Writing a legacy letter to your father

"I wanted him in this liminal space. My goal was to irreparably break his heart for the poor of the world so he'd never just be a spoiled, complacent American ever – He'd always be haunted, because those years are so formative… I just wanted to get in there, God's heart for the poor."

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Jon Tyson

Jon Tyson is a Pastor and Church Planter in New York City. Originally from Adelaide, Australia, Jon moved to the United States twenty years ago with a passion to seek and cultivate renewal in the Western Church. He is the author of Rumors of God, Sacred Roots, A Creative Minority, The Burden is Light, and Beautiful Resistance. For the last 15 years Jon has lived in Manhattan with his family. He serves as the Lead Pastor of Church of the City New York.

Ministry Shout Out!

• Adventures in Missions
• Adventures in Missions is an interdenominational missions organization that focuses on discipleship. We emphasize prayer and relationships in our work around the world. Since we were established in 1989, we have taken over 115,000 people into the mission field, some for as short as a week and others for as long as a year or longer. We minister year-round through our ministry bases and strategic ministry partnerships. We believe that by giving people the opportunity to step outside their comfort zones and join what God is doing in other cultures and nations, lives are transformed. We seek to disciple as Jesus did; our vision is that God would use us to raise up a generation of radically committed disciples of Jesus Christ.
• Family Mission Trips: https://www.adventures.org/family-mission-trips/

Conversation Notes

• 3:42 – Statement from a friend who works at Barna that heavily influenced Jon's life, "The church has basically reached a point of irreversible decline statistically, and by radical discipleship of our children, what would be described as a historic revival the church is beyond human turnaround. So it's going to take an act of God and radical discipleship for our kids."
• 5:00 – "The summer of covid-19 has probably been the hardest season of my life, but I've seen the greatest answers to prayer in my entire life this summer as well."
• 5:28 – Thoughts on personal prayer life and for our kids. "Intercessory prayer for the places that we live, having a sense of call to shape a place through prayer, those are sort of the huge passions of my life and I think it's the number one thing most people want to do, but don't know how to do. And it's the thing the enemy attacks the most because it's where all the power and fruit lie."
• 7:58 – How to coach our kids to pray? Make Jesus as compelling as possible. Also, stewarding your own life of prayer and sharing those answers with your kids. And make prayer fun. "The goal of prayer is to get your kids to love Jesus and I think when you're a kid, making prayer as enjoyable as possible and having consistency over intensity."
• 8:19 – Dr. David Ireland. Jon Tyson's coach.
• 8:43 – Thoughts on having a coach, finding a coach, and what Jon has learned from that relationship and how it's changed his life.
• 11:11 – Reasons to have a coach – "I think everybody needs someone older speaking into what they do. It's it's quite often in midlife…you've got enough success, you've sort of built your own coping mechanisms, tactics… you're kind of like 'I can just keep it going… I've built a life [and] I can probably manage this thing out,' and I was just like I need to get better. The future's changing and as things grow I need to be more agile, so I need to get a different toolkit."
• 13:25 – How to recognize a mentor? "I think… we all need to know what are we deeply called to, and then we'll know when we have the right person to speak into our lives."
• 13:44 – The Primal Path: Raising a Son of Consequence
• 15:19 – Sharing about writing meaningful letters to important people in our life.
• 15:53 – His son's voluntary expression of gratitude and how it impacted him.
• 16:48 – Writing a letter to his dad to share with him what he got right.
• 17:52 – Richard Rohr – "Whatever pain is not transformed is transmitted." "We tend to break our kids in the same place that we are broken because we don't know a way through it."
• 19:48 The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me by Bruce Feiler
• 20:52 – The World Race
• 20:57 – Sharing about the experience for his son. "I wanted him in this liminal space. My goal was to irreparably break his heart for the poor of the world so he'd never just be a spoiled, complacent American ever – He'd always be haunted, because those years are so formative… I just wanted to get in there, God's heart for the poor."
• 21:51 – Book: The compound effect.
• 22:21 – Sharing the story of his son's finishing The Primal Path with a 33 day hike across Spain
• 23:49 – Parenting through social contracts – agreements around responsibilities, rights and privileges. Inspired by Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families
• 26:32 – Book: Parenting With Love And Logic by Foster Cline
• 27:18 – "We have a responsibility to take the beauty of Jesus and make him come alive in our kid's hearts."
• 28:03 – The Primal Path. "The missing piece in modern culture, designed to help you walk a kid from adolescence into adulthood."
• 29:11 – "Designed to create a sacred relationship and a sacred journey between his father and his kids to help them get into adulthood….if you don't initiate your kids and take them on a journey, they will self-initiate, often through tremendous harm, or the culture will initiate them….it's basically who's going to design the pathway of helping your kids figure out life?
• 30:11 – "I'm trying to disrupt toxic masculinity and reclaim as normal a formation pathway from adolescence into manhood."
• 30:23 – Pathway for his daughter – "50 Pieces of My Heart: 50 key deposits every father needs to make in his daughter's life."
• 30:50 – Jon's next book, Intentional Father, Outlines five kinds of dads:
  • Irresponsible dads – come in, get out, do nothing
  • Ignorant dads – don't know what they are doing and do damage
  • Inconsistent dads – torn with their own ambitions – often absent
  • Involved dads – our culture's version of a great dad
  • Intentional Father – believes it's the primary responsibility and builds a pathway based on who those kids are
• 32:33 – Sermon series around Altars. Message about the Home
• 32:54 – Most recent book: The Beautiful Resistance – Being a dad of conviction vs. compromise. "Part of it comes with a sense of sort of working through your own drama… and figuring out what it is that God's given you, understanding what faithfulness to Jesus looks like, and then fundamentally breaking the fear of man… I'm not going to give an account to our culture for my life, I'm going to give an account to Jesus and there's joy in having convictions and there's joy in keeping them."
• 34:24 – "Work out the convictions that God puts in your heart, convictions about discipleship, and then just don't care what people think. And it takes a lot of work and maintenance to not care what people think. And then to raise kids who are not controlled by the fear of man or the culture. You can't impart that if you don't have that. So there's a lot of soul work that you need to do to understand your own values and your own convictions and then be willing to literally go to war for them."
• 37:12 – "Maintain the emotional bond with your kid. Kids come out of the womb with an emotional bond. Cultivate it. Keep it. That's the most important principle. So whenever you want to do any of these things, there's a connection where they trust you and they see that it's worth it."

Conversation Links

• The Primal Path Course – Raise a son of consequence
• The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character (available Father's Day 2021)
• Beautiful Resistance: The Joy of Conviction in a Culture of Compromise

Jon's Altars Series

• The Heart
• The Home
• The Church
• The City

Jon Tyson

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• Church of the City New York

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