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Brian Tome: What It Was Like to Pastor Through the ‘Worst Season of Discouragement’ in 25 Years

brian tome

Brian Tome is the founding and senior pastor of Crossroads Church, 2017’s fastest-growing church in America. He has authored four books including his best-seller, The Five Marks of a Man, and also hosts The Aggressive Life podcast. He is also a featured speaker at the Amplify Outreach conference on Oct. 19-20, 2021. As an entrepreneur, Brian has opened several other non-profits and started Man Camp, a primitive weekend camping experience that has helped tens of thousands of men reclaim the code of manhood. An avid adventure motorcyclist, Brian rides tens of thousands of miles and camps more than 30 nights a year. He has also released an adventure ride TV show called “Phantom Lake,” available on Amazon Prime. Brian is married with three children and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Key Questions for Brian Tome

-What does it look like for you to engage people who don’t know Christ during such a turbulent and culturally divisive time? 

-What is the difference between healthy and unhealthy aggression? 

-How do you help men move to a healthy place, particularly in their marriages and friendships?

– As a pastor and church leader, how have you handled walking through a spiritual desert this past year-and-a-half?

Key Quotes from Brian Tome

“You know, you always want to engage people who don’t know Christ, but really, I think my focus and our focus has been to shepherd the flock that we’ve already had.”

“Waiting on the Lord is something that you do when you’re at the end of your abilities, when you just can’t put a dent in it. I don’t wait on the Lord to bring my kids up in the way of the Lord. I bring my kids up in the way. I don’t wait on the Lord to solve my marriage. I look at what’s wrong in my marriage. I deal with it. So the aggressive life isn’t about pounding somebody physically or dominating somebody. It’s just recognizing I have one life that God’s given me, and I need to aggressively manage it.”

“Man Camp started at the end of a camping trip I had with some buddies as actually a motorcycle trip, and we sat around in the morning, our last campsite around the fire, and just started talking about things that were beneath the veneer and started talking about our hearts and started talking about God. And this is after we had had a couple of days of real difficulty, and I said, ‘We should have something like this for guys who don’t want to ride motorcycles and just want to bond with other people and be pushed.”

“You have to have things in your church that are outside of a worship service that your men would be attracted to. That can be a mission trip, by the way. It absolutely can. Men really connect with those things. It could be a camping thing outside….We had a guy bring in a wild horse and broke a wild horse on stage at Crossroads.”