This is why 75% of coffee shop fails in their first year. In this video, I'm gonna cover the top five reasons why coffee shop fails in their first year so that in that way you can avoid them at all costs when building out your coffee shop. Make sure you guys keep watching. Hello friends, my name is Wilson, your friend in helping you build a profitable, small business and a thriving food business. How many of you guys are looking into creating a coffee shop right now? Let me know in the comments below.  They think it's easy, they think it's simple and they think it's laid back to do so. However, creating a successful cafe is way more than creating a good cup of coffee. You need to write business fundamentals and that's the reason why you have to pay attention to the top five most common reasons why coffee shops fail in the first year. Let's dive right in. The number one reason why coffee shop fails is because of poor management. When it comes to management, we're talking about management of staff. That means people are hiring other staff based on just availability. They're not hiring people based on values. When you don't hire based on values, what do you do? You end up inviting bad apples, which poisons all your good apples.   That means it's coming money out of your pocket. In addition to that, you're inviting a toxic environment in your culture. That means that these bad apples, they're gonna start talking and spreading rumors and that turns into higher turnover. What does turnover mean? That means these people are quitting because they don't enjoy the culture that they're in. They don't enjoy the place that they're working in. And this would cost you thousands of dollars in hiring new staff, training new staff, and it is just a really, really big reason why coffee shops fail in the first place. In addition to that, when you hire based on the wrong culture, what happens is that your staff is not happy. When they're not happy, when they're not fulfilled and satisfied, this translates to their interaction with your customers, thus giving your customers bad experience. All in all, when you invite the wrong people in your organization, specifically the ones that don't match your culture and your values, that's a really big problem why people fail in the first year. The next problem when it comes to management is the poor management of inventory. When you don't order enough ingredients, you don't have enough to sell, thus limiting how much you can make. Vice versa, if you over order, you're gonna have a ton of spoilage which increases your cost of goods sold. That means decreasing the money you take home in your pocket. That's the reason why having proper good inventory management is so important to make sure that you are making money in your coffee shop. And finally, when treating vendors, a lot of people mismanage their vendors because they see them as people that they pay. They don't see them as partners that they can grow with and thus they don't build a relationship with them. They don't treat them with respect. And thus, when these vendors have good stuff, they're not gonna send it your way. When you need help with them and when you need favors from them, they're not gonna help you out. And that's the reason why having proper vendor relationship is so important. Case in point, we have a very, very good relationship with our vendors who are supplying us with cups. A few years back, there was a strike within our own area and thus a lot of different bubble tea places didn't have cups to supply and to sell their bubble tea. But because we had an exceptional relationship with our vendors, the remaining stock that they have, we were able to get some of it which allowed us to keep selling our products. That's the reason why having a great vendor relationship is everything when managing your coffee shop. The second reason why Moe's coffee shop fail is because of bad location. When it comes to a coffee shop, it is really about the right location. A lot of times when you can secure a good location with high traffic, then the chances of likelihood of success is definitely much higher because with a coffee shop, this is all about a volume game. You're selling a very low ticketed item and that means you need a lot of traffic in order for you to be profitable, in order for you to pay for rent and labor. So if you do not have the budget to be located in a high density, high foot traffic area, then it really comes down to the characteristics of the neighborhood that you're in. Some characteristics that you need to pay attention to is the accessibility. Let's say if you're targeting high school or university school students, then you must be located near public transit. Let's say if you are targeting families, then you must be located in a place that is relatively safe. Let's say if you're located at a space where not a lot of residential people are, then who can you sell to? That's the reason why, especially in today's age, you must choose a location that has a high residential density. That means that a lot of people are living around that area, even though you don't have a lot of walk-by traffic, there's a lot of people living around that area. Thus, you can cater to them through third-party delivery apps. All in all, the secret to the right location is understanding the characteristics of your location and being able to play that to your strengths. If you have high foot traffic, then play that to your strengths. If you're in a neighborhood, then definitely play that to your strengths. So understanding this allows you to build the right product and allows you to serve your customer that much better. If you guys enjoyed this video and find value in this video, make sure you guys smash the like button and let me know this is the type of content that you enjoy. Now, back to regular programming. The third reason why most coffee shop fails is because they have no uniqueness. What do I mean by that? When they come into your coffee shop, what makes you different? Now, a lot of people are thinking about, hey, what makes us different is because we're convenient. We're cheaper. Well, I'm telling you, if I were to want cheap, if I were to want convenience, I can make instant coffee at home for only 20 cents. Why would I want to come to your coffee shop? You must provide an experience for me. You must provide something different that I cannot get anywhere else. What is that experience like? It could be something very magical when they come in. There's something new every time. It could be something that's like home away from home. You get this feeling of, wow, this is a very comfortable place, or this could be a very sophisticated place where you serve very specific coffee. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you choose. What matters is that you're occupying a specific mind space in your customer's eyes. And that's how you're gonna be able to get lots of customers coming through the doors. Now, when you're thinking about how do I create this mind space, and what are you talking about mind space? Well, we actually created an hour-long free masterclass which you can attend in the link below where I talk to you and share with you specifically how to create the mind space so that in that way, your customers will always choose you over your competitors. Definitely check it out in the link below. The fourth reason why most coffee shop business fail is because they don't know their numbers. So many people, they work super, super hard. They see money coming in, but at the end of the month, when they look at their bank statement, they're looking at $50 cash in their bank only, or even worse, in their reds. That's the difference between a successful businessman and one that is not successful, one that actually closes their coffee shop in their first year. Do you know your break-even rate? Do you know your turnover rate? Do you know your average order value? Just imagine for a second how many cups of coffee you need to sell if all you're making is 25 cents per cup of coffee. That's a lot of freaking coffee you need to sell. And that's the reason why you must know your numbers so then that way, you know which levers to pull on in order for you to make more money. As an example, you can introduce complimentary or replacement items such as bakery, spaghetti, food items, to-go items in order for you to be more profitable. That is one lever you can pull. As an additional lever, you can actually look at how much output per hour all your staff is doing. How much are they making per hour for you? And if you're not maximized, then definitely you can stagger their shift in order for you to save some money there. In addition to that, you can be a little bit more creative with your hours of operation. If in the first hour, all you're selling is only a couple cup of coffees and making a couple quarters, then perhaps you can actually cut those hours shorter.  As an example, when we first started our ice cream shop, we were selling $7 ice creams, but when we started to introduce a $2 cone, our volume went up by three times. And on top of that, it is much easier for us to create. Now when we were talking about this, you might be thinking, $7 ice cream must be making a lot more money than my $2 cones. It is actually not true. The profits that we make from a $7 ice cream versus a $2 ice cream is exactly the same. Because with a $7 ice cream, there was a lot of cost of goods sold. We need to pay for extra packaging, dry ice, extra toppings, and all this amounts to a big sum, which in turn we were only making a $1.50 out of the $7. Whereas when we're selling a cone, all we were selling was the waffle cone and the ice cream on top, and that was it. Thus the cost was substantially lower, us making a $1.50 on this different item. When we're selling two different items, yet both of them making the same amount of money, which one would you want to sell? Of course the $2 one because it is much more profitable. This is just an example of the levers that you can pull when you know your numbers. So definitely you must know your numbers and this is the foundation of creating any types of business.  And that's the reason why you should definitely check out this video where I dive deep into how to create a proper coffee shop business plan. We go through all the business foundation so then that way you can start off on the right foot. The fifth reason why most coffee shops fail in their first year is because of their mindset. The lack of learning and growth mindset that is required to succeed in today's world, especially with technology increasing and advancing so rapidly, we must always be in the forefront of seeing how we can serve our customers better, whether it's technology, whether it's menu offering, whatever the case is, we must always have that learning mindset. An interview that I highly recommend you to watch is my friend, Max Mooney, of how he started his coffee shop in Seattle. So definitely check it out. More things that you should learn from is to learn how to market. Learn the latest strategies to marketing and reaching your customers, whether that be email marketing, whether that be Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, SMS marketing, these are all things that are constantly evolving so then that way you can better serve your customers. Another thing that you can definitely look at is to be involved in this industry and be involved in the communities, who are actually giving you tons of value. So definitely being in the right mindset for growth and learning is very important for you to succeed in this industry. So there you go friends, the top five reasons why most coffee shops fail in their first year. These are the items that you must avoid at all costs if you wanna create something that is successful, something that you and your family can be proud of. And that's the reason why we created this free masterclass in the link below which you can attend. This is a higher expansion of everything that we talked about today. We expand on how you can define your values.   You can actually start to connect with your customers so whether you have a bad location, a good location, you can have people that support you over your competitors all the time. And lastly, we're gonna expand into digital trends. We're gonna expand into different marketing trends that is working in the world out there. So then that way you can explode in revenue. Definitely check it out in the masterclass that is in the link below. Once again, I really hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you guys do, hit the like button. Otherwise, I'll see you guys in the next video.


Hey guys, welcome back to The Nova Show, it's your host International Nova and today we've got some cool music news and an update on the freedom partner spotlight. So let's get right to it. Now today's news is just been announced that Vivo has acquired Video Discovery app, Show You. Now the app Show You is a subscription based video streaming platform that helps users find video content that might appeal to them. Now Show You offers a wide selection of video content from creators like NASA TV, Reddit, ABC News and many others. Now with this move it seems that Vivo is setting itself up to be able to compete with platforms like YouTube Red and Spotify. Now in other news, Tunecore has been hacked. Now this past Friday the company did announce that it was hacked and the breach compromised a lot of custom information such as usernames, passwords, customer phone names, email addresses and physical mailing addresses. Now Tunecore did announce as well that no music was compromised as well as no billing information such as credit cards. Now it might be a good time to remind you guys we do have our own music label here and our own music distribution company called Beat. That might have been a cheap plug but now in other news Apple has quadrupled its iTunes match cloud space to 100,000 songs. Apple has confirmed the bump to 100,000 songs from the previous 25,000 of cloud music storage it offers on iTunes match and Apple music. And in other news Adele has again sold over 1 million copies this past week. Adele's album 25 continues to sell at an amazing rate selling another 1.1 million copies this past week. Now before we go I do want to update you guys on the Freedom Partner spotlight. A lot of you guys have asked to be spotlighted on the Nova show and we have no problem doing that. The only guideline is you have to be a music channel to be featured on the Nova show. Please continue to post your music on the comment section below I want to check you guys out and hopefully feature you on the Nova show. Now that's it for today's episode tune in on Friday for the next Freedom Partner spotlight. Until then you guys take care.


Hi everyone, I'm Puneema. I work as a software engineer for Intel. So here's my co-presenter, Sharath Kumar who is also a senior software engineer working for Intel. Let me share my presentation. So we are going to present about secure device onboard on Starling X. Here is the agenda of the presentation. We talk about briefly the Starling X architecture, we go through what exactly this DOE is, and then we talk about the integration and development steps that we have taken in order to support this SDO on Starling X, and we end this presentation with a demo. Starling X. Starling X is a complete Cloud infrastructure software which runs on the edge used by the most demanding applications in the field of industrial IoT, telecom, video delivery, etc. This is the architecture diagram of Starling X that we have. Starling X can be deployed on a bare metal or it can be deployed as a VM over the host machine. Here you can see a base Linux host OS is there. On top of it, we have CentOS and which supports Kubernetes-SEF-collect delivered. Kubernetes is basically for container platform, set for storage, collective for logging mechanism, and the work for VM. There are so many components which we have not shown in this architecture diagram. On top of this, we have, the Starling X have developed infrastructure services. We call it as flock services. The first one is a configuration management, which is basically used for installation, nodal configuration, inventory management, etc. For management, it is used for setting, getting and snoozing the alarm for the customers. It also provides a framework for other services, for basically for alarming and conveying the information to that bin. Host management is basically used for life cycle management of the host, and service management it provides the status of all active and passive services running on Starling X, and software management. It is used for, basically for software update. And one more thing to notice is that Starling X also supports open source projects. For example, open stack is deployed as a Kubernetes workflow on Starling X. That's how we have it here. And Starling X is very easy to deploy. It is having low-touch manageability. That is, we have, we provide a feature of fast recovery and then rapid response to the event. This is all about Starling X and SDO. SDO stands for Secure Device Onboard. It is also an open source project which is in the process of becoming industry standard through FIDA Alliance. Open source, it's open source project. SDO stands for Secure Device Onboard, as I told before. It is a process in which the device securely onboards to its target platform cloud service. When I say onboard, it is the first time the device establishes its secure contact with target platform service, which also lies on the cloud. And here, the first thing you'll notice is that on the manufacturing side, the OEM or the OEM does two things. So first thing is the root of trust, which is in the form of silicon for Intel devices, which can be ECDSA for ARM-based devices. And one more thing that he also generates is an ownership voucher, which is in the form of digital format, which contains the details of device and also the manufacturer details. And second thing is that this ownership voucher travels across the devices through the supply chain. We haven't shown in this diagram. So until it reaches the target platform, and this orchard.json file usually it will be, it will be rolled onto the cloud service. The same information is synchronized with the renderer server. That's how the renderer server will get to know the information of the device and also about its ownest target platform. And now the renderer server waits for the device to boot come. And the device reaches the phases of installation. It gets powered on. The only information it knows is the information IP address of the renderer server. It goes and contacts the renderer server. And renderer server authenticates the device using the owner.json and device as well authenticates. And it knows about renderer server, then it's no need. And after this authentication, the device contacts the target platform using the IP address provided by RV service. And here also mutual authentication takes place between these two agents. How it does is using the orchard information and using the root of trust which is there in the device. After a secure terminal establishes between these two agents, the payload required for provisioning the devices will be transferred. This payload can be as simple as a password or it can be a bundle of software which is required for the device to do its role further after the installation. So this is all about the overview of STO. Let's move on to the integration. And this is just an example supply chain use case that I have put. So you can see that renderer server which for this presentation, we'll be running on Starling X and then we show it. And our next step was that IoT platform service also to run on Starling X and show. This is the future plans that we have. And coming to the integration step, the first thing that we need to do is to fetch the binary drop from the STO product. And the link is provided over here. Container is the RV service and deployed on the Starling X. And one more work that is involved is the maintenance. So whenever there is a new drop we need to redeploy it on the Starling X. So when we started this work, so we had so many questions like if the RV service which is already working core on the Docker swarm, so what exactly are we doing? Being ourselves as a beginner, so we had this question, what is Docker form? What is Kubernetes? Why we are having this conversion? If we are doing this porting, how are we doing? So during our journey, we learned the Docker swarm. It is only suitable for smaller, simpler and more straightforward deployment. And Kubernetes, which actually very scalable used at the enterprise level and it supports many other features with a swarm doesn't support, even though it is very easy to understand Docker swarm and Docker compile format that Docker swarm supports. And one method that comes in handy is to use K-compose, but using this, you get a lot of deployment file and it is easy to get over hemmed and leave the task because there are so many files that get generated. To get started, what I recommend is to go through the Docker-compose and see what work is involved. And this is the file we had initially. So you can see that we have a server, so it has its own secret files. It has its configuration. We have this network information for the RV service. So the configs and secrets were very straightforward for the conversion. We just cured volume support from the Kubernetes. And then the difference was only the syntax and I have put it in the backup if you are interested, you can go through. The most important thing was network. So our colleague, Sharath Kumar will be discussing more on the network part, how we did the porting work. Sharath, over to you on this. Thanks, Puneema. So I would like to discuss like the basic background networking drivers, what we used in Starling X, which is taken from the existing Docker swarm. So by default, Docker swarm uses overlay network driver for its cluster, right? And that was a challenge for us to convert that driver to a Kubernetes native driver. And in the Starling X, we're using Calico which is a default network driver, which will be available for deploying your pod or services or it could be deployment. So this was a simple example where we're comparing Apple to Apple with the swarm drivers, network drivers with the Kubernetes existing drivers for the Starling X platform. When you see this deployment file of service for the Kubernetes, you can start with APA version, V1 which will be the version for deploying services. So the kind of the category where second length states that this deployment is about service deployment. Further going forward, at least we need to understand what is service is all about, right? So when pods are created or when it's workloads are created in the form of pods for any Kubernetes application, it will be like deployed any node. So as a end user, how you access that? So for that, you need some kind of end points where you can access those pods or the respective IP address of the pods then service is the solution. Service is nothing but combination of IP address along with the port. So this how each individual pods can be accessed across anywhere and it could be any number it can be searchable under the Kubernetes cluster by using service as well as labels. So then going forward the metadata like for the deployment of service you have to give some name, right? Otherwise how we can troubleshoot or how we can access those services. So the naming part is here actually under metadata. And the last and not least final piece is like spec the specifications for the Kubernetes deployment. And service has a two type of support, right? For the access part. One is a node port which actually provides access externally to the pod. But the second one was cluster IP where inside the node you can communicate or you can access the different pods communications. So, but for how here like sure we want to access the parts of the SDO applications across the multiple nodes. Then cluster IP will be not the solution. So we are accessing default as a node port. Then we are providing some port information where we can access the port by providing 8000 as a external and internal port where communication can be happened. And they're providing a node port as a 30,007 where the external users can access the pod from any node of the cluster. So this is the overview of the network of the existing Starling X integrated with SDO. Thanks for your time over to Koneva. Yeah. Thanks Sheriff for that quick explanation. It was very good and helpful. And this is how the diagram it looks like when we deploy these Kubernetes resource file on Starling X all in one setup. So you can see that this is how the external world sees it. This is IP address of the node and then the port it wants to listen to. And then the RV service which is having backend as Redis and is managed by a DB manager. And one thing we want to tell is a troubleshoot that we did in order to have this successfully running on Starling X is that when we run it for the first time it was creating crash waiting for the DB manager. The problem was that the container of Redis and then RV service were part of single pod. So this was causing synchronization issue. So what we did is to have this in it in it to wait for the Redis server to come up and then RV service to come up. And these are the commands for deploying and then to see the locks. And this is the resultant Kubernetes resource file that we have. And this is a snapshot that we have taken after running it successfully on Starling X and this is a last time RV service. And this is how the entire architecture would look like after the deployment. And yes, so we have successfully launched RV service on Starling X. Now comes the questions when you have many services when you want add many environment variables it's not easy with one cube control apply and then deployment file having so many environment variables it become very cumbersome. So we need, we also need to increase our knowledge and use a facility that the open source provides. So in that regard we have done this Helm chart creation. Yes, what exactly is Helm chart? Helm is a Kubernetes package manager which is similar to DNF that we see which runs on Fedora. If you want to do a quick comparison it is like just like DNF is a RPM package manager. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes resources. We come across world call as chart in the case of Helm. So that is nothing but the Kubernetes packages. There's nothing big thing over here. And this chart can be uploaded onto the central repository just like we do for Docker images. And this is just a comparison table that I've put in order for the user to get understanding of Helm. And this is the folder structure that gets created whenever we do Helm install. The first one is chart.ml, then template and then value.ml these three are very important. The rest of them are not concentrating because not important it is not mandatory to have. And one important thing to notice is that as you go on increasing your skill sets you can actually use chart which tells about the dependency between the charts. And to begin with this chart.ml template and values.ml is you know, and what we have done we just showed your server service.ml file that we had put in template. Whatever environment variables, the configuration and the secrets we put it under value.ml and chart.ml just the information about the chart and what it does. And these are the important commands to keep in mind. So obviously we should have Helm and Kubernetes on the styling case which is there already it provides it. And Helm lint is very useful for checking the syntax and for debugging you can use this particular command I have put over here you can actually package it and then install using this package or you just keep the path of the chart and here done. And this is how we successfully deployed the RV service which is one of the entities for the STO to happen successfully. And now coming to the demo. This is the environment setup that we have for the development purpose. We just use a simplex setup where the controller, computer and storage is on the single node and we have manufacturer supply chain toolkit on our development machine. Same goes for the virtual device which comes as part of customer reference implementation and IoT platform service which is also on our development machine. The only thing to notice is that very important thing is that end of our service which runs on the styling case. Let's see how we do it. So we're gonna play a video of it for the interest of time. Yeah, let's see it. So the first thing as I told before is the device initialization. You can see it, the device is there. And then I'm going to use a manufacturer CTK which I've set up already. So I need to give the port address of the RV service to the devices. So this can be done using the MySQL commands using the workbench. And then we see how this happens. So I'm gonna fast forward this a bit to show you the, so this is a MySQL workbench. You can see that I'm going to add the IP address of the renderer server and also the IP address of the starting X to the renderer server. And I'm gonna execute this command. This is how the virtual device will know where it's RV service is lying. So you can see that the command is executed successfully now. And then this is the device that I have which comes as part of customer reference implementation. At the end, you can see the highlighted one is the IP address of the manufacturer. This is how the connection between the manufacturer and the virtual device happens. So now I'm going to execute this executable. So I have run this executable and then you can see that at the end the device initialization successful is coming. So as part of it, you can see that the third line from the bottom is the GUID which is a unique ID which is generated as process as a end result of device initialization. And then the third line from the beginning is a serial ID of the device. These two are important for the next process in the demo to carry out. So the next thing is that, so whenever we have a customer, I told that the information about the customer will be stored in the voucher. So you can see that yellow flag is a voucher.json. And then I need to assign this device to the customer. So once again, I'm going to use a manufacturer SDK and then MySQL workbench to do it. So let's do it. So I'm going to fast forward a bit, yeah. And then you can see it here. So I'm assigning the device to the customer. So as part of it, I have copied the serial ID of the device and the EP owner ECRASA is the public key of the customer which I've generated it and kept already. And then when I execute this MySQL command, it's like assigning the device to the customer. So I'm done with it. So next, what do I do? So the next thing which should happen is that I need to give the voucher information to the IoT platform device management service. So before that, get this owner.json from manufacturer SDK. Let's do how I do it. So you can see here that in the link, I have <IP_ADDRESS>. This is where the manufacturer is running and the wording sees the owner.json content. So it basically has a device information and also about the customer. So now I'm going to copy this and put it under IoT platform SDK. Let's see, I'm going to fast forward it. So I'll come back to the terminal. So you can see it, SDO IoT platform under devices, I would create a folder which is having the name of GUID of the device and put the owner information over here. This is how the cloud service will get enough about the details of the device. Yes. So now let's run our RV service on Starling edge. For that, I am going to copy SDO on prime onto the all-in-one simplex setup. So I have executed it successfully. You can see that parts and then services are running already. So now let's move on to our IoT platform. You can see that it has started coming RV service. So now what we should do is, we should run TO0 scheduler which actually does synchronization of information between the RV service and the device target platform. That is how the RV service will get to know the device and its owner. So I'm running over here. So this is when the RV service and then the device will talk to each other. So you can see that it's a failure because RV service doesn't know that IoT platform is there. So we need to add this as part of white listing of RV service. So that I did it. So we need to execute TOO scheduler again. So you can see it is failed and then I have executed the command. Sorry. So you can see that second time it is getting executed. So let me fast forward to see the end result. Yeah. So this is second time the TOO scheduler happens and it is successful. So I didn't forward it correctly. Probably this time I'll do it. Yeah. So you can see that TOO0 is done successfully and then now we will move on to executing other protocols that is TO1 and then TO2. And then now I have to power on the device. That means that I need to execute the device. So you can see I have come to the device and then execute it and then start running other services. So this is the device, give the GUID and then run other services. So you can see the device onboarding has begun now. So there is something called OCS and OPS which does it. This is, this have run. Yeah, this is the logs from OPS which is responsible for TOO2 protocol. That is the conversation between the IoT platform and the device. And now let's see what happens on the OCS side. Yes. On the device log if you see, right? So you can see the device is onboarded successfully and then you can also see I am listing out the files that are downloaded. So you can see that payload.bin as I told before will come. So this is all about the demo. This is how the demo process happens with the RV service running on starting X. And this is the reference that we have. And yes, this ends the demo. So please join the community if you still have any questions you can ping me on the IRC. This ends the demo and thank you for listening. Bye.


The Peace of Christ to all of you. Greetings from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. My name is Drew Straits and I teach New Testament here at AMBS. I want to warmly welcome you to this short seminar titled, Political Idolatry, Countering Christian Nationalism. I'm a follower of Jesus who is deeply concerned that white Christian nationalism presents an immediate threat, not only to democracy in the United States, but also to the church's public witness. The church is desperate for spaces like this to define Christian nationalism, share corporate wisdom, and to ask so what questions? What should we do? How can we mobilize a social movement of Christians against Christian nationalism?  Over the last two years, really since 2020, a number of books have been written by historians, sociologists, some lawyers, and a few scholars of religion that deconstruct what white Christian nationalism is, where it came from, and how we got here. This work of deconstruction is so important because it helps us to name the parts of Christian nationalism that are incompatible with the life and teachings of Jesus. It helps us to understand what the objects of our resistance are. As someone who trains pastors and leaders, though, I'm a bit concerned that we are behind the ball on questions of reconstruction. What does effective and realistic everyday strategies of resisting and disorienting white Christian nationalism look like? What does a protest movement look like that bears witness to the nonviolent gospel of peace? I won't pretend to have my finger on the pulse of a comprehensive solution. At the end of the day, we need an interdisciplinary, ecumenical, multi-generational, multi-actor peace-building movement in order to interrupt Christian nationalism's influence. No singular personality cult pastor, celebrity scholar, or theologian can fix the problem before us. Either we are in this together or we are not in it at all. Before I discuss some action steps for challenging Christian nationalism, I want to invite us into a posture of prayer and lament. This is a moment where the church needs to show up. It is also a moment that the church needs to own. With that in mind, let's go before God and pray this prayer by Walter Bregman from his book, Prayers of a Privileged People. This is a prayer that has become very important to me since 2015. Let's pray. We name you King Lord Sovereign. We trust you except sometimes we do not. We take matters into our own hands. We fashion power and authority and sovereignty enforced by law and bureaucracy and weapons. We think to make ourselves safe. And then learn staggeringly how insufficient is our product, how thin is our law, how ineffective is our bureaucracy, how impotent are weapons.  Care for land, care for neighbor, care for future. We name you King Lord Sovereign. So undemocratic. And in naming become aware of your status, of our status before you. Loved, sent, summoned. We pray in the name of the loved, sent, summoned Jesus. Amen. The first thing that Christians against Christian nationalism can do to disorient and interrupt Christian nationalism is to break our silence. Silence is compliance. Silence and deference toward theologies of oppression is not an effective strategy of resistance. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in his speech, The Trumpet of Conscience, in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Silence before injustices in the world is a form of complicity in those injustices. And when we break our silence, we increase the visibility of those parts of Christian nationalism that are incompatible with the Gospel of Christ. As Jamar Tisby writes, the subtler threat of Christian nationalism is a kind of ubiquity that leads to invisibility. For so many white Christians, Christian nationalism isn't Christian nationalism. Rather, it's just Christianity. People don't even see it, and that's the deadliest threat. So we are facing a bit of a double-edged sword here. On the one hand, Christian nationalists think that Christian nationalism just is Christianity. On the other hand, the non-Christian watching world looks at Christianity and all it sees is white Christian nationalism. The next thing we need to do is to define Christian nationalism. This is crucial because it's impossible to resist something unless you can name the objects of your resistance. Or as Kimberly Crenshaw writes, where there's no name for a problem, you can't see a problem. And when you can't see a problem, you pretty much can't solve it. I want to be absolutely clear today that the problem that we are trying to solve is named white Christian nationalism. And it's impossible for us to resist it unless we can understand what it is. Thankfully, in 2020, two sociologists named Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry published a remarkable book called Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States. Whitehead and Perry's book is the first sociological, data-driven analysis of white Christian nationalism in the United States. In other words, it's not just the latest musings of what a theologian or historian thinks white Christian nationalism is. It's actually an argument built on fact-based, scientific-based evidence, real-time data from the Baylor Religion Survey. If you have not had time to read this book, I encourage you to get yourself a copy if you want to learn more about what white Christian nationalism is. Or if you don't have time to read it, I also wrote a comprehensive review of it that is on Scott McKnight's blog with Christianity Today. I wrote that review specifically for pastors, leaders, and organizers if you Google my name and the title of their book, it should come up. I encourage you to read that if you want to know more. Whitehead and Perry define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework, a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. The Christianity of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion. As we will show, it includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. Here's the key part. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious. In other words, for white Christian nationalists, their ethnoracial identity is interrelated and overlapping with their partisan political allegiances and also their religious identity. According to Whitehead and Perry, there are four responses among Americans to Christian nationalism. The first group are what they call rejectors. This comprises 21.5% of American society. The next group is what they call resistors of Christian nationalism. This group comprises 26.6% of American society. The third group is what they call accommodators of Christian nationalism. This is the biggest group. It comprises about 32.1% of U.S. society. And the fourth group are ambassadors of Christian nationalism, and they comprise 19.8% of U.S. society. According to Whitehead and Perry, key predictors of ambassadors are identification with political conservatism. Belief in the Bible is the literal word of God, religious practice. They believe the founding fathers are Christians, even though this idea has been proven to be mostly a myth by scholars like Mark Knoll and John Faya. They believe that America is on the brink of moral decay. They believe that God requires the faithful to wage war for good. Only 16% of them reside in cities, and ambassadors tend to believe in the rapture at the end of history. In my mind, some of the most significant takeaways from taking America back for God are this. Whitehead and Perry offer us more definitional clarity for us to understand what Christian nationalism is and what its value systems are. Second, they show that white Christian nationalism is not strictly about religious revival, but rather about political power, boundaries in us versus them, boundaries in order. Most provocatively, they show that ambassadors in particular tend to be religiously disconnected from faith communities and at odds with biblical values like hospitality, peace, and justice for the poor and oppressed. What do we do with that? Many Christian nationalists are not consistently even participating in a faith community and live a life or a set of values that are often at odds with teachings from the biblical narrative, especially those of the life and teachings of Jesus. In addition, Whitehead and Perry show that among Christian nationalists, one does not have to go to church or hold to Orthodox Christian beliefs to be a Christian nationalist. In other words, there's a kind of secularization among some very conservative purported Christians here in the United States of America. They show that Christian nationalism gravitates toward nativism or an anti-immigrant ideology, xenophobia, a fear of strangers. Their data suggests that they strongly gravitate toward white supremacy and in some more extreme cases among ambassadors, participation in the white power movement, homophobia, militarism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. So how did we get to this place? How did we get to a place where the crucified, border-crossing, neighbor and enemy-loving Jesus has been transformed into this whitewashed, militaristic, xenophobic, Rambo-like Jesus? Rainn Wilson, otherwise known as Dwight Schrute from The Office, tweeted something to this very idea a few years ago on Twitter. He wrote that the metamorphosis of Jesus Christ from a humble servant of the abject poor to a symbol that stands for gun rights, prosperity theology, anti-science, limited government that neglects the destitute and fierce nationalism is truly the strangest transformation in human history. So how did we get here? Historians have been able to trace much of this back to evangelicalism in the 20th century and other movements that go even deeper into United States history. But there are other more modern things that have taken place that have proliferated bad theology. To be sure, I think we need to have some hard conversations about social media in the church. One in five Americans affirm QAnon conspiracy theories and so do one quarter of evangelicals. In fact, research shows that misinformation spreads six times faster than true information on the internet. During the 2016 election, the top 20 fake news articles on Facebook generated more clicks than the top 20 real articles from every major publication combined. According to psychologists, fake news distorts the truth because it reinforces a human tendency to accept information that affirms our beliefs. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. Fake news is especially good at evoking confirmation bias when paired with information overload or what some call data saturation or high volumes of articles that have been shared hundreds and thousands of times with thousands of likes and thumbs up. This is an excellent way at leveraging confirmation bias because it can cause the brain to process information with the emotion centers of the brain rather than those involved in the reasoning or logic centers of the brain. In addition to this, this can stimulate a dopamine rush that can create an addiction, an online addiction to sharing misinformation, fake news, and that can ultimately radicalize people's psychologically speaking. Another study recently came out by a group of psychologists with the proceedings of the American Political Science Review. They showed that Americans tend to share disinformation not because they are uneducated or misinformed, but rather because they hate their ideological opponents. Pastorily speaking here, this is of significant concern. How are congregants in our churches using social media? Is social media radicalizing them? Is it being used to psychologically manipulate their brains into dark corners of the internet with disinformation and theologies of oppression, theologies that are incompatible with the life and teachings of Jesus? In addition to social media, we need to have some hard conversations about structural problems in our society that are stimulating radicalization. For those of you who don't know, neoliberalism is the word we use to talk about the governing philosophy of our time. Neoliberalism has created a pervasive culture of income inequality, hustle culture, personal branding, gig economy, and pressure to create the entrepreneurial self. I won't pretend that I have immunity from all of these social pressures in our society. This is truly a pervasive phenomenon that influences all of us. Bruce Rogers Vaughn recently wrote a book called Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. Rogers Vaughn is a theologian whose specialty is psychotherapy. He talks about the three orders of suffering in the history of the world and talks about a third order of suffering that is induced really and stimulated by the neoliberal order. The first order of suffering is the human condition, death, grief, separation, illness, natural disaster, physical pain, so on and so forth. The second order of human suffering is human on human evil, war, robbery, sexualized violence, murder, etc. The third order of suffering according to Rogers Vaughn is depression, anxiety, addiction, intense shame, and personal failure. He writes that the people I now see tend to manifest a far more diffuse or fragmented sense of self, are frequently more overwhelmed, experience powerful forms of anxiety and depression too vague to be named, display less self-awareness, have often loosened or dropped affiliation with conventional human collectives, and are increasingly haunted by shame rooted and a nebulous sense of personal failure. How do we deconstruct these structures that are causing harm and reconstruct human collectives where we can all flourish amidst difference? Can the Church enter into these kinds of spaces and empower us in our disarray, in our stress, our addiction, and anxieties to live a life of flourishing with God and with neighbor? Also in acknowledging these structures, can we become more empathetic toward those who've been commodified by the neoliberal order including some Christian nationalists? And in becoming empathetic, can our empathy disorient the ideologies of hate and xenophobia that fund white Christian nationalism? The next thing we can do to challenge white Christian nationalism publicly is to talk about political idolatry. In ancient Judaism, idolatry was something that happened in the mind of the worshiper. It was not something that happened in your heart, rather it was a form of what Moshe Halbertal and Abishai Margallit call cognitive error. They write that idolatry is perceived first and foremost as an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshiper, thereby internalizing sin. An idol, then, is an object of power that co-ops our theological imagination, distorts our knowledge of God, and ultimately leads us into what the rabbis called avodah-zorah, or strange worship. In this sense, Christian nationalism is a worldview where one's theological imagination has been co-opted by state power. It is a form of strange worship. Over the last couple of years, the Department of Religion at the University of Alabama collaborated with the the Smithsonian Museum of American History to archive images and videos from the January 6th insurrection. I've spent many hours studying these images, and I have been profoundly jarred by how many of the insurrectionists are praying to Jesus and worshiping Jesus as they laid siege to the center of American democracy. This archive of images and videos can be found at a website called Uncivil Religion, and I've got a QR code here for you to link to it if you want to go look at some of these images and videos on your own. This passion for praying to Jesus as insurrectionists laid siege to the U.S. Capitol is especially present on the floor of the Senate when the now famous horn-studded shaman started praying to Jesus Christ on the floor of the Senate chamber. I actually transcribed this prayer in a video and I want to read it together right now. As I'm reading it, I want to ask this question. If idolatry is an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshiper, then who are these insurrectionists praying to? I mean this as a serious theological question. The shaman prayed, Jesus Christ, we invoke your name. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for gracing us with this opportunity for this opportunity to stand up to our unalienable rights. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into this building, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation and not theirs. That we will not allow the American way of the USA to go down. Thank you, divine, omniscient, and omnipresent Creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, with your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots who love you and that love Christ. Thank you for blessing every one of us who is here now. Thank you, divine Creator God for surrounding us with divine, omnipresent white light of love, protection, peace, and harmony. Thank you for allowing the USA to be reborn. We love you and we thank you. In Christ's holy name we pray, amen, to loud cheers among these insurrectionists on the Senate floor. If you have the space and time, I encourage you to actually pause the seminar at this time and discuss with one another what stands out to you in this prayer. What disturbs you about this prayer? What actually sounds familiar to you in this prayer? Feel free to do that now if you have the space and time. To understand idolatry, we need to go back to the biblical narrative. In the biblical narrative there are two metaphors for idolatry. The first is the marital metaphor of idolatry. This is the metaphor of idolatry that dominates the ways that we conceptualize idolatry today. In the marital metaphor, the threatening third party is another God. It is the worship of another God. The political metaphor, on the other hand, is much more complex and is not one we are particularly familiar with in the church today. In the political metaphor, the threatening third party are kings or queens, political authorities and sometimes even their bureaucrats, institutions including the military, economy, or even taxation. In fact, during the life of Jesus, a sectarian Jewish movement broke out called the fourth philosophy. The fourth philosophy believed that even the act and gesture of paying taxes to the emperor was an act of political idolatry, something encroached on God's sovereignty. The threatening third party in the political metaphor can also be royal ideologies, discourses of power and oppression. If we are going to map out these metaphors, the marital metaphor is very binary. It is very black and white. God, the husband, is in an exclusive covenantal relationship with Israel the wife. This is a very patriarchal metaphor and sometimes even a misogynistic one according to some passages. Israel or the wife commits adultery or betrayal against God the husband when she worships a third partner or worships another God. So this model is very binary and black and white. The political metaphor on the other hand is triangular and much more complex.  The political metaphor, though, is especially complex because there is no need for a third party or to worship another God to create a situation of disloyalty. Rather, the subject does not have to transfer the sovereignty of God to another person. He or she can actually just take it by herself or even divide up God's sovereignty and power to their peers or bureaucrats or political system. This introduces the problem of deification. As Moshe Halberthal and Avesheimer Gallant write, the biblical problem with a powerful person is how to prevent the tendency toward hubris and pride and thereby self-deification. One way from managing royal hubris in the Old Testament was what we call the Deuteronomic Law of the King. When Israel was transformed into a monarchy from a theocracy the Deuteronomistic historian, the author of the book of Deuteronomy wrote the Law of the King in Chapter 17. In the Law of the King, the Deuteronomist prescribed the king from accumulating weapons, women and wealth and every day the king was to read this law daily in order to not exalt himself above other members of the community. That's actually a pretty powerful metric I think, maybe even for some of our modern politicians. What are their attitudes toward women, towards weapons and wealth? Maybe this could be a helpful metric for determining one's fitness for office even in our modern context. So the question before us is what are you thinking about the political metaphor of idolatry is this? When does our loyalty to political institutions betray our loyalty to Jesus in God's kingdom and lead to strange worship? In other words, how exclusive is the reign and rule of Jesus Christ? And at what point does loyalty to a political system become an act of betrayal? What are the reasons for understanding this relationship between loyalty to Jesus and loyalty to state power? I'd like to suggest that strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power distorts our exclusive loyalty to the life and teachings of Jesus. Strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power inspires and or legitimates harm toward our neighbor. Strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power sees the state rather than the unarmed multicultural church as the primary context for Christian action and witness. Strange worship and betrayal happens when pledging loyalty to the state critically inverts the value we place on our baptismal identity. In fifth, strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power stimulates a hierarchical ethnoracial caste system. Put another way, when our ethnoracial identity like when whiteness or white supremacy becomes our controlling narrative we create an ethnoracial hierarchy in society that is incompatible with the way of Jesus and the way of the early church. So our question as Christians against Christian nationalism is this. How do we disorient erroneous desires for power, boundaries and order? How do we challenge political idolatry? One way we can do that is by telling the whole story of Jesus Christ. By talking about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus including the teachings of Jesus so that we can animate publicly the ways that following Jesus is incompatible with the values of white Christian nationalism. I have some discussion questions for you. The first question is this. Where do you see Christian nationalism in your community? Why is it important to be able to define and understand Christian nationalism? What is one feature of Christian nationalism that most troubles you? How do we reorient Christian nationalist lives around the life and teachings of Jesus in a church body? This question is especially significant knowing that many ambassadors and possibly even some accommodators are not consistently even participating in a church body. As you know by now there's a spectrum of attitudes and postures toward white Christian nationalism. With that mind I encourage you to take on a posture of curiosity, a posture of empathy and a posture of assertiveness as you are discussing these questions in your own context. Also of course a posture of neighborly love. If you have interest in going deeper on some of these so what questions, next year I will be teaching a four week short course through AMBS's Church Leadership Center from April through May 9th. The title of this short course is Resisting Christian Nationalism with the Gospel of Peace. I'm seeing this short course as a kind of summit for pastors, congregants, leaders and organizers to come together to share corporate wisdom to dig deeper into the biblical narrative to think critically about ways that we can challenge white Christian nationalism the good news of the God of peace, this God who is incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, who has shown us a way to reconcile humans to God and also human beings to one another. Blessings to all of you and thank you again for creating a space to talk about white Christian nationalism in your own context. Take care.