Why Does God Care About Renting Apartments
For twelve years, my brother Erik stood in front of a room on Sunday mornings and talked about God. Then he took a job renting apartments.
The transition was not dramatic on paper. He had started his career in business, gone into full-time ministry almost by accident, spent a decade as a music pastor and four years planting a church, and then came back to the family organization when our dad was approaching seventy. Board conversations. A childhood pastor who said, what about Erik. The kind of convergence that looks like a plan only in hindsight.
What was dramatic was the question that showed up on the other side of it. Erik describes sitting in meetings about the Department of Housing and Urban Development, staring at spreadsheets, walking property, and thinking one thing over and over.
Why does God care at all about renting apartments?
He had an answer available to him, and it was a decent one. The organization gave half its profits to global missions. The money mattered. But he could not make the answer cover the actual hours of his actual week. The giving was sacred. The spreadsheet was just a spreadsheet. And he could not shake the sense that something was missing in that math.
He was right. What he found on the other side of that question turned into a decade of work that has moved millions of dollars into missions and changed how a lot of people understand their Monday.
The Room Where He Knew the Least
Before any of that, there was a first day.
Erik walked into CRF in 2012 as the person being raised up to eventually lead it, and by his own description he was the dumbest guy in the room. Everyone there knew infinitely more about affordable housing than he did. People would ask him questions and he would have to ask them back.
There are two ways to handle that, and most leaders pick the wrong one. You can walk in performing certainty, making decisions to prove you belong, running over the people who actually know how the thing works. Or you can spend a few years asking questions and learning to lead from underneath.
Erik picked the second one, and he is honest about why the first one is so tempting.
Our insecurities can get the best of us. If you find yourself in leadership in any capacity, you have got to deal with your fears and insecurities, because they will not only hurt you, they will hurt people around you.
That is not a soft observation. Insecurity in a leader is not a personal problem. It is an organizational one. The version of you that is afraid of being found out will make decisions to protect that fear, and the people around you will absorb the cost.
Six Men at the Front of a Room in Seymour
The question about the apartments did not resolve in a boardroom. It resolved because Erik started reading. Tim Keller. Os Guinness. Amy Sherman. People who had done the deep work on what everyday labor has to do with God. He was not researching a product. He was trying to settle something for himself.
Then a pastor friend in Seymour, Indiana called and asked him to fill in for a couple of Sundays. Preach whatever you want.
Erik cobbled together some notes. He describes them as terrible. He says he had no idea what he was talking about. This was 2014, before The Stone Table had a name. He went down and shared what God had been teaching him about how everyday work is important to God.
At the end, there were half a dozen grown men weeping at the front of the room, waiting to talk to him.
His first thought was not, I have found my message. His first thought was, oh gosh, what have I said. Who did I offend.
This is the part I want you to sit with, because it is the whole thing. Erik was not delivering polished material. He was saying out loud the thing he had been working out privately, in notes he is embarrassed by, on a topic he assumed was obvious. And a room full of men who had spent their lives in banking and manufacturing and landscaping came apart, because nobody had ever told them their work mattered.
It has happened over and over since. A man in his seventies who had run a landscaping business for fifty years and just sold it came up to Erik last year with tears on his face and said, if I just would have known this stuff, I would have approached my work differently.
Fifty years. One conversation he never got to have.
What He Would Have Missed If He Had Waited to Feel Ready
Ask Erik if he felt ready for any of it, taking over from our dad, taking the missions work in house from a pastor he had been slightly afraid of since he was eight years old, and the answer is immediate. No. You never feel ready.
He does not treat that as a problem to solve before you move.
You step into these things not because you are worthy or because you are able. You step in because the Lord has led you there.
The freedom in that line is easy to miss. If the qualification for the next thing is competence, you will be waiting on a feeling that does not arrive on schedule and may not arrive at all. If the qualification is obedience, the next step is available today, and you get to be honest about not having the whole map.
Erik’s framing is that God rarely shows the entire picture because the point was never the picture. The point was the hand you are holding on the way there. Whatever puts you in a position where you have to trust more, he says, is actually your friend.
The Thread That Survives Every Season
There is a trap on both sides of inheriting something that works.
Honor it too much and you preserve a museum. Change it too fast and you cut the artery that made it work in the first place. Erik has been navigating that for fourteen years, through a leadership handoff, a rebrand, the launch of The Stone Table in 2015, and the recent sale of most of the affordable housing portfolio.
His answer is to look for the threads that are eternal.
The specifics of the late eighties and nineties that made affordable housing the right vehicle do not exist anymore and would not make sense today. So the mechanism changes. The reason does not. As he puts it, you could not replicate the what we did, but you could replicate the why we did it.
That distinction is worth borrowing regardless of what you are carrying. Most people defend the wrong layer. They protect the format, the schedule, the offer, the platform, and lose the conviction underneath it. The format was always disposable.
The Part Nobody Wants to Hear
There is one more thing, and it is the least popular thing Erik said.
Back in 2000, a friend from Hillsong told him it takes three to five years to shift a culture. Nobody wanted to hear that then, and nobody wants to hear it now.
We want the microwave. We do not want the oven.
Erik has moved too fast before and watched it damage things in ways that were expensive to repair. His advice is patience with yourself, patience with others, and an honest acceptance that culture moves on its own timeline no matter how urgently you need it to move on yours.
Be humble. Be patient. Be courageous. He would tell you all three are required, and that the third one is what keeps the first two from turning into an excuse.
Somewhere in your life there is a door you already know you are supposed to walk through. You are not going to feel ready for it. That was never the requirement.
Write it down today. That is the first domino.
Watch the full conversation with Erik Cooper on the Create Your Art Podcast, and if you have been sitting on a message you assume everyone already knows, book a free Content Clarity Audit at 1898creative.com. The people who need what you know are already searching. They just cannot find you yet.
Create your art.
Full Transcript
Erik: I went from preaching on Sundays to renting apartments on Mondays. And I was like, why does God care at all about renting apartments?
Three to five years is what it takes to shift a culture. And no one wanted to hear that. We want the microwave. We don’t want the oven.
I’m a recovering accountant. The funny thing about me is I’m a terrible accountant, even though I have a degree in it.
I just went down and shared what God had been teaching me about how everyday work is important to God. At the end, there were a half dozen grown men weeping at the front waiting to talk to me. And I thought, oh gosh, what have I said?
You step into these things not because you’re worthy or because you’re able. You step in because the Lord has led you there.
Darren: Welcome back to another episode of the Create Your Art podcast, where we believe that you are an artist and that you need to do the hard work of bringing that into the world and sharing it with us. We’re on a mission to help you find your voice and create your art. And we’re also here talking with awesome people doing awesome things, being artists in their field.
Today is pretty cool, because I get to talk with my brother, Mr. Erik Cooper. Erik, thanks for joining me today.
Erik: Of course, yeah.
Darren: Last week we got Dad on here and we peppered him with all kinds of questions that he just loves so much.
Erik: It was his greatest joy to be filmed.
Darren: Oh yeah, he loves to be on film.
Erik: And is this like a test today, to see if our stories match?
Darren: Oh yes. This is live, with the whole studio audience here. We are testing you to see if they align. And if they don’t, we’re going to show it to him so he can scold you.
Erik: Fair. That’d be great.
Darren: No, it’s awesome. It was fun talking with Dad and hearing his side. That’s a 40 year-ish journey of things he was building. Obviously a serial entrepreneur and all the kind of fun stuff that we got to watch Dad do over the years. But you, as the older, wiser, more gray-haired brother.
Erik: Not more wise. Totally more gray.
Darren: Yeah, exactly. But you, in the last few years, got to take on the mantle of what Dad built, which I’m very thankful for, because that’s a heavy mantle and I don’t want to take it on.
I want to start here, because you’re now sitting in this seat, president of two organizations, a missions organization and then the business arm of what Dad started, CRF. And this moves millions of dollars into missions. But when you came back, it was after 12 years in ministry. You were a music pastor, a lead pastor, you started a church, all that kind of fun stuff. What pulled you back from that into Dad’s mantle, if you will? What was the catalyst there? For those who don’t know, I know I’m your brother and I kind of know the story, but you know what I mean.
Erik: Sure. And when you say came back, I guess for some clarity there, I had no intention of ever being in full-time ministry. In fact, my wife grew up in a ministry family and always joked that she married me because I wasn’t going into ministry. It wasn’t because she had a bad experience with that, but she was like, I’ve done the ministry family thing. I’m just going to marry a nice business guy and we’re going to be a part of the church and we’re going to love Jesus and we’re going to serve that way.
We didn’t want to be in church leadership. And then five years into our marriage, I was like, hey, what do you think?
So when you say come back, I mean, I started my career in the business world. We were heavily involved in our churches, as many people are. God’s work in the world was always a central part of what we did as far as work, as far as a job. I worked for a CPA firm, and then for a few years back in the earlier days of CRF, I was a staff accountant. So I came along to help Dad with some of the basics.
Darren: All that CPA stuff you have to do.
Erik: I say I’m a recovering accountant. The funny thing about me is I’m a terrible accountant, even though I have a degree in it.
So when you say came back, I worked for two or three years in the early days, and then all of a sudden, out of left field, found myself in full-time ministry. That’s a whole story for a whole podcast. Never thought I would be in ministry, but then spent 12 incredible years that I would say were, you know, life moves in seasons. I look back on that season now and it’s one of the richest seasons of my life.
Darren: Oh yeah. I was wrapped up in it.
Erik: You were a part of all of that with us. I had a great 10 year run as a music pastor and then was a church planter for about four years. But what brought me back again was kind of unexpected. Once I was in ministry, I thought, well, this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life. But then Mandy and I were starting to sense some restlessness, and just that there was change coming.
And of course, our dad was getting close to 70. This was 2012-ish. He was getting close to 70 years old. I think the board of the organization and our other founding board member, a guy named Tim Shroud, who really was the genesis of the idea (Dad took on the day-to-day and really built it from the ground up, but those two guys together), they were starting to think about the future.
They needed someone who had a background in business, who understood the business world. But really, at the heart of our organization is this idea that business and missions, business and God’s work in the world, go together. So they wanted someone who could straddle both of those worlds.
It was interesting. I was starting to feel this. Dad was starting to feel this. There were these little percolating conversations that were starting to happen. But then out of nowhere, our childhood pastor, who was on the board at that time, came to Dad and said, what about Erik? So it was this convergence of stirring and then these external confirmations that, hey, maybe this is a dialogue we need to start having. I really had no intentions of coming back into the business world, but when the offer came, we just knew it was the Lord’s leading.
Darren: Yeah, it just made sense.
Erik: It made sense.
Darren: It’s funny. When we were talking to Dad, he was saying, as he was walking through his story, there were all these moments where it wasn’t like, I had this idea, I went and chased it down and I built it. It was very much, I just walked through the next open door. As I’m thinking of your story as well, and even mine in some weird way, that’s just in our family. Whatever next step is there, huh, that seems like a good one. Let’s take that.
Erik: Yeah, I think sometimes we want the Lord to show us the whole picture. We are at our best when we are trusting the Lord. So I think sometimes he doesn’t show us everything because he wants us to just grab his hand and take that next step. I always tell people, whatever deepens our faith, whatever puts us in a position where we have to trust Jesus more, is actually our friend.
We want the Lord to show us the whole thing, and he says, just hold my hand and take the next step. I think there’s something beautiful there. So I would concur with that. Be obedient for the next step in front of you. And then when your hair is all gray, like mine, you turn around and you look back and you’re like, oh man, I wish I could have seen it all in the moment, but look how God was faithful. Look how trusting God’s sovereignty took care of us. It doesn’t mean you don’t walk through really hard times, but it does mean he’s always with you in every moment.
Darren: Yeah, that’s so true. And to speak to those 10 to 12 years in ministry, 10 especially within that music pastoring side of things, building something relatively rich and meaningful. We were writing songs before writing songs was cool. Before every church was writing songs.
Erik: Yeah, we were in the early days of that.
Darren: Cutting edge right here. This guy led the cutting edge there.
Erik: No.
Darren: But what did that time mean to you? I know you spoke to it being a rich time, a meaningful time. But what did that really mean to you, those years in ministry?
Erik: As I look back on that now, I think that was a gift from the Lord to me. And hopefully it was a gift to other people as well.
Part of my story, it’s funny. People ask me how I got to where I am today. No one would ever take the path I took. I started out as a music major in school, Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. I thought I wanted to be in the music business. In fact, I have a lot of friends who still are in the music business that I went to college with. That’s what I thought I wanted to do. So I started out as a music major and then graduated with a degree in accounting. That was my journey.
But music was always a part of who we were. Even when I was working in the marketplace in those first five years of my career, we were volunteering at the church. I had interned under the music pastor there. Music was just such a part of what we were doing. And so I had kind of left Nashville, thought I had left all of that stuff behind.
And then we found ourselves, like you said, in the late 90s, early 2000s, this was the early days of Hillsong and this Australian group coming out of, we can write our own music and music can actually be cool and modern and all of those things. We were kind of following that lead, had some friends out of that church who helped us with that. And the Lord, I think, gave me a gift, to do all of the things that my heart had longed to do in that capacity.
So we ended up writing songs, recording albums. As you know, our last album was picked up by Integrity Music, and we’ve got some songs floating around. You get that mailbox check every once in a while. Mine was like 47 cents last time. Enough to take my family out for dinner. But yeah, you do get it once a quarter, you get a royalty check, you can go out to Chili’s, take your family out to Chili’s.
But it was a gift to me. I say it was a gift to me, because I think we had really, really good fruit in that season that I hope is still paying dividends in people’s lives that I don’t even know today.
Darren: For sure.
Erik: But I think the Lord was taking me beyond that. That was a time where he said, I’m going to give you the desires. You know, delight yourself in the Lord, he will give you the desires of your heart. I look back on that season with such joy. Our friends Nathan and Trish were a part of that with us. We had this community, this family of people that we worked together with. We were doing this out of a local church and it was beautiful in so many ways.
But I look back on that and say, sometimes the Lord just gives you a little gift. I think he winks at me every once in a while and says, I knew that was important to you. And here you go.
Darren: That’s awesome. That’s beautiful to think about, just the gift of it. So often you’re onto the next thing or the next phase that you don’t stop and go, that was really cool. That was really beautiful.
Erik: And a lot of times you only see these things in arrears, in looking backwards. I think we have to look back and see the faithfulness of God in the beautiful seasons and in the difficult seasons. But then as we look out into the future and we see the unknowns out there in front of us, I think we have to use God’s faithfulness in the past to remind us, I don’t know how this is going to work out, but he’s had my back for a long time and I know he’s going to have my back again, when I keep him first.
Darren: Great reminder. So you talked a little bit about the board coming to you and going, hey, we think you’re the guy. You were feeling a little bit of something, like there’s shifting in the air. I think we’ve all been there, where something’s coming, we don’t know what it is, but something’s coming. And this idea is presented to you. Did you feel ready to take on something like that? Talk me through that a little bit, that, oh man, is this what I need to do next?
Erik: No, you never feel ready. You never feel ready, but sometimes you know this is the way, walk in it. Like we were talking about, you take that next step of obedience. But when I stepped into the room that day, that first day at CRF, I was the dumbest guy there. But I was being raised up to become the next leader of the organization.
Darren: Was that the understanding from day one?
Erik: Yeah.
Darren: Okay. I thought so, but I couldn’t remember if that was the case.
Erik: I don’t remember how widely we articulated that. I’ve slept a few nights since.
Darren: Yeah, it’s been a minute.
Erik: But yes, that was the expectation, that I was going to come in, work under Dad, and then eventually take the leadership baton from him. But you come in and, I mean, everybody in the company knew infinitely more about affordable housing than I did.
Darren: For sure. They knew things about the business that were second nature to them. And you’re going, hey, how do you do this? And they’re thinking, this guy’s supposed to be the one, you know?
Erik: So there were things I brought from a leadership capacity and an experience capacity. But when you walk into a situation like that, you never want to walk in like you’re the guy who knows everything, or you’re the guy who is in power. So I spent a lot of years, I hope the team feels this way, just trying to learn and ask questions and understand and lead from kind of underneath, which I think sometimes is the best way to lead.
Darren: Yeah. Like you said, when you’re the dumbest guy in the room, that’s the only way you can do it. I think that’s where a lot of leaders might hurt themselves. Well, I don’t know anything about this, but let’s go anyway. And then they run it over.
Erik: And our insecurities can get the best of us. When you feel insecure, when you feel fearful and afraid, when you feel like people are looking at you like, what’s this guy doing here, it can cause you to respond a couple of different ways. I’d love to think I always responded the right way. I’m sure I did not.
But if you find yourself in leadership in any capacity, you’ve got to deal with your fears and insecurities, because they will not only hurt you, they’ll hurt people around you. So I spent a few years working through that. It was a journey. That was definitely a journey.
Darren: So you come in day one. You don’t have the reins at this point, but you have this mantle put on you of, I’m going to eventually be taking this over. I have to learn. You’re walking through the leadership and that lead-from-underneath thing. But what was the hardest part of stepping into that and going, man, this is a lot of responsibility, this thing that Dad has built over 30 plus years at that point?
Erik: That’s a great question. The hardest thing, I guess to some extent, was trying to, I remember we spent a lot of time, I had a lot of conversations with Dad and with others to say, why are we really in this business? What is this for?
Dad was really good at saying, hey, we’re in this business to stay in this business. We felt like we had an incredible ministry opportunity in affordable housing. There are a lot of slumlords in our world, so there was a huge piece of that. But to say, okay, when Tim generated this idea, when he brought it to you, when you guys came together, what’s really the heartbeat of all of this?
So we spent years just unearthing all of the why. I think the hardest part was really trying to discern where we had been, but now it was obvious, not just with a leadership shift, but that we were shifting into a new day, into a new phase of our organization. 2.0 is starting.
So really trying to get under the surface and say, was affordable housing the point, or was it the opportunity?
Darren: Was it the door to walk through, or was it the reason that you’re in the room?
Erik: Exactly. Because we believe, as you know, Darren, because I talk about it ad nauseam, we believe business of all kinds is part of God’s work in the world. So it doesn’t just have to be something like affordable housing or healthcare, something that eases suffering. We believe for-profit businesses honor God, bless, love, add value to the world.
I know business has gotten a bad rap over the years, and sometimes for good reason. But I always tell people, don’t allow the distortion to define the truth.
So really, at the end of the day, we had to say, why did we do this? Affordable housing, real estate was the opportunity. But ultimately it was this connection of business and the marketplace with God’s kingdom work in the world, with his glory among the nations. What role does business and the marketplace play with God’s glory among the nations?
It took a lot of processing and dialogue. And Dad, while I think he would agree with all of those things I just said, he’s not the guy who is going to articulate those. So I was the guy who was coming along and trying to make sense of some things, to take 25 plus years of hard work, not just by Dad but by a whole team, and say, okay, why are we here? Why did we do this? And what then does the next season of our existence look like? That was probably the hardest part.
Darren: That’s heavy.
Erik: Yeah. And on that front, to go, how do we expand? As you know, we’re in another season like that now, because after 12, now 14 years of me being at the organization, we have now sold a lot of our affordable housing portfolio. We’re still in the business, but not in the way that it was from day one. We’re not managing, we’re not running the day-to-day operations of the real estate that we own. So now we’re pivoting again into a new season of saying, okay, what’s the next iteration of this look like?
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Erik: When you’re talking about create your art, to some extent people think of that with painting or music or all these things that are inherently artistic. But there is an art of creating a new reality in whatever business or line of work we find ourselves in.
Darren: I can stand on the rooftops and scream that one, because that’s the whole point of the thing we’re doing here today.
And that’s what’s so cool about seeing this. Obviously I’m in it, being family, but from my sideline position, watching Dad build this thing and then watching you take this mantle on, like you said, Dad’s not going to articulate this, but Dad got up every day and went to work and built something pretty remarkable. We always joke that he just kind of put his head down and then one day looked up and was like, oh hey, this is pretty cool.
There’s an artistic approach there. And then there’s an artistic approach to what you’re doing now, in the sense of taking this and molding it and giving it language and putting it together and going, what does 2.0 look like?
Erik: I think there’s different artistic skills and expressions for different seasons. I couldn’t do what Dad did. I wouldn’t have been able to do that.
When I look at Tim Shroud and others on our board, they have skill sets that I don’t have. But I have, I think, a certain skill set that is required for this moment. So I would encourage people to just contemplate that you don’t have to, for me to become our father, I would have fallen short. I don’t have the ability to just take something that wasn’t there and make it there.
It was just a lot of consistency and faithfulness and getting up and going to work every day. Dad would have never thought about himself as an artist. But his kind of builder, get in the dirt, dig it up, lay the foundations, get the structure up, has allowed me to step into this season where something already existed and say, how do we make it even more beautiful?
Darren: How do we build upon this foundation? You often say standing on the shoulders of giants, right? The people that came before you, and you get to take that foundation that was laid over time and go, what if we crafted this now? It’s a different skill set, but they complement each other really well.
Erik: Yeah, and I think that’s something we all need to understand as human beings. I’m a firm believer that God created us to need each other. We hate that, because we love the idea, especially here in America, of the self-made person. I built this myself.
I look at our team back when I first came into the org and I look at our team now, and we have people who can do things I can’t do, because we’re made, we’re designed. I always tell people we’re made in the image of God. All of us are made in the image of God, but none of us individually reflect the fullness of our creator. We have to be brought together in order to fully reflect who God is in us and through us.
So don’t feel like where you lack in other areas, or, you know, when I look at Dad and I’m like, gosh, I could never have done that, I don’t have that skill set. It’s okay, because we’re made to lean in and intertwine and interlock with one another for God’s glory in the world.
Darren: It was funny, a couple of conversations back I was talking with my buddy PJ, and he was talking about how creative collaboration is one of the biggest things he feels is missing, very similar to what you just said. You try to do this on your own, but it’s when you partner with that next person, or you allow their skill sets to complement yours, that all of a sudden it’s, oh, this is bigger than me. Okay, what does it look like to partner with somebody else? So I echo what you say in the sense that we’re created for community, and for some reason it’s one of the biggest things we push back against.
Erik: Yeah, the artist in us is an insecure little child. Let’s be honest. When we get around other people who are better than us, then we’re afraid. Well, if they shine or if they flourish, then I’m not going to anymore. So there is this hesitancy there.
And the truth of the matter is, we could get into this whole reality of the sin-broken world that we live in, but we do devour one another and we’re not always trustworthy people. So to say, oh, you just need to collaborate and work with others, it’s easy. It’s not.
To some extent, we are living in a sin-distorted reality. So those insecurities, while we’ve got to deal with them in our lives, there’s also reason that we don’t just inherently trust and collaborate and work well together. And yet, as the people of God, again, death, resurrection of Christ, I believe we can step into a new reality together and we can be a foretaste of what God always designed and intended. But I’m not saying it’s not hard work. We live in the thorns, this is the reality of this world. The truth of the matter is, we were made to fit together, and as God’s people in the world, we’ve got to figure out how to model that well.
Darren: I want to go back a second, to give an understanding of the business in a 30 second version. Dad created CRF, which was in affordable housing, and the goal, it was a nonprofit, so the goal was, hey, 50 percent of the dollars go back in to build the business, and then 50 percent of the dollars go out to global missions work all around the world. And when it started, it was basically zero, and then it built and built and built, and then eventually they could start to give some money.
Well, Dad was giving through one of the board members you mentioned earlier, a 90 year old guy at the time, Tom Paino, who was our pastor growing up. And Tom came to you and said, hey, I’m 90. I’ve got to figure out my succession plan a little bit there, as far as where the dollars from CRF were going into the missions work. And he said, hey, I think you might be the person to bring this in house, if you will, and start to build that internally.
What did he see in you? And what was some of the hardship in that? Taking that mantle on, it was almost like a secondary mantle placed on you.
Erik: At the beginning, everyone knew these things were going to blend together eventually. So I think what Pastor Tom saw was someone who grew up under his ministry, who he knew shared his heart for missions.
I mean, we joked, Darren, that we grew up slow baking in the Great Commission. Every Sunday at our church, there was a missionary there, there was something about global missions or God’s glory in the world. That was in our DNA. So I think he knew that.
While some of the leadership was feeling, okay, Dave’s son, Dave’s DNA, and somebody who grew up under Tom’s leadership, Tom’s DNA, I think from the beginning there was this idea that we would eventually bring the missions under our auspices as well.
He came to me maybe two years in. It was 2014. I started in 2012. And he said, hey, I’m 90, I think it’s probably time for me to slow down a little bit. Although the funny thing is, for the last decade, he still didn’t slow down. He just passed away this year.
Darren: 101.
Erik: 101, just passed away this year.
Darren: Which is wild.
Erik: And it was nothing for him to call me and say, hey, I’m still working on this project down in, I mean, up until a year ago. He’s 99, 100, still out there.
So, definitely a heavy weight. Because as much as I honor and admire our dad, I honor and admire Pastor Tom. Tom was one of those guys. When I was a kid, I remember when you were a kid, if you’d walk around the corner and you’d see him at church, it just struck you. And it wasn’t, I don’t think he was trying to be scary, but he’s Italian, you know, kind of had that.
Darren: He had a personality. He wasn’t like, hey, how you doing?
Erik: He wasn’t a warm, fuzzy, climb up on my lap kind of guy. So I was always a little nervous when he would call me on the phone, even as recently as a couple of years ago. I was like, oh gosh.
Darren: Yeah. You’re an eight year old kid again, running into him in the hallway outside of service.
Erik: But again, you step into these things not because you’re worthy or because you’re able. You step in because the Lord has led you there. And I think we have to understand, none of us are capable of carrying anything that we’ve been asked to carry.
I always told people, I think my greatest strength as a leader is that I am well aware that apart from my connection to Christ, I am hopeless. And that’s not to say we act weak or we don’t know what we’re doing. But what I’m saying is, I am fully aware that any ability, wisdom, skill set, creativity, any of that stuff that I have is rooted in my connection to God through Christ and the leading of his Spirit.
None of us are prepared to carry the weight that we’ve been asked to carry, because apart from Christ, we are not able to carry it. So I think there’s some liberation in that.
Darren: Yeah, it’s a humility kind of stance. Again, not that you shrink back from the work, but you go, I understand my place in all of this.
Erik: And there’s some beauty in that. Blessed are the meek, right? Meekness is not cowardice, but it is understanding where your strength comes from. And it’s a daily choice. It’s a daily choice to surrender to the only thing that gives me enough strength to do what I’ve been asked to do.
Darren: That’s good. So from that conversation with Pastor Tom all those years ago came the start of what is now known as The Stone Table.
Erik: Yeah.
Darren: So we have CRF, which was the foundational business side that Dad started, and now we have this thing called The Stone Table that is the missions piece. The flow-through, if you will. That vision stemmed from that conversation with Tom all those years ago. You stepped into that going, what does this need to look like? How can we build this mission side within this bubble of what we’ve built here?
I guess now, what has been 2015 technically, when that launched. So we’re 10-ish years, yeah, 10 years. I can do math quickly. We’re 10 years in and The Stone Table’s had a massive impact. We’re talking millions of dollars flushed out into missions projects all around the world. Talk to me a little bit about whose lives are being touched and changed in the work that The Stone Table is now doing, a decade into it.
Erik: It’s interesting to think about that, because my contention would be there are people all over the world I’ll never know who have been touched by the work. And that’s what you hope for. I don’t know that we’re even meant to know the ripple effects of our work. So I’m just trying to steward the next season of this. So much of what has happened in these last 10 years, I’m just reaping the windfall of people who went in front of me.
But we started The Stone Table in 2015. When Pastor Tom came to us, we knew we needed to rebrand, we needed to relaunch. And this idea of the stone table, I’m a big C.S. Lewis fan. The stone table, for those who may not connect the dots, is the location of Aslan’s death and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Darren: The great Chronicles of Narnia storyline.
Erik: And so we wanted something that said to us, not overtly to people who maybe don’t know that story, and because tables are gathering places too, and we were gathering people together around these ideas. For those of us who know, what we wanted, and what we wanted for future generations to have to wrestle with, is why did they name this The Stone Table? It’s because the death and resurrection of Christ is the centrality of everything that we do and everything that’s important to us. So we launched under that name.
And we really wanted to say, gosh, we’re channeling money to missions, and that’s going to always continue to be a core part of who we are and what we do.
Darren: And channeling is the big word there.
Erik: Yeah. So we take money from the business, we put it into The Stone Table, and then we have projects with missions partners that we have identified. We’ve got some core relationships that we work through and with. And then we bring churches and other business people along to, we say, give with us. So we’re not a traditional fundraising organization. We’re a giving organization that says to other people, hey, come along and give with us.
But I never wanted to just be about fundraising and missions. I wanted to be about missions, but I never wanted to just be about money. So I kept saying, what other value do we have that we can offer to the church, to other believers?
And we started realizing that there was this, and again, Darren, I don’t want to belabor this story, but some of this came from me just trying to figure some things out for myself. You mentioned it earlier. I came from full-time ministry back into the marketplace, and I went from preaching on Sundays to renting apartments on Mondays. And I was like, why does God care at all about renting apartments? I was doing the real work of ministry here. Now I’m renting apartments. And I understood the money that we made, we were giving. So I understood that spiritual connection. But I’m like, there’s got to be more to this.
Darren: More than just being a paycheck.
Erik: But you’re looking at spreadsheets and you’re sitting in meetings and you’re dealing with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and you’re like, why does God care about this?
So I started on this journey for myself, just trying to connect the dots for me. And I started reading books like Tim Keller’s Every Good Endeavor and Os Guinness’s The Call and Amy Sherman, all these people who have done deep dives on this. And I started realizing, oh my gosh, there is a deep historic reality to everyday work, our day jobs, and God’s work in the world.
So it really happened, I filled in for some pastor friends on Sundays because they knew I wasn’t pastoring anymore. A friend from Seymour, Indiana called me up and said, hey, can you preach for me a couple of weeks? I’m going to be out of town. He said, you can do a series, do it on whatever you want. I said, well, I’ve been exploring this idea of the marketplace and its role. He’s like, that sounds awesome, just do it.
So I went down. I had no idea what I was talking about. This is probably before the official launch of The Stone Table, 2014-ish. And I cobbled together some notes. I don’t even know if I have those anywhere. They were terrible. But it was just some ideas.
Darren: Every great idea starts with terribleness.
Erik: Yeah. And I just went down and shared what God had been teaching me about how everyday work is important to God. And at the end, there were a half dozen grown men weeping at the front waiting to talk to me. And I thought, oh gosh, what have I said? Who did I offend?
But that has repeated over and over again for me over the last decade. I’ve realized that there is a huge gap in the hearts of the average follower of Jesus. I had a guy who’d been in the banking business. I had a guy who had run an assembly line in a manufacturing plant. I had a guy who had run his own landscaping business for 50 years and had just sold it. He was in his seventies. He came up to me, this was just last year, and he had tears running down his face. And he said, if I just would have known this stuff, I would have approached my work differently. I would have done something different with the business that was in front of me.
So I realized at that point, oh gosh, this is what we have to offer. We’re a business that’s giving money to missions, and we are continuing that part of our journey. But there’s this whole other part of our ministry that has risen up kind of unexpectedly, which was, how do we serve the church? How do we serve the field?
We do a lot with business as mission and what role business has in taking the gospel to the world. But we also work with local churches to say, how can you mobilize your marketplace people to help them see their Monday as just as sacred as their Sunday? And that’s a huge part of what we do now.
We say we mobilize believers to make Jesus known at work and around the world. So we are marketplace people, we are business people, but we are just as passionate about the glory of Jesus as we were when we were working in full-time ministry. And that’s what I say, it’s a different seat, but it’s the same calling.
So we believe everyone who is a follower of Christ is called. And I think sometimes we think, well, because we use the terminology called into ministry, and I understand why we do that, I’m not suggesting we move away from that, but that idea of, they’re called, I’m not. Marketplace people just kind of get left over and they feel like, well, the Lord passed out all of the callings into ministry, I didn’t get one. So I’ll just go into marketplace work and I’ll give what I can and I’ll come to church and I’ll volunteer, I’ll sing on the worship team. But they don’t see their work as important to God, and we think that needs to change.
Darren: It’s been cool to see how you’ve embraced that, because it is these two worlds. We were passionate about global missions, but also there’s this reality of helping those grown men who walked down the aisle that day to say, oh man, if I had just known. It’s been really cool to see those light bulbs come on for people.
Erik: And we think it all goes together. We think it was all meant to go together. Because I want the average marketplace person to understand that what they’re doing right now when they go to work matters to God. But I also want them to understand that they carry a responsibility to the glory of Jesus in all the earth.
So I think sometimes not only can marketplace people struggle with purpose and their connection to God’s work in the world, but they can kind of outsource their responsibility to missions, because they’re like, well, we’ll just outsource that to the professionals. I’ll work over here in the marketplace.
And what I want to say is, no. We’re all called. We all carry the same calling. We have different assignments within that calling, but all of us need to get on board with the understanding that our professions, our work, it matters to God, and we are called to his glory in all of the earth, no matter what we do for a paycheck.
Darren: Really good. One thing I wanted to ask was, you know, 14 years into this now, when you step into something where you’re taking over for somebody like Dad and Tim and Tom who have built these things, if you honor too much what they do, you can end up just staying stale and kind of killing it. And then if you change it too fast, you can end up losing the heartbeat of what made the thing work in the beginning.
So how, as now the visionary of where you’re taking this, how do you carry on what they’ve built and not lose the heart of it, but also take it into this 2.0 version of it?
Erik: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think you have to look for the threads that are eternal. What are the threads that are eternal through every season?
Because you’re right. If we honor too much, let’s look at it in another capacity. I grew up in a great church, I loved the way we were raised. But if you don’t change the carpet and the seats and the technology, and you don’t learn new songs, but there’s a thread that connects all of those things, even if the expression has to change based on the new season that you’re in.
So we try to do that. We have a big annual board meeting and I always try to go back to the beginning of the story and tell the story from the beginning. And what are the aspects of the heartbeat that started this that still need to live on today?
The affordable housing business has changed dramatically. The things that were available in the late eighties and nineties that caused us to form the organization in that way don’t exist today and wouldn’t make sense today. That’s what I tell people. You couldn’t replicate the what we did, but you could replicate the why we did it.
So I think you look for the eternal thread that goes through all of those things. And then, if you are stepping into an organization that exists and trying to pivot it into a new day, one of my encouragements for you would be, when I stepped into the music ministry back in 2000, I had a friend from Hillsong Church who told me three to five years. And no one wanted to hear that. He’s like, three to five years is what it takes to shift a culture and to shift into a new season. And you’re like, three to five years? It’s an eternity.
Darren: Yeah, because we want the microwave.
Erik: Right. We don’t want the oven. And if you do jerk too fast, and I’ve done that, you can damage the organization in a way that you may not be able to sustain yourself through. So you have to be patient. You have to be patient with yourself. You have to be patient with others. And you have to understand culture takes time. I don’t know if I always did that perfectly, but God was gracious.
Darren: I think I’ve heard you say this before, but there’s a tension there that you have to wrestle with. And the tension is good, because if you allow it to go to one side too far, that’s when the damage happens. So I think you’ve got to honor what has come before you, but you have to say there’s a new day ahead and there’s something beautiful there.
Erik: Absolutely.
Darren: What would you say, and you’ve already kind of done it, but what would you say, any final words to somebody out there who goes, hey, there’s a logical next step in front of me. I don’t see the road. I’m taking on this mantle that maybe I didn’t see coming. What would you say to encourage them today?
Erik: Be humble, be patient, but be courageous. You’re never ready for what the next season is going to require of you. And if you wait until you’re ready, you’ll miss opportunities. So be courageous, but be humble.
And obviously we’re a faith-based organization. I can’t have this conversation with you, Darren, without talking about Jesus. So what I have to do every day is get up and fall on my knees and say, Jesus, if you don’t show up, I can’t do this.
There’s the Lord’s model prayer. I use this a lot. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus gave us that model prayer. I don’t think he gave it to us just to quote. The idea was, there are different aspects of that prayer that we need to bring into our own prayer life, our own prayer posture. So I try to pray that prayer in some capacity every day.
But that your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, to me, that is about surrendering my centrality to his centrality. It’s to say to God, you are the center. I am at the periphery. I serve at the pleasure of the King. So what do you want? And could you actually, I mean, I pray this often, would you take the things you want and desire and would you put them inside of me so that I want and desire them, so that I don’t have to always wonder, is that the Lord or is that me?
But you have to go back to that every day. Because I’m just a firm believer, Darren, we are only fully human when we are dependent on the Lord. We were created to be with and in relationship with him. And apart from him, I mean, scripture says, Jesus said, apart from me you can do nothing. I think we are fully human when we are dependent.
And that feels so counter-cultural, because we have kids and we raise our kids to not need us anymore. And I think our spiritual lives are actually the opposite. We go deeper into our dependence and need.
So what I would say to people who are out there pursuing that next step, first of all, if you don’t know the Lord, give us a call. I’d love to share the good news of the gospel with you, because there is nothing like it. It is not just another world religion that we get to choose from. It is something completely and totally different. So call me. I’d love to introduce you to Jesus.
Darren: We’re now putting his cell phone number at the bottom.
Erik: Yeah, if you want to have a spiritual conversation, I’d love to have it with you.
But I guess for those who are following Christ, apart from him we can do nothing. So whatever you’re stepping into, just know you’ve got to be courageous, but you’ve got to be dependent and humble, and you’ve got to be patient, because these things take time. They don’t just happen overnight.
Eugene Peterson had that phrase, a long obedience in the same direction. That’s what we’re called to, a long obedience in the same direction. And I’m desperately hopeful. I don’t know how many more years, I’m only 52.
Darren: You’ve got those years.
Erik: Yeah, exactly. I don’t know how many years are left in front of me, but I want to get to the finish line and know that I left it all in the field. And that will happen as I hang on to Jesus with all my might. And so that’s what I would say.
Darren: That’s a good period to that sentence.
So I would challenge you with a couple of things today. One being what Erik just said. If you don’t know Jesus, start there. That’s the first one.
But maybe there’s something you have been trying to say yes to. There’s a door you need to walk through. There’s something you know you need to do, but you’ve been avoiding it. I want you to take that and write it down today.
That’s the first domino. We talked to Bryan Neale a couple of weeks ago about the first domino. It’s not this big, audacious thing you have to do. The first domino is just writing it down. What’s that logical next step, the first domino you need to hit? Write that down today so that you can step into it when it comes.
And as we wrap today, I want you to remember that you are an artist, and that your voice is needed in this world more than you know, and that you are loved more than you could ever imagine. So go out and create your art, and we will see you here next time on the Create Your Art Podcast.