Dave Hataj (Owner of Edgerton Gear, Inc.)

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 Christ followers who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits and routines, and how their faith influences the work that they do each day. You guys have been asking me to bring on some more blue collar guests onto the show. Today I am bringing you a phenomenal one. His name is Dave Hatag. He grew up working in his father's gear shop starting at the age of five. At the age of 19, Dave became a Christian and he was convinced that if he really wanted to serve the Lord, he needed to become a pastor. So that's exactly what he did. And over time he came to realize that work, even blue collar work in a gear shop, is ministry. He quit his pastoral ministry job to take over operations. Edgerton Gear based in Wisconsin where he currently serves as owner and operator and has been for about 25 years now. To give you an idea of the scale of that business, if you've used an aluminum can, a paper cup, a piece of paper, a book. So basically all of us, you have used the product that Edgerton Gears has played a role in creating, right? Dave recently published this excellent book titled Good Work, which brings a much needed blue collar perspective to this ongoing faith at work conversation. I really loved this episode of the podcast. Dave and I talked about what it means for our work that Jesus talked way more about his kingdom than he did about, quote unquote being saved. We talked about how apprenticeships give you wisdom while information products and YouTube tutorials give you knowledge. And we talked about what scripture has to say about our work and the actual work products that we create. We what Scripture says about those things potentially lasting into eternity in the new heavens and the new earth. Please enjoy this terrific conversation with my new friend, Dave Haytack. Dave Hatag, thank you so much for being here. I was just telling you before we start recording, I loved this book. You know, when people ask me for good faith and work resources, I honestly, it's a Pretty short list of books that I recommend and yours is one that I've added to it. I think our audience here on the podcast has been asking for more blue collar perspectives on redemptive work. And just thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

My pleasure to be here. And that's pretty high praise because in a lot of ways, I wasn't sure why I was writing the book. I always told my wife I would never write a book. But it turns out I think you're dead on. There's a need for a blue collar voice.

Is that why you did it? Why did you write the book?

It was kind of a strange thing. I got pretty ill about five years ago, just burned out. And doctors called it adrenal fatigue, but nobody could really diagnose it. So it took me about a two year recovery of going home early every afternoon, just resting, sleeping. In the second year of my recovery, you're kind of faced with your mortality. I was 55 at the time. I'm going, God, what's happening? Where am I headed? And I realized I've had incredible mentors. I've been so blessed in so many ways with great people in my life. And I wanted to get down on paper for my staff. I have three grown sons. This is what I feel God's been teaching me for the last 25 years in business and in life. So I just started writing. It was kind of therapy. And I showed it to one of my mentors, Paul Stevens, up in Regent College in Vancouver, and he said, oh, this has potential. And long story short, I didn't try to promote it. It just kind of people just took it and ran with it. And here I am today with it.

Quite the reluctant author. So, Dave, let's start here. Tell us a little bit about Edgerton Gear. What do you guys do?

We are a custom gear shop. And so gears are those little things with kind of like bicycle teeth. But gears are in everything from anything that makes paper to tractors to cars to. I often say that there's nothing on your body that's man made or in your room, your house at work that wasn't made without the assistance of gears. So back in 1962, my parents were married. Three little girls, one in the oven, which was me. And my dad said, you know, I got to figure out how to make a living. And his summer job when he was a teenager was a little gear shop working in Chicago. So he started the business, you know, 20, let's say I grew up in it. I was working in the shop by the time I was age 5. And we are serving customers everywhere from those who are making toilet paper in the current pandemic to masks. I had a rush job today that said they need a couple gears immediately because I'm making N95 masks, to bottling to any kind of paper product, to lumber products, food service, packaging, cardboard boxes, you name it. Pretty much our gears are in everything. We're not a production shop. So all of our machinists are pretty much journeymen or craftsmen, very highly trained. And we did that intentionally because modern industrialization, it can get very boring very fast. So we wanted to keep low production, so keep everybody interested and engaged on a daily basis.

That's interesting. It's an interesting perspective on automation and technology. So I want to go back to the beginning of your vocational story because I'm reading your book and my first thought was, oh my gosh, this guy is George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life. And I was, I was so glad you went there in the book and drew the parallel yourself. So tell us your story. So you're starting to work at the gear shop when you're five, which is a topic for another time that we could dive into. Take us from there to today. Like, what's the story behind this?

Well, the only person I'd been to college in our family was my oldest sister. And so my family going back generations, very, very blue collar bricklayers and machinists and lumberjacks, et cetera. So we were very poor growing up. So this is all I knew. And we were required to work in the shop as kids. And as I started to school, I loved to read, but I struggled with a lot of the other classes. My dad always said, you gotta learn math because you're gonna need that as a machinist. And as I started going into high school, I could not relate to any of these career paths that other students were taking to go to university or college. I was in that boat of I took every shop class that you possibly could. And in our high schools and most high schools, the shop classes are at the end of a long haul, at the end of the school. And a lot of us don't do well in class, but we do really well with our hands. That's how we learn and engage the world. So, so I took woodworking and welding and drafting and printing and auto mechanics and everything. And by the time I got to be a junior or a senior, the idea of going to university wasn't even on my radar. It wasn't even brought up in our family, so I had no idea what I wanted to do. So got out of high school, and my dad said, well, you're working in the shop unless you have a better plan. And I had no plan. And most of my friends, a lot of them did go off to university, but quite a few of us just had to get local jobs. We're a small town of 5,000, so you just find a job. I initially hated it because I'd been doing it for so long. Back then, in the early 80s, manufacturing was dirty, dark, and dangerous. It was greasy, it was filthy. But in a way, it was enjoyable, too, if you like to get dirty and greasy. But I think I was more burned out with, what is the point of making gears? How is this possibly making a difference in the world? One day I just. And it's kind of an interesting story. I was also training to do triathlons and marathons at the time. But on one of those training runs, I was just completely depressed and just kind of having a major pity party, like, woe is me. Woe is me. And I heard a voice. It was so real, I thought someone was playing a trick on me. I thought it was coming out of the bushes. But the voice just said, you are not alone. And it repeated it. And my world turned on a dime. And at that moment, I realized I was incredibly loved. God was real. And then it was a matter of, what do I do with my life? If you're incredibly loved and you realize you're here for a purpose, what does God do with the machinist?

And so you're at this point, right, and you have this incredible encounter where God grabs a hold of you and you do what a lot of young people do at that age. Like, I should be a pastor, right?

Exactly. That's what people tell you. That's the only career path.

Right.

If you are really zealous for serving God, you must become a pastor, missionary, Sunday school teacher or something. But the idea of serving God in the workplace wasn't even on anybody's radar. I think back.

Yeah. So pick up the story from there.

So I didn't go to church for a while because my dad was a very angry atheist, my mom a very devout Christian, and I didn't want to get in the middle of them. So I really kept my faith quiet for a while. I was living at home at the time, and one week they went off on vacation and I snuck my way to church. And that first Sunday, I met a man named Pete and his son Scott and Pete was a VP for University Christian Fellowship. He helped start the Marketplace movement back in the 80s. And people just took me under their wing, and it's like, wow, you're zealous. So I did all the traditional things. I volunteered in the youth group. Then I got almost like an internship in the youth group, got hooked up with Athletes in Action. People said, oh, my gosh, you want to serve the Lord? Okay, where are you going? Went up to California with Athletes in Action. Long story short, I ended up getting a job as a pastor in MEGA Church. I had never been to college, no theological training. I was the Wisconsin hick in Newport beach in this big church, and they offered to pay me to be their pastor to college. I. I don't think they knew what they were getting, and I don't think they thought I could do much damage because at the time there was only 10 students.

The funny thing is, pretty low risk. Yeah, low risk.

And I had no idea what I was learning or even teaching, what I would learn during the week. I'd teach on Sundays and Wednesdays. And our focus back then was, you read the Word, you worship and you pray. Within a couple months or six months, the group just started to explode. And God just did some amazing things. And the group grew over to 100 students and. And I had a crazy burnout experience. Very, very painful. I won't get into the details right now. That's for another day. But I was really shipwrecked because the one place that I thought I would be most accepted and loved and find purpose in my life became extremely painful. And then I went, God, now what do I do if I don't fit in the church as a professional religious person? What in the world do you want to do with my life? And I met my wife shortly before that. We were married and. And I got some advice to say, go up to Regent College in Vancouver Theological Graduate School. You need to get to know God. You need to get to know Jesus and figure out what you really believe versus what the church has told you to believe. That led me on a study the end of the first year. Still didn't know what I wanted to do. And I took one of those weird classes. What colors your parachute? They analyze your gifts. They do personality assessments and all that. And it came back and it said, the test at the end of the semester came back and said, you and you got to keep. I should back up a second. Realized the last place on the planet I would ever want to come back to would be Edgerton. Gear making gears in the shop. It was the most dark, depressing, painful place on the planet for me. I said, God, I will go anywhere, do anything, but I will not go back to the shop. So fast forward, I get these test results back and I'm not kidding, verbatim, it says you are uniquely gifted to run a small manufacturing, family run business.

Unbelievable.

I screamed. I was like, lord, no, Absolutely not. No.

Anything but the old Building and Loan. Anything, anything.

Exactly, exactly. So I did feel like George Bailey, okay, I'll go back and honor my parents. And they were more than willing to have my wife and I back because. Because my dad was starting, he was just burned out. He was starting to have some health problems. And I took another six months to prepare at Regent College to say, okay, Lord, if you're calling me back to this mess, what I call my family and my family business, we all have messes. If you are who you say you are, you have to somehow be able to reach this little blue collar machine shop in Wisconsin. Otherwise, if my faith isn't practical, what's the point?

So you take this personality assessment and it's like, hey, basically telling you verbatim, go back home, go back home, run the gear shop. At this point, did you see that work as ministry? And if not, like, where in your story did that happen? Where did you start to connect these two ideas together?

Boy, Jordan, that's a great question, because I think I really was like a lot of Christians who said, God is only really interested about saving people and it's all about people. And even though I had these amazing mentors that taught me about theology of work, it took me, I would say, gosh, good, 10 years to really understand that making gears is part of the creation mandate. You know, it is part of serving the good of the world. Modern civilization really, as we know it would not exist without gear. So I had this tension that was trying to get in my head intellectually. I knew that. I came to realize, yeah, my job is really important, but the hard part of it really took a long time to come up to get there because I wasn't getting any validation, I shouldn't say any, but very little validation from the Christian community.

I want to come back to that and talk about that in a minute. But first, let's park here for a second. So we talk a lot on the call to mastery about how people master various vocations. I'm always curious about what the keys to mastery are in fields that I don't understand. I have no idea what it Takes to be a master machinist. Right. So what are the keys to mastering that trade? A very hands on technical trade. How do you become world class at that craft?

Another good question. It's something, it's something I just grew up with and never had to really think about, but it was, you know, my dad was a phenomenal machinist. And the attention to detail and the perseverance and the focus on math skills and to have. Back then, all the machines were manual. So you would have steel chips flying in your face and your arms and you'd get burned. And it was dangerous. But it was this discipline. You know, we are working within tenths of an inch, you know, not 20, 10,000ths of an inch. So if you take a human hair and you split it six times, or I should say, yeah, three to six times depending on the thickness of your hair, that's one thousandth of an inch. Cut that again in half and that's half a thousandths. And those are the tolerances we're working with. So I remember one story that, you know, I'm running a manual lathe and my dad would cut the piece of steel, bring it over, here's the blueprint. You got to figure this out, you got to make it. And he teaches methods of setting up and doing the same thing over and over. But the attention to detail to make the machine and understand cutting speeds and cutting oils and tool angles and RPMs and all this together wrapped up. How do I take every tool to make it perform the way I do? Because you're really forcing your will on a piece of steel to make it conform to what you need it to be. And I remember one case, I scrapped the part four and five times. And every time I scrapped it, the whole, the board kept going oversize on me. It wasn't within tolerance. And I would take it back to my dad, give it to him, he'd shake his head, he'd go, start again and start again, start again. So I guess, short answer to your question, it's just the discipline to be committed to this excellence that is very tangible. You know, your part is not to print. Or it is then having that perseverance and that courage. Because the other thing that's interesting about machining, people think, oh, it's just, it's. Everybody does things the same. If I gave a blueprint to 10 different machinists how to make a gear, they would make it, they would come up with 10 different ways of making it interesting.

So in that way it's very creative.

It is very creative. And even in our shop, that's one of the things that excites me the most, is really seeing, you know, the guys that are running the machines, their giftedness and how they think, how they use their creativity to get to the same goal. We're using the same machines, but how are you going to get there? I think that's one of the most fascinating things about being human is when you see people engage that God, creativity and just to figure things out, I think that's really exciting.

So in the world of machinery, right, apprenticeships are how you learn. Right. It's how you learn technical blue collar work. Apprenticeships are less common in what we might call, quote, unquote, knowledge work. So I'm curious for you, you had to make that transition from being this highly technical worker as a machinist to the less technical work of owning and operating the business. So as you over time made that transition, how did you seek out apprenticeships in that latter role? Like, did you continue to apprentice yourself under mentors as you began to operate the business day in, day out?

Oh, absolutely. In fact, even you know anything I do. What is great about the apprenticeship model of education is that you have this mentor, right. And the mentor is giving you guidance, giving you direction. They've gone before you. And, you know, I teach in the book, I teach this class that I talk about crashing with character. And one of the things that we do with our students that we teach them, one, they're not the center of the universe. Two, you don't reveal as much as you think you do. Right.

I wish somebody told me this when I was, you know, nine years old.

Yeah, exactly. And so it really stresses humility that you need to learn from those who have come before you. So even when I started transitioning more of a management leadership role, I always look for those older people that say, man. And one of my best mentors has been a baker his entire life, but he just understands people and he understands business processes and family. And I got other mentors who are really are phenomenal at theology. So it's always been in my, I guess the apprenticeship DNA is always learn from those who came before you.

Yeah. And get to know them personally.

Right.

So we're living at this time where anyone can learn anything on YouTube. And that's wonderful. But nothing can replace direct one to one communication between mentor and protege and apprentice. Right. Because they get to know you, your unique challenges, your unique needs, and they can coach you through it. Right.

Well, and exactly. And I think with the most incredible important part of mentorship is we are all broken, we are all fallible. We all bring our own wounds and garbage to the table. And a mentor recognizes that. And they've made mistakes before too. So I think the most important role is they come alongside. They see us for who we are and can help us get there in spite of all of our junk that we bring along with us. And that's, I think, the real difference between gaining knowledge on YouTube and gaining wisdom by doing things and having people speak in your life and coach you and mentor you and help you overcome in a lot of ways yourself.

That's really good. I love that distinction between knowledge and wisdom. I think that's the delta between what you might call a direct apprenticeship and an indirect apprenticeship on YouTube. Hey, so we love talking about habits and routines that make people particularly productive. I'd love to know what your day looks like from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. What's the TikTok of your day?

Okay, so I'm early to bed, early to rise.

Good for you.

Me too. Yep. So I'm usually up by 5, 5:30 up here in Wisconsin, it can be difficult in the winter, but I get up and I do my bathroom routine and then I'm in the kitchen. And I've been experimenting with intermittent fasting for the last few years. So. So a lot of times I won't eat breakfast until 10 or 11 o' clock and I'll make myself a smoothie, take my supplements and my vitamins. In the winter I build a fire in our fireplace. We have a wood stove, sit down and maybe read the word or just meditate, journal and just really try to check in and say, oh God. Okay, God, what's today about? And I think one of the more maybe you do this too. But what I look for when I sit down in kind of those quiet moments in the morning, I try to just calm myself and listen to where the stress points are. Where am I feeling anxiety, what am I worried about today? And really try to dig into that. I think I learned that quite a few years ago because if I don't deal with my anxiety and stress first thing in the morning, and I can name it, identify kind of shapes the whole day or carries with me and influences how I respond to people and how I make decisions. So I try to just get that very centered place first thing.

Hey Dave, let me stop you there because I want our listeners to hear something you just said because I've been experiencing this lately. The power of clearly articulating what you're anxious about. Right. And giving a name to that anxiety is incredibly powerful. And I find it's really powerful if I write it down or if I speak it out loud. The other day I was in our kitchen at the end of the day and my wife found me. I was literally just like talking to myself, talking about like, why am I anxious? Okay, it's this, this, this. I understand it now. Lord, help me overcome this. I'm casting these anxieties upon you, but there's a lot of power, it's a lot of wisdom in what you just said. All right, so that's your morning. Take us from there.

Well, then I have this phenomenal two year old, almost, well, actually year and a half year old golden doodle that I've got. And I've always been a dog guy. So we get out and take a long walk and it's usually it's after I come out of that quiet, you know, solitude moments of in front of the fire, then it's just outside walk. I need to get outside. I need to see the sunrise, I need to feel the wind in my face and just connect with God, I think, on a deeper level out there. And then especially like you said, if you identify that anxiety, then I take it outside and say, lord, what do I do with this today? And even if it's the scriptures that come back, like today it was Psalm 34 where I really had to dig into it, just recite and meditate. I was like, you have not abandoned me, you have heard my cry. I, I am living with fear today. I want to believe you and all of that. And so it's really a prayer walk every morning to get me ready for the day. And then I get in my truck, I'm here at the shop by seven, and it's a matter of seeing what's in my basket. Quotes orders, guys have questions, answering emails, and we're off to the races.

Yeah. What time do you go to bed?

I try to go to bed between 8:30 and 9 and read myself to sleep. So I've always got books on my bed stand and my routines just to calm my mind. Like right now, I just finished Everything I Needed by Robert Pilgrim. I think that's the name. What everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten. Or it's, I'm wrestling through a book by Chesterton right now. Holy cow, that's hard. Yeah.

Geez. Chesterton's not easy.

Yeah, yeah. Or just whatever. But usually it's that's how I zonk out.

Yeah, I'm quite the early to bed guy as well. It's looking like, you know, 8:45 to 9:15 is about my window right now. So you mentioned something in your book that I loved and it's a good segue to this conversation about how the gospel influences your work. You talk about on your drive into the office in the mornings, praying this specific prayer that you're praying for your business. Can you talk about that?

Well, I go between two prayers and one of them, you go Back to Matthew 6:33. Seek his first, His kingdom and his righteousness and all these things. So really it's, you know, I am called to seek God's kingdom 24:7 in my business. What does that look like, Lord? What does your kingdom look like in a machine shop of all places? And the other prayer that goes along with it, realizing how inadequate and sometimes just frail. I mean, I gotta be honest, life is just so overwhelming. I just need God to infuse me every day to see as he sees, to think as he sees, to listen as he listens, to speak as he listens. And I need his spirit just to hover and infuse me. So when I get to work, he's already there before me, which of course he is, but just to have a completely different perspective. And may his kingdom come through me today, every day while I'm here.

So that's a perfect segue in the book. You really harp on one of my favorite topics and a topic that I am growing increasingly obsessed with. And you mentioned that when you first started reading the Gospels, there wasn't nearly as much talk about, quote, being saved as there was about God's kingdom and bringing about God's kingdom. Please get up on your soapbox, this is your invitation. And talk about, talk about. What does that mean? Practically, as you and our listeners engage in our work each day, day, how can we help bring about God's kingdom?

Well, I think first of all, we need to understand exactly what you said, that there's not a lot in the Gospels about salvation. And Jesus is constantly talking about his kingdom. Well, what is that? And I've wrestled with that. What in the world is his kingdom? And it's really the reign of God. Go back. He wants to. Everything is his. He wants to take it back. He wants his values, his perspective, his way of loving and engaging the world and people in a way that is life giving instead of life sucking. Right? So this little simple verse that says, seek first his kingdom and His Righteousness. I really spent a long time trying to understand what in the world that meant. And I picked up a book by Dallas Willard a number of years ago, the Divine Conspiracy. Dallas Willard talks about how that that word righteousness that Jesus uses repeatedly throughout the Gospel, especially the sermon Mount, can be translated true inner goodness. And he even goes in a little bit more about. It's that ideal that God puts in our hearts and our minds. This is what life should really have been about if we weren't dealing with fallenness and brokenness and sin, right? So I'm like, okay, that starts to make sense to me because it says, seek God's kingdom and his goodness. Now then I really start thinking about how does goodness change everything? How does it impact everything that I do throughout my day? Because if that's my barometer, if that's what I'm trying, my standard that I'm trying to live up to, it's such a crazy, radical concept, but it's so simple. If in every encounter, every interaction that we have with anybody, in every job that I do throughout the day, if my first priority is looking at that from, from God's perspective of goodness, his standards of perfect goodness, it gets really radical, really, really fast. Because now every person I meet, I'm not looking at them as a person or employee. I'm like, whoa, how can I breathe life into that person? Every job that I do, whether it's making a gear, selling a piece, quoting a job, what is goodness in that context? When that starts happening, I don't even know how to explain it really well except through the book, because it starts changing everything around you. It's like every one of us has a sphere of influence that we have that's unique only to us. We have only our experience, our friends, our family, our giftedness, our job, our skill set, whatever. If we start making God's goodness that top priority, it starts influencing people and things around us in a way that I think is really contagious. And I think that's what Jesus was talking about when he was on the Sermon on the Mount. You got to realize he was speaking to the masses, the blue collar people, not the religious professional. They're the ones that he fought with, right? They're the ones that he ticked off. And they ticked him off, right? But when he's on the Sermon on the Mount, talking to these masses of 5,000 people, what got in my mind is, who are those people? Why would people follow? In the city, here in Edgerton, if Jesus came along, what was it about? Jesus that just enamored people and drew people to him. And I think we live such in a broken world that we don't even know what goodness is anymore. Everybody's flipping each other off on the highway. We just want look out for number one. We treat each other rudely. And he starts saying, this is what life really could be. Could you imagine a car salesman and I got some friends that are car salesmen that treat people with absolute goodness in their best interest. When we deal with our customers, if our top priority is their success and, and not ours, when I'm dealing with staff, if my first priority is to make them successful and love them, it's this radical upside down world that really starts to change things.

I love that. And there's such good practical applications for. Okay, great. Living in line with kingdom principles has implications for the here and now and how we treat our customers, how we treat our employees, et cetera. What impact does it have eternally? What impact does it have in the eternal kingdom? You've studied scripture, you've been to seminary. Like, what impact does it have in the new heavens and the new earth and the permanent eternal kingdom in which Jesus is reigning forever on the new earth?

Wow, that's a deep question.

We're going deep in our first conversation together, Dave.

Well, you know, I go back to something that Paul Stevens taught me is that. And that this idea that everything just burns up and we get a new head and new earth and everything we do here doesn't matter, we just got to get people saved. Well, that's not scriptural. And if you go to the Book of Revelation, in different places, there is this concept of the new heaven, new earth, and that things done in faith here and now will carry over into that new city, that new Jerusalem, that new heaven. So, you know, my gears, if they're done in faith, you know, let me back up. I think our concept of heaven too often is we're sitting around with harps and singing and worshiping. But what is worship if God made us as workers and six days, if we're made in his image and he worked for six days and then he rested, he has endowed us as workers. That's what we do. And I really believe we're going to carry our gifts, our talents into that new heaven and we are going to be working. To be honest, I'm tired of making gears. I hope I get to do something else. But I think those things that we do that we're passionate about, that whether it's our hobbies or whatever, that that's going to carry over. And so this concept of goodness, we are changing the world now. We are caught in between the now and the not yet. And what we do now, I think can help transform and carry our broken world, reconciling it, you know, to where God wants it to be.

So well said. I know you're reading my book called To Create right Now, if you get to the end in chapter 12, I quote a lot of NT Wright and talking about we do not create the kingdom, only God does that. But we create for the kingdom and the things that we do in line with kingdom principles. I believe the physical things, the gears that Edgerton Gear makes, have a chance of being included in the new heavens and the new earth, the new Jerusalem. I mean, this is Isaiah 60, where the nations are coming back into the city and they're not coming empty handed. They have physical, cultural goods. And if that doesn't inspire us to create not only with excellence, but in line with the character of our creator, God, man, I don't know what will. But all right, so all that said, I'm with you. Right. The eternal significance of our work is not just in saving souls, but we should be concerned about saving souls and more importantly, people understanding and grasping the gospel as their functional salvation day to day. Right. Not just their legal salvation. So I'm curious if you have seen evidence. I talk about this in my latest book, Master of One, that as we get masterful at our craft, it makes us just winsome to people. Like excellence is attractive to people. And a lot of times that can open up doors to share the gospel with words. Have you experienced that?

Absolutely. And I think that's why I'm even more passionate about understanding my actions, how I do my work, how I live, the quality, the commitment to excellence, the kingdom values of humility and trust and faith and love and all of those things really does attract people. It's like, wow, what is up with that? And so that excellence in everything we do is very attractive. And so it leads to questions. It leads to, how do you do life? How do you have this perspective? And when I came back to the family business, My gosh, it's 28 years ago now, there's 17 employees. There's what I would say, one believer, and he was a very angry Baptist and very angry. Okay, I had every person that shop.

I know this guy. I think I know this guy.

Yeah, Everybody that shot told me off in those first two years except one. And it wasn't the angry Baptist. He told me off Too. What I realized over the years, you, you know, my dad, the way he was being an angry atheist, my mom being devout, and everybody knew I worked in the church, they thought I was going to come back and beat him over the head of the Bible. And so I had to be very quiet about my faith and earn their trust by how I live my life, exhibiting integrity in everything we do. Everybody in the shop is on their own journey, right? Their own spiritual journey. And some guys, they're not ready to hear anything. They just need to see it before they do earn that trust. So over the years, there's been story after story, people just said, you know what? I didn't have any clue about God until I started working here. Now I'm interested. And from there all the way to just praying with guys because their faith has become the most important thing in their life. But it's not my job to convert people. It's not my job to share with them constantly. Our company is not a prison. We're not demanding that you have to believe certain ways. But I do demand that we have shared values in how we are committed to our customers and our product. And then their spiritual journey is really up to God.

So you talk about this in the book, this idea that as Christ followers engaged in work outside the four walls of the physical church, we have an opportunity, I think a unique opportunity to make people more like Christ, whether or not they have any interest at all in being like Christ. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

I'm in the unique position because I own the company. And whether you're a business owner or a manager or in any position of influence, and I think no matter what job, that we can all say we are in a position of influence. But in my role, one of my primary roles is to create culture, you know, to create the values and the beliefs and the assumptions that we all carry and how we're going to do business. And so by creating this culture that is kingdom based with these values, I treat people like, you know what, I don't care if you're a Christian or not, but you got to adhere to these values. And I think it's just like a sports coach or anybody, you call out the greatness of people, you challenge them to be more and more of who they are created to be. And my perspective on every person in the shop is they do have unique gifts and talents. My job is to be committed to their success, to help them to become who God really created to be, whether they realize that or not. And in so doing, I think business has phenomenal. It's a phenomenal opportunity and potential. People want that. I think there's a heart cry in all of us to live in a way that meets that inner desire to be great without being what the media says is great, but to be somebody who matters, who has a sense of purpose, and to do it in a community. As I often say, we're here for two reasons, and God puts into all of us a need for purpose and a need for quality relationships. And in a business, that is the ultimate. We have a purpose, a mission statement as a company and as a team. As a community, we have that opportunity to do that together, to support each other through all that.

Yeah. So speaking of purpose, in your book Good Work, you cite a Gallup poll that I frequently cite that found that 85% of workers globally are actively disengaged from their jobs. What's the church's unique solution to this problem?

Oh, boy, that's another great question, because I could go two ways on that.

Go both, feel free.

Well, I think the first thing we got to recognize is that churches fail miserably in really helping everybody that goes to church to realize that they are created for a purpose and they need to be out living in their jobs. You know, we don't. We're not called to save people in the church. We're called to love them into the kingdom and by doing. And the only way we do that is to meet people where they're at. And so if we cloister ourselves in our churches, in our fellowships, without engaging the world, we're ripping the world off what they need more than anything. And so we need to be out there living our jobs, whatever the job may be, with that sense of purpose that we have a deeper calling to do everything we can, to be agents of goodness and grace in everything we do. And that's how the kingdom spreads. So the church's responsibility for me, first of all, is to not only set people free, but kick them out into the world, you know, And I think there's a lot of fear. We need to withdraw from the world.

Boy.

We need to get them out the world. So that's the first part of it. The second part, if we together came to realize that's our mission, to be in the world together, we can really, I think, inspire people to go, whoa. So knowing God and following Jesus isn't just about going to church. I mean, he cares about the deepest part of who I am. And I think collectively, if we can gather outside of the church walls and together inspired and tell each other stories of how God is shaping and using and molding us and in our businesses and in our work to make a difference. This whole pandemic, I think is fascinating right now and it's heartbreaking in so many levels. But for the first time we're really having defined what's essential and what's not, which is really, really interesting to me because we put so much emphasis on the media and on being whether it's a rock star, music star, whatever. But now we're getting down to the basics of what is life really about. And all this self isolation and quarantining is really exposing man. I need each other, I need somebody, I need to be together. And so the church can really model that sense of deep community. I think a lot of people are really lacking.

Yeah, let me offer something on this topic. So here's the deal. Gallup says 85% of the globe's workers are disengaged. A huge chunk of that are Christians who are disengaged from their work. And I think all of us, Christian or not, who fall into 85% are falling for one of two false narratives about work. One is the narrative that says there's no meaning in work. Work is a meaningless means to an end to collect a paycheck and move on to the truly meaningful things in life. The other narrative, the other false narrative which may be more common today, is that work provides ultimate meaning and satisfaction and self worth. Either of which fails to accomplish the Lord's will for me personally and for the world at large. Right? And the only third way, the only true narrative for work is the biblical narrative of work, which celebrates a God who himself worked, but says that nothing other than Jesus Christ can provide your life with ultimate meaning and worth. But if the church doesn't get the biblical narrative of work, the rest of the world surely can't. Right. The purpose of work is glorifying God, loving neighbor, self, making disciples, creating for the kingdom. But if we don't get that, how in the world do we expect other people to grasp onto that? And I think that's what people need. They crave story. They crave a story. It's what Lewis was looking for early in his life. We were talking about George McDonald and how he changed C.S. lewis's life prior to recording. He was looking for that true master narrative to make sense of life, to make sense of work. I think that's what we're looking for. What would you say to that?

I couldn't say it better because I pouch it in terms of what I call the grand narrative. And this is, this is how we taught our kids about God. And rather than, you know, beating them over the head and saying, you got to memorize all these scriptures and just wrote memory, I want them to be captured by the grand narrative that we are all part of a bigger story and it goes way, way, way back. And miraculously, we are part of that. We are not an accident. All of our life experiences, all the hurts, the pains, whether it's family, friends, the gifts, the talents, God made us to be part of that big story. And I think you're right on, Jordan. Once the church can wake up and realize that's what we have to offer, that every person here does have a sense of purpose. We're put here for a reason. And how do you fit into that? And I think it takes a lot of conversation. I think it takes a lot of just mulling over, like being a gear maker. How in the world does being a gear maker serve the greater purpose of the kingdom? And I would love to see that with carpenters and plumbers and technicians of all kinds. And you know, whether, I mean, if you don't have that, you're right. What's the point of getting up, going to work in the morning?

Yeah. You want to make Christianity attractive to the world, give people a bigger story. My favorite line of your book, I underlined this like three times. Yeah. God invites us to be his ambassadors, his princes and princesses, to usher in the goodness of his kingdom. That's the story of, of work. I have a five year old, a three year old and a five month old girl. And those five year old and three year olds, they just want to be princesses. They sense this royal DNA running through their veins. And if you can help them connect that to God's story for their life and God's story for the world and the small role that they can play as actors in that grand narrative. Man, that will get them fired up about life, about work, about creating for the kingdom and. Hey, so last question before I ask my kind of three rapid fire questions. You know, Jesus spent the majority of his adult life doing blue collar work as a carpenter then, and I think this is such an underappreciated detail of scripture. At the resurrection, he appears to marry as another type of blue collar worker, a gardener.

Right.

Like, what significance do you assign or do you hope the modern church will assign to those historical facts about our Savior?

I think he's really validating that the kingdom comes through so many different occupations that are out there. And it's not an exclusive role for the religious professionals. But whether it's being a gear maker, whether it's being that gardener or the fisherman or whatever, they're all the same. And God wants to meet us where we're at in very, very powerful ways. And we are agents also of transformation and to be supercharged with his spirit, to see every aspect of our jobs, every aspect of our lives, to be those ambassadors, to be those princes and princesses, you know, to transform a bakery, to transform a gear shop. I think that's what God wants us to all of us to look at our occupations as this is very, very.

Powerful and not just the religious professionals. By the way, my most hated term in the church today is full time ministry or full time.

Is it?

I hate it so much. But I've struggled. But I've struggled with it because what do you call someone who is paid by a, you know, four wall church? I actually think you've come up with the best term so far. Religious professionals. That's a pretty good way of describing those roles.

So I think when we use that term full time, I completely agree. What are we all part time? Are we part time Christians? That's what we do.

Yeah. Jesus called us all to be full time missionaries. All right, Dave, so three questions I love to wrap up every conversation with. Number one, which books do you gift the most or recommend most frequently to others?

Okay, so the first one right off the bat, it might be a little bit weird, but the road back to you. I like weird Road back to you by Morgan Cron and Susan Stabile and the whole Enneagram thing. And I know some people are like, oh, the Enneagram thing? Well, to me it's pretty powerful because for the first time, my wife understands me a little bit better. In an Enneagram. I'm an eight. I'm a challenger, and it helps her understand my moods. But I find I'm attracting eights. Other men and women who are frustrated, they react strongly. Anger is always close to the surface. So that's just been a powerful book for people to go, oh, that's who I am and that's who I am. And I don't have to feel so bad about it because it also looks at the dark side of who we are. So I think that's a really powerful book. The other two books that I highly recommend. I gave some thought to this and I talked to you before we came on the air. George MacDonald the Fisherman's lady and the Marquis Secret, they're two back to back books, powerful stories of transformation from this little fisherman guy to being something so great and grand. And McDonald just really captures beautiful story of how we're just all agents of transformation and influence and very powerful ways, especially agents of grace. And that's what I love about his books, profit more than anything.

We. Yeah, we were talking about McDonald before we started recording. I don't think any of us would know CS Lewis if it wasn't for George McDonald. He had a profound impact on Lewis's life and helping. I actually think Lewis used this exact term in a letter to Tolkien or something like that. But for the true story, McDonald gave him a picture of the true story of life. So McDonald is great. Hey Dave, who would you most like to hear talk about these topics we've been talking about for the last hour about this topic of faith and work. Who do you want to hear talk about this?

Well, one of them that I already recommended to you, a buddy of mine named Andrew Campbell. He's one of the most phenomenally gifted woodworkers I've ever met, but he's also a deep theologian. He wrestles with life and with God and has wrestled with God in pretty amazing ways over the years. Then another guy I met recently, his name is John Silveria, he's a retired machinist and he has wrestled. He's a strong follower of Jesus and he's been trying to wake up our country in terms of to the world of manufacturing and the great crisis we're all facing with a retiring demographic where we don't have enough young people coming to the trades. And we've denigrated the trades and manufacturing to something less than worthwhile. And he's really trying to lift the standard up. And he's been trying to say this for a long time. So he'd be another really neat guy for you to talk to.

I love that. Dave, you're talking to an audience full of Christ followers trying to redeem every corner of creation for our king through their work, trying to do extraordinary work. What one piece of advice would you leave them with?

I thought about this one a lot for quite a while too. And two words, go deep. And the reason I say that is I think we really need to understand who God made us to be. Every person out there. Again, you are so unique. God has uniquely crafted you unlike anybody in the world. Right. And so when I say go deep, you need to get in touch with how he made you and why, what gifts and talents has he given you? Because you can influence the world like anybody, unlike anybody else. Right. You have your own unique sphere of influence that no one else in the world has. But the other reason we need to go deep is that we all have our dark side, like I mentioned before. And the best craftsmen, the best tradesmen that I know, they are in touch with themselves because I've seen some incredibly gifted people that are incredibly toxic and they self sabotage all their efforts and endeavors because they're impossible to live with and they are wrecking ball to everybody around them. So I think there's this really important thing to go deep, understand the good and the bad and bring the bad to God and allow him to transform you.

Dave, I just want to thank you for your incredible testimony and example. You are an inspirational and very practical example of how work can reveal the kingdom and the character of our king and everything that we do. Thank you for reminding the church of the dignity and worth of all good work. And thank you for the gift of this amazing book. As I said before, I don't think there's a ton of great faith and workbooks out there. I've got a collection of just 12 that I recommend and Good Work is one of them. And of course, if you're listening right now, you could find all of Those books@jordanraynor.com bookshelf Dave, thanks again for spending time with us today.

Oh, Jordan, thank you so much. I'm so excited about what you do and the message you're trying to get out there in the world desperately needs you, my friend. So thank you so much.

I know I said it on air, but I love Dave's book and after that conversation, I just, I love Dave Hatek, man. I hope we hear a lot more from him in the coming years. Thank you guys so much for tuning in to the Call to Mastery this week. I'll see you next time.