Andrew Campbell (Woodworker)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're.

Still going to love these older episodes.

Because the majority of each conversation focuses.

On how the gospel influences the work of our guests.

With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most masterful work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week I'm bringing you a conversation with somebody who's following Christ and also pursuing world class mastery of their Christmas craft. We're talking about their path to mastery, their daily habits and routines, and how their faith influences their work. You guys have been asking me for more blue collar guests. Today I'm going to bring you one with my new friend, Andrew Campbell. Andrew is a masterful woodworker who's got way more than 10,000 hours of purposeful practice under his belt. He's crafted everything from custom cabinetry to boat interiors to these really beautiful gypsy wagons that he rents out on his property on Airbnb. He's been at this a long time. He's really, really good at what he does, and he's just got a wonderful theology of work and perspective on work that he wants to share with us. So Andrew and I recently sat down. We talked about how mediocrity, mediocre work takes the Lord's name in vain, how to calm the, quote, cocktail party inside of our minds for us who are.

Ambitious for the work that we do.

And we talked about the death of ambition and Paul's advice in First Thessalonians that we value a quiet life and what that looks like in today's day and age. So please enjoy this conversation with my.

New friend, Andrew Campbell. So I want to talk about your story in a minute, but first tell us about the work you do today. Briefly summarize what you do to earn a living today.

Well, I have a cabinet shop here at my home in Plain. It's a cooperative shop, so I actually have two other guys that work with me, kind of rent space in the shop, run their own businesses, and then we basically just divvy up the work between us. So we build custom kitchens, furniture. Right now I'm working on a chapel for a large new church in Wenatchee doing doors and cabinets, and we designed the pews. They got a bunch of volunteers going to be putting the pews together. So, yeah, a Variety of stuff.

And then in addition to this, you make these gypsy wagons. And our first call, I called these tiny houses, and you quickly corrected me. So what the heck is a gypsy wagon? And how does it differ, if at all, from a tiny house?

Well, so a tiny house is meant to be towed somewhere and parked. And these can actually be towed somewhere for vacation. So they're actually highway legal. They have all the right lights and turn signals and everything else on them. And so it's basically an RV really, but in an older form. So if you hearken back to the 1800s and the horse drawn gypsy wagons wandering around England and Europe, the Romani people, these are kind of a modern version of that.

So I could be driving down the interstate or maybe a local county road and just see a house drive by. That would be a gypsy wagon.

Or it could be someone's tiny home. No, these are not house shaped. So if you think of a tiny house, it's usually got a peaked roof or a sloped roof. They seem to be getting bigger and bigger as the tiny house movement grows. So the tiny houses get bigger. I've been following the phenomenon for years, and it's like, oh, 200 square feet is not big enough. Let's make it 400 square feet and 35ft long. No, these are 16ft long. They have curved roofs. They have a traditional mollycroft. If you think about the old showman's wagons, or a train that has this raised portion in the middle with windows in it, it's called a mollycroft. So they have that. So they're very specific shapes that are common to the three different gypsy wagon styles.

So I want you to tell us your story and kind of the path that led to the work you're doing today. And feel free to start wherever you want.

I did woodworking in high school, and to be honest, it was probably the one thing that kept me sane in high school. I'm a super adhd, not your greatest high school material. And so being able to work with my hands was immensely satisfying to me. The thing about it though, is even back in those days, the idea of the trades was never something that was shown to be a viable career for somebody. You know, people were sent off to going to college and having career as an architect or an engineer or whatever was the laudable thing to do. I mean, my dad really wanted me to be an engineer. Went through high school, it was a breeze for me, but I just loved working with my hands. And so for years, every chance I got, I worked with my hands Started out at the technical university in Durban studying fashion design because I have no idea why. Still to this day I think, what on earth. I think I went to a career fair and there was this older lady there who talked me into trying to get into the fashion design department, which I had absolutely no qualifications for. I had no portfolio. I hadn't done art at school because it was either pick between woodworking or art. So I picked woodworking. So I ended up applying for this course and got in 500 applicants, 50 of them got in and one of them was me. And I didn't meet any of their criteria, which was bizarre. So I think it was a God thing that got me to this school in Durban, South Africa where I grew up. And this messed up preacher's kid shows up in Durban and meets these absolutely incredible people. And God just started this process of turning my life around. And anyway, partway through the year, my first year of fashion design, I realized there's. I can't see myself doing this as a career. You know, I talked to one of my profs and she says, you know, to be a fashion designer you just need to eat, sleep and drink clothing. I don't. So forget that. And so I'd made some friends in the interior design department. And so I ended up switching over in South Africa back in the 90s, well back in the 80s 70s, everybody was eligible for two years of military service. So I did my year of military service straight out of college. I worked for an architect for a year. And during that year I felt like God was calling me to go into full time youth ministry. We talked earlier about this bizarre mentality growing up in the church, that there's this hierarchy and I was trying to raise support to be on full time staff with yfc and I was, I had asked my uncle if he would be willing to support me, one of my uncles. And we had this huge youth camp called Youth Week. Thousands of kids. He came out to that and we chatted and he looked at me and said, you know Andrew, you need to get a real job here. I'm thinking I got a real job in the kingdom. But he said, no, if you want to really be of service to God, you need to go to seminary and become a pastor. Because obviously pastors are like top dogs. The only thing higher than a pastor would be a missionary. And so that's this mentality I grew up in and I didn't know how to deal with. So anyway, off I went and got involved full time working with kids and I ended up doing that for 15 years between college volunteering and then two and a half years at Labrie Wilderness Training School working with kids. And granted there was some amazing experiences during that time. Always I would end up in the shop building something and feeling like this schizophrenic person because every time a van full of kids would come down the driveway, it was all I could do not to run and hide under my bed, but when I had tools in my hands, building cabins for this place or fixing the pump down at the river, I felt like I was alive. And so I lived with this bizarre, almost schizophrenia. Being in youth ministry is what I'm supposed to do, but what I feel most at home with is working with my hands. Anyway, the long and the short of it is I ended up coming to the US to work for an organization called Youth Dynamics because I, I wanted to grow my skills in actual wilderness ministry. I had a friend I work with NYD and we started doing backpacking trips and mountain bike trips together and wanted to get some more experience. So I came out here to Anacortes, Washington on Fidalgo island and started working with Youth Dynamics. They had an organization called Reach Out Expeditions. Anyway, I ended up designing a program for Youth Dynamics, a training program, and one of my volunteers, I was in charge of what we called our short programs and trained volunteers for that. And one of my volunteers was a shipwright. So I would work full time in the summer, running up and down mountains and rafting rivers with kids. And then in the winters I would work part time to supplement. And in a sense that winter was, I would call it, the birth of something inside of me that now this comparison between what I was doing, which I was supposed to be doing for God, and what I loved doing, which was working with my hands. The dichotomy or the disparity between the two things just grew and grew and grew in my mind. But because of the pressure to be a good Christian in full time ministry, I did not know what to do with that and there was no one I could talk to about it. Anyway, I feel like God's hand was so on the whole process because my wife at the time and I had started building a house and so I ended up taking a leave of absence from yd. I just remember being in this bizarre place where I felt guilt and shame about not wanting to go back to doing ministry and yet this excitement about being able to work with my hands. Anyway, I was on the phone with my volunteer friend, the shipwright guy, Carl, and he asked me what are you doing for the next few months? I said, I have no idea. I said, I can't go back to yd. I don't know what I'm going to be doing. You know, House is starting to wrap up. And he said, well, I've got this boat job I'm working on. You want to come and work with me on it? And I said, heck yeah, I'll be there in a heartbeat. Three days later I had a business.

And how long have you been doing that now?

That was 20 years ago. 2000 is when I started my business. So 20 years ago.

Wow. And somewhere along the way you were able to make the connection that this work as a woodworker is. Glorifying the Lord is a means of creating for the kingdom. How did you get there? What happened in your story that got you there mentally?

It was a long process. Honestly, I think probably for four or five years after starting my business, I really suffered from a lot of shame and guilt around leaving youth dynamics. What's so hard about this whole thing is that the only way you can see it is if you're out of it. So I have so many friends that are still in it, still in full time ministry in various places. Not just youth dynamics. I actually have a guy who works with me who used to be in full time ministry too. And he sees it too. He says the guilt and shame of leaving and starting my business. It took me years to get over it. But I probably had some of my most profound encounters with God in the wood shop. I remember a couple weeks into starting my business and I was in my shop and I was planing a piece of teak for a boat and just standing there with this beautiful piece of wood chucked in a vise making shavings. I felt God's presence in a way that I had never experienced in my life before. I mean, I was an emotional wreck in the middle of it and I have just had such incredibly profound moments of worship in the shop and the sense of this is what I was made for.

Why do you think that is?

Because it is what I was made for. It's how God wired me.

I love that question about what work can you not stop doing? But also the lens of giftedness, like what are you really, really good at? Because as Christians we believe work is service, right? Work is ministry. Ministry serving other people through the ministry of excellence. So it's gotta be something you're great at, right?

Yeah. Well, I have a friend who's a chef. I just look at him and I say, you know, every day of your life, you answer Jesus call to feed the hungry, and you do it with excellence. And he loves it. I love watching him cook because he just can't help it. Even at home, he'll slap together something for dinner and it'll be gourmet. He can't help it.

It's something really special to watch somebody feel God's pleasure as they work. Right. To just know I'm doing this work well in service of others, and I'm so exuberant because of it. I think that's what feeling God's pleasure looks like. Hey, so speaking of mastery and the ministry of excellence, let's talk a little bit about craft. Right, so we talk a lot about mastery. What the keys are to mastering different crafts. Whether you're an entrepreneur or a writer or a woodworker in your craft, what are the keys to mastering the art of woodworking? Like, what does it take?

Well, a minimum of 10,000 hours.

There you go.

The tipping points guy, Malcolm Gladwell. I read that. It wasn't Tipping Points, it was Outliers. I think it's in his book Outliers, he talks about 10,000 hours.

Yeah, we talk a lot about that on the podcast.

Yeah, There is just no substitute for time. One of the things I've done over the last several years is I've taken on interns and just given them the opportunity to work in the shop. Alongside of me, I have a young guy, Andrew Morris, who's phenomenal craftsman, and he came from a woodworking school and spent two and a half years in my shop and is now running his own shop. And just having the time to do things over and over and over. There's no substitute for that. Muscle memory, practice, multiple different problem solving. I mean, woodworking is problem solving. Woodworking is practice again and again and again.

Yeah, I talk a lot about this in Master of One. There's no substitute for grit and discipline over time. Right. You got to stick with something long enough to not just fall in love with it, but stay in love with it. And you stay in love with something when you get really good at it. Are you familiar with the concepts of deep work or flow?

Probably, but it may not be called that. Maybe I'm familiar with it, as in, I do it all the time and.

Exactly right. That's where I'm going. So Cal Newport wrote this book I love called Deep Work, which he defines as professional activities performed in a state of distraction, free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. I find that this is indispensable to mastering knowledge work like writing. Do you find this to be critical to your work as a woodworker?

Yes, except that my problem is distractions. I can't get them to go away. You know, I'm generally juggling four to eight projects at a time. There's two other guys in the shop. Last summer there were five people in the shop. And honestly, I got to a point where I didn't want to go to work anymore. The days were one constant distraction. So getting into a flow and just being able to do focus work, I really struggle with that. And I know how important it is because when I'm there, when I get there, I feel at peace. I feel like I'm in the groove. So I am learning a new skill which is not that different from what I do day to day, but timber framing. And so the night before last, I was sitting, straddling an 8 by 8 post that I was working on with a chisel in my hand, chopping away at some mortises, cleaning them up. And I was sitting there thinking, I am going to take this as an opportunity every day for a couple of hours to just get in a groove, to slow down. Almost as a meditation.

Yeah.

Right now I'm just building a shed for my sawmill with some big timbers and there's no hurry. I don't have to have it done on a schedule for a customer, but I can just peck away at it. And all my life I've struggled with gotta get her done, get her done, you know, hurry up, get her done.

Yeah.

And this time I'm deliberately, almost teaching myself to slow down and get absorbed in the process.

So I love that you value this because you've experienced this. Right when you can get in the groove, when you get in that state of flow or deep work, whatever you want to call it, magic happens. That can't happen any other way. I'm going to send you a copy of Deep Work. My listeners know I recommend this book all the time. It just gives really practical tips for how to have more distraction free time, even if you got a team around you.

Right.

It's an indispensable resource. I'll make sure to get you a copy. I want to ask you about productive rest. This is something I really believe in. So for me, in between times of writing or prepping for this podcast, I like to do things with my hands to rest, right? So I like to wash the dishes or do laundry, whatever it is. What do you do to rest? Do you rest with Your hands. Do you rest with your mind? What does that look like for you?

I mountain bike, I fly fish, I tie flies. I read a lot when I started my masters. Had to jump through all these hoops to try to get into the master's program because I don't actually have a bachelor's degree. So they asked me about the stuff that I read. So I listed off the books that I'd read in the last six months, and they went, oh, well, you're already reading at a master's level anyway, so I love it.

Is reading restful for you?

Reading is incredibly restful for me. I mean, all through high school. I was in boarding school in high school, and reading was my. My place of escape. Kids would go and get stoned and I would go and lose myself in a book. That was my coping mechanism.

So for me, reading isn't all that restful most of the time, right? Because I read to work, I read to write. I mean, I'm just reading to research the next book. But I think about that old adage, work with your mind, rest with your hands, work with your hands, rest with your mind. I think there's a lot of wisdom there, right? So reading for you, super restful. But for me, it's running or doing the dishes or doing something with my hands. So, Andrew, I'm really curious what your typical day looks like from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. What does a day in the life of Andrew Campbell look like?

I wake up in the morning, and I probably spend an hour, sometimes two hours just lying in bed trying to learn how to meditate, quiet down the cocktail party in my mind, of which I am the unwilling host, talking to the Lord and sometimes reading scripture, sometimes reading a book just depends on what's going on at the time. But just being present, just trying to listen to what God's doing. In my own life and the lives of people around me, it's hard for me not to think about work in those moments because the details of the day come crowding in. So I'm still learning to navigate that. Just an immense amount of detail that I carry around in my head. That's kind of my start to the day. Then I grab some breakfast and head out into the shop. And boy, every day is different. You know, it could be meetings with customers. It could be installing cabinets or delivering furniture or working on a project or working with several of the guys I work with, lining out work or helping them through things, or just generally going around checking on quality Control or fixing a machine or buying supplies, doing the accounting. I'll take a couple days in a month, mornings and bang out all the accounting stuff that has to happen. Not my favorite thing in the world, but I've learned by necessity to do it.

What time are you wrapping up your day in the shop?

Well, after doing this for 20 years, I have disciplined myself to not stay in the shop past 5 o'. Clock. I used to work all hours of the night. I mean, I'd work a full day in the shop and then I'd start working on a gypsy wagon. And I did that for a lot of years building wagons. And physically, I just don't have the energy to do that anymore. I mean, by the end of a day in the shop, I'm physically whooped because my work is very physical. My shop has an upstairs and a downstairs, and so we do Stairmaster every day. And so I'm usually fairly physically tired by time 5:00 clock rolls around. There was always this sense of there's a wolf barking at the door, you know, and if I don't work, I'm not going to get paid. And it was just tempting to want to try to work more and more and more hours. But I've realized how important rest is. I don't work for customers on the weekends. I may putz around doing stuff in the shop for myself on a Saturday, but Sundays, I don't work at all. Sundays is my day to just sleep, go for a bike ride, hang out with friends, hang out with my wife, my kids, whatever. Just do something restful. And the older I've gotten, the more precious that day of rest has become to me.

Yesterday, I recorded an episode of the podcast with your friend Dave Hatag, the author of Good Work, and you endorse his book saying, I want to read this direct quote. I loved it. Quote. In an age where Christians have such a poor reputation, the simple message of us seeking first God's kingdom and true inner goodness and living that out in our workplaces will do a whole lot to make our faith relevant and. And the gospel actually. Good news, end quote. So there's a couple things I want to unpack here. First, how do you live out the pursuit of God's kingdom in your work as a woodworker?

Well, I think the most simple way is to do what we do excellently. When I walk away from a customer's home, I always tell my customers this. I say, if you're sitting in your living room looking at a piece of furniture I made or you're working in the kitchen that I built and what's going on in your mind is, this is exactly what I had in mind then I have done my job well. The kitchen is the most important place in the home. It's where everything happens. For a lot of people, life revolves around the kitchen. And so I spend a lot of time with customers, walking through their lifestyle and their social habits in the home and how do we make this space into a place that's going to enhance that. But I think that for me, when I've done work for somebody and they tell all their friends about it, because sometimes they're surprised, sometimes they're shocked almost at how easy the process was to work with us. And I say that because I have worked with a lot of different contractors and a lot of different trades people. And I hear the stories of the disgruntled, frustrated homeowners where they feel like they're being ripped off, where they feel like they're being overcharged, where they feel like the workmanship is poor or the follow up if something didn't go right, hasn't been what it should be. And to me, you just can't do that. One of the hardest things for me to do is to write the invoice at the end of a project and charge somebody for my time. I really still struggle with that because I want to make sure that what they've gotten and what they paid for is fair. And so to me, the most important thing at the end of the day is I walk away with a customer who feels like they have been blessed by the work that I've done for them. Not just aesthetically, but in the whole process. And sometimes that's difficult because there are customers who, oh my gosh, there's nothing ever that's going to satisfy them. And then I was talking with my wife yesterday because having some issues with one of the guys I work with and being a boss, manager, whatever, is not easy either. And so there's learning to treat people well when I just want to lash out and be furious, you know, because of certain things going on. So I think that's probably the most challenging thing for me. My coping mechanisms are either get angry or shut down and walk away. Learning not to do that, learning to treat people with kindness and grace, learning to treat myself with kindness and grace when I don't do things well.

Right. We talk about the Ministry of Excellence as our most fundamental form of ministry in our work. I think that's what you're alluding to, reminds me of that Dorothy Sayers quote, which I'm sure you know well. The church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is that the very first demand his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Right?

That's how we love our neighbor, as ourselves, through our work. By the way, you mentioned in your endorsement, today's book, essentially I'm paraphrasing, but that the ministry of excellence in our work can make our faith more relevant. What do you mean by that? I think I know what you mean, but I want to hear you talk about this.

So, sadly, I've gotten to work with several Christian contractors, and honestly, they have lousy reputations. It is absolutely tragic that what they learn in church on Sundays does not translate to the way that they do their work to them not badmouthing their customers behind their back. There are several in our area contractors who I actually will not work with anymore. I just said to them, I'm sorry, you say that you are child of God and yet your reputation is no better than your average Joe that doesn't know God from a stone. It's made me really sad to see that and to have to deal with it and to have to try and challenge it with no visible effect. I mean, one of the commandments is do not take the Lord, your God's name in vain. And that doesn't mean swearing. It means don't call yourself by the name of God, Christian, little Christ, and then act like you don't know him, because if you know him, he's going to change the way that you work, the way that you act. And that was so true in my own life. The disparity between what I believed and how I acted became so clear to me probably 10, 12 years ago. I started realizing that the things I said I believed and how I actually acted and lived my life were not the same thing. And so I just started saying to God, you know, what if this doesn't actually result in actual change in the way that I treat people, in the way that I do my work, then to me, the gospel is irrelevant. It's not worth anything. So what is that going to take? Oh, my gosh. That led to a massive, massive deconstruction of my faith, of my understanding of God, of my relationship with church and Christians, and still ongoing. But, yeah, if what I say I believe doesn't change the way That I live, then either what I believe has no value or I got some serious work to do.

Yeah, well said. Impact, the way we live and the way we work. Of course. So you live what Paul refers to in First Thessalonians as a quiet life. You live in a town aptly called plain. What impact has the intentionality to live in relative obscurity had on your relationship to your work and your faith?

Yeah. This is interesting. Dave and I have had lots of conversations about this, Dave Haytig and I, about what we call the death of ambition. This point where we've got. To where we don't need or want to be anybody. Don't want to be an Internet star. Don't need to be on YouTube, don't want to write books. And Dave has, obviously God's taken him down this path where he's begrudgingly written a book.

Yeah.

And becoming in demand. And the pressure that that puts on you often to be somebody that you're not. So how do we stay authentic to who we are? You know, that verse in Thessalonians has been what I would call an inheritance word for me since I was in high school. It's always been in the back of my mind. And so the idea of working with your hands and having a good reputation with the people around you is important. I think our world, our culture, has it the other way around. We seek to be somebody, but there's no real foundation under it. It's sort of like building the house on the sand or building this beautiful building and plonking it down on unstable soil. When the pressure comes, when the storms come, that thing's just going to collaps. Look at the stars. Look at the movie stars. Look at the pop stars. All the famous people, their lives are imploding because they don't have the character. The solid 10,000 hours of being a decent AS. I love Dave's idea in his book Good Work, about righteousness being true inner goodness. Having to develop that true inner goodness is the solid foundation on which fame or notoriety or whatever can actually stand and not collapse the person within.

Well said. So three questions I'd love to end every conversation with. First, you read a lot. Which books do you recommend most frequently to others?

Well, definitely. I just actually bought several copies of Dave's book, Good Work. And I'll be passing that around to my friends because it's brilliant, especially in this whole realm of work and faith. I've been reading a book recently. It's called into the Silent Land by Martin Laird. And it's a book on the contemplative lifestyle. And I've recommended that a lot to several of my friends because that's a part of the journey that I'm on right now. You know, I talked about the cocktail party in my head, of which I'm an unwilling host. That's a quote from Martin Laird. Just learning inner silence, learning the art of being still rest, experiencing God's presence. Without that, I think being excellent, being truly innerly good is almost impossible. And we live in a world that's just so frenetic. As tragic as this Covid thing is, there is this sense that the world has stopped and is rebooting. In a way, it's like, turn it off. And I think that there's a lot of good that's gonna come out of it. In spite of the heartache and the economic stuff going on, it just felt like we were on this trajectory of insanity, using, abusing, consuming, that just needed to stop and be reevaluated. And in a sense, this thing is almost a blessing.

That Martin Laird book sounds really interesting. You guys listening can find Those titles@jordanraynor.com Bookshelf hey, Andrew, who would you most like to hear talk about how their faith influences the work they do in the world every day?

Well, honestly, I sent you my friend John family lines. I would love to hear you interview him, because he is a man. I mean, I've known John for probably 18 years now, and he is a man that pursues excellence in everything that he does. And I would love to hear a conversation between you and him about that.

It's a great answer. All right, one piece of advice to leave this audience with. Again, these are people who view their work as eternally significant and are trying to do it well for the glory of God and the good of neighbor. What do you want to leave them with?

I would say that pursuing true inner goodness, which obviously comes from an intimate relationship with the Father, is foundational to doing good work. I mean, the word says that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

Jesus said, apart from him, apart from the vine, we could do nothing.

No good thing.

We could do no good thing. It is the foundational thing.

It is absolutely foundational. And so it's obvious to me when somebody has that, and I get to work with them, and honestly, I have people who don't even call themselves Christians, and yet somehow they have something truly, deeply good. I don't know how that works, but somehow there's something that comes out of them. Where I know that this is from an internal heart place of wholeness. And then I work around Christians who call themselves Christians and I go, oh my gosh, you are.

It is the foundational thing. Andrew, I want to commend you for just the important redemptive work you do every day and loving your neighbors yourself by making great tables and cabinets and gypsy wagons. And thank you for reminding us today that God's called us to redeem every square inch of creation. Even through building things with our hands. Maybe especially through building things with our hands. Hey, you guys can follow Andrew's work on Instagram. You don't post frequently, but the stuff you do post is great. It's Beaverhill Woodcrafters. Make sure you check out his Airbnb listings, which we'll link to right here in the show notes. Andrew, thank you again for doing this.

Thanks, Jordan. Appreciate it.

I hope you guys really enjoyed that conversation with my new friend Andrew.

Hey, thank you guys so much for.

Tuning in to this episode of the Call to Mastery. I'll see you next week.