Can a church of 50 people help change a city? Glenn Bleakney talks with Dr. Brian Beattie, founder of Freedom House, about how kindness, community partnerships, and faith helped transform downtown Brantford, Ontario. Hear what they learned about revival, reformation, and bringing lasting Kingdom impact to your community.

Welcome to the Kingdom Reformation show, everyone.

And today we have an exciting episode.

My guest is Dr. Brian Beatty and we're going to be talking about city transformation from a real live scenario that Brian has been personally involved with.

Brian, welcome to the show today.

Glenn, thanks for inviting me.

Really good to be with you.

So tell us about yourself.

Where are you based?

What have you been doing?

I know you were pastoring for a while, but something happened and we're going to go right into that, which is really all about what you call the City of God.

There was a video made about it and of course, you wrote a book about the City of God and transformations.

Tell us about yourself.

Yeah.

Married with three children.

Married for 40 years.

Didn't grow up going to church at all.

So when I started going to church, I was probably a bit of a thorn in the flesh to every pastor I had growing up because I always had so many questions.

Right.

And I always wondered why what I saw in the Bible didn't seem like it was transferring into normal life.

And.

And I was actually going to be a lawyer.

That's actually what I wanted to be when I was growing up.

And I felt very strongly called by God to.

To become a minister, a pastor, and so went to Bible college.

I was already traveling and speaking and singing before that.

It became a necessary evil for me to.

I was told by other traveling speakers that said, sometimes if you're going to go there and sing or whatever you do, they may want you to speak and they may want you to have a.

Something behind your name.

How about college and seminary became a bit of a necessary evil.

So for almost 40 years now, pastored the last 25.

Very involved in business, very involved in politics.

Intentionally just sticking our head in the middle of everything to see how to transform cities.

Yeah.

Awesome.

So you're based in Ontario, Canada, in a city that's known as Brantford.

And there's a couple of kind of interesting people that.

That came out of Brantford.

Tell us a little bit about the history of the city.

Yeah, there are.

So Brantford is about an hour west of Toronto.

For those that are global and wondering where it is.

So not far from Toronto, Brantford, if you're a hockey fan.

Wayne Gretzky, best hockey player ever.

Most awards.

The guy is amazing.

So he's from Brantford.

Alexander Graham Bell lived here.

The first phone call happened from Brantford to Paris, Ontario, about 10 kilometers away.

And that's another claim to fame that our city has.

But we're going to say that Brantford, being The City of God is the biggest one.

Yeah.

Amen.

Awesome.

So Brantford wasn't always the City of God.

What happened to Brantford?

Its decline?

Yeah, so back in the 80s, so Brantford was a bit of a hub for industry for many years in Ontario, large manufacturing base here.

And then in the early 80s, downturn in the economy, the two major plants that were running and producing for the industry here, they shut down.

And we went from a very thriving city to ghost town in not very long.

So it was went to about 25% unemployment.

The downtown in our city, the city corps was really a ghost town.

In fact in six Hollywood came to Brantford.

They were making a movie called Silent Hill.

Silent Hill is based on a terrible video game about this post apocalyptic wasteland filled with demons.

And my imagination, Glenn is like this.

They were thinking, we want to make this movie about Silent Hill.

But we don't want to spend a lot of money on sets.

What should we do?

And they said if we go to Brantford, we will have to do nothing because of our downtown and the things that happen.

So they actually did that, they made the movie here and it was a big hit, as big a hit as a horror movie can be.

And so that was a mess.

Back in 94 when one of our mayors was running for or to be mayor, he said to the Toronto Star, he said, we have the worst downtown in Canada.

Now whether that was true or not, it was close.

It was a bit of a disaster.

It was not a place people wanted to grow up and stay and plant.

It was like young people were growing up and getting out of the city.

And so that's kind of the place God called us to.

And we hated the city if we're honest.

We used to pastor just south of here and we, we never liked the city.

We would walk, we would drive around, not drive around in town, drive around the city.

In fact the downtown where there was a mall.

My wife had come here with a friend of hers back when we were passing to south of here and they come to the mall and done shopping and went to, went to the movie and then afterwards and they, as they came out, they were accosted by a couple of semi homeless people.

My wife came home just ripping mad.

She goes, we are never going back to that city as long as we Live.

He was so upset.

It turns out that we did go back and eventually our church was in that mall, so.

Oh yeah, yeah.

The call of God.

You say to God, I'm not going to do this.

And we'll find a way to see it happen.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So there's been obviously a transformation that's happened in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.

What does it look like now?

And then we'll go into the story.

So we were able to bring the churches together, we were able to bring civic leaders together with the church leaders intentionally for the sake of the city.

And we're doing the same thing now.

There's a group that, that I'm part of right now that we're starting intensely for the sake of the city.

How do we do that?

And so we're going from the worst downtown in Canada to a thriving city.

And so our goal is to do that.

And from the beginning, Glenn, when we were doing this, the beginning was how do we do this?

So it becomes a story for God's fame, for his glory, but it's a sign that it can happen anywhere.

Canada has a bit of a insecurity thing.

It can happen in the States or can happen somewhere else, but it doesn't happen here.

And so we really felt strongly from the beginning that what God was doing here was a bit of a prototype for other cities, that God could bring people together, God could honor all the calling, whether you're in business, education, government, whatever it is.

You could come together and work together for the sake of the city, for the sake of the kingdom, to bring real transformation to the last.

That's awesome.

And from everyone fleeing, as you mentioned earlier, all the devastation, crime, homelessness, massive unemployment, and now unemployment near record lows.

My research says population growth and construction booming.

An economy that's diverse, forward looking and obviously connected to the greater Toronto and Hamilton area.

So that's a massive change and it just didn't happen, just some magic formula or anything.

But you guys were involved in inviting God into the equation.

The great solutionary.

And how did that happen and what did that look like?

Now this is a powerful story and we want you to just take your time, Brian, and just share how this happened, the transformation.

Yeah.

So we came here, as I said, a bit Kicking and screaming to come here.

It was actually, see, Let me go.

I'll go back a little bit, because when I was in Toronto, pastoring at a church there, I wasn't really a city guy.

I was a. I was raised in the country.

I wasn't a city guy.

In fact, when I was in Toronto, I was kind of complaining to God.

It's like, it'd be great if you got me out of the city.

It'd be great if I could just slow down and do some things that were more in my makeup.

And when I said that to God, instead of doing that, he actually called me strongly to cities.

In fact, it was an open vision that God gave me.

So it was September, it was October of 94, 95 rather.

And I was at a service, it was a Sunday night.

And we just come back from a youth trick as a youth pastor in church in Toronto.

And the kids, the.

The youth group prayed for me.

I ended up on the floor, and for about 45 minutes to an hour, I had this open vision of cities.

And I won't go into it because it is long, but it was an open vision.

God called me to partner with him for cities.

And it was like.

And I'm a bit of a driven person.

I'm a bit of an age personality.

And so when the vision was done and I'm off the ground, I was like, yeah, God, let's do it.

And he said, brian, you can't do it because you love the idea more than you love the people.

Wow.

And that was the fall of 95, and that.

That started a bit of a process internally.

And we weren't bad people.

My.

My wife's amazing.

She's way better than me.

But we weren't bad people.

We were pastoring.

We're doing things.

But he just took us through a whole season of internal process.

Because what we came to find out, Glenn, was it's transformed people, that transform cities.

And so it's not a program.

It's like, God does something amazing in you and go.

That would be good for the city.

And so it was from that process that we went to.

We.

We had moved here.

God called us here, which is a whole new story, because we didn't want to come here.

In fact, my wife made a huge list of why she shouldn't come to the city.

And she said, God, here's all the things you have to do.

And he did them all and more.

So we ended up here and as I said, places of mass and whatever.

But we knew that God called us here, that we want a mission from God.

And so what we did was we just set out to start doing things.

And for five years it was crickets.

We were just doing stuff and nothing was happening.

And one of the first things we started in this in the city, in the neighborhood was a program for the kids, the youth and the raid in our neighborhood.

And it went quite well.

It was a Saturday morning program and the city heard about it.

And so we got a call and said, will you come and help us with Canada Day?

Now in our city, Canada Day has probably the second biggest event on the calendar.

Like half of the city will come to the, to this event in, in, in the park.

So they said, can you help us run the kids stage at Kennedy?

We said of course we can.

So we did that and that went really well.

The next year, the same girl, her name is Laura Don Kaven who works for Parks and Rec in Brantford.

The next year.

Now the city had started working towards revitalizing the down our downtown.

So it wasn't just us or it wasn't just the church.

It was like everyone was coming together.

The city, the churches were coming together to go we can make our city great.

And they were calling this a revitalization of the downtown.

So the city had built a square in the downtown called Harmony Square.

But no one was coming downtown.

Still Florida said, hey, we're going to start movies in the square.

Well, Freedom House, our church, will you help us do movies in the square, which is just free movie night for families on Thursday nights in our square.

And we said of course we will.

So we did that and that went really well.

And the second year we're doing movies and square with the city.

And Lori dawn said to me, she said, can you guys do a winter carnival?

And I said of course we can.

Now Glenn, we don't know anything about winter carnival.

We knew nothing about it.

And I went back to our leadership team.

There was probably 50 adults in our church at the time.

Went back to them and said, hey, we're doing a winter carnival.

It was only five months away, right?

And so we don't know what we're doing.

But we googled it.

We googled winter carnivals and found a big one in Montreal about six hours from us and another fair size one in Sarnia about two hours from Us.

So we called them and they helped us do this Winter Carnival and the Gold Glenn, for that Winter Carnival, Frosty Fest.

The first year was Lori dawn set the goal.

She said, if a thousand people came to the Winter Carnival, it would be like, we'll call it Revival.

That'll be what you want to call it?

I said, yes, I do.

So our globe was a thousand people.

The first year, 8,000 people showed up.

Wow, 8,000 people, first year.

And then in year five, 15,000 people came to this Winter Carnival in downtown and in Harmony Square.

And the mayor stands up on the bell stage at Harmony Square, and he said, this is the watershed moment of the transformation of our downtown.

And we're looking.

I'm looking around at our team, and we're just beaming that God would allow us to be in the middle of this.

But what happened, Glenn, is that we got.

God allowed us to get in the middle of everything.

It was a goal from the beginning, but then we started doing that, and it went from there to then.

Lori dawn said, brian, do you have any other ideas of what we can do in the square?

And so I gave her.

I did.

I had a huge list.

And one of the things that we did was what we called the Living Nativity.

So it's a Christmas play.

I said to Laurie dawn, we could do this list and Living Nativity.

She goes, what's a Living Nativity?

I knew that Lori Donna had some Catholic background, so I knew she knew a bit of the Bible story of Christmas.

So I said, lord, Don, the Living Nativity is the biblical Christmas story where Mary and Joseph come to the barn and they have a baby.

And then the kings come and they bring gifts and say, we really like your baby.

And then the shepherds come, they sing and dance and say, we really like your baby.

And then everyone that's sitting there watching say, we really like this baby.

And that's the Living Nativity.

She goes, I like that.

She goes, give me a week.

I have to talk to my boss to see if we can do that here.

She called me back in two days and said, we're going to do the Living Nativity in Army Square this year, which is amazing.

I didn't know how we're going to do it because I hadn't written it yet, but I had the Bible, so I was pretty good with that.

And the interesting thing about that plan is that while we're planning for the living activity in Army Square, there's an argument in our city between the city and the Christians and the atheists.

About like, just around the corner, like a block and a half away, there's another square, Victoria Square, where there's a plastic nativity set that goes up every year.

And there's an argument happening between the atheists and the church in the city.

This shouldn't be in our city square.

This shouldn't be in our civic square, blah, blah, blah.

We have to get this out.

And while that argument's going on, on in the papers and online, we're prepping for the living Nativity, which happened in Harmony Square.

And thousands of people came that year.

And for years and years we did that living Nativity.

And Lori dawn said it was a favorite thing that we've ever done or that anyone's ever done in the city in Harmony Square, which led to a number of things that.

And it was all a relationship.

All we did was we built relationship with people in the city and said, what do you think our city needs?

Because we're willing to help.

We're willing to help.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

What I love, Brian, is you share this at 50 people, it's not a massive church of thousands of people, but 50 people that were willing, made themselves available and God began something.

So that was a catalyst.

And then.

Yeah, let's just fast forward.

So what's happened since then?

How has this literally just infiltrated the city in terms of politics, other social areas and the church, et cetera?

Yeah.

I'll just add one more thing about what we did.

And so we were doing all this stuff in the city and we were trying to find a way to banner.

And we had, we again, from the beginning, we decided we're going to banner everything we did under kindness.

So we actually formalized things under what we called the Kindness Project.

And so we wrote curriculum in the schools, we did kindness campaigns.

I mentioned earlier that we're very involved in politics.

And so we were doing a political door to door campaign, myself and one of the guys from our leadership team.

And we're standing at the door, we just knocked the door and had a great conversation with somebody about voting for Phil, for the mp, which they did.

And we closed the door and we're walking away and goes, we said we could do with this with kindness.

We could get people in our city being kind.

And so after that campaign was over, we devised what we called the Kindness campaign.

And we ran it exactly like a political campaign, going door to door and get people being kind.

And so this was our gig.

We would go door to door, we knock on the door and say, hi, I'm Brian from Freedom House.

You may know us with things from the living Nativity or from other things in Harmony Square.

And we are here today to ask you.

And we pause dramatically because no one likes somebody coming to your door.

We're here to ask you, would you be kind to your neighbor for a month?

And that's all.

And they stand there and go, how do you say no to that?

Right?

Standing, going, okay, all right, yes, I'll do that.

And I said, that would be great.

And we use stories about how the neighbors over here are wonderful people, the neighbors over here are terrible people.

But we would do that, and then we'd say, hey, would it be okay if we put a campaign sign on your lawn so everyone knows what you're doing?

And they go, yeah, that'd be okay.

And at the end of that month, what we do, Glenn, is we do a neighborhood barbecue in that neighborhood, somebody from our church, who was that neighborhood pastor.

So they knew after that month that somebody in their neighborhood was there to bless them and be kind to them.

And so we did the kindness campaigns.

We had a Kindness center.

We did kindness awards where it wasn't just us that were being kind.

In fact, again, from the beginning, we wanted to be catalysts for kindness, catalysts for God's character in our city.

Because acts.

Sorry.

Romans 2:4 says, it's the kindness of the Lord that leads people to him.

It's his kindness.

And because he was kind to us without strings attached, we thought if we did that, that would be quite amazing.

And so this kindness campaign, Kindness Awards, where we had people from the city nominate other people from the city to win these awards.

We built affordable housing.

We did concerts.

Anyway, we just kept doing things intentionally to go, we can make our city the kindest city in Canada.

In fact, Phil, our mp, we actually wrote something for him to read in the House of Parliament in Ottawa, our nation's capital, could say our goal was to make Brantford the kind of city in Canada.

And he read that in Parliament, and the whole place erupted about that.

And I don't know if you saw it on the video I sent you, Glenn, but we actually invented a superhero named Captain Kindness.

Yes.

And he became more popular than I was.

Still is.

And it's interesting.

So you're there in Australia, and I remember listening to the hillsong pastor talk about how his worship leader, Darlene, was way more popular than he is.

That's kind of what happened to me.

And Captain Kindness was like, Captain Kindness was everywhere in the city.

He was so well done.

And still is, in fact, Captain Kindness.

Don't tell anyone is Dave Carroll.

He's actually the pastor now of Dave Freedom House.

Because now I. I travel and tell stories and inspire others to bring transformation to their cities.

Wow.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah.

The kindness of the Lord leads to repentance.

And, yeah, Jesus talked about that.

Just loving people, showing kindness, so powerful.

So you talk about transformation in your book being more than social action, though.

Okay, so, yes, we bring a cup of cold water to help people, but then you also talk about, well, drillers.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so the.

The goal is that, yes, you do social action.

You feed the poor, you help the widow, you help the orphan.

That's pure religion for sure.

But the goal is, how do you help them become the one that they find the water for themselves?

Because when they do that, then they're going to do.

There'll be this cycle that starts where you bless them, they feel the blessing, they bless others.

So cup of cold water, for sure.

But it's farther than that.

It's actually teaching them that there's stuff in them, whether they're Christians or not, there's stuff in them.

There's goodness in them.

We talk about changing a city by good into good through kindness.

And it's because of the kindness of the Lord so we can show people.

And many people in our city got involved in the stuff we did before they even knew who we were.

And that makes evangelism, like really talking to people about Jesus so much easier.

Because when you.

Instead of going door to door and asking them if they love Jesus or want Jesus, if you do Jesus stuff, kingdom stuff in front of you, front of them, rather, and then say, why are you doing this?

That creates a great way to talk about Jesus.

And our answer was always the same.

When they said, why are you doing this?

It's like, we want to show you the love of God in a practical way.

And when they start getting involved in that, they become the well drillers.

They become the ones that, hey, you did something good for me, but I can do that for myself and then do that for others.

And there's something about going beyond just social action.

And it's amazing.

I'm not.

I would never stop social action.

I'm saying it's not enough.

Because what you want to do is go to the root of the challenge.

Often when I'm speaking about this, Glenn, I'll talk about Martin Luther King Jr.

He was preaching one day about the road to Jericho.

He said, one day we're going to have to come to the place where we stop just throwing coins at the beggars on the road to Jericho.

And we actually intentionally.

We actually reconstruct the road.

We actually reconstruct the road.

And that's what I'm talking about, where you get to the root of the problem.

So that's what we're trying to do.

How do you get to the root of the problem?

Ed Svoso, who was one of my heroes and has a global network called Transform World, I was his national director here in Canada for a number of years.

He talks about what he calls eliminating systemic poverty.

Eliminating systemic poverty.

And he talks about it being.

In a number of ways.

So it's materially, motivationally, relationally and spiritually.

So everyone has some level of poverty.

And if we can eliminate it.

So for the poor people that we call, they don't have money, so they're poor materially and motivationally.

Right.

But the, the richer people that are more affluent, they're also poor relationally and spiritually.

Because when you've got stuff you don't need, you don't trust people relationally, and you don't need people, you don't need God.

You don't think.

So this idea of poverty is kind of levels of playing ground.

And if you know who you're talking to, you can go, hey, I can help you with that.

And it won't just help you, but it'll help you.

It'll help your family, it'll help our city.

And so there's a way to create a culture.

We talk all the time about creating a culture, whether it's in your family, your business, your church, or a neighborhood.

You can create a culture that's kingdom oriented.

And the average bear in the city, the average person in the city, they're not going to call it that.

Those are our titles and our names from Jesus, just talking about kingdom.

But there's a culture of righteousness, peace and joy that is very attractive.

It's very attractive.

And if we can display that to people and then show them that it can actually permeate everything about them and their families and their workplaces and their schools.

It just draws people.

It just draws them.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's interesting because yesterday I just recorded a video on the same topic and how it is so attractive and how it changes people when we manifest the kingdom in that way.

And the goodness of God and righteousness, peace and joy is what the essence of the kingdom is.

Okay, Brian, so look, let's fast forward a little bit.

Obviously you guys were on this journey for a number of years.

The city's changed significantly for the better, and there's been transformation.

What was some of the specific things that you began to just see shift in terms of socially, economically, spiritually, politically?

Just kind of unpack that for us.

Yeah.

So I would say that the idea that the church could be a significant stakeholder and player, when done correctly, to bring life so again, righteousness, peace and joy, the biblical concepts, but that the church could be an answer.

And so when we started, and I would say we've seen this globally, when the church starts getting involved, there's a bit of a tension between the church and civic leaders because it hasn't always been good.

It wasn't good here in our city between the church leaders and civic leaders years ago, but we found that through consistent loving and showing that love, showing the love of God in practical ways, that it earned the right to be heard, to be at really any table we wanted to be in the city we could be at because we were invited.

And so there was that change of how people saw the church.

For the most part, there was that, and then there was the idea that really shifted between the pastoral leaders in the city and everyone else that were Christians.

And so we intentionally went after the.

What.

What's known as a sacred secular divide.

And for.

For many years, it's been the pastors.

You have a sacred call.

Everyone else, whatever you do in the city, you're just smocks.

It doesn't matter.

That doesn't work.

And I know you know this, Glenn.

I've seen some of your stuff.

But why would we think that if God sends to somebody, I want you to be a doctor, or God says to somebody, I want you to be the teacher?

How amazing is that?

Why would we think you're just a layperson, you're just a.

Like, why can't we, as leaders of the church, honor them and empower them to go?

What God has called you to do is so sacred.

It's so sacred.

And that makes Monday to Friday really sacred, too, instead of just Sunday, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

So good.

That's powerful.

Yeah.

Okay, so you talk about moving from renewal to revival to reformation in your book.

What's.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, we felt very strongly.

So if I was to go back to the 80s, when I was in Bible college, I would say that.

Just felt old saying that out loud.

By the way, when I.

If I was going back, I would have called myself a revivalist.

The.

My favorite course I Took in Bible College was revivals.

Could it happen again?

The Welsh Revival, Pazuza street, could it happen again?

And in fact, that was my last paper.

I wrote and I wrote about how good it would be.

And as I, as we're looking around, it wasn't happening.

And then the 90s hit.

Revival hit.

It was huge for us.

Revival in Toronto, Pensacola, Florida Revival, Holy Trinity, Brompton and London.

And it was huge.

But we observed that, we observed revival.

And it doesn't matter what you look at, whether it's historical or the 90s revival hits, it comes for a time and it's gone for us.

We felt like God want us to play the long game, to go, yes, we need a move of God, yes, we need revival.

If you need revival, man, you should pray as hard as you can for God to send it and for you to be active about it.

But don't stop there.

If you need personal renewal, go hard after it and change your life.

But don't stop there.

If your church needs revival or your city have revival, but don't stop there.

Go after reformation where business, education, government, the arts, all these main sectors of society are totally affected for the long haul.

And so people are called and they realize they're calling.

And it changes the fabric, it changes the culture of cities for many years to come.

Wow, that's great, Brian.

So one of the things we talk about on Kingdom Reformation is that distinction.

Obviously Reformation is in our name.

And the idea is we want this to be part of the DNA of the church, which it is in the Kingdom.

We read that in the scripture we see transformation.

The Old Testament, even in the New Testament.

One of my favorite stories in the New Testament is when this guy named Philip goes into Samaria, which he was the least qualified for a variety of reasons to be there, but he wasn't a Samaritan.

There was tension ethnically, racially there, etc, but he goes in, there's a move of God revival.

Awesome.

He was obviously personally renewed already.

And then something began to shift there and there was a change and the there was great joy in the city it mentions.

And then obviously Acts 19, Paul and Ephesus, wow, Things began to change there.

And these guys who turned the world upside down.

Acts 17:6.

But so the difference between revival and renewal, you know, the.

The Lord told Israel, hey, I'm not taking you into the promised land, but I'll send an angel.

And Moses is like, no deal.

And then he asked God for two things.

He's like, we don't just want your promise we want your presence.

And to me, that's the difference.

Revival, let's see your glory.

We need your presence.

Yes, but show us your ways.

Understanding the ways of God that help us to.

As you said, these revivals come and go.

We've had great revivals, and they had impact.

But how much transformation occurred in the respective cities, for example, where it happened and was it ongoing?

So you're in it for the long game.

So what would you say to those who are really leaning in, Brian, saying, we want to see transformation in our city, in our nation, in our.

In our community, et cetera?

What would be, you know, the basic instructions for next steps?

Like to really start to see this happen?

Yeah, yeah.

I would first encourage you and say, you're doing exactly what God wants you to do.

God wants transformation in your city as well.

So it's not just you.

It's probably the heart of God that's already stirring you because his heart is for the city.

I. I mentioned, Glenn, the.

The vision I'd had in 95 of Jesus looking over this cliff down in the city and his call to cities in.

In February of 23, God took me back to that very same vision.

And instead of Jesus sitting on the cliff and he was actually weeping over the city, the first vision I saw in 95, this time I was right back in the same vision, and Jesus was there as a lion of the tribe of Judah.

And I'm standing there, and it was the first time in my life that I felt such fear of the Lord that I. I thought, I wonder if I'm going to live through this experience.

It was so intense.

And I looked at him, I knew it was Jesus.

And Jesus, as a lion, waved his paw over the city and everything started to shine.

Everything was shining.

The trees, the roads, the buildings, the people.

Everything below was shining now.

And he turned and looked at me and said, keep it that way.

And to me, that was another thing about the Reformation.

It's like, I can do this in a second.

I can bring revival.

But you're the one that has to do it.

You're the one that has to partner with me.

It's like one of the things we talk about.

All I think Augustine said, and I'll paraphrase here, without God, we can't, but without us, God won't.

So when.

At first, when.

If you start feeling the tug towards transformation, it's the Heart of God.

God wants every city God wants.

He's not willing that any would perish.

So go for that tug.

The next thing I would say would be, how does it gonna affect you?

So we haven't talked much about my book, and that's okay.

But in the back of my book, Glenn, there are 10 steps, and I'm gonna walk you through a few of them here at the beginning.

And that's what they so first of all, you dream with God.

Second of all, it'll affect you personally.

There's a personal crisis, and you have to embrace that personal renewal.

It's like I said in 95 when God said, ryan, you can't do this because you love the idea more than the people.

Because the idea of transformation, it's not like church is normal or it's not like business is normal.

It's like Jesus is king and he has an attitude about it and it's his kingdom.

And so it'll affect you personally.

And then you'll need to start working with others.

You'll need to start having conversations and see who else is leaning in, because no one person can do this.

In fact, just the church can't do it.

And so there'll now be these concentric circles.

You're going to start building.

So it's you.

So if you're a pastor, you're going to start talking to your staff, you're going to start talking to your congregation about transformation.

If you're a business person, you're going to start talking to those that work with you and for you.

About the reason we have this business is to be part of the community transformation.

It's not just to make money.

And listen, I want every good Christian leader or business leader.

I want them to make tons of money.

I want them be really rich for the sake of the kingdom.

And so there's.

It'll affect you, it'll affect your family, it'll affect your sphere of influence, and then it'll affect others.

So who else in the city is leaning in on other spheres?

So can the churches come together or the pastors come together with the business people?

Because sometimes, and Glenn, you know this already is that in cities, churches will go.

If we just got all the churches together in the city, all the pastors together, we could have transformation.

I can tell you what it won't.

That won't happen.

Because you've got to get business people, you've got to get politicians, you've got to get educators.

It's all these spheres of influence coming together.

And Creating a net under your city that no one gets missed.

If somebody falls through your city, they're going to hit the net and somebody's going to grab them.

Because there's macro thinkers thinking the big picture and there's micro thinkers thinking about that.

And so you're going to find the people that are leaning in as well.

You're going to find the people from other sectors of society, and then you're going to find people in your city that are already doing it.

You'll be surprised to find out that there's already people in the city bringing transformation.

They won't call it what we call it, but they're already working towards a good city.

Like Glenn.

There's nobody, I bet, met one person in my travels that if I said, so what are you looking for in your city?

I'm looking for poverty and homelessness and food insecurity.

They don't exist.

And so find the people.

And you alluded to it earlier, find the solutionaries, find the people that are revolutionaries, bringing real solutions to the world, to your city, and partner with them.

Maybe you won't believe the same things about theology.

That's okay.

But you do believe you are bringing the kingdom together and you get to talk about it eventually with them.

Yeah.

Wow.

So powerful.

So tell us about your book and obviously how we can get a copy.

Yeah.

So the book I was just talking about was called City of God.

It's a story of, of what, what's happened here in Brantford.

City of God.

And the other book that we've written, and we were talking about this as well a little bit, is just Kingdom is it.

And what just Kingdom Is it is helping people understand that there's a, a change of thinking that has to happen to go from an attractional model of getting people to church, church centric, to kingdom centric, where it was Jesus only message.

His whole message was how to understand there's a king with a kingdom, that that word means the domain of the king, or where the king has rulership.

And then there he wants that to grow, ever increasing, never ending.

It says in Isaiah 9.

And so you can get all both books just Kingdomize it and City of God on Amazon.

They're both on Amazon.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

I had Ian Green on previously.

And for our audience, if you're not familiar or you never listen to that podcast, just go back.

It's called Just Kingdomize it with Ian Green and Brian, you're part of the team as well.

Tell us about Kingdom Eyes Global.

What exactly Is it?

Yeah.

So we came to realize the ones, there's six of us that were the main people that started it back, I don't know, five or six years ago.

And as we were just talking.

So a number of us have been longtime friends.

Ian was the linchpin that knew everyone.

I'd known Ian since like early.

Sorry, mid to late 80s.

We had taken teams over to England.

He's from the uk.

So we had come together and said, man, it seems like we've got very similar stories of, yes, we want God to help us build our church or business, but it's bigger than that.

So what we are, we want to be catalysts for individual, organizational or citywide transformation.

So that's what we do.

A couple of us are really passionate about city transformation.

That's one of my goals.

Couple of the guys are business guys.

One of the guys is a CEO of a wealth management group.

Ian's done so many different things, traveled internationally for 40 plus years, written other books, but just guys that want to see God's kingdom in real time on earth as it is in heaven.

Okay, so yeah, that's awesome.

So how do we connect with you?

If those who are interested in knowing more and want to connect with Kingdom Eyes Global, what's your call to action?

Yep.

So Kingdom Eyes global.com is our website.

Awesome.

That's great.

Well, thank you so much, Brian, for joining us today.

Powerful conversation about transformation and you've walked through that journey again.

I just want to encourage our audience, whether you're watching the video, listening on the podcast, get a hold of the books, city of God, Dr. Brian Beatty and just Kingdomize it, which was written by a few of you guys, all about transformation, available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Thanks, Brian, for being my guest.

It's been a real honor hearing your story.

My pleasure, Glenn.

Thank you.

Bless you.

Thanks.