highest quality product you know starbucks was like the tip of the spear right and so then there would be no none of these craft coffees places if starbucks hadn't proven that there's a market for it yeah and your mom still drinks starbucks and is her favorite place and it is and so it's not bad right well i i think one is that we shouldn't uh hate on one approach just because it's not what we enjoy yeah yeah you know because there is a snob okay okay can i add an elitist there's a there's an elitist snobbery to coffee and there's an elitist snobbery to the the local church idea oh well that that's a big machine that's a mega church i don't wear that i am a part of the snobbery elitism but we're also coffee of coffee but i've also been but i've also been blamed for standardizing certain aspects of church that we could copy the culture and bring it to another space right so like there is that fight of like how do you stay local and then how do you still innovate and grow and you were really the innovator and you were a lot of times the reason why we like grow because you create such an open culture but it has how has our two different because i what i've said is that you've created the ship and then you've let all these different people like figure out how it's going to be filled with different cultures and different ideas and the way like we navigate certain aspects but you're really the driving force of how the church is run you always have been you're the visionary and the leader but how do you do both how do you lead or can you do both like i want to ask you this because like i've seen it from a coffee side but how does it work from from a church side like an organizational side like can you still get to that place where you're massive and still small i think you can have massive influence and still have intimate community okay and that's a part of the the drive for us is to make sure that we um have the greatest impact on culture in the world that we can right and at the same time that everywhere where there's an expression of mosaic it's authentic and real and and human and and built on relationships and community and it that's not easy it's really really challenging you think and so how do you create a culture that can do both well i think that what you do is you start with the culture and you start with what do you want it to look like at every stage along the way and uh and and you'll have to fight it because the one of the unique things about church is different than a company is in a company you're hiring people uh and you're being selective in the hiring process you do interviews and you can actually protect your culture in the hiring process in the church it's a everyone's welcome culture come as you are and so everyone's coming to church bringing their own culture and or and bringing their own crisis and bringing their own corruption and bringing the mess of them so when you're talking about a church culture it's so much more dynamic because you especially if you have thousands of people you have no idea where they're where they're at where they've come from you have to create such an intensive process to help people grow and and and then also you you now have almost like moral responsibility for all these people who identify themselves with you even though you may have never even met them or do not know them right and and so i think it's so much more complicated in church life right and and so you have to really work hard at communicating and transmitting values which is why we have always had these five core values that kind of drive our church and it doesn't mean that you always achieve them it doesn't mean that you're always living up to them but it means that you never give up the struggle to living out those values mission is why the church exists that this is relativity to culture relevance to culture is not optional that love is the context for all mission what's the fourth and fifth one and the creativity is the natural result of spirituality that's the one i've always had an issue with uh-huh and that's true sure must always submit to spirit that's my favorite one yeah the last two are my favorite i'm blanking now because i was irrelevant what did i say culture is not optional but yeah that one i think has actually changed the church yeah and then and then i like that one was the most obvious thing i think that changed the church and then creativity is the natural result the spirituality is the one i think the church had the hardest time with oh everybody thought i was a heretic when i laid that one out well now it's common language yeah now it's seen as a common framework for the church of course the church is supposed to be creative and then i think the one that is probably the most anchoring to the replication of our culture is um structure must submit to spirit because we talk like i've taught this i have the privilege of talking about these and i hated these growing up i didn't hate them i like you know like when you're growing up and like you tell us all the rules you're like i don't agree with that one and then we always argue with them and you you're always so kind right and but now like i get to be on the team that like goes to new cities and like we talk about these core values and it's something that's super important but the last time i got to talk about it was in seattle when they were starting and we um we i got to talk about structure must submit to spirit right and that this idea that that you know when i think and i it's so great that he brought up the five core values of mosaic because that is the one that i think lets us replicate mosaics culture yes we have this structure yes this is how we do a service yes or a gathering yes this is how we do groups or connection or community or but then it's got to submit to spirit and the spirit of of of of not just the holy spirit but the spirit of the culture and of the people and the room and like not everything is a copy-paste situation so you've got to roll with it and that's what that that has always been it's like you have to have this ability to improvise to to know that it not the world is not the same and to like bring a spirit to the structure and i love this idea and i think that is the thing that kills great organizations right because the spirit i think of blue bottle was still to be a great craft coffee company right and they're losing it with this rapid growth and aggressi like rapid aggressive growth but it's something that doesn't have to be lost right yeah i i don't think it has to be lost i think it's always it's always fragile but it's it's fragile if you don't grow because if you talk to me about that because if you don't grow you're not actually living out those values interesting and and so when people go yeah but aren't you endangering your culture if you keep growing mosaic i go no i'm endangering our culture if we don't grow mosaic because a culture by definition is something that's active and alive and growing so yeah because you had an interesting like crossroads with people people who were attracted to mosaic were local were like small church people but you were not a small church voice you were always people were always drawn to you yeah they thought you drawn to like the mission and drawn to the things yeah they thought i was against mega churches and i kept saying i'm not against mega churches yeah and uh they they have a very very specific function just like malls you know and uh i understood the mall of america in uh you know in minneapolis-st paul i mean when it's when you have minnesota winters you want to create a city that's indoors and you know and i don't understand of all of america in miami where you have great weather or in los angeles and there's a different kind of context but um ac you're going to show it's true yeah but i like to walk and not sweat yeah because i mean i'm years ago i remember i was in a room with these with pastors and and they were all criticizing all these mega church pastors i mean that's what you know they were doing in the back room and small-minded people and i just finally said hey why don't we just accept the fact that they're more gifted than us and uh that god just gave them the the leadership capacity to do way more and the reason you're criticizing them is because you're jealous and you just haven't owned the fact that you want what they have and so since you can't achieve it uh you have to criticize it so i never want to criticize someone who's able to accomplish something different than what i've accomplished but my goals have been different and and some of it is maybe if i want to use like coffee language like who's my customer if the customer of starbucks is everyone who is entry-level and there are billions of people in this world right that they're introducing coffee too right they're going to have a much larger audience if um if my customer has a craft coffee shop is that connoisseur of coffee that person who knows the difference who can taste the difference like you're kind of wasting a great wine on someone like me you're wasting you might be wasting a great coffee on someone like me you're you know you can tell the difference yeah i i've just been you've just been you've been conditioned by the by the green mermaid lady and uh um you there are certain things that you know i can tell the difference right and there's certain things that you know i haven't taken the the effort to refine myself but you can tell the difference between like cooking meat and grilling meat like you go to a local busher mm-hmm i do like i kind of do a local ranch i go get my meat very carefully and i make sure my chicken is free range and that there's no hormones and yeah and you like very specific about where it comes from i am because i know that i can't that i'm not a great chef i'm aspiring to be one but i cannot even be a good one if i start with a bad product yeah and so i have to have the material matters and uh interesting but does the material matter can i like i know it does i'm asking this is a leading question the does material matter because there's so many churches in the suburb we're always amazed right and amazed by this meaning like we're always trying to figure out how do we grow and keep our culture and we don't worry too much about the culture because i think it's built on like good things so we're like okay the coach is going to continue but we go to suburb churches and we're like how do they have this building how do they have 1 000 parking spaces how are people just you know and like i am not knocking a single church in the culture sometimes the messages are not the most interesting so it isn't it isn't but is it because the the gospel is attractive and so if you're living in a suburb and you're like they have all these things the gospel's attractive they seem like good people they're trustworthy like why do they grow like crazy like what is there's the difference well i'm just trying to be so careful but my thoughts you know i mean when i listen like if i were not a follower of jesus right i would say christian preaching is feels like mcdonald's so you came to church you came to jesus at a church that was more mcdonald's it was it was it was a mega church like a mega mega church in orlando yeah but the preacher was uh from tennessee and he was very down to earth and very warm and i'd never heard any preaching in my whole life so okay i didn't know maybe that's the thing is if you think there's only one mcdonald's you know there's a different but i've never been i never i've never been in a church in my whole life right so there's no so so you don't know what a cheeseburger is i didn't know you go to mcdonald's you're like what is this round circular heaven piece yeah and i didn't know all the jokes he was telling ten thousand other preachers were telling i thought he was the only one the only one they're actually his jokes and so i was the perfect customer because i'd never had a cup of coffee before uh you know i uh yeah like i remember when um i never had sushi rick yamamoto who's a friend of mine said i'm going to introduce you to sushi and i thought well no one better than my japanese friend right you know and so he tricked me right he took me to a sushi bar in uh in little tokyo and all he gave me the first time was california rolls there's no sushi in it and he knew that the first thing he had to do is get me past the psychological barrier oh wow and so my first experience with sushi i didn't know this story this was nice avocados you know and i don't know what else they put in that california role and it was awesome and i and he taught me how to use chopsticks so i felt like i was a part of the culture and and uh and how to you know mix my wasabi with with soy sauce and everything else and i felt i felt like i was in this authentic experience and uh and then a little by little he introduced me to um raw tuna and you know and then ron and then and uh and then he invited i was invited to go speak by him at this wall street event in san francisco and he said now tonight is going to be like the best sushi in the world and i never had anything so amazing i mean the sushi melted in my mouth and i wanted to die from the experience it was so extraordinary and i've been addicted to sushi ever since and i can tell the difference and sometimes i just eat sushi going i know this isn't the best but at least it's okay yeah this isn't the idea of sushi not not sushi and but he he coached me he mentored me yeah he developed my taste he helped me through the barriers and made me a connoisseur and i think that what happened to me in my own faith journey was i'd never been to church i'd never heard a sermon i never heard anybody talk about the bible opening it up i thought the hymns were weird i thought the fact that they had hymn books in every pew and no bibles was very odd that they valued the hymn book more than the bible um i couldn't connect to the songs if they felt like german marching songs or something like that to me and um and so all these clothes because hymns were based right it didn't relate to me right but what did but what but the messages kind of did because he was interesting he was intriguing he was funny there was something that was compelling and there was always something that spoke to me at a deeply spiritual level yeah and uh and i and i still didn't wouldn't go back you know i mean and so you know i would get tricked back once a month you know i would you know get pulled back by a friend or family member and little by little i was more engaged and what mattered began to speak to me in the message so i do know that a church that was essentially culturally irrelevant to me actually helped me come to a faith in jesus yeah and so i always say that love covers a multitude of irrelevance because they were incredibly loving and yeah very real yeah and they invited me to birthday parties and events and play volleyball and hay rides and i got to know people as the people that really want me over and that's an interesting interesting thing that you say that because right because it is the community that kind of that like the message can be irrelevant or the most mag like magnetic thing in the world but if there's no one likeable in the room you won't stay right because the people before and after are the reasons why you stay the reasons why you can how you connect and and only some people can connect to a singular person right but i i think about it too like this i'm like you said that you know maybe it wasn't the best message or but it was it was the invitation it was the connection it was you had never experienced this before but i do think there's something you can you can learn from the mega church or the the big organization or the 1.6 billion served daily because like you know i would have never walked into a like you know you go i think i think in life when you're like in your 20s at least for me i was an elitist you know like you drive an hour out of your way to get the best coffee you do this this and this and then as you grow older you realize so much of it becomes about function so like i don't knock suburban churches because they realize that like they're having to deal with four kids or two to four kids and working all day and then coming home they are they're trying to create the most streamlined functional way of doing things and there's a lot of brilliance to it yeah and a lot of parents are like just make my kids happy and i'll grow your church and so like i love seeing that because i'm like you know i we have the luxury of like we get to experience a lot of great clothing brands and like so many brands that we're introduced to for the first time because we're in la and it's local and it shows up in a little pop-up but i still go like i there is no question like i love your sweatpants but i still buy walmart 10 sweatpants because they're freaking good they fit good you can destroy them and then i wear your sweatpants when i'm going somewhere nice what's so funny is this morning i was throwing out a pair of hawks and i thought it's we were laughing about this last night because we wearing the same pair of dogs they're our favorite socks they're hanes and we bought them at target and they're probably the cheapest socks in the world and they're just so comfortable so i'm wearing socks right now me too and and so it's not always about finding the thing that's the most expensive it's fine thing that really works for you right and it isn't always about the coolest thing i think also too like like sometimes sometimes the coolest thing isn't the softest sometimes the closing doesn't make the most sense so i think i don't know i think it's it is about how i don't know what the ultimate thing we leave people with no i think this is what is it is that um one of the things that you co where you can you see a movement like there's there's definitely been a coffee movement across the world which means there was actually in that sense um there was a customer for it right and there was a i used the word loosely but there was a need for it people wanted there was a demand for it and when you asked me about mosaic and how we created the culture i specifically gave my life to create a culture for the cultural outsider for the innovator the intuitive the pioneer the entrepreneur the artist the creative i wanted to create a culture that was magnetic and receptive to the person who would maybe become an atheist or an agnostic or a buddhist or um or maybe just hold on to a spirituality but think that religion was suspect because they never experienced it in a way that made sense to them and so i didn't create mosaic to compete with great mid-america churches that provide great church for people who have a very specific culture right and that's why you don't want to judge things because your your culture needs to match the customer you're trying to reach in a sense and when people say we're trying to reach everyone as a writer people always go you know who you're writing your book for and when the person says for everyone you know they don't have a book right and when you when you're when you're writing for very specific audience it has a chance of being accessible to a much broader audience but you have to write someone specifically and mosaic definitely was created for people in this new world of thinking but what is and that's why i came to l.a to do it but what we've discovered is that those people are all over are all over the world and they're all over the midwest and they're all over the south and all over the east and they're in europe and in africa and asia and south america and and i think i don't know if we mentioned at the beginning but we get invitations and requests every week people begging us to open up a mosaic somewhere around the world yeah and so this is what we're talking about and this is what we're leading to is we're going to leave people with is that especially with the the revolution in 2020 of losing the opportunity to gather together physically the church had to become even more resilient and innovative and become dynamically connected through social media and through the internet and through a virtual world and what's what that means though is the person who goes to mosaic in l.a is just as close to our church as the person going to mosaic in london or the person going to mosaic in new york or paris or berlin and or cape town or wherever it may be and so we wanted to we want to actually step into that reality and go we want to identify you and help you connect to this tribe this community and be a part of mosaic realistically as much from wherever you are in the world as anyone here in l.a and so we're opening up this idea of mosaic houses in cities across the world and if you are part of mosaic but you live in europe or a part of mosaic but you live in south america or in asia wherever you may be or in kansas city or in kansas city chicago you know miami wherever you may be yeah chicago vancouver toronto you know yeah and you would like to be officially connected to mosaic and um and hope and be a part of our opening up houses in your city then we want to encourage you to contact us because we're putting in a really i think powerful and beautiful process to help you connect to the church as a whole and to be a part of creating this kind of culture wherever you are in the world i think the way and if you're thinking if if you're hearing this and you're you're this is the first time we've talked about this publicly because it's a shift in our our culture a shift in our focus that we're going okay if we don't if we're not meeting globally or locally for another year probably who knows when it could lift in a day it could lift in months then we're going to put this focus on opening up as many houses as we can across the world in a house meaning you and your friends a house could mean you inviting people that you meet into your world the house could mean just you and a roommate or you and your family but we want to create um a space where we can connect in a space where we can have proper feedback there will be some incentives like conversations with you in conversations with their staff like like staff people who have helped develop the culture of mosaic and we want to create spaces in cities all over the globe because i think it's changing the way we do church and the way we have connectedness and you can be in new york and there may not be a mosaic campus but that shouldn't stop the way we connect to the to the messaging that we resonate with um where i think in the past it has church has been traditional where it's like where i can go on a sunday right on a wednesday is where i feel connected to it's like no it's like now you can connect through an app and you can connect through a through a through a video you can and then and then there's a space where you can connect as part of like a mosaic house and so if you're listening to this and you're going okay how do i get connected go to the instagram mosaic and dm mosaic then i'll be checking it tess will be checking it and we'll start connecting with people in different cities tell us who you are where you're from and if you want to do this so where do they go to at mosaic on instagram and dm that account okay yeah because don't go to bad already we won't do it about already but that'll be overwhelmed go to app mosaic right and a team will reach out to connect yeah we're gonna be meeting even today uh just to keep moving this forward but i'm excited because when we know where we have houses across the world we know where to focus and so when people say hey are you ever going to open up anything more in barcelona are you going to ever travel here yeah like um we'll know where to go where to go where to put our emphasis where to put our energy yeah where to put our resources and um and i think it's exciting to me it is exciting and you gave a message called 52 hertz a while back and talking about this like the idea of the lonely whale that that travels the world and it's on it and it speaks a unique frequency and it's that 52 hertz frequency and i think that's mosaic across the world it is people who go to other churches or don't go to church at all and they just have a different frequency and so there's this is there this is the moment where we're going to connect the 52 hertz the 52 hertz frequency to each other into the whole and so we'll know and we'll build a system and a back end where we will all be connected in a beautiful way and i think it is this is the time to move it from social media because i think social media is so insanely destructive and unhealthy that this is the time where we're going to create a channel so we are connecting we are messaging we are having time and i think this is the future of the church i think it's the future of our church and of course we're going to strive to be in person like we look forward to that day but i do think there's something really special about this new wave of doing church yeah and i think that it also lets you know that you don't have to be alone yeah and that there are people who are with you and for you and we can create a process where people can be praying for each other even though they're in cities across the world and and um and be praying for your city in your area and for your friends who don't know jesus and um and finding a way to bring the approach toward faith that we have that is very unique and um there are not a lot of expressions of faith like mosaic in the world and i'm going to say that and so i just want to encourage you if you're listening and you're like i am mosaic but i'm in berlin we want to know you we want to know that you're there and we identify you and we want you to join this and we want you to feel as connected to us as you are locally in la absolutely um okay i'm excited i think the question that i've learned from this thing is i'm i'm no longer going to judge the person who goes to starbucks and ask the question of like what is it about starbucks that you like so that i can learn from the person who's going like no this is my thing and this is why i like it and i think i think we can all learn from each other and i guess we're really opening up craft coffee shops across the world we just know we want to know where where our baristas are yeah and with that i want to cut another coffee all right this has been a fun one i'm more light-hearted i think i think we could title this one mr coffee california sushi man oh how about we just call it mosaic houses mosaic houses it was crazy though because one of our guys walked in right before we started this conversation on sushi is like not connected and nick used to be a sushi chef what yeah so here we go okay thank you for listening to the battery podcast if you um aaron mcmanus people are asking about merch yeah keep asking we will drop soon um we are figuring it out i didn't want to drop it during like a heavy week i wasn't in a space i had stuff i didn't want to make it feel like we were trying to be advantageous to something that's heavy but we will drop um you can rate and review this episode on itunes and you can listen to on spotify you can watch on youtube you can leave a comment um we're really grateful for every person who reaches out every person who supports this podcast every person who posts and reposts and mentions us and your stories uh our instagram is battlereadypodcast on instagram and our email is aaron batterypodcast.com there is a lot of emails and i'm grateful i don't respond to all of them but no i see them and i'm really really thankful have a great day see you on tuesday [Music] you

Channel: Mosaic

Views: 6,738

Rating: 4.9099097 out of 5

Keywords: MOSAIC, MOSAIC Los Angeles, Erwin McManus, Erwin Raphael McManus, Los Angeles Church, YouTube Church, Church, Jesus, Worship, Mosaic MSC, Mosaic, MSC

Id: hSl9Ln_aXw0

Length: 56min 8sec (3368 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021