The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 050 – Growing Up As the Pastor's Kid—An Honest Conversation with Barnabas Piper
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. - Well, hey everybody, and welcome to episode 50. Yes, 50, we're halfway to 100. How cool is that? - Of the podcast, my name is Carrie Newhoff, and I hope our time together today helps you lead like never before. Hey, I think you're gonna love my guest today. If some of you grew up in a preacher's home, you will love today. Those of you who are church leaders who have kids, man, listen up. My guest today is Barnabas Piper, and Barnabas is a leader in his own right. In fact, he has a great podcast we will link to in the show notes that he just launched and is a writer. And he had the experience of growing up as John Piper's son. Yes, the John Piper, and he wrote all about it in a book a couple of years ago called "The Pastor's Kid." And I have an honest, authentic conversation with Barnabas all about what that was like, you know? How do you find your faith when your dad is one of the most popular preachers on the planet? And Barnabas is so honest and so authentic with it and has had a great time finding faith on his own and talks about that journey very, very candidly. So I'm super excited about my conversation with Barnabas. Actually, I'm gonna be a guest on his podcast in the future, which is awesome. Excited about that. And I wanna let you know about some conferences I will be at this fall. In fact, I will be in several cities this fall on the Orange Tour, and I am so looking forward to hanging out with so many of you. September, I'm gonna be at the Atlanta Tour stop and also at the California Tour stop. So if you go to orangetour.org, you can register right there. I'll also be in various cities in October and November. Would love, love, love to connect with you. So if you haven't registered for the Orange Tour, please do so. We're gonna be talking about equipping the next generation of leaders, how to reach families and I'll be speaking to senior leaders on that track. So make sure you don't miss that. Also, I will be next month in September at the Activate Conference. And that's in New England with Josh Gagnon. He is putting on an incredible conference. We will link to that in the show notes. So make sure you don't miss the Activate Conference. It is in New England. And I'm gonna be one of the keynotes also doing a breakout there. And the details are in the show notes. So make sure you don't miss that. And I just wanna say, before we get right into the message, I've had an experience, I record these podcast intros, usually a couple of weeks before broadcast. And yesterday, this is a Wednesday. On Tuesday, yesterday, I sent out an email to everybody who subscribes to my blog, sort of newsletter slash email list. And it was just a word of encouragement because I'm right now in the middle of a series at our church called Playback. And it's all about the messages that play back in our minds. And both, when I sent that email out to 20,000 leaders yesterday, and when I talked to our church about it this past weekend, oh my goodness, the response I got, like my goodness, I just can't believe it. All I was trying to do was encourage people. And the goal of this series, I'm doing the goal of the email was simply this, to try to erase the negative thoughts that go through our mind with more positive thoughts. And I was simply shocked at the amount of people who said, man, I am so discouraged right now. This email came at just the right time. The sermon series came at just the right time. And a few weeks earlier, what I had done is asked our church, I just said, hey, will you take a few moments and just write down some of the negative thoughts that go through your mind? And I heard from hundreds of people who attend our church, and the results literally brought me to tears. I mean, people wrote things like, I'm a failure, I'll never get it right, I'm so stupid, I'm no good enough, you're a bad mom, you're a terrible parent, you'll never amount to anything. I just couldn't believe it. And things like Christ can't even love you, and your sexual sins will never be forgiven. I just broke down and wept when I read those cards. And I thought, wow, like people need encouragement. And so I've been preaching through this this month, actually you can go to connectuschurch.com and follow along with the series if you want to. We'll make sure we link to that again in the show notes. But then when I wrote to leaders, and I just got deluged with responses from leaders who were like, thank you, thank you, thank you. I needed to hear that, I was right ready to quit, or I was so in the gutter, and hey, I don't know where this podcast finds you. I don't know how you're feeling right now. I don't know what you're doing right now. But if you're like me, you know that sometimes it just gets discouraging. And if that's you, I just want you to know, hey, don't give up, you know, I'm in your corner, your heavenly father loves you, and you're not alone, you're just not alone. So be encouraged. And man, if I can play some little tiny role in just encouraging you as a leader, 'cause leadership's hard, and life is hard, and family's hard, and raising kids hard, and being a parent is hard. I just want to encourage you. And that's my word for you today. So I think this interview with Barnabas is really gonna encourage you, and I'm sure there are times in his life where he just needed a word from someone, and I'm sure there's times where his dad and mom needed words of encouragement. So if this podcast episode comes to you that way, I'm so glad for that. And here's my conversation with Barnabas Piper. - Really, really excited today to have Barnabas Piper with me, and Barnabas is an author of two books now, and also a blogger and a podcaster, and he works in the whole heads up, the whole leadership department over at LifeWay, Christian Resources. So welcome Barnabas. - Was it really good to be on with you, thanks so much? - Yeah, tell us a little bit about what you're doing now, and explain for our listeners the context in which you grew up and were raised, because it is unique and yet not unique to a lot of people who were raised in a similar context. - Yeah, absolutely, I'll kind of work backwards. So where I am now is I live in Nashville area, I work at LifeWay, Christian Resources, like you mentioned, I work on the leadership development team, so under a guy named Todd Adkins, and I work on sort of the brand development and marketing side of things, so essentially trying to help take leadership development resources and connect them to church leaders. So that's my day job. I'm married, we have two little girls who are nine and six, just moved to Nashville a couple years ago, but going back in time, I grew up in Minneapolis as the son of John Piper, so that's, that obviously sort of created a unique environment for my developing years. So first 18 years of my life in his home moved away went to Wheaton College in Illinois, got into the publishing industry after that, so I spent about eight years in the Christian book publishing industry before moving to Nashville. But that experience growing up in a pastor's home was a really formative thing, creating its own set of challenges, as well as a lot of blessings, but created a lot of questions along the way and positioned me to walk through some challenges in my own faith and my own life, just trying to figure out what is it that I've been taught, what is it that I know and what is it that I actually believe? - Mm-hmm. And in, you know, you had sort of a double situation, where not only were you a PK, as you talk about in your book, The Pastors Kid, but you know, your dad is one of the most globally recognized known admired preachers on the planet alive, so you sort of grew up with that double whammy of having a well, well, well known father, who you wanted to know through a very, very different lens, which is I don't really care, you know, I always joke with my friends and I mean, gosh, you know, I always say my family doesn't care how many downloads that were in my podcast today, they don't care how many viewers I have on my blog or how many people bought my books. And I mean, it's a fraction of what your dad would have seen in his ministry or still sees. They just want me to be a dad and you grew up with that kind of tension as well. - Yeah, and that point is really helpful. I think that's true for any pastor's kid. I think the more prominent the pastor, maybe the more concentrated it is, but that idea that none of us are terribly impressed with our parents position, you know, it doesn't matter if they're a professional athlete or a musician or a pastor or, you know, a CEO, we just don't care that much about what they do, we really only care about how we relate to them. And so the things that stand out to me in terms of memories that are cherished that I enjoy the most are the ones of Backyard Soccer Games or my dad cheering really loud at my little league games or walking to and from church with him on a Sunday morning, or just the time that we spent doing really normal things. And that always holds court in my heart and my memories as the things that define our relationship. The pastor piece of it created an environment that kind of encroached on those things to a degree, but that's not the thing that I appreciated most or that mattered to me most. - Which I think, you know, that's really interesting. I mean, you're a leader and a dad in your own right now and you've got, you know, a number of years of distance between growing up in your dad's home and your mom's home and leading your own home now and being sort of, you know, an adult in the business world or publishing world. But I wonder, you know, there's the old thing about, you know, love and respect that women desire love and men cherish respect. And I find that difficult because sometimes you feel way more successful as a person at work than you do at home. I know I've struggled with that. And you write about it pretty honestly in your book. Actually your dad wrote, I don't know if it's the foreword or the introduction, but he talked about how painful it was to read the book, but how glad it is that you wrote it. But it seemed like he struggled in that area a little bit too, right, that, I mean, he was so consumed by his ministry and by what he did, that those moments where he was throwing the ball in the backyard or just being a dad, were maybe a little bit hard to get to as they would be for a lot of us in a leadership position. Is that true? - Yeah, to a degree, it's funny, you know, in writing the book, I talked to several dozen pastors' kids and unfortunate number of them had stories about how little time they had with their dads. How many holidays were truncated by somebody else in the church needing their dad's time, how many games he missed, you know, just sort of the absent father type of thing. And that was not my experience. For me and for us, the thing, the challenge was kind of where where the passion lay, you know, he poured himself into his preaching and his church. And I say this because we've had, I've had these conversations with them and he has stated it publicly. So this is not, I do not intend to throw stones at my dad or to, you know, tell tales out of school. That was an area where his heart was fully invested. And I think he felt the same level of care for us in the family but didn't have, he didn't know how to express it quite the same way in terms of just engaging us as children and relationally and digging into our hearts and our doubts and our fears and our struggles. I mean, I just didn't have a lot of conversations with him about hard times I was having as a 12 year old or a 16 year old or things like that. And so that was where the gap lay for us. For a lot of other pastors kids, it was I would have taken any time with my dad. I would have taken going out for pizza with my dad. Whereas I got to go out for pizza with my dad all the time. He made a point to make time for us. So which is a really meaningful thing and something that I would like to take as a dad and do with my kids. And, you know, I think we all want to be, we all want to be better than our parents in some ways. You know, you want to take what they did well and learn from it? - Of course. - So, but yeah, so for us in my house, the challenge had to do with, I think, that invested the passion of the heart and the personal communication as opposed to just sort of the basic time spent. Dad's never home, dad's not paying attention. That wasn't your story at all. - Not at all. - But I can get that. You know, the picture that emerges of your dad in the book is, you know, an inordinately gifted man who loved God. And it wasn't even a hypocrisy thing where, you know, you saw two dads, the guy who was in the pulpit and then how he behaved at home. There was a deep integration of who he was and he really does love Jesus and he threw himself into the ministry. But I think for a lot of us who are church leaders, you know, my kids are 19 and 23 now. I can totally relate to the fact that sometimes it can just be harder to connect at home than it can be in ministry. And how do you, like did you find that difficult having those conversations when you were in your teenage years with your dad, you said you did? And why was it difficult? Is it something just innate in being a preacher's kid or like what makes that difficult? Because I would say probably my kids, you know, we've had some great conversations but I'm sure they feel some walls and some pressure as well. - I think it's a, you know, it's sort of the age old nature and nurture question. I think my dad's nature, he's an introverted person. So when he stands in the pulpit and expresses things with this sort of fiery passion, I shouldn't say sort of, it's extremely fiery passion. That is not something that comes out at home. But that doesn't make him hypocritical. That's a context thing. It's kind of like you find actors who in an interview context are exceptionally awkward but you put them in front of a camera or on stage and they just explode with personality. It's an expression kind of thing. And so he doesn't naturally, he's not a natural conversationalist. He's not a natural to sort of sit down and dig into things and talk through how you're feeling and things like that. I'm sure some of that was how he was brought up. I think some of it is just his personality. And I think some of it, and he would say this now, is he didn't know at the time what he knows now about the importance of emphasizing it. He's close to 70 now and he's still trying to be a better dad every day and get better at it. And so he knows things now that he didn't know then that he looks back and says, yeah, I wish I would have done some of those things differently. Which to me as a dad is incredibly encouraging because I hope when I'm 70, I'm still learning and growing and trying. But yeah, so it was a, I think it really was a situation where he wasn't naturally inclined that way. His natural inclination was writing and speaking in a presentational way. And so between that and just sort of learning as a dad and not knowing everything he needed to know, it just didn't come naturally. So those conversations were kind of few and far between. And of course, most, and I didn't know as a teenager, as most don't, that you can drive those conversations. You know, I didn't know that I could go to him and go, let's have a, you know, let's have a chat about this because how many 16 year olds do that to their dad where they just sort of sit down and go, hey, let's have a heart to heart. In retrospect, I wish I would have taken more initiative too, but I didn't. So that's just, it's the live and learn kind of piece when it comes to that aspect, I think. - Well, and I think that's fair. I mean, I always say to my kids, you're my first kids, my only kids. I'm learning how to be a dad and there's a sense in which they're learning how to relate to a dad and how to be a kid, right? Or a teenager or a young man. And so that's a challenge. But you say, and I think you argue quite persuasively, that there are unique challenges that come from just being raised as the preacher's kid, as the pastor's kid. So what were some of those disconnects that you discovered early on that became a formative part of your life story? - Yeah, I think just contextually speaking, and this is true for any pastor's kid. It could be a church of a hundred people or a megachurch. So my upbringing, when I was born, my dad had been a pastor for about three years, and the church was a few hundred people, maybe four to 500 people, kind of a mid-sized church. Between then and when I graduated from high school, it grew to about 2,000. And then over my college years, almost doubled again. So it experienced sort of steady growth at kind of getting more rapid over time. But the context of being the pastor's kid didn't really change that much. And the difficulty is the observation, the awareness of the family of the pastor, where everybody knows something about you that you didn't tell them. So it's just that sense of people are watching. And it's a real thing. It's not just a self-consciousness issue. It is when you talk to 10 different people on a Sunday and they ask you questions that they're not intending to be rude, most of them are very much intending to be polite or be kind. But they're asking questions about things that they really don't have any business knowing. So hey, how was prom last weekend? Or hey, how did your baseball game go? Or hey, I saw you're doing this for a summer job. And those kinds of things, and you go, I am, remind me of your name again. - Right, right, right. You shouldn't know that. You shouldn't know that, right? - Right. And so you just, it cumulatively builds this sense that everybody is watching you. And then there are the more, you know, there are more egregious examples where people feel the right to tell you how you should and shouldn't do things. And so I give a couple examples in the book of driving into the church parking lot, playing music really loud and getting collared by this lady who proceeded to just chew me out for my choice of music and the volume of it, while two friends who were with me just stroll right on into church and nothing happens to them because she knew me, quote unquote. And so that is one aspect, but it can't be downplayed the effect that that has on somebody who's, every child, every teenager is going through an experience of trying to figure out who they are, you know, they're learning how to be an adult, they're learning how to make decisions, what's right and wrong, who am I as a human, as a Christian, am I a Christian, those kinds of questions, these are big things for somebody who's seven to 18 to 20 to be figuring out. And now it's complicated by the fact that everybody's expecting you to be a certain way or telling you to be a certain way, even if it's not explicit, there's a tacit expectation that the pastor's kid does not do these things, does do these things, lives like this, and we're all sort of giving you a grade on a week to week basis, that's a great challenge. And it has really significant ramifications on the soul. So it's not just sort of the petulant, don't tell me what to do, although sometimes it's that. But the sense of how do I figure out what is right and wrong, how do I figure out what is actually honoring to God when I'm being told how I'm supposed to live according to an entirely different standard? The standard is pastor's kids are supposed to be this way, not this is the way a follower of Jesus lives. And so that disconnect is a really challenging thing for pastor's kids to overcome because it creates, it creates a challenge in having an authentic relationship with Christ, because you're not connected with Christ, you're connected to expectations. And if we wanna add a further complicating factor, it's the fact that most pastor's kids know more about the Bible than most of their peers. So just because we grow up around it, there's family devotions and there's countless sermons in Wednesday night Bible studies and whatever the context of the church is, you are around that more. And so you know a lot of the answers, but you don't know what you believe. You just know what the right answers are. So pastor's kids that we can win the Bible trivia contest, we can win the sword drills, we will out Christian anybody, but there can be a massive gap between that and where our heart finds its identity and its confidence and that genuine plugged in personal relationship with Christ that helps me say, it doesn't really matter what everybody else says, I know what honoring Christ looks like. So all of that blends together to create just sort of this, this web of difficulties that are, I think unique to somebody who's in a pastor's kids position, it's different than any other celebrity kid because there's the spiritual aspect tied to it, the moral aspect tied to it. The flip side of that is that it's not all bad. You know, being a pastor's kid is not the most miserable thing in the world. I think some pastor's kids aren't really miserable. I loved, it taught me to love the church. It taught me I have viewed the church as my family since I was a kid. Sometimes you do want to punch your family in the head. We all know this, but they're your family and you stand by them and you love them and you don't abandon them and they don't abandon you and all of that biblical knowledge has value because that's the material that God uses to guide our hearts and our lives. So all of those are good things that came with it too. So I don't want to just focus on the bad and say, wine, wine, complain, complain, being a pastor's kids, the worst thing ever. - Right. - Now, those expectations, where a lot of them articulated or some of them just kind of in the water supply, you just picked up on them. Like clearly when somebody grabs you by the collar and says, you shouldn't be playing that kind of music at that volume and what's wrong with you? That's an articulated explanation. But, you know, was it just stuff then? When did you become aware that you were, I think one of your chapters is called, you know, the fishbowl. When did you become aware that you were living in a fishbowl? - The things that I noticed, especially early on, it wasn't so much an articulated, you should be this way, not this way. It was, there was just maybe a higher standard. And I remember that going all the way back to, I don't know, first or second grade in Sunday school class, where we were playing Bible trivia games and the expectation was that I was supposed to answer the harder questions. I was, and I wasn't supposed to get any wrong. Now, of course, being a competitive and prideful person, even at the age of seven, I thrived on that. It gave me a great sense of pride to be able to answer the hard questions, get all the answers right, and thereby be superior to all of my second grade peers. But even starting at that point, you just know that the pastor's kid is supposed to have a slightly different level of biblical knowledge and behavior. And, I mean, even it would come through tacitly in things like if you, when I would talk to somebody, so say junior high, I did not get along with my mother very well when I was in junior high, because I was a punk kid who had a bad attitude. And she was my mom who was trying really hard to teach me how to be respectful and responsible. It didn't go over very well. And so I would talk to a youth leader and talk about how frustrated I was. And just the look in his eye that the pastor's kid would have these knockdown drag out arguments with his mother, who is the pastor's wife, it's like it caught him off guard. - Right. And when in reality, I think most 13 year olds have disagreements with their parents and some arguments and some of them are very intense. And so it was those little kinds of things. So just watching how people reacted to me and seeing what they expected of me with just a handful, maybe just a few here and there where people would say, "You can't do that, you're the pastor's kid. "You shouldn't talk like that, you're the pastor's kid." Or, "Hey, you should sign up for this thing "because it's sort of expected of you as the pastor's kid." Most of the time though, it was just sort of, you just looked around and you knew that people were looking at you going, "Well, how are you gonna handle this?" - And it was something you were born into. It's not something you chose, right? Like your dad was a pastor from the very beginning who's a pastor throughout your formative years. And kind of wherever you go, you're just John's son. You know, you're the pastor's son. It's this unofficial label that follows you everywhere that probably I can see that would feel stifling at times. Did your parents do things to try to protect you from that? Like were they aware of that? Or what are some good things that they did that you think maybe 'cause you paint a number of scenarios in your book. You talk about like, you know, the complete rebel and the atheist and the whole deal, which is where some preachers, kids end up. But, you know, you didn't fully end up there even though we'll talk about where you ended up spiritually in your late teens and twenties in a little bit. But like did they do a few things that you think maybe softened the blow? - I think what they did a very good job of was, you know, I mentioned earlier that difficulty into figuring out what am I supposed to be because everybody's telling me I'm supposed to be a certain kind of thing. And then what is it that actually is the life that God wants me to have? They only emphasize that second thing. They never reinforced those other expectations. You know, it was never a we don't do that because we're the pastor's family. Or we don't do that because people will frown upon it. They just, that never came up. It was always, so if I'm 15, 16 years old and trying to determine if I ask him, hey, can I go see this movie with friends? They didn't say we don't see movies like that because we're the pastor's team. - 'Cause of my position. - Right, they didn't say people might see you there. They said, what's good about that movie? You know, how is that movie gonna be something that helps you think better or, you know, teaching me to filter things on an actual biblical standpoint as opposed to a sort of this artificial moral standard? So that was a big deal just because it helped me develop that side of things and going, I know there's another way to think about things. I don't have to be bound by this artificial standard that other people have created. Now it took a while to sort of move towards freedom from that. But they planted the seeds of it. The other side of it though is that like, we never really talked about the difficulty of being a pastor's kid. My dad would acknowledge it sometimes, you know, like when he faced public criticism for various things and he would just say quietly, I know this is hard. I know that you see this. But the conversation didn't go very far after that. It was just sort of an acknowledgement that, yes, this is a difficult, unique circumstance. But not a lot of talking about how should we handle this as a family? How do I respond to this? I do remember asking him on a couple of occasions, like, hey, I don't like seeing people talk about you like this. How should I respond? And he would, you know, we talked through that a little bit, but that was pretty rare. So there wasn't a lot of active protective measures, but there was a sense of we don't live by that standard. We will try to create a context that is not bound by some sort of legalistic standard. - I think that's wise. I mean, I'm replaying my approach to parenting in the midst of this. And that was one thing my wife and I said regularly to our sons, it's like, hey, you know, we're not asking you to do this because I'm the pastor. We're having this conversation because we're followers of Jesus. And you think that's a helpful conversation, but you don't really know where that one's gonna land. - Well, I think that the difficulty for pastors about that is, I mean, that is a helpful conversation to have it's a necessary thing to say, but there's something inherently complicated about it when dad works for Jesus. - Yeah. - You know, so it's not because of my position. It's because we want to live a life that honors Jesus, but those two look a lot alike. You know, because a lot of pastors demand things of their kids be this way because I'm the pastor and it looks a lot like honoring Jesus. It is, it's moralistic behavior. So for the pastors kid to get the heart of that, to get the passion of, no, we really only care about what Jesus thinks. We really don't care that much about what people demand of us. That's a hard thing to understand. And that's not something that I have started to get comfortable with just until, you know, into my adult years where I could begin to understand that you can make the same decision, one reason being, for two different reasons, one of them legalistic and the other one because you want to honor Jesus. And so they look exactly alike, but one of them is, one of them has the right heart behind it and the other is seeking to impress people. - Yeah, you know, that's really good. And I'm sure we had to work through that in real time. So to expect a 12 year old or an 18 year old to work through that in real time sometimes can be a little bit, you know, difficult as well. So let me ask you, what was the hardest part of being the pastor's kid for you? If you had to isolate it to one or two things, what was the toughest? - Two answers to that come to mind. One was sort of the most frustrating thing. And that was, that was feeling like I had to be what other people wanted me to be. I'm a natural born contrarian. I want to find my own way. I want to figure out what works best for me. I like to take suggestions from people and take the pieces of them that work and integrate them into my life. And I've been like that since I was a kid. I don't like being told, do this thing. So to have expectations heaped on me, just raise my hackles. I got really frustrated. But the thing that was the hardest for me in terms of actually kind of defining my life was the difficulty in figuring out, maybe figuring out isn't even the right term, the difficulty in recognizing that knowing answers and being able to argue all the points of theology is not the same thing and almost has no bearing whatsoever on actually faithfully following Jesus. And so there became this gap that grew in my life between the former and the latter. So I was a theology major in college and I was a fairly decent theology major in college. Wasn't a great student, but it just seemed naturally and I was steeped in the stuff since I was a kid and I enjoyed it and I enjoyed winning the arguments and writing the papers and parsing out why is this guy right and this guy wrong? What does this guy say about the Apostle Paul? Blah, blah, blah, blah, I talk about the five points of Calvinism or, you know, eschatology or just pick your nuanced theological thing and I could argue about it, but that didn't mean that I was sold out in saying I would like Christ to rule all of my life. And that, and I didn't even recognize it. I didn't have, I didn't see that I had sort of this dry husk of faith and this robust sense of knowledge and it's much better to have the reverse if you have to choose. It's great to have both, but if you have to choose, it's better to have a robust faith and less knowledge. And so that ended up leading me, me God ended up using it because God is good like that, but it put me in a position where my faithfulness to Christ, I don't wanna say it dwindled exactly, but maybe that is a good way to put it. And I just found myself making worse and worse decisions and making more and more moral compromises to the point where I got axed from a job in my mid 20s because of a series of just dishonest decision-making in the workplace. And it was that's when things just sort of crumbled and I saw that, you know, this dry husk of faith that sort of just crumbled up into dust and what I had leaned on as my Christian identity was simply a bunch of answers, not a genuine relationship with Christ. - Is it fair to say that, and then maybe this is the wrong characterization of it, but like in this sort of decade from maybe when you first became aware, okay, there's some real pressure here in my teen years of being the pastor's kid to your mid 20s 'cause you're in your early 30s now, right? - I am, yes. - Your 30s, yeah. So, you know, in your mid 20s, that was really trying to discover, well, who am I? Was it an identity quest? - Yes, that, I think that sums it up well. I mean, the subtitle of the book is finding your own faith and identity. So, the pastors get finding your own faith and identity. And obviously, where I tried to drive the books to say the identity has to be in Christ. - Yes. - And that my identity was in, it really wasn't anywhere. I just, I didn't have one. Now, some pastors kids pick an identity. They pick the identity of I hate the church and so I'm gonna be the rebel, or they pick some of them find a really genuine faith in Christ and for them, their identities, absolutely Christ defines me. All this other stuff is just superfluous. For me, I was floating between the two. I didn't know what I was. I didn't find this theological, being theologically robust, very fulfilling. I just, it was what I was good at. So, you just sort of gravitate towards what you're good at, but it wasn't very fulfilling. I loved serving in church, but I also knew that it was a bit hypocritical because I also knew this other side of my life where I was making some moral compromises. And so, it really was a place where it came to, it came to a place where all of that other stuff kind of got wiped away. So, lose a job, have to tell my wife about this, have to take a step back from serving in a church. And here I am, it's me and a crappy job that I had gotten just to sort of pay the bills and sorting through things with God with the help of some really close friends and some faithful church elders who were helping me and seeing my own need for the first time and God's grace for the first time in a way that's not a paper that I was writing for a theology class. - Yeah, or something you were hearing that your dad was preaching. - It wasn't a sermon. I wasn't regurgitating when anybody else was saying. I wasn't, you know, it was none of that and simply looking at it and going, it's this or it's nothing. Like, this identity is found here or it's not found. And that's, you know, that was, I think the Holy Spirit actively just pointed my eyes towards the things that I needed to see. And that was when faith went from drying up to flourishing because I saw, I mean, I could have told you the gospel before that, but I saw the gospel. I saw I am a sinner in need of a savior and that's the savior and this is what he did for me. And that's why it's worth giving my life to him. I wouldn't say I got saved at that point in terms of like the decision. - Yeah. - Because I think I was a believer before that, but that's where a spark, a little teeny spark of faith was blown into something that actually had some light and heat to it. - Jesus may have been your savior, but maybe that was the moment where he truly became your Lord, he truly became the one for whom you were living. And yeah, I get that. So if I'm understanding this right, Barnabas, it was like there was this crack that started to open up in you in your early teen or teen years. And maybe it had been there all along and it just got wider and wider between, you know, your character and your real surrender of your will. And then there was sort of what you believed. Did you ever get to a point where you were questioning the tenets of Christianity, or did you always wanna believe it was true, or like how far did you're kind of, I see your sort of life rebellion, we've all been there. I mean, we've all had areas where there have been gaps between what we say and what we believe and what we live. But, you know, did you ever get to the point where you started to intellectually question the validity of Christianity? - Not in the sense of saying, I don't believe this is true, but in the sense of saying, is this defensible? - I mean, part of being the contrarian is that I question everything. And so I take almost nothing at face value. And so yes, if you want to tell me that God is good, but there is evil in the world, I need to find a way to reconcile those things. And I'm not willing to say, the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it. I would like to know what the Bible says about it. And what is it about God's character that makes His goodness so good that these other things can be accepted as part of His sovereignty or something like that? I mean, these are big questions. And I mean, that's just one example. But so yeah, I questioned, but not really, not from the point of, I questioned wanting the answer. I wanted to know that God was good. I wanted to know why I should believe, not with the inclination of saying, I don't want to believe. And so the book that it just came out, well, at least when this podcast releases, it will have just come out, it's called Help My Unbelief. And that's a lot of those issues is the difference between the kind of questions that say, I don't want an answer, I just want to disprove you. And the kind of questions that say, God show something to me, I want to see truth. One of which is unbelief, and the other of which is the kind of doubt that leads to belief. - Yeah, and that book, you've actually got a tattoo, doesn't it, that says, just that, Help My Unbelief? - Yeah, it says, I believe, Help My Unbelief, that verse out of Mark 9, yeah. - That cry, which is a great prayer. I think that is an amazing prayer. And that's kind of where you found yourself in your early 20s, mid 20s. But because that hadn't been resolved for you, there was a widening gap between how you were living and where you probably wanted to end up. - Right, yeah, and I think it was during that process of no more false identities, no more sort of false confidence or constructs of faith that I encountered that verse, I believe, Help My Unbelief again. And of course I'd read it dozens of times prior, but this time it grabbed me and I saw in that just this microcosm of Christianity, that faith is not complete, it will always be a struggle. But if you have enough faith to cry, Help My Unbelief, you're following Jesus. So you start with, I believe this much, this teeny little bit and I need help with everything else. And that is submission to Christ. And so sometimes I have lots of beliefs, sometimes you have a little bit of belief, but if you can cry, Help My Unbelief, you acknowledge your need and you throw it on him and say, only you can help me with this God, that that's the essence of Christianity. And so it became something that became a foundation for me because I knew I didn't need to be, I didn't need to have all the answers anymore. I could say I don't know, but I do believe and I know I need help with My Unbelief and so I can progress in following Jesus with that in mind. - We'll link to both of your books, by the way, in the show notes, but isn't that interesting? That's a very, you know, that you had a tattoo, I mean, that's always significant. I mean, you know, that's like, yeah, that's kind of permanent. Okay, that's a really big thing. But you go right back to, and I mean, you know, in the particular ministry you were raised in John Piper's ministry, I mean, my goodness, you know, your dad is known for certainty of conviction and for strength of intellect. I mean, and you had all those when you were seven years old, I mean, you were winning the sword drills and answering all the Bible classes and that sort of thing, and yet, yeah, obviously. You know, there are questions that just don't have emotionally satisfying answers and you got to the point where you could kind of suspend that and say, faith and doubt can coexist. I think I'm gonna choose faith, which is an awesome, awesome place to find yourself in. - And realizing that not all doubt is created equal. And I don't know if this is a helpful term, but it's what I see as believing doubt. So doubt at its basis is just, I don't know. I am not certain of this thing. So that is doubt at its basis. How you use that doubt and how you respond to it determines whether it's good or bad though. So is it the kind of doubt that says, I don't know, but I have enough confidence in God's character to say, I'm gonna take my doubt to him and see if he can show me an answer, or maybe he won't show me an answer 'cause it's beyond my understanding, but he will show me himself, whatever I need to continue to follow him, or is it the kind of doubt that you say, I'm not certain about this, and I don't want an answer, or I don't trust God, or I don't believe that his character is good. That doubt is unbelief, because unbelief is not the same as doubt. Unbelief is rejection. Doubt is simply not knowing. And so for me, what that has done is freed me up as a questioner to not feel guilty about asking lots of questions. As long as I can say, my heart wants to follow Christ, I believe, help my unbelief, that prayer, then my doubts will lead me deeper into faith, not further out of it. - I think that book's gonna help a lot of people. So glad you wrote it. Yeah, that is a huge issue for so many people who grew up in the church, and so many people who are new to faith and like not just exploring it. So let me ask you, your relationship with your parents over the decade or more that you've been out of the house, when you were going through, well, first of all, how did it change? And then when you were going through sort of your crisis in your mid 20s, what role did your parents play in sort of navigating that? Or did they just have to sort of stand by and watch that happen? How did that work? - Yeah, that became a pretty defining time for us because it, as I came into my own and began to kind of learn what my identity was in Christ, and when you start with identity in Christ, you learn a lot of other things about yourself too, because you begin to see, oh, this is how I can use my abilities. I wasn't sure what to do with them before. Oh, this is what it looks like to work really well in a, doesn't even need to be in a ministry context, or just working in a way that honors Christ. So whether it's writing or marketing or the various things I've been part of. And so growing into that and beginning to flourish there, I no longer had to be defined by what my dad did or how he saw me, not that he told me that, but that I think that's a natural inclination is to sort of, it's very easy to be defined by what your parents, how they view you or what they raised you to be. And so it led to some very hard difficult conversations where I had to push back and say, I need more freedom. You know, I need a little bit of space, not having you speak into that. But then it's also led to some really, really helpful conversations when I can go and ask them questions that I didn't have the humility to ask before or ask for help in a way that I didn't know how to do before. And so I would say my relationship with my parents now is as healthy as it's ever been in the sense of, they know who I am, and I know who they are, and they have learned and continue to strive to learn how to relate to me without pushing on me to change or anything like that. They, you know, express a lot of appreciation for what God has done and who I am. And I can appreciate who my dad is and who my mom is and what they do from a distance without necessarily having to be in lockstep with them on everything. And so it's ultimately, I think that's just the nature of a maturing relationship is I don't have to be like you you don't have to be like me. We can, we can appreciate one another without, without demanding that the other be something else. And so that and then during that crisis time, the biggest, the biggest strength they had and they've always been like this for me and my siblings is availability. I always knew they were there. I always knew if I was a, if I was in a spa where things were falling apart, they would get in the car, get in a plane and come from Minneapolis to Chicago in a moment's notice. - So I'm what they're doing. - Yes, and I could always go there. You know, they've always had a, you know, they never kick anybody out of the house. Doesn't matter what me or my brothers did, we didn't get kicked out. We always had a, we always had a place to go back to. So, and that speaks grace and love and care because even if there are disagreements, that sort of devotion and sacrifice and presence is really, really loud. - Although it's in the rear view mirror now, I mean, you know, you hint at it in the book, but there are always things you do as a teenager or as a young adult that I'm sure if your parents knew the whole story. And again, you know, they'd be like, ah, how did you, how did they handle that? And how did you handle that tension? When you were doing things that you knew are not consistent with following Jesus and what were some good things that they did in that season? - That was some of the hardest conversations I had with them. Those were some of the hardest conversations I had with them because anybody who's listened to my dad or read his stuff knows that he's very intense and he takes sin really, really seriously. And so he just, he's like a drill bit just driving into that aspect of this needs to be done away with, you know, this sin in your life. And I didn't always appreciate that very much. - I'll bet you didn't. - Even when my conscience agreed with him, I just, I guess I would say his version of killing sin is not the same as my version of killing sin. Or I didn't just, I just didn't, I didn't express things the same way. So there was, there was some tension in just him learning to see how God was cleaning up my life and me recognizing that what he really wanted for me was best even if he only knew one way to express it. And, and so that was, that was not always a very, those were not always very pleasant conversations because when you're telling your dad back off and he's trying to do what's good for you, he thinks you don't want what's good. When in reality you do want what's good, you just maybe don't want it expressed just like that. But again, that's something that we've kind of methodically worked through over the years to understand what is helpful from him and then him learning to see how God is working in my life that may not look exactly like how God works in his life. - And that's good. I mean, that's one of the things I really admire about your story Barnabas is you have been fighting for the relationship with your dad and I'm sure he has been fighting for the relationship with you over these 30 some odd years. And it's not easy. - Yeah, it's, it's not. And I have seen plenty of pastor's kids who just sort of tap out or pastors who just sort of go, well, he just went on his own way and it just, it isn't worth it to me to, to give up when, I mean, they're my parents and I love them. And there's, there's so much good there, but there also does need to be this sense of this very, and not just sense, this clearly communicated idea of, I'm going to be different than you and you're going to be different than me. So we just need to learn to, we need to learn to see how God is using the other person, how God is working in the other person's life. And then there are certain things maybe we just don't talk about because, because we won't come to a point of agreement or it's going to hinder the good that's already happening. - Yeah, there was another and I know I wanna get to a couple of questions before we're done today, but there was a couple times in the book when you said, you talked about the way you hear your dad's sermons and obviously your dad's one of the most listened to preachers on planet Earth and people would come up to you and start talking to you about your dad's message and you just heard it differently or you hear it differently as his kid. Tell me about that and tell me about, you know, what you were really longing for your dad to say. - Yeah, the short version is I didn't hear a lot of his sermons or I just, when you hear, when you hear the same voice speak over and over and over again, you begin to tune out and it's not in this, it's not in a intentionally disrespectful sense, just it's your dad, you know? - Yeah. - You talk to it all the time and what I mean, I've said this to people, people occasionally ask, how many of your dad's books have you read? And he enters a few, not most, but a few, but I would rather talk to him than read stuff that he writes. Not that interested in reading his blog posts and I don't tune into his podcast to hear sermons and that kind of thing because getting on the phone or seeing him when we see him in person a few times a year now that we live in different states. I mean, those are far better interactions for me and I take away more from them. I'm more encouraged by them. They mean more to me, they leave more indelible memories. I don't remember sermons my dad preached. The only one, the only aspects of sermons that he preached that I remember are one or two that were very timely for me after I left home. And so he stopped being quite the regular voice. And then one or two where he told stories about me that he either got wrong, which was annoying to me. - Which sometimes happens? - Yes, I caught the big fish. My brother didn't, that kind of thing. Or that were somewhat embarrassing. Like two of his most prominent sermons involved, one involved me getting my bike stolen and the other one involved me totalling a car. And these are one was given at the Passion One Day Conference. - Oh yeah. - And the other one was at a missions conference, but it was turned into one of the, one of the desiring God Ministries sort of big promos for about four or five years. And so those are the things that stand out to me from his sermons. Conversations on the other hand, or something that I hold on to. And I think, I think pastors should just get really comfortable with the idea that talking with their kids is far more effective than preaching when it comes to their family. Probably their wife too. - I'm not going to, I'm not going to get in the heads of pastor's wives, but I would bet that they don't care nearly as much about their husband's sermons as they do a really good conversation. - True. - And so that, that I think, I mean, that's always, always been what I've appreciated about interacting with my dad is conversations with, time spent with, and I just don't care that much about the sermons, but that doesn't mean I, that doesn't mean I don't think they have value for other people. I can recognize, I recognize as gift, I recognize as ability, how God uses it, and why other people resonate with his sermons so much. I just resonate with other things. - Totally appreciate that. So we got a lot of pastors listening, probably a good number of PK's listening, and we've got a lot of church members listening. Now, you've finished the book with like, what is it, seven guidelines, commandments, for things you showed or shouldn't do, but okay, there's a lot of clergy parents listening right now, you've owned them, you've convicted them, what are two or three things that you're just like, hey, pastors, when it comes to your kids, do this or don't do that, what's your top advice? - I think we've covered a lot of the bigger relational kinds of things, so just really practical things. So we just talked about don't, you know, have conversations, not sermons. - Yeah, guilty. - Well, here's the thing, I'm not a preacher by trade, I still preach it my kids. - That's true. - I think it's a bit of a dad thing, not just a pastor thing. So pastors, you're not alone in that front. It is, it's, if they listen and converse, but I think the other thing is that also applies to counsel. When your child asks you a question, especially as they get older, and they want to interact with you relationally, they're not sitting in your office asking for counseling. They just, they want dad to interact with their heart, and what they're interested in, or what they're scared of, those kinds of things. That's a lesson I'm trying to absorb as a dad, as my nine-year-old grows, because we're having more of those conversations, because her emotions are a lot different than they were when she was four and five and six years old. But another really practical thing is have a hobby you can invite your kids into. So my, here's, this is, my dad was really good at doing the things that I enjoyed. He hated fishing, but I liked fishing, so he would go fishing with me a few times a year. He loved most sports, so playing sports together was always a good way to spend time together, but he didn't invite me into his hobbies very much. But that's because his hobbies consisted mostly of reading. Reading isn't, reading, by the way, pastors, if you're the studious type, reading is not a communal activity. Sorry. (laughs) Sitting in chairs in the same room and reading does not count as spending time together. - Or blogging. - On podcasting probably doesn't count, those are my hobbies, so. - Right, and again, this is something I have to absorb as a parent and a husband now. So this is not throwing stones at people who are awful, well, I consider myself a success. But if you can figure out something that you can share with your kids, so for me, I love watching and going to baseball games. I don't know that my daughters will ever fall in love with baseball, but at the age they are right now, they love going to games with me or sitting on the couch with me and watching baseball. And it's something we can do 'cause we can talk together and I can teach them about the game, and it's just playing with your kids and spending time doing what you love and folds them into your life. So that's a really significant thing. It is really good to do what they love too, but to show them what you love, you're inviting them into something that they know you're excited about. - It's a really interesting point, because my kids now, as I said, at 19 and 23, we always went to their games and their activities, but I played golf, and so I would take my kids golfing. My son last Saturday just said, "Hey dad, you wanna go golfing?" I'm like, "Absolutely, I had stuff to do, drop what I did." Those hobbies come back, and for Father's Day this year, they got me Blue Jays tickets. I don't even watch the Blue Jays that much anymore, but they know that that's one sport I really like, and we're all gonna go to a game together in August, watch the Blue Jays play the Yankees. So, I mean, it's funny how when you invite them into your world, and those were two things that were part of my world, that's come back to me now as a dad of young adults, so really good advice. - I think those things create memories too, and memories are really profound in a relationship. So, when things have been challenging in my family, being able to look back and remember going to baseball games with my dad, playing with him, going fishing with him, doing things that mattered to me as a six, seven, 12-year-old, that creates a relational foundation that is not very easy to break. You cannot throw away good memories very easily, and it creates a connection where, yeah, now, so I'm gonna go see them later this summer, and he invited me on a fishing trip. - Wow. - He doesn't even like fishing. But he's never been to the boundary waters in Minnesota, and he knows that I love it, and so we're gonna do that, and then I will probably drag him to a twins game while I'm in town because I love the twins. And so, these things, I'm 32 now, not 12, but these things still hold true and create relational touch points that are really significant. - See, that makes me just love you, dad. Absolutely, I love that. That he invited you fishing, and he doesn't even love fishing. So, great advice. Okay, what about pastors' kids who are listening right now? Either adults like yourself, or maybe there's a few teenagers on the line right now? - I think, relationally speaking, pastors' kids often have the sense, dating back to when they're little, that you don't question dad's calling. So, if you say anything dissatisfied with the church, you're undermining your father's ministry. That's not necessarily true. - Sure. - It's true if you go public and criticize them, but if you talk to your parents and say, "Hey, here's things that I'm struggling with," that's a relational conversation. You are trying to sort through challenges in your family. And so, I would say pastors' kids maybe need to get over some fear and be bold with their parents, and say, "Hey, this has been really hard for me "for a long time." They may not receive it very well. You may be shocked at how well they receive it too. They may have wondered how to start a conversation or wondered where you were with things. So, start the conversation, don't wait for them to do it, 'cause they may not, they may not know how, but you do, 'cause you know how you feel. You know what you're struggling with. You know the challenges you had as a 16 year old that maybe there's still some residual effects as a 35 year old. So, that's one thing. I think the other thing is, and this is a broader thing, but I think it would be very beneficial if pastors' kids could kind of go back in time and clean the Sunday school slate, like everything they were taught, Bible story-wise, everything they were taught, moral lesson-wise, and then start with Matthew one and read through the four gospels, just looking for who is Jesus really? Because that relationship is where the identity is found and confidence is found, and grace is found, and forgiveness is found, and freedom is found. I mean, all of these things, it's your relationship with Christ, and you may have a very skewed sense of all of those things because of the clutter that has been sort of heaping, you know, the expectations and the morals, and maybe you had a disparate sort of Bible lessons thrown at you over the years, and so you know lots of trivia, but do you really know Jesus? And so as much as you can, shelve that stuff and go try to figure out who is Jesus just by walking through the gospels, and I think that your soul will find a level of refreshment that is completely unexpected. - So good, that's so good. How about church members, you know, everybody, you know, your pastors got kids who are growing up in church, what do you do or not do? - Most church members love their pastor's family, or they're inclined to. They may not know them personally, but they're inclined to, and that's great. There's very few church members who are jerks who just wanna hurt the pastor's family. They're out there, there's a lot of horror stories, but that's not the majority. I wouldn't imagine most of those folks listen to this podcast, but your love for the pastor's family has to be expressed in the right way. You know, you can't just go up and barge into a kid's life and say, "Hey, how was this thing that you heard about "because that can actually cause damage?" Like we talked about earlier. Whereas, but if you have the opportunity, maybe it's as a youth leader, as a Sunday school teacher, as somebody who's maybe on the inner circle of people who know the pastor's family to really befriend a pastor's kid, or really anybody in a pastor's family, but to be the kind of person who says, "Look, I do not care what your last name is. "I don't care what your dad's position is, "and I don't care what church we go to. "I'm here because I care about you. "I want you to be free to be yourself, "to ask questions, to express doubts, "to confess whatever you need to, "or want to confess, and to be that kind of friend." That's a powerful thing, because pastor's kids don't often find the freedom of that kind of friendship. For most people, it's gonna be more of a sense of awareness of the pressures on the pastor's family, so you lead with prayer to support them, and then just try to remember that they're not really any different than you are. They will have the same familial struggles, they will have the same tendencies towards weaknesses and sins, they're gonna forget people's names, they're gonna say awkward or embarrassing things, they're going to make a lot of mistakes, because God didn't make pastors better than anybody else. He simply called them to a different kind of ministry than you're called to. And so, if you can absorb the reality that they are just like me doing something that God has called them to do, just like I'm doing something that God called me to do in whatever business, then you begin to care for them as another member of the church, not see them as sort of like this hope of your church, where they're higher and closer to God, which is a really harmful way to view things. - Wow, I'll tell you, I can't thank you enough. This is really, this has touched me personally, just as a dad and as a pastor, and somebody who cares very much about my family and my kids, and I think you helped a lot of leaders. We'll have all the links in the show notes, but Barnabas, people are gonna wanna connect with you. Tell us about your blog, your podcast, or to connect online. - Yeah, absolutely. The easiest place to connect with me is on Twitter. I love Twitter, and I love interacting with people on Twitter. It's just @barnabaspiper. If you go to Barnabaspiper.com, that's my blog. I also write regularly for a site called the Blazing Center. So, you'll see some posts at both places. So Barnabaspiper.com is probably easier to remember. And then the podcast is called The Happy Rant. It's a little bit less serious than this one. We, myself and my two co-host, again, I'm Stephen L. Troge, and again, I'm Ted Kluck. Just sort of look at church and culture and sports. And basically, it's a counter action to all of the angry ranting that happens out there. So, we just sort of off the cuff, make fun of things, and laugh about stuff. - That's good. - But try to have a thoughtful take on quirky things that happen in the church, and why are Christians so weird, and things like that. So, it's the Happy Rant podcast, it's on iTunes, or @HappyRantPod on Twitter, if you wanna follow it there. - That's cool. And your books, again, just do they have websites, or just on Amazon? - If you just go to BarnabasPiper.com, you can find both of them there with links to the Amazon Barnes and NobleChristianBook.com. But yeah, so just BarnabasPiper.com, and you'll see a little tab that says the books. - Barnabas? - Thank you. - Thank you, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks so much. - I'm so grateful I got to know Barnabas, and I'm so grateful he's so honest and open with his story, and that his dad is so honest and open about their story as well. So, I really hope this was encouraging. Everything's in the show notes, by the way, if you just go to karaenohoff.com/episode50, that's right, five zero, you will find everything there. And make sure you pick up a copy of Barnabas' new book, and this book that he's got about being a pastor's kid, and also check out his new podcast. Again, all the links are in the show notes at karaenohoff.com/episode50. So we're back next week with episode 51, which means we're almost at the one-year mark. Woo-hoo, that's crazy. And next week, I am super excited to bring to you my guest. My guest next week is going to be Chris Dunnegan, and Chris is in charge of all the social media at Newspring. He does social so well. I don't know whether you follow a Newspring church, Perry Noble's church on social media, but you really, really should. So it's all about social. In fact, we're calling it with his permission, the Nerdist Guide to Awesome Social Media for your church or organization. He just takes you behind the scenes, shows you how they're knocking it out of the park, and how you can do it too, whether you have a budget for that kind of thing or not. So that's episode 51. Make sure you subscribe. Then we got the big anniversary show, episode 52. Upcoming guests include Ravi Zacharias and Craig Grishel. We've got others, Judd Wilhite, Jared Wilson, Jerry Gillis, Beth Marshall this fall. Sue Miller is gonna be on the podcast and many, many more. So super excited for that. If you subscribe, you will automatically get all of this and more for free every Tuesday when we upload a new episode. So you can do that on iTunes, Stitcher or Tune in Radio. And in the meantime, thanks so much for listening. I really hope this has not only helped you lead like never before, but maybe in some way today, this encouraged you. Don't give up, keep leading. Your Heavenly Father loves you. We're in your corner and we'll see you next Tuesday. (upbeat music) - You've been listening to the "Carry Newhof Leadership" podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)