GARDENS IN BABYLON
The inaugural episode. Kevin and Riley introduce the podcast's vision — cultivating faithful families in hard places — tracing it back to Puritan pastors who kept the family altar burning under real persecution, and unpacking why family worship, a biblical doctrine of vocation, and multi-generational faithfulness matter more than political solutions alone. They also share their own stories: two small-town pastors, nine kids between them (soon ten), and a friendship that started with a discouraging day and an unexpected text.
Oliver Haywood was a Puritan pastor who endured persecution. Yet he was urging families to keep the family altar burning, meaning faithful worship in the home.
And so both of those pieces are available and found in this newly revised theology of the family edited by Scott Brown and Jeff Pollard. You can get a copy for yourself through Church and Family Life if you're interested. We will put a link to that in the show notes. So just to introduce ourselves, I want to welcome you to Gardens in Babylon, our new podcast. I'm Kevin Minnett.
I serve as pastor at Christ Chapel of the Sign of here in beautiful Howard, Colorado at 6,400 feet elevation. I'm here with my co-host Riley Taves. He's a pastor at Grace Covenant Church in Eltona, Manitoba.
at much lower elevation.
Yes, near close to zero actually. Both of us are small town pastors. I kind of like it that way. But we still want to, even though from small context, we want to change the world. Even though we're in different parts of America, we think God can do something big in small places.
By America you mean THE Americas?
The Americas, yes, North America.
I am still proudly Canadian, I will have you know.
Riley, how many stoplights are there in your town of Gretna?
In Gretna? Zero. Grand total of zero. And actually, I don't pastor in Gretna, I pastor in Altoona, about 10 minutes away. And there are also zero stoplights in Altoona. Altoona does have a crosswalk though — you can press the button and it'll stop traffic for you.
Very convenient. Here in Howard, we are actually completely lightless. I don't even know if there's a street light in the community.
So just a little bit of background on the cold open there. Back in the latter parts of the 1600s, after the monarchy had been restored in England, you have the Church of England back in full control and a series of laws coming down known as the Clarendon Code, making it very difficult for anybody who isn't willing to conform to the state church. One of these was the Conventicle Act, which made it illegal for people to gather for worship outside of the Church of England, even in someone's home, if more than four people were present. So you had pastors being fined, imprisoned, driven out of their towns. Kevin, what was the Five Mile Act? You weren't allowed to be within five miles of a place where you had previously ministered.
Oliver Heywood, the man quoted in the opening monologue, was personally caught up in this. He was ejected from his church, fined repeatedly. What some of these faithful ministers would do who were unwilling to submit to the government's declarations is go and preach in barns and fields, wherever they could find space. Heywood was one of those.
Along with persecution from the government, you also have moral laxity, skepticism, public contempt for serious Christianity. Families trying to obey God faithfully are facing heavy fines. These men were writing a confession of faith while their churches were being pressured and scattered. And what's really interesting is where Heywood puts his finger on the root of the decay at the time. He doesn't firstly blame the king, doesn't firstly blame the unrighteous laws — he puts his finger on fathers who had stopped worshipping God in their homes. You have state persecution, economic hardship, cultural contempt — and where do they point the finger? They said the problem starts in the home.
I'm reminded of the legend of G.K. Chesterton writing into a newspaper on "what is wrong with the world," and his reply was: "Dear sirs, I am." I think that's a wonderful illustration of taking responsibility rather than looking to see the problem always out there.
It reminds me too of a book David Bonson wrote called Crisis of Responsibility, identifying that as a cultural issue of our day — we're constantly wanting to blame other people or make ourselves a victim of circumstance.
As these men are identifying, they're putting the root cause of the problem at the feet of faithlessness — calling the church to faithfulness. It reminded me of that old saying, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Clearly hyperbole, but it speaks strongly to the influence of those raising families. Family is the first institution God ordained, and what makes up society is families — so you either have faithful families or unfaithful families at the end of the day.
I'm deeply burdened by this, man. No, it's really not — it's a joke. Riley, what do you call a homesteading pastor who grows vegetables and preaches? A garden variety minister.
Right now the only sound effects are my kids crying outside of my study here. I'll give that one a five.
I have one for you: what is orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot.
That one I'll give you a six — you edged me out on pure creativity.
In the monologue, I said Babylon would fall, but faithful households built on permanent foundations would still remain. Riley, what do you think about that statement?
I think it's true. When you're a kid, you tend to look at institutions around you as almost permanent. I remember in 2017 for Canada's 150th, realizing our country isn't actually that old. Nations rise and fall — empires with much longer lifespans than any current nation have collapsed. But the institutions that have continued are the ones God himself ordained. The family is the most foundational unit. Whatever happens to a nation, there will still be families — and the stronger you can be, the better off you'll be when nations and empires are collapsing around you.
And a heritage, right — not just families generically, but a family name surviving where families are reproductive. I was reading with the kids this morning about the fall of Babylon in the days of Daniel. It had been prophesied, and for King Nebuchadnezzar it certainly felt permanent — he wanted it to be permanent. But Babylon falls, and the people of God remained; there was always a remnant. The faithful family isn't just a place where the Bible gets read — it's a mini economy, a place where children are practicing biblical truths in the everyday, not just intellectually comprehending them.
Guys like C.R. Wiley have written about the home as a mini-oikos, an economy — the word for household and the word economy really are shared terminology.
Oikonomos, right — the law of the household.
So is there a point historically where we lost sight of that, and relegated work and home duties as somehow secular versus Bible time as sacred?
A lot of the problem is that people don't have a mission for their home — which is a downstream effect of not having a mission for their lives. Part of our problem is that we think in separated parts, compartmentalizing.
As Joe Boot put it, there's been an "ecclesiasticizing" of the kingdom of God — we tend to think any real meaningful kingdom work is that which specifically relates to the institution of the church. I think this is a hangover from Roman Catholicism that's even infected Protestant churches. This is part of the great heritage of the Reformation — the doctrine of vocation. Prior to the Reformation, if you wanted to really please God with your life, what were your options, Kevin?
Pretty much be a priest, I guess. A monk.
Right — join a monastery or convent. If you wanted to devote yourself to the Lord, that's where you went, because regular life wasn't thought to be that. So I think we still have a hangover from that: kingdom work is church work. So churches try to create a job for literally everybody — ushering, doing sound — because we have this separation in our minds that everything kingdom-related has to do with the institution of the church. That's what Dr. Boot is getting at with this "churchifying" of the kingdom of God. What that does is create a perspective that fails to see how the rest of life — our job, our vocation, homemaking, child rearing — actually relates to the kingdom of God. The home then just becomes a place to eat, sleep, and watch Netflix.
I looked at your website before we started — both your church and ours use the same tagline: "all of Christ for all of life." We want people to become integrated in their thinking, understanding that everything we do can, should, and will inevitably relate to Christ. One of the great lines about the Puritans is that they brought the monastery to the marketplace — they saw work as something that can and should be aimed at the glory of God in the way only monkery was previously thought to. I'd say we can go further and bring the monastery into the home — seeing that everything we do daily ought to aim at the glory of God.
In the industrial revolution, women felt like their role as homemaker and mom was subpar compared to "producing something of importance." My wife often wears a t-shirt that says something like "mothering is kingdom work." It's a good reminder for me.
Tie those threads a little bit, Kevin — how is mothering kingdom work?
A mom is raising children to fear the Lord, to operate in the real world under the Lordship of Christ. Our tagline is that who Christ is touches every component of our lives — it's not just a Sunday occupation, it's an all-of-life occupation. Another Bonson book, Full Time, makes a similar point: how many pastors would feel comfortable saying our meaning in life comes from work rather than from God? He argues the Greek word avodah, found over 400 times in Scripture, is variously translated work, worship, or service depending on context. He points to Genesis 2: six days you shall work, but on the seventh you shall rest — rest applying to resting in the Lord, tied to Lord's Day worship.
The same word is translated worship in countless contexts and serve in many others. Avodah unifies the sacred and the secular — our work is quite literally worship, or at least should be. Even those who fail to recognize work as worship are worshiping something. The question is to whom our work is directed. That's why Paul says if you don't work you shouldn't eat, and that we should be serving the Lord Christ in our work, not our "eye masters" — those looking over our shoulder. Eating, drinking, is kingdom work. Raising children is kingdom work — raising them in the paideia of the Lord.
If we're commanded to work as unto the Lord, for his glory, and you replace him as the one you're working for with anything else — that's where idolatry comes in. You've dethroned the one true and living God and are serving something, someone else.
I ended that section by saying the decay isn't first a Senate problem — it's a supper-table problem. The solution is parental, paternal. It's the duty of fathers to lead the home in this direction.
The political threats are real, but how can I as a father lead our families? That's really the point of this podcast. We want to showcase families who are in hard places — a Babylonian context of some variety — and just see what these people are doing, as a showcase of faithfulness.
So Kevin, you're saying politics don't matter?
No — it's a matter of proportions. You can't govern a nation if you haven't governed your own house first. Paul, giving qualifications for an elder, asks: how are you going to rule in the household of God if you can't even rule your own home? I'm here in Colorado, we have a lot of progressive government leaders, and many of them have exactly zero children. They make horrible rulers. I'm not saying politics doesn't matter — it matters a lot. But if the family altar is cold, political engagement will mostly be noise. We're just blame-shifting from focusing on what we can do to just complaining.
We recognize we'll have listeners who are overwhelmed, just barely keeping their head above water — not at the point of being a homesteader. Where do we start with that person?
Start by identifying priorities. Some theological groundwork needs to begin: what is the purpose of your home? Things that matter to us, we find ways to accommodate. Examine your schedule and commitments and ask whether all the things keeping you so busy are actually contributing to the goal and mission you have for your home. Be deliberate to structure your life around the things that really matter — which might mean cutting some things out.
Our default assumption can be "I want to give my children the life I never had" or "a fun and entertaining childhood." If instead you realize God's given you an assignment — to bring up your children in the discipline of the Lord — that's a different goal than just keeping them entertained. Having that goal is what helps you identify priorities. If you aim at nothing, you'll always hit it.
Secondly, I love Deuteronomy 6 — Moses commands the people to teach these things diligently to their children, speaking of them as you sit in your house, as you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise. I've spent a lot of time in youth ministry, and one of the big emphases is needing youth leaders who can "do life" with the youth. But God has already given somebody who loves these children and is with them at all these different times — parents. He's told them specifically to take this approach: teaching them as you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise. Applied to modern life: as you drive your kids to swimming lessons, as you put them down for bed, pray with them. As you're disciplining them, these are opportunities to instill biblical values. Work it into the rhythms of life you're already living in.
Part of what we want to do here is bring real families, not just an intellectual guru with one kid or none who has a great parenting book. We want to showcase people in the trenches who've faced true challenges — people planting imperfectly wherever God has put them, in some pretty hard contexts. This pulls from the prophet Jeremiah, who told the children of Israel going into Babylon: build, plant, marry, multiply, seek the welfare of the city I've sent you to — cultivate where God has placed you. He didn't lessen the challenge for them; he brought them into an even harder context to prove themselves faithful there.
That's the heartbeat of what we're aiming at here — cultivating faithful families in hard places, not just surviving in the middle of Babylon, but building something that can outlast it. I love the exile imagery, but I want to remind listeners that's not the only image we have in Scripture. I love Christ's parable of the master who goes away to acquire a kingdom and tells his servants to be faithful with what they're given while he's gone — those who are planting gardens in Babylon, being faithful with what they're given, get rewarded. Then the king returns, having acquired the kingdom, and those who opposed his rule are dealt with. So let's remember Christ has purchased Babylon and everything in it.
This is God's world — my Father's world. The issue we're running into is what Jesus described in the parable of the weeds and the wheat — we're the wheat running into weeds constantly. But at the end of the day it's a wheat field, and eventually God will triumph over the weeds.
For those who are struggling, keep in mind the King is returning and will reward those who were faithful to plant even in Babylon. This is for everybody, however overwhelmed you feel — for the moms at home juggling laundry, dinner, and schedules; for the dads seeking to be faithful and provide, trying to disciple their growing boys, trying to lead worship when everybody's tired. We want this to be practical, beneficial, and encouraging.
We want it to be educational without the stuffiness, encouraging without being shallow. We want real stories of faithfulness.
We are pastors and fathers also seeking to do what we're commending here — trying to be faithful gardens in Babylon ourselves.
God was gracious in giving me a heritage of faithfulness — I didn't have to discover it. I knew my dad, a godly father, and my grandpa and grandma Minnett, both of whom passed away almost exactly a year ago — farmers, raw and real people. I knew both sets of my great-grandparents too, and on my mom's side, my grandpa and grandma and all their children and cousins — forty of us, plus great-grandchildren. There's a legacy of faithfulness there. I was born in Manitoba, spent my first twelve years there before our family moved to Ontario. I was saved at four years old. God eventually took me to college in South Carolina, where I met my wife Amy. We were married six years out of college; I was already dabbling in church planting potential in the Winkler area — that eventually fizzled out. In time the Lord brought us to what became Redeemed and Grace Bible Church in Morden, Manitoba. In 2019 we moved to the United States — before COVID, by God's grace. We served alongside Pastor Tim Bashong in Indiana at Syracuse Baptist Church, but weren't able to find permanent housing there. In the Lord's providence, a Winnipeg connection brought our attention to Howard, Colorado — a vacant church building closed up for seven years, with people praying the Lord would send somebody to replant a church there. We'll be three years here this fall. The Lord has blessed us with nine children he's allowed us to keep, three he didn't allow us to keep — and we just learned we have a tenth on the way, due in November.
For me, it's a legacy of intergenerational faithfulness — godly grandparents and parents on both sides. I owe my parents so much. In my early twenties I went to Zambia and saw so much brokenness and need, and felt like I needed to do something where I'd be living beyond myself. My dad sat me down and asked what I was passionate about — it had always been ministry. I enrolled at Steinbach Bible College in 2014 — I like to say I went to an Anabaptist Bible college and came out a Calvinist. I had no intention of ever preaching; maybe missionary, maybe youth ministry. That changed in my second year when I took a preaching class and preached to my home church for the first time — it was such a blessing. I got hired as a youth pastor right out of Bible school and got engaged to my wife Diana, working at the Morden EMMC — around the time I met you, Kevin. Long story short, I came to different convictions about youth ministry and youth discipleship, and we felt a strong need for a faithful Bible-preaching, specifically Reformed church in my hometown. Seven years ago this August, my wife and I moved back to the Altona area and found a house in Gretna. We planted Grace Covenant Church in the fall of 2019, and had six blissful months before COVID hit. We now have five children — our youngest was born last December.
Since 1689 and this Puritan Heywood, they both hammer on family worship as the heartbeat. What does that look like in your home?
What helped us a lot was coming to a real vision for what the family should be before we started having kids — visiting you guys and seeing your household set up with homeschooling and everything was a glimpse of what we hoped our lives would be like. We've structured our lives around worshipful rhythms, trying to follow the Puritans — a morning and evening time of worship, echoing the morning and evening sacrifice in God's law. We do a Psalm in the morning, sing it from our Psalter, and pray together. In the evening we have a longer family worship time. I really benefited from Don Whitney's book on family worship — his three key words are read, pray, and sing, and I like to add catechize. We follow what we're doing in Sunday school, read the relevant passage, get the kids to ask questions, sing a few songs from our hymnal and psalter, and work through catechisms — the New City Catechism with its songs, and the Westminster Catechism. We work this in after supper, and pray with our kids before bed. It's been really encouraging seeing our kids engage more and more, asking random questions about something from family worship — getting to that Deuteronomy 6 picture of speaking of these things as you walk by the way, as you lie down, as you rise, as you do life together.
So much of that is similar to what we do — time in the Word, prayer, singing, and catechizing, sometimes informal question and answer, sometimes working through a specific catechism. We've also worked through a book on history, Preparing the World for Jesus by Kevin Swanson, which does a great job weaving in all of history from creation alongside events synonymous with Scripture. We're about three-quarters through since starting in the fall. We'll also take a creation magazine and think about God's beauty in creation — it's hard not to see all the beauty around here and give God the glory, looking at the book of creation and magnifying the Lord's marvelous design.
Maybe a resource you'd want to share with somebody just getting into thinking about these things?
Definitely Voddie Baucham's Family Driven Faith. He outlines having a mission for your home, a vision of what God calls you to be, and how it relates to the mission of God. That's my go-to resource.
An excellent one — we love basically anything he's put out. I'll add another: Kevin Swanson's book, a good friend of Voddie's, consistent with Family Driven Faith but extremely practical — sections on family devotions, family culture, family honor, family discipleship and character training, family relationships, family church and state, and family education. Very implementable into the rhythms of life.
A heads up on where we're going from here: Season one, we'll be thinking a lot about family worship, since it's a really key component of solving the Babylon problem. We want to talk with real families planting real gardens — pastors with bigger or smaller broods, grandparents in a different season of life passing on the torch, missionaries in genuinely hard places, fathers with conviction, families building businesses together, folks thinking multi-generationally, not just for the moment. Our next episode is with Pastor Eric Anderson, founding pastor of LifeSpring Church in Crosby, Minnesota, father of nine, many of his children now in an older season of life. In a subsequent episode we'll talk with Dale and Lisa Joost in Southern Alberta, grandparents, parents of eleven, involved in music ministry and worship.
Looking forward to keeping the conversation going and being an encouragement to all who are out there.
We'll try to be on basically all the places you'd normally find a podcast. If you know a family that would be wonderful on this show, reach out through our Facebook page or DM us — Gardens in Babylon, cultivating faithful families in hard places. Real families are the heartbeat of what we're building here. Send us your dad jokes too — I could use the help. Thanks for joining us on this initial podcast. Until next time, keep planting, keep cultivating, and God will give the growth. God bless.