Hey everyone, it's Brian Brown. I've got something a little bit
different for you today. I was recently on the Beauty
Through Faith podcast with Gustav Hoyer and Benjamin
Harding, who are mission partners at the Callos Arts
Foundation, So you can check them out at callosarts.org.
I'm going to be speaking this weekend, weekend of September
26th, 27th up in Fort Collins with them, and we wanted to be
able to share our entire conversation both with their
audience and with ours. The first part of the
conversation, the one you're about to hear, is them mostly
interviewing me on the topic of beauty and faith.
And honestly, it gave me a chance to tell some stories and
explain some things that went into the founding of the Anselm
Society and have added up to who we are over the years.
They're stories that some of our inner circle know, but not
always stories that I tell a lot at a podium or on the podcast.
So some good stuff in there. And the second part of the
conversation, which will be the episode that I post right after
this, will, I flipped the script and interviewed them about their
work and their organization. Both are well worth your time.
I hope and I hope you enjoy them.
Welcome to Beauty Through Faith. I'm your host, Benjamin Harding,
and today I'm really excited to sit down with Brian Brown, the
executive director of the Anselm Society.
Brians not only a good friend of our work, he's also going to be
one of our featured speakers at our upcoming Rocky Mountain
Callous Beauty Through Faith Conference on September 26th and
27th. Now, if you haven't grabbed your
tickets yet, you'll want to because we've put together such
a rich lineup. We'll kick things off Friday
night, September 26th, at 7:30 with a plenary session led by
Doctor Junius Johnson. He's going to help us think more
clearly about the nature and the reward of encountering beauty
right alongside his words. We'll get to hear the artistry
of Doctor Paul Barnes. Then Saturday is packed with
variety. You're not going to want to miss
it. And of course, included in our
incredible speakers list is Brian Brown.
And if you're in the Colorado Springs area, the weekend before
this weekend, September 19th and 20th, the and some society is
hosting a long expected feast to celebrate the birthdays of Frodo
and Bilbo Baggins. It's going to be a weekend of
learning, feasting and those moments where you meet someone.
And thank you too. I thought I was the only one.
You can find all the details at Ensem Society dot.
Org there's. So much happening in the world
of beauty right now. Let's jump in.
Brian Brown, welcome to Beauty Through Faith.
Thank you very much. It's fun to be with you.
And we are joined by our Executive Director, Gustav
Hoyer. Hi, Gustav.
Hey, Benjamin, Brian, it's a pleasure to have you on.
Really looking forward to hearing from you today.
What's caused some trouble? That's the spirit.
And so the first question to cause trouble is, hey, what has
been your pursuit of beauty in your life?
What does that mean to you? So I have to it.
It's funny. This is so incarnational for me
because I'll just tell you a story.
I was in in 2007. I was doing a post grad program
in theology and I was doing daily prayer at the Anglican
church across the street, this beautiful 1925 Gothic Revival
church with a lovely little side Chapel like a lot of those more
ancient churches and the churches that were built in that
style have. And I walk over there and the
chapel's beautifully lit and there's this absolutely gorgeous
girl kneeling at the front of the Chapel with golden hair and
the lights falling on it just right.
And I've never seen her before. And I ended up found out later
her name was Christina. I ended up chasing her for
everything that I was worth and we've been married for 15 years
now and and we we sang in the in the church choir that week
together. And I, I remember writing to her
in in a letter while we were dating long distance that she
was beauty to me. She was this incarnation of it
as well as someone that revealed it to me.
And so like my whole life, that's, that's an encapsulation
of, of, of my whole life of chasing beauty.
I wasn't, I wasn't conscious until I was pursuing her of a
phrase like that. I'd been raised with a love of
great books and great music, and I was very fortunate to, to have
that in my my childhood art history.
And a lot of it was, was sort of high end are the sorts of things
that that you sort of only get as a child if you have a very
attentive parent or teacher or school.
But I also there there were also the the bits of it that were
just kind of folded in with the rest of of life.
My brothers and sisters and I would read or watch a wonderful
story and then we would charge outside with costumes and swords
and things to act it out. We actually just showed the
Prince of Persia to my kids last night.
And my 9 year old son's first reaction was daddy, I need
someone to sword fight with. And there's a proper reaction to
that. So.
But I was never aware of this as a conscious thing.
It was just the way that I live. And then I start chasing this
girl and all of a sudden I start getting a vocabulary for it,
both in the sense that I'm experiencing it in, in life and
she's unpacking it for me because she's just further along
in, in that journey. The, the, the reason that I
brought up chasing a girl was not to look impressive by
referencing Dante, although I could, but because I think the,
the pursuit of beauty is ultimately the pursuit of God.
You're, you're looking simultaneously at this material
earthly thing that you can't quite explain, but that wants to
draw you in and wants to draw this response from you.
And a lot of the time we don't have a vocabulary for it, but
romantic love is one of those things, things that is, is, is
most powerful in that, that way. And as I got further into my
theological journey, I start reading people like Alexander
Schmeman who are unpacking this idea that the, the whole earth
was designed to be a place of communion with God.
You start to give a a vocabulary and a a structure to oh, that's
what this is this idea that goodness and truth and beauty
are are inseparable aspects of one thing of one God, and it's
ultimately him that we're pursuing not in AI don't need
this other stuff. I only need God sort of way, but
precisely the opposite of that. My my pursuit of this other
stuff is is the direct path to pursuing him.
If it's if it if it's done right, if I'm listening for his
voice. So for me, it chasing a girl was
the encapsulation of that and sort of my doorway into the the
deeper realm. Yeah.
And, and let's talk about that deeper realm, so to speak.
You've been pursuing beauty for many years into that deeper
realm. Talk to us a little bit about
the Anselm society. You're the executive director of
this. This is such a a passion project
for you. Talk to us about the Ansem
Society and what it means to you in that pursuit of beauty.
Well, I wish I could say it was a strategically master planned
effort. I love thinking 10 steps ahead.
I love planning things. I'm quite good at it.
Ansem was never that. Dana and I moved to Colorado
Springs in 2009. There there are cities in the
world where you can go to usually not the whole city, but
some portion of the city, and you'll just be assaulted by the
sort of aggressive ugliness. You'll see those brutalist
concrete buildings that were built in the 60s or 70s.
Colorado Springs is not that Colorado Springs is has less of
an aggressive ugliness than an aggressive banality.
There's just a lot of asphalt and concrete and cars and strip
malls and whataburgers and things.
James Howard comes to calls places like that place is not
worth caring about. Like no one, no one put love
into a lot of the square footage in this city, even though for
the last 40 years it's been a Mecca of evangelical ministries.
There was almost this, this sense of there's this beautiful
14,000 foot mountain right next to it.
Well, I guess God's done the work.
I guess we don't have to do anything on a material level so
focused on the next life that we're not putting an investment
into the, the here and now. And honestly, those those
incessant encounters with with mundanity desensitize you to
high beauty, both your need for it and your response to it when
you encounter it, when you're just kind of used to Everything
around me is is mass produced. Everything around me did not
have love put into it. Everything around me was not
somebody trying to build something that would last for
people they cared about. And Christina and I felt like,
are we the only ones that feel this way?
We spent a couple years honestly whining a lot and trying to get
away. And eventually we realized, OK,
this, this seems to be where we are planted, at least for now.
We need an attitude change. We're not capable of that
attitude change. Let's start praying.
And almost immediately we start praying for God to change our
attitudes, and we find ourselves in a small church and we start
meeting people in that church. And I talked to my pastor about
how I can do some good in the congregation.
And we cook up this idea for a lecture series.
Let's beef up the life of the mind in the congregation.
OK, great. We'll do 4 lectures over the
course of the next year. We'll bring in speakers from the
outside who can challenge us and help get us to think more deeply
and that sort of thing. Well, we bring in a guy named
Michael Ward who talks about CS Lewis and his faith without
imagination dead. And we bring in a a guy from a
classical architecture background.
He talks about principles of Christian urbanism in this
asphalt and concrete city that I just described.
We bring in Peter Lighthart, who could have talked about
anything. The guy's written, what, 80
books on a million different subjects.
Well, he wants to talk about Dostoyevsky.
OK Well, now we've just done CS Lewis, Dostoyevsky, architecture
and urbanism. And what we find is people are
coming out of the woodwork not just from our church, but from
churches all over. And the thing we're hearing over
and over and over is AI didn't know this sort of thing had a
place in the Kingdom of God. And I love this stuff.
I love great stories. I love great music.
My church has no explanation for why this thing that matters so
much to me matters at all. And 1 by 1, they're all meeting
each other and saying you too. I thought I was the only one.
And we're saying that right, because we thought we were the
only ones. This has been the thing that has
been the center point for the Ansem society ever since it was.
It's never been. We've been around for 12 years
now and it's never been a master planned thing.
Every time I try to get too far ahead with the master planning,
God sort of slaps me on the wrist and some great dream sort
of shatters and something doesn't work out.
And OK, now it's just being small and faithful to that next
little thing and to the people that are right in front of us.
And the people right in front of us at this point are hundreds of
of local people that are very involved, thousands of people
that are sort of more peripherally involved.
Who all had that conversation? You 2.
I thought I was the only one. The stories that matter the most
to me, the songs and music and art and architecture and nature,
all these things that my soul tells me matter deeply, not only
matter at all in the Kingdom of God, they matter more in the
Kingdom of God. And now I'm surrounded by people
who feel the same way. And we are encouraging each
other in the going deeper and deeper into that beauty and
creating more and more as a response to it and then dialogue
with it. Gustav, you have met Bryant.
You both live in Colorado. Brian, you know, after that just
beautiful explanation of what the Anselm Society is doing and
has come from, I kind of want to run through a wall right now.
So, Gustav, could you take it from here?
And ask. Sure, there's there's so much
you just shared with us Brian, that we can talk for hours about
going back earlier to your own journey.
I've been fascinated as I've been engaging thinkers in this
space more comprehensively in recent with with Kalos and
becoming aware of Ansong as a as a community as well.
This nature of the connection of Eros, of of love, of desiring to
the experience of beauty. I.
Really like how you. Touched that and the sense that
that. Is.
Too passionately pursue beauty is in itself the holy expression
of Eros. As opposed to.
An erotic culture, a culture that has debased that which
should be exalted and and made sex a replacement of of genuine
proper. Eros is not derivative of but
supplanting and then connecting that passion that really
ultimately the experience of the aesthetic wants to not possess
but commune with. And we think of the wrong
distorted end of Eros is to commandeer and own.
And what you describe is knowing fact, as that leads ultimately
to the. To the.
Aesthetic glories of God himself.
We couldn't possibly arrogate ourselves to even consider such
a thing, but to commune with that beauty.
Is. Ultimately, underneath the
aesthetic impulse and and you describe then that passion is
fused with that aesthetic craving.
There is an an Eros in that. Would you just elaborate?
I'd I'd love to hear your thoughts are really compelling.
So take that and run with it. Yeah, well, I mean, go back to
the the parking lot and the Whataburger.
The there's so much in our world that people don't say this out
loud usually, but so much on in our world as we experience is
built this way that there is a, a division between matter and
spirit, between stuff, physical stuff and the things that quote
UN quote really matter. And a lot of us come from church
backgrounds where that was implicitly or explicitly even
even stated that that the Kingdom of God was entirely
spiritual. The sort of an implication that
we're going to be all disembodied souls in in some
sort of cloud someday. That's not the story of
Scripture. And I've seen so many situations
where good but under catechized Christians are surprised by
that. Where did you where do you get
this story? Where, where God where the
future is God coming back to heal his creation as opposed to
disappearing us out of our clothes and and turning us into
spirits somewhere? Literally the Book of
Revelation. It's not like Revelations really
complicated and hard because it's apocalyptic literature.
That part. It's not hard.
That part it's quite clear and that so much of life is this
way. Nothing matters.
It's it's nihilistic and the church kind of buys into it.
Yes, we will concede to you the idea that nothing really
matters, but that's because there's this far off realm that
has nothing to do with the here and now that we're going to
escape to someday. And The funny thing is, I think
a lot of people end up, you kind of end up in 2 places.
One ultimately leads to the other.
You can either go full nihilist and go yet nothing matters,
despair. Or you can then go, well there's
nothing, nothing really matters I guess except my own pleasure.
I'm going to define myself by my desires.
And ultimately, if you're really honest with yourself, sooner or
later you end up looking in the mirror and going, I don't like
what I see. I don't like what I have built
with my desires. But The funny thing is our, our
future as as, as Christians is, is actually one where our
define, we're defined in a weird way by our desires.
Not because our desires are the end goal, and not because
worshipping something in the creation for itself is the end
goal, but because God is the one that put desires in us.
We were made for this longing for what is ultimately for Him.
And He didn't make a disembodied souls just waiting around for
Him to fulfill that. He put us as material beings in
a material world and put His fingerprints everywhere and put
communion with Him everywhere. And once, once somebody says
that out loud and you start to look at Scripture that way, you
start to look at the world that way, all of a sudden you can't
Unsee it. Why is it that when Samson's
hair was cut, he lost his power? God, I mean, God didn't need to
do it that way. That's odd, but but he did.
There's a physical object that God has imbued with spiritual
properties. Why is it that there is a feast
of red and wine? At the centerpiece of the
traditional Christian worship service.
That's weird. Now, CS Lewis said that that
seems rather crude and unspiritual to us.
But Lewis said God doesn't see it that way.
God put us in this world where the physicality of who we have
made to be is actually, it's not something that you sort of
surrender to and say, I'm going to just go where my desires
lead. But even thinking about
cognitive science, the way our brains are made to work, we're
made to be attracted to things. And it's not just that following
our desires gets us to God, but God made us with those desires,
with things that draw us out of ourselves.
And that is supposed to be part of a journey toward him.
As Christians, we can't. We can't fix the world by saying
everybody blinders on, close your eyes, try not to look.
What we can say is there is a higher beauty still.
Go further up and further in it seems.
I. Think has been the perspective
of the ancient church, the church for 2000 years and in a
way the end some society and organizations like Kalos are
trying to reclaim that cosmological understanding that
as you've mentioned, Father Alexander Schmemann, you are
what you eat. And how he turns that phrase on
its head and says, yeah, the material world matters because
it was made by God and he is called it good and beautiful.
It's one. Of the things that fascinates me
too, Brian, what you? Say, is that this?
Pursuit of beauty is a form of satisfying our souls cravings
even now and higher beauty brings us not to replace an
understanding of God, but to augment and enrich.
And actually, it is a way of knowing God that as an former
evangelical, I'm I'm in still in, in Protestantism.
But what you characterize is the left brainedness, the
bibliocentricity to the exclusion of all other aspects
of living that are common in evangelical traditions.
I think that's one of the things that Callus hopes to encourage
our brothers and sisters, particularly in those traditions
that your body is, is a gift and it is part of God's expression
of who you are. And the weeds outside your house
are part of that expression. And the sunshine falling, and
the food and the and the joy. So how do you take that embodied
life? And and pursue fully God.
You cannot fully pursue God if you are not pursuing beauty.
And I think you've said that. Well, that's the good life.
Now shouldn't be surrendered and cut off in only a just simply a
biblioscentricity. That's a failure to live fully.
And I think you've said that, well, I think that's behind some
of what Anselm is doing. What we're trying to do is, is
invite the church, our brothers and sisters to more fully live.
Any anything you would add to that, I'm hearing you bring that
theme forward. Yeah.
Well, I mean, if you've ever been in, most of us at some
point in our lives have been in in one of those really beautiful
old churches, maybe in the US, maybe in Europe.
One thing I noticed in those buildings, when you walk in,
usually nobody has to tell you to whisper.
And I, I mean, I've been to churches in Europe where
everybody's in tourist mode outside, right?
They've all got their backpacks and their water bottles and
their cameras, and they're talking about where they're
going to go to lunch and they're.
Yeah. And, and, and then all of a
sudden they go in and their voices hush, not because they
saw a sign, but because the architecture told them that the
stones were crying out the glory of God.
I love that idea that that Christ said, if, if, if we don't
cry out his glory, the very stones will.
I think one of the coolest things in Christian history is
that we actually ran with that and said, we will make the
stones cry out. And the, there's, there's, so
there's sort of that high beauty that we used to put in our
church buildings. And we have a lot of church
leaders now who have been just as desensitized to that high
beauty as everyone else. So as good as they may be at any
other aspect of, of pastoring, they don't boldly promote and
protect sacred spaces and art, ritual and tradition, authority
and reverence. These sorts of encounters with a
beauty is sort of the Niagara Falls type beauty, what I
remember called the sublime, this thing that is almost scary
how how far beyond you it is. The problem is if we've if you
don't have a church like that in your neighborhood and someone's
not inviting you into it, it's hard to have those encounters.
A lot of the time you go to the the Art Museum or something and
you encounter something like that out of context and you're
just not ready for it. So I think the one of the best
meeting places actually for most of us where we are, and this was
one of the meeting places for for me as well, is to take
something that we already value, but don't value enough and
elevate it. So we all value food.
We all like eating. We would rather be full than
hungry. And even if our, you know, our
tastes run more more McDonald's than fancy restaurants, we know
what it is to taste something good.
And one of the things that we have ended up focusing on a lot
in the Anselm society is these sorts of experiences with
beauty, not in that high architectural or sacred music
sort of realm, but in this really earthy, ordinary sort of
realm. Because if you take something as
simple as feasting, not just eating, but feasting, recovering
this theology of not only do I still love this material thing,
I love it more than you because I'm a Christian.
So we're going to take food and we're going to create the sense
of abundance eat. There's more than enough.
Somebody loved you enough to think of you before you got here
and prepare this table for you in the presence perhaps of your
enemies and. Put thought into what it.
Looks like and spend hours just enjoying it and talking
together. I had a German professor in
college who got a bunch of the freshmen together and just
because this was his thing put on a a full recreation of the 9
the last nine course meal served on the Titanic dish by dish.
We'd never tasted anything so fancy, right?
Even. Like even some of the dishes
were like, maybe this one wasn't quite my thing.
For someone to love us so much that they would put this spread
before us like that. All of a sudden, you.
Put someone in an environment like that, 2-3 hours in,
they're. Having conversations.
They never would have had. They are attuned in their with
their senses to things they've never noticed.
They're tasting subtleties in the dish they maybe wouldn't
have tasted before. They're experiencing love
they've perhaps not experienced before.
And we've had people in these these feasting, conversational
kind of settings actually walk up to us and say, I think I just
got a taste of what heaven is like.
That's why. We are.
Here That's why we're on this planet to commune with God and
offer this communion to the world.
So the best place to me I know I've sort of gave me a really
long answer to a short question, but I think the one of the best
places that we can start to kind of wade into the challenge of
this disconnect between the material and the spiritual is to
find those really incarnation a really practical ways to bring
them together and offer them to people.
I just one note I want to. Make and Benjamin I'll turn it
to you as you talk about food it makes me think of the reality
that artists are a lot of the community that we're dealing
with would. Be well.
Served in in your model, to think of themselves like the
chef, as the servant of those who receive rather than the
hero. And I do think that for
Christians, servanthood is the defining moral mandate for what
it is to be in the Kingdom, and that the Christian artist is
like the chef, that these works that are produced high or low
are acts of love for others. I think you characterize that
really beautifully. Yeah, well.
That, I mean, it's not an accident that you picked up on
that. I'm the the so Christina, my
wife runs. She's the director of our Arts
Guild, which is a group of vocational artists.
That may not be their primary income, but they could.
You know, if you look at yourself in the mirror, I am a
writer. I look myself in the mirror, I
am a painter. I am pursuing excellence in that
craft. They are.
We've created this environment where they don't have to choose
between their artists friends and their Christian friends.
Frankly, if we did nothing else, that would often be the most
important thing they needed. But we're also trying to to then
give them things they they are getting in the larger culture
around them, more of this theological backdrop and and
whatnot. And one of the things that we
hit new members with quite early is, yeah, you have to get out of
this mentality that the the world around you has given you
of the the artist as profit, the artist as higher than yeah, you
are not the hero. You are the servant.
And what if you had an ethos of creating as a gift of love, not
for a hypothetical someday audience that gosh Gee, I sure
hope my book reaches. But adults and.
Children in your community, in your church, in your life.
What if that was why you created To love real people right in
front of you? And so often we see it changes
everything. We have a big.
Birthday celebration coming up here in just a couple of weeks
that wow. The Ansem Society is putting on
a long expected feast to celebrate Bilbo and Frodo's
birthday, It looks like. Brian, tell us a little bit
about this idea of feasting in your gathering.
A weekend of revelry and restoration.
Wow, that's that's exciting. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, we used to do a a weekend conference called
Imagination Redeemed and hopefully someday we can we can
do that again. But it is so expensive to do
these kinds of big conferences these days.
And honestly, we love the doing a lot of the show element to go
with the tell element because you know, a lot of people aren't
conference people. Even if you put on the best
conference in the world, but who's going to turn down a
feast? There's not that many people
that are going to turn down a Lord of the Rings themed
weekend. There's, there's a certain value
to just sort of laughing at yourself a little bit and going,
gosh, I love this story so much. You do too.
Let's give ourselves permission to enjoy it.
So what we've done is, is, yeah, we've crafted a a weekend that
it has September 19th and 20th of 2025 in the middle of we do
have a retreat portion and we've got some wonderful speakers that
are going to be dealing with different elements of feasting
as spiritual practice and as artistic practice.
So there's, there's that intellectual and spiritual feast
component kind of in the middle of it, but there's also
components of, of rest and, and, and communion.
You know, you can, we've got a pipe move group.
We're just going to, but a bunch of men are just going to go off
and smoke pipes and talk. They're hiking groups.
There are just sit down and don't bother me all afternoon
while I process everything that I just experienced at the
retreat. There were whole rooms devoted
to that. But yeah, it's bookended with
just enjoyment, rightly ordered enjoyment.
So we'll have a a Lord of the Rings game night mix of trivia
and just like Balder dash variants and poem recitations
and things like that. Make it good for both Tolkien
newbies and and and then the Uber fans that can answer the
really really hard trivia questions and they really need
to read. Up on Tom Bomba they'll so that
you know, you can weed out the just the movie guys, the movie
Lord of the rings. But if you are just the just the
movie guys, come on and we'll you know, you'll you'll hear
songs you recognize, but all up with what we call our pub
nights, which is literally just singing and storytelling and
distinct. Wow, that it sounds.
So incredible. And then you turn around and
come to the Rocky Mountain Conference of Kalos and you're
going to be a feature presenter there.
We're so honored that you would come to our first Rocky Mountain
Conference. Tell us a little bit about what
you're going to be sharing there.
Brian, we can't wait to invite you and the Anselm Society to
this amazing conference that we're going to be having in Fort
Collins the next weekend, the weekend after Bilbo and Frodo's
birthday. We're going to have a really.
Good September. Yeah, yeah, it's.
Going to be incredible, right? Yeah.
So first of all, I'm just, I'm really excited to get to come
out with, come and hang out with you guys in Fort Collins because
there's we're, we're, we're so blessed by what we see going on
in, in Colorado Springs. But they're great.
There's great stuff going on in Fort Collins too.
It's so exciting that, that you're there, Gustav and some of
our other friends there. I'm so I'm just excited to come
and hang out and be a part of that there.
As far as my session, see, I mean, see if any of these lines,
if you've ever heard any of these lines before, oh, beauty,
whatever it is what you mean that you mean when you say that.
Oh, that's not for me. Like I'm not an artist, I'm not
qualified. I don't have the time.
That's my wife's thing. I'm just an engineer like.
All of us on some. Level know that that beauty
thing, somebody ought to do something about that, making it
and enjoying it. But we tell ourselves a lot of
stories to convince ourselves it's not us.
And I think. That's exactly how the enemy
wants it. But I mean, we were just talking
about Lord of the Rings. What if, as Gandalf said, it is
the deeds of ordinary people that keep the darkness at Bay?
What if there's a way for ordinary people through ordinary
things to participate in the life of Christ in the building
of his church? So what I want to do in my
session is take that theological vision that is the really the
centerpiece of of the whole weekend.
And there are smarter and wiser and more educated people than me
that are laying the groundwork with keynotes going into to the
breakouts that include mine. So that's awesome for me.
I don't have to do that heavy lifting.
I want to take that theological vision and bring it to the
dinner table, the workplace, the backyard, the small group.
I want people in my session to leave feeling like we've opened
a door to further up and further in.
Not in the realm of the thing those fancy people do, but in
the realm of my cubicle tomorrow, my home schooling
tomorrow, my laundry tomorrow. Oh, that's exciting.
And we're so looking forward to this conference and to have you
there and to just dive into these themes that you've laid
out so beautifully just in this conversation here on the
podcast. Gustav, you got anything more
for for Brian before we head out to our day?
No. I'm just.
Really thrilled Brian, you're going to be sharing those
thoughts and and I want to encourage you want if.
You hear this before? Our conference.
You really won't want to miss Brian.
You've heard a bit of his. Intellect and his.
Passion and his faith here. And I very much look forward to
hearing from you at length. Brian or at least greater length
and and want to thank you so much for being a part of our
conference and being such a supporter too as a sister
organization with and so I'm feeling that sense of journeying
together on this mission that's bigger than either of us and and
I'm grateful for that so I look. Forward very much to having.
You with us? It's going to be.
Great. And honestly, it's our our.
We, I mean we support. Each other because it's the
larger mission and because thank God we don't have to do
everything we can we can specialize a little bit we can
focus on the yeah that the things that we're best at or the
people that are right in front of us, which is the way that we
are are made to work and and if I were to sort of piggyback on
what you just said to to leave a sort of a parting gift to the
listeners that. If you're sitting there
listening. And thinking, I wish you know, I
wish I had this where I am. You can.
Start where we started. Which is plan to flag?
Put a flyer up at your church and say I love such and such.
Anyone who wants to come and talk about such and such over
dinner, sign up. I can pretty much.
Guarantee you will be surprised at just how much you 2 I
thought. I was the only one.
Comes up. So, Ryan, thank.
You thank you for joining us on Beauty Through Faith.
It's been an honor and we will have you on again very soon.
Maybe we can debrief on the conference.
I want to hear about the revelry and restoration that's happening
and at your gathering as well. So we're we're going to have you
back to to fill us in on those details.
I know our listeners are going to want to hear that too.
So thanks so much. Yeah, my pleasure.