Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Parish Circuit. I'm Stuart Amidon. With me is David Riley. As always, but not as always. And today, as a very special guest, we have with us Dr. George Grant. Dr. Grant, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Oh, it's my delight.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: So we have just to recap everybody on where we are, recent episodes and what it is that we're trying to do here. So we have watched socialism kind of unfold itself more and more in our American culture, in our Louisiana culture, and especially so in the last 30 or 40 years. And if you've been listening to the Parish Circuit for very long, one of the things that you've heard me and David say over and over again is, oh, look, it looks more like socialism again.
And this is not necessarily an issue that we've attached to only exclusively the left, although it is much more prevalent there. It's also very prevalent on the right in terms of politics. And so there's a lot of undoing and responsibility taking that we have to do as a culture, as Louisianians, as Acadians, to say, okay, we gotta fix the world, but first we need to be able to diagnose it effectively so that we know exactly what we're going at, what we're going at the root of. And that's why we have invited Dr. George Grant to come and be on our podcast. So Dr. George Grant is a excellent historian. I would encourage all of you to go and find his modernity lectures and the books that he's written and try to learn a little bit more about the less told stories of American history and really how we got to where we are today. And that's what we want to talk about. So Dr. Grant, most recently J.D. vance, has been making waves on the news because he's been talking about the taking money that would go to daycares and sending it home to families. Okay, sending it home to families that have at least one stay at home parent, right, David? Isn't that the way the laws right? One stay, at least one has to be working. One can stay at home. It could be the husband, it could be the wife. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the gist. And on the surface, on quick glance, something like this, whenever we see that happening, we say, oh, you know what? That money was just going to go to these daycares anyway, so it might as well go to homes. But one, one of the things that we talked about in previous episodes was, heads up, guys.
If you Take the king's coin, you're the king's man. And with that will come strings and attachment, and I would argue will dive us deeper and deeper into dependency upon the state, dependency upon the government, to fix all our problems. We were talking about that before the podcast started and farther into socialism.
The question that keeps coming up for us, Dr. Grant, is how the heck did we get here?
Because if you look at the founding of our country, if you look at the west in general, largely, we were people who believed in hard work. We were people who were willing to put our hands to the plow to build something.
If you didn't work, you don't eat. But it seems like we have seen this gradual and maybe not so gradual shift towards dependency on the state, towards a redistribution of wealth model. And we would love for you to help us put a historical lens on this. What, what happened, man? How did, where did the, where did the shift start? And how did we land here so hard?
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, it's been a long, long, slow train coming.
And so there are a lot of precipitating factors to get us to where we are.
Socialism is really just a manifestation of something that came earlier called nationalism, a new ideology that would remake the old Christian world in a more scientific and enlightened fashion. So this is the spawn of the Enlightenment. It is a part of the project of the Renaissance.
So we go all the way back to the time when philosophers, thinkers, politicians were thinking about ways to undo the old Christian order, kingdoms and principalities of the feudal system of relationship based identity rather than national state based identity.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: So the whole concept of nation and nation building and nationalism is a very, very recent concept, obviously from biblical times. We have countries and kingdoms and principalities and so forth. But the idea of bringing together people who weren't necessarily racially or culturally or geographically related to one into a large nation state is rather unusual.
And so there were attempts in the ancient world to create those kinds of things, but they were empires and they were ruled from a top down kind of.
The Egyptian word was ma'. At.
It's control from the top.
And power drips down through several layers, the viziers and so forth, down to the common people. Okay, but that was. Empires were not the norm, especially after the advent of Christianity.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Instead you had decentralized, oftentimes grassroots connections that were relational.
You related to one another. And so when you thought about where you were from, you didn't identify a state, a nation, a government.
You identified relationships. You were from this tribe or these People or related to this landlord.
And so when you get to the Enlightenment, the idea is that first of all, Christianity needs to be undermined because the moral standards ran against what Peter calls the ignorant passions of fallen man.
And so there was the desire to get rid of the constraints of Christianity.
But it was understood by most of these philosophers that that was a cultural construct.
Interestingly, this is why Karl Marx really missed the mark, why, why every Marxist revolution eventually failed until people like Antonio Gramsci came along and started to realize that cultural Marxism, a Marxism that changes the culture, not just the economy, was the way to change the world.
So we start to see this really come to fruition with the French Revolution.
This is one of the reasons why when Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United states in the 1830s, he was about a month and a half into his journey when he suddenly realized he had not seen a policeman, a soldier, or a state appointed representative of authority in a month.
He was astonished. He hadn't seen any evidence of government for a month.
And yet freedom was thriving and people were prospering. And he was, he was thunderstruck by the vitality of American culture because there was no state. Well, he was living in the period immediately after the French Revolution, after the Napoleonic wars, immediately before the Marxist revolutions of 1848, Europe was straddled with layer upon layer of bureaucracy and of statist government because nationalism had taken root as the primary worldview grid for understanding the way people operated in society.
So what has happened is that intellectuals and philosophers from around the world have continued to adopt this notion and have seen the, the need to have that kind of Egyptian ma' at sort of structure as a means for organizing society, think of it as a pyramid with government at top and all of the people down at the bottom. So while I really do appreciate some of the projects that the Trump Vance administration had put forward to try and reverse the radical progressivism that we have fallen into in our national institutions, using the state as the primary means to battle the state is not a long term successful project.
Yes, I'd rather see money go home than go to the daycare centers, but why not just affect that through tax cuts?
Lower the tax rate, right? It's our money anyway. The government doesn't have any money that we didn't give it.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: And it's taxpayers who are bearing the burden.
More than half of the American population literally pays no income tax, although they are taxed in every other way on groceries and gas and Lord knows what. But the truth is that if you just simply say, we're not going to take the money away so that we don't have the money to give is a much better solution long term.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And it creates a smaller government, which, you know, maybe nobody actually wants that.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Right. The last president of the United States who actually significantly reduced the size of government was Calvin Coolidge.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Wow.
Wow. So it's been a minute. It's been a minute.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Yeah, let's say it's been a minute. It's. It's actually been a century.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: So, you know, one of the things that we have to start to do is we have to start peeling back the layers so that we can remember how we got here.
And that really requires a lot of hard work because modern historians are uniform in their blanket assertions of.
Of the centrality of the state and of this nationalistic sort of worldview.
And it's out of nationalism that we get all of the virulent ideologies of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is something that Alexander Solzhenitsyn point out, that Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, that Ronald Reagan attempted to point out.
You know, whether it's fascism or mercantilism or, you know, some form of Marxist Leninism, all of these are the spawn of enlightenment nationalism.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: So then the antidote to this, it sounds like to me, is a hard and fast localism, a return to.
Yeah.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: Although, you know, one of the things about local politicians is that even when, you know, the money is returned to the local area, it's usually returned to local politicians, institutions, bureaucracies, and local states.
Well, that doesn't solve the problem. It needs to be a localism that arises out of a grassroots sort of parish mindset.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, talking my language.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: That enables free enterprise to flower and flourish, opportunities to be spread far and wide. Productivity comes from the bottom, not from the top.
And that's the kind of localism that we need. Yes, it's more than a Wendell Berry localism. It's more than, you know, an anarchist kind of localism. It's that reimagining the vision of Christian connectedness, covenant communities focused on loving our neighbors. Well.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Hmm.
So here's the big question, right? So let's get.
So the. The enemy that we have on the horizon is this constant urge to centralize. And with centralization comes the urge to grow larger and larger. And I would argue that nationalism is just leading by its logical conclusion to this globalism that seems to be being pushed for over and over again on a. On a level above me, above my pay Grade.
So to start this grassroots initiative, it seems like it starts within local churches. To me, it seems like the most effective place to flip the switch. Obviously, families, but a congregation of families that are moving in this direction together, that seems like a strong mechanism, right?
[00:15:04] Speaker B: It is. And you're absolutely right.
In the same way that judgment begins with the house of God.
When churches are weak, when churches fail to preach the whole counsel of God, when churches fail to deal with a comprehensive biblical worldview, society will suffer. We see this all over the place in the Old Testament and warnings of it in the New, but what this means is not only do pastors need to be proclaiming the word of truth with power and suasion and comprehensiveness, the people in the pew have to take responsibility.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Part of the reason why we cede so much authority and power to the state is that we're not willing to do the hard work ourselves. For instance, welfare exists because we don't care for our family members and our neighbors.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: That's the bottom line.
Churches have walled themselves off from the problems of the culture. So every local church ought to look at the community and say, what's the most plaguing problem in our community?
The state's not the answer.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: We shouldn't be writing letters to the governor to fix this. Let's us go fix it.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, let's us take responsibility for. I like the, like the concentric circles that we're talking about here. So we've got our. We've got our families, we've got our church, and then we've got our, our neighbors around us. And this has been a talking point for a little while for us is the idea of loving your neighbor and exactly what that looks like. We're studying through the book of James right now, so this is very, very helpful.
I'm reading your book.
It's a slow read for me, but bringing in the sheaves. And so that's been helpful in these categories too. When you say churches looking around them and assessing their neighbors and deploying towards those needs, do you mean, like, are you recommending that the church organizationally operate ministries within it, or are you saying deploy your congregation to do those things or both?
What do you think your the right strategy?
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the answer is you deploy the congregation.
You equip and enable the congregation to go. But in order to deploy, there has to be sort of a central command casting, vision, accumulating resources, affecting change. And so in some ways, it's both okay, but it, but it's, you know, we don't want again to fight centralization by creating another centralization.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: We want to decentralize in every way that we can. And so it's really important that the church recognize and, you know, this is something again, why I have some sympathies for the Trump Vance project.
They are attempting to utilize misused resources for better ends. I appreciate that very much.
What they should be doing is radically decentralizing.
And you know, George H.W. bush talked about the thousand points of light, and while it was great rhetoric, it never was firmly fixed into good social policy.
But that's what we really want. We want to take resources that we have and properly deploy them so that ordinary people can take responsibility for the problems and the needs around them to bring about flourishing culture and society.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: So it seems like to me too, as we're thinking through this, the thing that keeps popping into my brain like one of the first dominoes to go down, at least in our cultural context, and David, you can help me think through this, is education.
Because we, you know, we're in South Louisiana, we're very, very weak in education here.
Even the Christian schools that are in our area, like the long standing Christian schools in our area, functionally look like the same state. Now we have voucher programs that have invited the state into those schools and they're operating on state approved curriculums and credentialing and all those things.
And so as a result of that, education in those areas has gotten, I would argue, weaker.
It seems like the development of some type of a movement in the church towards a more thorough, rigorous Christian education would be a big domino to fall here. Is this a precedent that you would agree with? I mean, do you see this in church history?
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Almost every major revival and renewal movement throughout all of history. I mean, we can trace this back to the cathedral school movement of the 8th and 9th centuries all the way forward to, you know, the parish school models of Scotland under John Knox and then later Thomas Chalmers, and then in our own day, we're seeing the flourishing and flowering of classical Christian schools.
And those are all the direct fruit of real and substantial revivals.
So when there is an ongoing revival that will endure beyond the moment of emotion, you've got to have long term discipling structures put into place. And again, this is where the local church can come alongside. Families can equip, families can afford families resources.
Churches have facilities, churches have access.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Well, maybe some churches do. Ours doesn't. We dream of having a facility one Day.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we're involved in a church planting movement and so I understand years and years before, we had our own facility. Our church is 20 years old this year and we moved into an adequate sanctuary building. It's really just a giant, beautiful barn a year and a half ago. So.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Sometimes it takes a while.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Take heart, Christchurch. Take heart.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: So, you know, one of the things that we can do is take the resources that we have and utilize them for kingdom purposes.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: I mean, you're doing that right now with this, this podcast.
This, this podcast is a decentralized, a non monetized, purposeful pushing forward of the grassroots vision of transforming a local community one step at a time. That's what it's about.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that's our big hope. Our big hope for sure.
So, so let me go back through and hash this. So the larger issue here is the centralization of nationalism. It's in our DNA. Like it's just, it's the air that we breathe. We're the frog in the pot. We haven't even realized necessarily that it's there. The antidote we're arguing for here is a, not just a localism, but a Christian localism, something that emanates out of the local churches first.
And one of the first dominoes to accomplish that end is a movement towards more robust long term education. That is some type of a positioning of the church and its people towards a Christian education, towards, hey, we're going to create institutions. And I appreciate that you put this in the context of long term discipleship. I think that's an important piece that we need to add there because that's what institutions do. Institutions are long term solutions to a problem that you see in front of yourself right now. Like, we have a lot of homeschool families in our church. There's a ton of homeschool families in our area. And that's awesome. Like I, we're homeschooling some of our kids right now. It's going very well. Like, that's great.
But the solution en masse, right, to change and affect a culture would be to some extent the creation of an institution.
Right.
Something that moves that direction more thoroughly.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: And there can be hybrid, hybrid institutions. For instance, 35 years ago we established Franklin Classical School.
So we now, in our community, we have grandchildren of alumni who are in our school.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Wow. Awesome.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: That is a remark. We have lots of alumni who are now teaching teachers in the school.
But in addition to that, we have a homeschool umbrella, a kind of a co op program.
So While we've only got about 300 students in our day school, we've got more than 1000 students in our homeschool umbrella. So what we've done is we've taken the heft of the institution and we're utilizing that to have continuity and a long term effect in the homeschooling community.
Because we love homeschoolers. We love what that decentralized focus of parents having the responsibility to disciple their own children in substantive fashion. We love that.
But we want it to endure for more than just the 12 years that a kid is under the tutelage of mom and dad.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: We want this to be a movement that changes the culture.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: So there are ways that a church can come alongside even the homeschoolers to build institutional structures that will both facilitate the work that they're doing at home, not steal away any of their authority or responsibility, but at the same time create that long term generational succession, covenantal succession that we're looking for.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yes. Okay, so what kind of changes? So let's talk about this in just like, practical, measurable things. You guys have been doing this for 35 years. Okay. So you've been moving more towards this for. You got grandchildren in the school now, that's amazing.
How have you seen this affect the culture where you guys are in Franklin?
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Well, several things that are just on the surface obvious.
One is that we have wide recognition in the community as an enduring institution critical to our.
Our culture. Our community.
So, you know, that happens when politicians show up to your, you know, homecoming game.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Yeah, they know. They know it matters. Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: This is something that is a cultural institution that is important to our community.
35 years ago, we weren't even on the radar. 35 years ago, people heard Franklin Classical School. What do you all play? Violins. What is this?
And for a very, very long time after we started succeeding and growing, we were under a cloud of suspicion. Are we a cult? What is, you know, what is this weird thing?
[00:27:40] Speaker A: We've heard that before, but now, you
[00:27:43] Speaker B: know, having endured over time and worked hard to be good neighbors, I mean, one of the things our town does is we have street festivals, about three a year. Well, we deploy our students.
We either take a booth or we join in the parade or something. We always make sure, sure that we're participants in the life of the community. We're not altogether set apart. This is not a monastic sort of endeavor. This is an endeavor to influence the wider community.
And so that's one obvious thing. Another obvious thing is that Every politician, at least every rather conservative politician, wants me to show up at their big barbecues and campaign events.
You know, they see that as a, you know, a way to connect with a constituency of great influence.
Another manifestation is the number of small businesses that have been started.
Enterprising alumni who start out mowing lawns as a sophomore in high school wind up building lawn care businesses that turn into multimillion dollar enterprises at one of our schools, not here in Franklin, but one of our overseas schools that we've started in Suleimaniya, Iraq.
A couple of the alumni realized that when they went on their senior trips to places like Geneva, they noticed there's no trash anywhere on the streets. There's no piles of garbage outside the town.
And they came back home to Sulamonia and they started a garbage ministry.
And it's now a multimillion dollar industry because they realized, okay, here's a need, something we can do to solve it. We don't have garbage trucks in Sulaimania.
Let's buy garbage trucks and let's serve our community well.
One of the young men that helped start the garbage business 10 years ago is now the mayor of Sulaimania.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Wow.
Wow. And it really just started from being focused on a local need.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Just looked around and saw a student who goes away on a senior trip. He looks around and he realizes this does not look like home.
It's not because the houses are old. It's because this culture is different.
Let's bring the Christian worldview to Suleimaniya in a very practical way. We're gonna pick up the garbage.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Yeah. That's one. I love that this really goes back. I mean, this seems to be a recurring theme in so many of our episodes that we keep going through is the need to just look around, assess the needs of our community. So our city is Opelousas, Louisiana. Our parish is St. Landry Parish.
Look around, assess the needs, and move.
And one of the things, too, that's encouraging about Speaking with you, Dr. Grant, is that you can just do things.
You looked around and you said, hey, we should start a school, and then you did.
I mean, obviously there's a ton of work involved with that.
There's a lot of lift. There's a lot of things you had to do, but people can just. We can just move. You can start businesses, you can create institutions.
I like the illustration that you gave earlier of needing to have, like a central command kind of being deployed from the church. So that would imply talking to your pastors and elders, saying, like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this.
Do you see holes here? Is there some opportunity here? Can we, can we deploy this? I mean, this is kind of getting me excited, to be completely honest.
I see nothing but opportunity where we live, Dr. Grant, the business community is vastly underserved.
The local community is vastly underserved. There's holes everywhere. And as far as I'm concerned, every hole is an opportunity.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: Amen. And that is the way that the Christian worldview can really have a huge impact and in a community.
One of the things that, you know, I mentioned, Peter, I've been teaching through First Peter, but I love the summation of the gospel in First Peter, chapter one, and the deploying of the body of Christ as living stones. But one of the things that he says at a time when the church was fiercely persecuted was simply do good and the world will see the good that you are doing and it will stop their mouths.
So one of the things that, that people want to see is if Christianity is all that we say that it is, show me the proof. Show me the evidence.
Well, the proof can be, you know, vibrant, loving families and stable marriages at a time when that's becoming rarer and rarer. But it can also be the benefits that we bring to the wider community as we change the world one block at a time, one neighborhood at a
[00:33:52] Speaker A: time, and over the course of decades.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: So that's the, for the long haul, it can't be a short term project.
[00:34:01] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: It's just got to be the way we think about the world.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Well, and if we're. So if we're putting this in the larger context of the conversation that we've been having this whole time to change the world.
Okay. Even if we're just talking about changing a local city where we live, so there's only 16,000 people in the city, it's not a big town. Okay. But even if we're just talking about that, that is a long term project and it is absolutely, it's very easy, I think, to go back to the statism, nationalism thing that we were talking about socialism thing earlier.
It is a temptation, I think, for people to say, well, the state can just create a new system, deploy a bunch of money, and now that will fix our problem. In scare quotes. I put that in scare quotes and intentionally, because they think that that's going to be the only real solution. That's going to be the only thing that can solve our problem quickly within our lifetime.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: And see, that's Marxist thinking. Yeah, let's go Marxism says that every problem is an economic problem.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Oh, let's go Talk about that, Dr. Grant. Talk about that.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: So if the solution to every problem is just more money, then we are classical Marxists.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: I think we are. Right. Like, I think. I think we are.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: If you look at the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto, the United States has satisfied the requirements of all 10 planks.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Oh, man, don't say this is making me sad.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: So what we've got to do is we've got to stop thinking like Marxists and start thinking like Christians. You know, one of the things that the Apostle Paul says when writing to the Corinthians in Second Corinthians is that the Macedonians saw the responsibility to care for brothers and sisters who were suffering financially. Even though they had nothing, they gave out of their lack.
In other words, they didn't see this as an economic issue. They weren't counting pennies. What they were doing was they were saying, we have a responsibility here. Let's take responsibility. And they did the same. Thing needs to be said of other that we see a problem and we decide, okay, we're going to tackle this problem. We may not have the money, we may not have the resources, we may not have the expertise, we may not have the background, we may not have the support of the wider community, but if a thing is worth doing, it's simply worth doing. Or as G.K. chesterton put it, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.
Not that we condone mediocrity, it's just that if a thing is worth doing, you just do it.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And you move forward.
It's okay if it's not going to be perfect for the job.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: We're not responsible for the next thousand steps. We're only responsible for the next right thing.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great point. So I think that one of the inhibitions to people today is they get hung up on what tomorrow is or all the stressors that tomorrow could bring, or the next week or the next month. Or they look behind themselves and they say, I have all these issues in my past or all these problems that have happened before. I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can take the right step. And I. And the theme of the Bible is that Jesus just says, hey, you got right now, you just need to worry about today. You need to worry about the next couple of minutes that are in front of you. The rest of it, that's in the future. We're not going to Worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow's got enough trouble, Today's got enough trouble for itself. We're not going to worry about tomorrow. And if you got sin to deal with in your past, you can confess and be forgiven of it. You don't have to look back and worry about the past. You can just say, hey, today I'm going to be faithful for the next, I don't know, like couple of minutes, I'm just going to worry about being faithful right now. And I do think if we just think that way, I think that births a type of localism by itself because it means that you're in the moment where you are looking around the needs that are within your purview right now. We even see that in whenever Jesus is talking about the oh man, the parable of the Good Samaritan. The point of the parable was like, who's your neighbor? The person in front of you, the
[00:38:56] Speaker B: person in front of him.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: That's who your neighbor is. And there's a geographic and time sensitive constraint that we've forgotten as a people. Isn't that fascinating? We instead only think in national or worldwide issues and we try to 5 year, 10 year, 15 year plan everything that we do. And I'm not saying that plans are bad. You know, obviously people in the Bible made plans. But my point is our point of focus.
What are we doing right now? How are we being faithful right now? And I think if we move towards that direction, it's going to help us to solve a lot of these problems we're dealing with now.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: There was a pastor named James Alexander Bryan who was trained at Princeton. And he came in the post civil war years to Birmingham, Alabama, which was an emerging new south steel and industrial town.
He was frail, he was not a particularly great preacher. He was a terrible organizer.
He never grew over the 55 years of his ministry. His church, Third Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, Alabama never grew.
It stayed right around 100, 125 people the entire 55 years.
He was nevertheless at the end of his life, lauded as Alabama's greatest citizen.
At his funeral, two Supreme Court justices, a governor, three former governors, what all came to speak. He's the only power pastor in Birmingham, Alabama that has a permanent memorial to him, a statue of him.
He was known in his day as religion in shoes.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: What, what did he do?
[00:41:14] Speaker B: Brother Brian, as he was commonly known, every single morning would go to the police stations, the fire stations, the factories, the shops, the little grocery stores. He would walk in every single morning for 55 years and he would say, how can I pray for you?
I'm your pastor.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: He started Initiatives to care for the poor.
He cared for orphans and widows in their distress, and he launched initiatives for the homeless.
Homelessness was a huge problem in Birmingham in those emerging industrial days.
They didn't have tenement houses like Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, New York.
And so people were looking for industrial jobs from the devastated south would often encamp in little refugee tent cities.
And Brother Bryan just simply loved people.
And the result was that he was allotted as Alabama's greatest citizen. All he did was take his very meager gifts and he deployed them locally.
He's not known anywhere around the world. I mean, there's been one book written about him. Title is Religion and Jews.
But, you know, this is a guy who changed his community, who still changes his community. You go to Five Points, you see the statue of Brother Brian. And of course, it's a statue of a pastor kneeling in prayer.
And that's what he did. All he did was walk through his community and pray for them. And it changed the character and nature of the community.
And, you know, we have. At the same time, we have these global evangelists starting to emerge, the emergence of radio ministries and all of the rest, platform building, mega churches. Here was Brother Brian. All he did was love his community. Well, pray for them. And to this day, he's an icon in Birmingham, Alabama.
[00:43:45] Speaker A: Wow.
So be faithful with what's in front of you.
I mean, that seems to be the gist look at what's in front of you today. What do you have today?
Yeah, I think that the big error that we fall into is the. This is too big for us.
You know, the ruins are too ruined.
We're not going to be able to make it through. We can't change the country.
To which I'd be like, well, maybe you can, maybe not, who knows? But you've got today. You've got today. You got the resources you've been given.
Get to work. Get to work.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: So be like Nehemiah, you know, Take on the problem, survey the ruins, deploy the people, Give everybody a place on the wall and go to work, rebuild. You may have to do it with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other, but go to work.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And take responsibility.
Take responsibility and do the job. Dr. Grant, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate you giving your time. Hopefully, maybe in the future we could do this again.
Take responsibility. Listeners, if you're listening to this podcast, right now, you're living in Appaloosa Saint Ledger Parish account.
Wherever you might be, you have opportunity in front of you. The Lord has given you opportunity in front of you today.
Get to work, be faithful, take responsibility. One foot in front of the other, and let's build the Kingdom of Christ here in Acadiana. Dr. Grant, thank you so much. Appreciate you. Really means a lot.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Thank you. Bless you. So good to see you.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: Yes, sir. Listeners, thank you all so much for listening to another parish circuit. You can find more on theparishcircuit.com you can support subscribe to our podcast, find the articles and news or support. By the way, there's actually money in the bank for the first time. We're still operating in the negative, but at least there's money in the bank.
Guys, thank you all so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
