How to plant a desire for goodness and truth that ultimately leads to Christ
How good jobs are saving the lives of 20-somethings at his company, why our definition of “kingdom work” needs to expand beyond saving souls, and how to plant a desire for goodness and truth that ultimately leads to Christ.
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[0:00:05] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians? Those of us who aren't pastors, or religious professionals, but who work as hotel managers, brick masons, and psychiatrists. That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to my good friend, Dave Hataj. He's the owner of Edgerton Gear, a large gear manufacturer in Wisconsin, and one of the deepest thinkers I've ever met about how the gospel is shaping his work day in, day out.
Dave and I recently sat down to talk about this extraordinary program he's built that is now being adopted by the United States Navy to edify blue-collar work in the lives of 20-somethings and quite literally, save their lives. We talked about why our definition of kingdom work must expand beyond simply saving souls. We talked about how we can plant a desire for goodness and truth in our co-workers that ultimately leads them to a relationship with Jesus Christ. Trust me, you are not going to want to miss this great episode with my friend, Dave Hataj.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:26] JR: Dave Hataj, welcome back to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:30] DH: Thanks for having me, Jordan. Pretty excited to be here with you.
[0:01:33] JR: Very rare repeat guest. Expectations are sky high. No pressure, whatsoever, okay?
[0:01:39] DH: That’s funny.
[0:01:40] JR: Hey, it's been almost four years since you were last on the show. I don't want to assume that everyone listening today has listened to that episode, or remembers what the heck either of us talked about. Spend a few minutes retracing some ground here and let's start here. What does Edgerton Gear do?
[0:01:56] DH: Well, I can't believe it's been four years since we've met.
[0:01:58] JR: I know. Isn't that crazy?
[0:02:00] DH: I'm honored to be with you and our friendship has grown deep and I'm just so excited, first of all, about what you're about and that we can just continue to grow together. Edgerton Gear is a custom gear shop or a 40-person company. We make gears. I often say that modern civilization would not exist without gears, without blue-collar folks doing their thing. Our gears go in anything from making aluminum cans to bottles to making computer equipment, to making clothes, any kind of packaging, and cardboard boxes.
I mean, when you look around a room and everything that you see in your room, everything you're wearing on your body was made with the assistance of gears. We're not a big production shop. We’re very custom. We've got 40 people. Most of them are journeyman machinists who have been through lots of training and they're just really, really good at their job.
[0:02:47] JR: It's pretty wild, I'm sure for you to be able to look around a room and be like, “Man, all of these products that these gears help make, our gears are literally a vehicle through which God is answering the prayers of people for clothing, for food,” right?
[0:03:02] DH: Yeah.
[0:03:03] JR: Do you ever sit back – Have you gotten over that? Or do you sit and just really dwell with that truth from time to time?
[0:03:11] DH: I am in awe of it. I think the older I get, I just turned 61 this year, and I can go to literally any grocery store, or any store in the world and I can walk up on an aisle and I can identify products that our gears help manufacture. It is amazing. Considering that I grew up in the business, swore I'd never come back to it, couldn’t understand how blue-collar work gear manufacturing has anything to do with the Kingdom of God, to get to a place now to going, wow, this is my form of worship and service to a way that us and the small group of people can make a really significant difference in this world.
[0:03:46] JR: Yeah. I told you this before, lots of books now by God's grace, thank God, in this faith and workspace. One of my all-time favorites is your book, Good Work. You tell the story of how, yeah, you came to faith in Christ. How old were you? 19?
[0:04:01] DH: 19. Correct. Good memory.
[0:04:03] JR: You believed this lie that many young and sadly, old Christians believe that this work isn't worship, right? That if you wanted to follow Jesus fully, you needed to go into full-time ministry. How did you get to the place where you realized that taking over your dad's gear shop was ministry?
[0:04:19] DH: A lot of kicking and screaming. As you know, I've followed that career path of when you get zealous for the Lord, what do you do? You become a youth worker, maybe you go in a church, you get job as a pastor.
[0:04:31] JR: You went down that path for a while, right?
[0:04:32] DH: I did. I did. I had a tremendous burnout experience in the large mega church and it woke me up and going, “But Lord, I don't want to do this. Everybody's saying I should be a pastor, but this doesn't fit.” I had two phenomenal mentors who really were early pioneers of the faith and work movement who said, “You know what? Maybe you got to go back to the family business.” The funny part is I went up to Regent College because everybody said I had to be a pastor, so I thought, “Oh, I got to get a theological degree.”
While I was there, I took one of those classes that examines your gifts, your history, your calling. At that time, Jordan, I said, “Lord, I'll go anywhere in the world.” I did short-term work in – admission work in Mexico and inner city LA and youth work, etc. I said, Lord, “I'll go anywhere, but just don't send me back to Edgerton Gear, in that dirty, dark, dangerous machine shop.” It was my first semester at Regent College. I got a paperback and examining what your calling is. It said, quote, “You’re ideally suited to run a small manufacturing family-run business.”
[0:05:29] JR: That's amazing.
[0:05:30] DH: I screened. My wife was excited and I was able to do a master's project to come back and say, how do kingdom values relate into a family business? How does it not only change the business, but how does it change the family? That embarked a multi-year journey of trying to turn around a very dark, dysfunctional culture to this Jesus's kingdom isn't relevant, even to a blue-collar manufacturing company.
It wasn't overnight. Two years. I often say, the first two years were hell and then it got worse. Because when you're dealing with broken, dysfunctional people that are major addiction issues and ego issues and just worldly issues that people can't buy and tell that the critical values of excellence and truth and having a mission to make the world a better place, even in a manufacturing environment, people rebelled and they sabotaged it.
It was about the 10-year mark that we really started seeing change. A big part of that is I decided, I'm going to stop hiring for skills and I'm going to hire for character. That became the game changer. That was 31 years ago that I came back and hoped that I'd be out of here in five. It went from over the decades, it's moved from my prison because it felt like, I'm just in prison here. This is a really tough place. I don't get a lot of affirmation from the Christian community that what I'm doing is important, to now, it is my happy place because I've just seen God do so much amazing things through even the small business.
[0:07:00] JR: You make this shift from hiring for skill to hiring for character. What you're not saying is, “I only hire people who are professing Christians,” right? Talk more about that.
[0:07:08] DH: Well, if they're professing Christians in the interview, I get worried. I'll be honest, that's a red flag.
[0:07:13] JR: Man, that's so sad.
[0:07:14] DH: Yeah. We did. We hired a few folks that they were some of the worst employees I've ever had, because they thought their number one job was to proselytize, evangelize, and judge people and convert people, while the quality of their work was not good. Their work ethic was to a point, where other people were judging them like, “What are these people doing here?” It really came to me as, to the point of, do they have a work ethic? Are they humble? Are they teachable? Do they have those characters and those virtues that we all need to be successful?
I guess, over the last few years, 10 years or so, it really helped me understand that that's the dividing line for the kingdom, right? We often want to say, well, we don't earn our salvation by works. No, but there sure should be some evidence of our faith, right? That should come through our actions, through how we treat each other, the quality of our work, how we honor our employers and our co-workers. That's a big deal. The kingdom isn't about words. Jesus even said, it's about power and how we live it out day by day. How do we walk it?
[0:08:17] JR: Yeah. You mentioned a few minutes ago, you see the view, you see the work that you guys do at Edgerton Gear is kingdom work. But, man, in order to understand that, we got to get clear on how Jesus talked about the kingdom of God. Because man, when you – you and I have talked about this a lot before. When Christians today say, kingdom work, nine times out of 10, maybe 99 out of a 100 times, they are referring exclusively to saving souls. As you pointed out before, human souls are only one aspect of God's eternal kingdom, and that matters for our work. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[0:08:52] DH: Well, if we go all the way back to the creation mandate, going all the way back to Genesis, we're instructed to help the world thrive. Build a civilization, right? That includes agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and building communities. That entails literally every job that we have today. I mean, it's incredible, all the things that it entails. When we relegate kingdom work to just church work, I often tell pastors, nothing in your church here would even exist without us manufacturers, without us blue-collar people, like Christians and plumbers, and so on.
We have to have this mentality that every job matters, everything is important. You can't just care for people's souls. It's much more holistic than that. Even getting to the point where you look at Matthew 28, when it says, “Go forth and make disciples.” What does that mean? Does that just mean we're just supposed to, like you said, save people? Well, to really make a disciple, or to serve someone, you have to look them, like I said, holistically and help them realize, they have a personal calling. They're not here by accident. Where do they fit? How do they live out their call and their giftedness through how God created them to be in whatever area of work that they might fit in with this broad thing that we call civilization?
Jesus and throughout the gospels, throughout the New Testament, there's this emphasis on doing good work, right? That takes so many different aspects of that that we really limit ourselves and we try to narrow it and pigeonhole it down to church work.
[0:10:18] JR: Yeah. How would you define what is kingdom work, or the good works that Christ called us to?
[0:10:24] DH: Well, I always come back to, first of all, who am I as a human being? We look at every person around us. If every person is created in the image of God, then we have to look at what is special about them that they can make a contribution to our community and to the world? Kingdom work to me is having a realistic view that there is good and evil, there's good and bad. There's a spiritual battle going on in a cosmic level that comes down to the very personal level every day and how we treat each other.
It's not this big, grand – these big grand gestures. Kingdom work to me is meeting that server at your coffee shop, looking them in the eye and thanking them and affirming them and blessing them. It's making a really quality product, versus a crappy product that fails. It's this commitment to excellence that exudes God's goodness. I really believe God's superpower is his goodness. When you start digging into what good means, it's crazy. I mean, just not only how we treat each other, but goodness could reflect hygiene. It could reflect physical fitness. It could reflect how we treat and raise our kids and treat our spouses, how we work.
Goodness is such a crazy, deep thing that we overlook, but the kingdom of God – I mean, you go back to Exodus when Moses actually asked God, “I'm overwhelmed. I'm dealing with all these people. They're throwing all this gold into a fire.” Moses was fed up. He went back to God and he goes, “Lord, help me understand that who I am in your perspective.” He begs God to say, “Show me. Let your glory pass before me. Show me your glory.” God's response was, “I will indeed allow my goodness to pass before you.” That to me is the crux of kingdom work. Do we exude God's goodness in every aspect of our lives?
[0:12:14] JR: As you were talking, you reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from your book, Good Work, that I pulled up. Here's what you wrote. Isn't it weird when people quote you to you? Such a disarm thing as an author. Here we go. I'm going to quote you to you, okay? “Jesus makes it clear that we're a key component in ushering in God's kingdom. God invites us to be his ambassadors, his princes and princesses to usher in the goodness of his kingdom.”
[0:12:41] DH: Well, that's a good quote. Who did that quote?
[0:12:42] JR: That's good. Somebody should write that down. Somebody should write that down. Put it in the updated edition. What does that look like practically at Edgerton Gear? You talked about coming in and you took over this family business. It was dysfunctional. What did it look like to usher in the goodness of God's kingdom into a gear manufacturing shop?
[0:13:02] DH: You have to understand where we started. When I come in, there's pornography everywhere. There's a quarter barrel beer in the lunchroom fridge. There's parties every day after work and even during noon hour, guys are often going down on the bars and having a few beers. They are mistreating each other. They're judging each other. There's factions that are fighting each other. Everybody's just out for themselves. You had to come to work every day and just be on your guard at what's going to happen next.
Versus, to me now, it's do we come – and we greet each other with a smile, with a good morning. We respect each other. We appreciate each other. We have company meetings that we share pretty much all of our numbers and all the good, the bad, the ugly that's going on every week. My role as an owner now has morphed into, I'm the chief blesser. I need to go around just to affirm people, bless people, appreciate people, empower people, encourage them in our mission to serve the world and constantly reiterate and talk to our values, quality value and service, what we're about. But our mission is really to serve the greater good of the world. We're not just in the gear business, we're in the people business.
I think the simplest example I often have is if you're in a bad mood and you walk into a room, everybody picks that up, especially if you're a leader. I've tried to hide my bad moods and people will – I’ll walk in and like, “Oh, my gosh. Dave's in a bad mood.”
[0:14:24] JR: Yeah, they can tell.
[0:14:25] DH: People can pick it up right away. Well, we can pick that up from each other. Here in our company, it's this awareness and understanding, we're all human. We're all on the journey together. How can we encourage and just move together with love, respect and appreciation? It's just a lot of the simple things, but I've had a lot of customers come in the last year and say, “You know, when you walk into this company, it just feels different.” They're amazed at how clean the shop floor is.
Well, I didn't go out and sweep all the floors. Every person is responsible for their own department. There's this incredible sense of pride and community about who we are and how we just care. We all have our good days and bad days, of course, but the bigger picture, we're all committed to a vision and a sense of mission much greater than ourselves. That just has a very different feel to it.
[0:15:12] JR: Yeah, it's really good. I use this analogy, as you know, in the Sacredness of Secular Work, of scratching off glimpses of the kingdom, like a black – not gambling scratch off, but one of those artistic scratch offs, right? When we understand that the kingdom is more than just God and his subjects, the people and his king, the kingdom is also marked by beauty.
[0:15:36] DH: Yes.
[0:15:37] JR: See Revelation 21. And order, see 1st Corinthians 14. And humility, see Matthew 19, right? When you shape the culture of a business-like Edgerton Gear to reveal those things, you're scratching off glimpses, you're yanking pieces of the goodness of the kingdom into the present. I can hear some listeners saying, “Well, why does that matter if you don't explicitly get to share the gospel with all those employees?” Can you address that million-dollar question, Dave Hataj?
[0:16:09] DH: Well, first of all, you just nailed what we're about. Humility, beauty, and order. When you come through our shop, our gears are literally beautiful. Our guys look at their creation of what they make as beautiful. In order to do that, you have to have a lot of order. You walk through the workbenches and guys are just organized. The number one thing, when we interview people, we look for his humility, because we all have to be on this journey together. Why don't we just care about souls? Is that your question?
[0:16:39] JR: Yeah, that's it.
[0:16:41] DH: Well, we live in a physical world, and scripture is really clear that all isn't just going to burn up and go away. God's going to redeem much of what we do today. When we look at a holistic person and all that they are and all that they're creating, that's just God stuff. How can you discount the physical and the mental, the emotional, and all this, that entails what it means to be human and just cast it away and say, “Well, none of this matter?” That's so silly. I don't know how.
[0:17:10] JR: Here's how is it. If Jesus' blood paid the price to redeem my soul, your soul, and this material world, then I should care deeply about the quality of what I do with this material world, because Jesus' blood paid to redeem that as well. Amen?
[0:17:26] DH: Amen. Absolutely. Amen. I think, we do a tremendous disservice when we don't get involved in environmental movements, when we don't care about our cities and our communities and we just focus on the spiritual, because – and I'm dealing a lot with kids, which I will get into in a minute. But when I look at them, their physical, emotional, and mental needs are so great, they're not even close to – at a point to hear the gospel, or to focus on the soul. They have real needs. You look at how Jesus cared for the poor and cared for that holistic person. The kingdom is much greater than just salvation. Amen all that.
[0:18:01] JR: Yes. When we treat it as only salvation of souls, we inadvertently diminish the power of Christ’s death and resurrection.
[0:18:12] DH: Yes.
[0:18:13] JR: And certainly, diminish the importance and eternal significance of our work. All right. Once we break down this false hierarchy of sacred and secular work, kingdom work and non-kingdom work, there still remains these other false hierarchies though, such as work we do with our minds and work we do with our hands, so that I know is near and dear to your heart as the owner of a gear manufacturer. In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul says, “Hey, we urge you to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and to work with your hands.” But that's the opposite of the ambition of so many people today. You got a front-row seat to this trend.
[0:18:47] DH: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
[0:18:49] JR: I'm sure you've thought a lot about this. What do you think is the root of our lack of ambition to do hard work with our hands?
[0:18:56] DH: Well, a lot of it can be traced all the way back to Greek thought. The sense that the only thing that matters is the spiritual, the mental, etc. In fact, the Greeks were known – work was viewed as negative, terrible, bad, you hire servants to do the menial labor. I think it even goes further back to that. Not to be too simple, but it's just sin. We want to set ourselves above other people. We all want to feel super important. We have this ego that we're always comparing and judging, and we put on the pedestal of the values of power and sex and recognition, fame, all of that. That's from the world. How does that translate?
We focus on being influencers. We would just want to be somebody and get recognition and fame and all that. The deeper part of who we are as people is as we work with our hands, as we find – when he said, live a quiet life and do the work of your hands, there's a tremendous amount of fulfillment that comes from not chasing all those things, but just settling down and saying, “What was I made to be and how can I make a contribution to whatever it is God puts before me today?”
Contentment, peace, selflessness. It's the upside-down kingdom. If you want to find your life, you lose it. That's why it's so amazing that Jesus came. As a stone mason, he's a craftsman. He demonstrates for us that there is such simplicity and beauty in working with the material world and making things better for people and making things with beauty and order like you said. That's the human spirit. That's the way God created us to be. But the distorted part of that chases all these other things that tries to fill that void that only God can fill.
[0:20:42] JR: Yeah. I've always loved that in Genesis 1 and 2, we see God calling Adam and Eve to both what we would call white-collar and blue-collar work. Naming the animals was “knowledge work,” right?
[0:20:54] DH: Yup.
[0:20:55] JR: But tending the garden was blue-collar work and work with our hands. Then of course, when we see Christ come, he spends the majority of his time working with his hands. I love this. You read V1, the earliest draft of my new book, The Sacredness of Secular Work. You generously wrote one of the most over-the-top endorsements. But you did call me out on something that I ended up changing. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.
[0:21:19] DH: Yup. Yup.
[0:21:20] JR: It was my exposition of this Greek word tektōn, that we translate to carpenter to describe Jesus' vocation. You and many theologians far more experienced than both of us argue that carpenter is not the best translation of this word. What is and more importantly, why does it matter? I'd love to hear you talk about this for a little bit.
[0:21:42] DH: Well, it was funny because at Christianity Today, they had that great article about it and what tektōn was, or is. The reason we all focus on a carpenter is that when they're translating, one of the early translators, when they took the gospel and the Greek and Aramaic and translated into English, they didn't have a word for stonemason, or craftsman, this tektōn. They didn't know what to do with it. The only thing they could come up with that would vaguely resemble it, the true meaning of it was carpenter. We've lived with that ever since. But the reality is there weren't a lot of trees in Galilee.
When you look at all of Jesus' parables, there's a lot of them that deal with stone. The cornerstone that the builders rejected and many other parables. There weren't a lot of trees. He probably wasn't “a carpenter,” but he was a craftsman, a stonemason that worked with all kinds of materials. I think that's important because I've often had carpenter friends as, “Well, Jesus was a carpenter.” Now, he was way more than that.
To me, it's important that we don't pigeonhole not only Jesus and his ministry, but his work, because it opens up a whole – a much broader story, a conversation that all of us that are working with our hands. It's not just working with our hands. It's knowledge work. It's connecting. I think when we work with our hands, it connects our brains and our hands to our hearts and those are really critical. It's just so much more encouraging when you can help people understand that we have this holistic approach to work that models our savior, models what God created us to be.
Jordan, I was speaking in a church. I think it was two years ago. I started off asking. I asked the pastor. I said, “I want to try something crazy. If you’ll allow me to do this.” He goes, “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.” He was interviewing me. I got up and I said, “You know, folks? I want to get to my audience a little bit. How many of you here are called a full-time ministry?” It was a setup. I got to admit, it was a setup. My wife stood up with four other people out of this room of 400. I went, “Oh, that's great. God bless you, you full-time ministers.”
Well, then I said, next, I said, “Stay standing, please. I want to just affirm you.” I said, “Now, how many plumbers do we have in the house?” Everybody's looking at me like, “What? Plumber?” I had one old guy in the third row look at me and his hand started to come up. I said, “Sir, stand up. Please, stand. Any other plumbers?” I said, “God bless you. Your whole life work was plumbing and where would we be without plumbing?”
I proceeded to go through every vocation that I could think of, truck drivers and machinists, electricians, and so on. I know the time I had the entire room standing, they were all having fun with it. Then I got real serious and I asked this question. I said, “So, why didn't you all stand when I asked the very first question of who in this room is called the full-time ministry?” It was like a bomb going off in people. Then the rest of the conversation was, we are all called a full-time ministry. We got to stop regulating it to just church work.
[0:24:32] JR: How do you define ministry?
[0:24:34] DH: Service. I think it's simplest terms, it's serving. Serving each other in whatever capacity, in whatever way you can.
[0:24:40] JR: It's so good. I forget to tell you, I stole this from you this past summer.
[0:24:43] DH: You did?
[0:24:44] JR: Yeah. I, well, keynote of this big youth conference. I took a slightly different approach. I asked them to stand up if they felt God calling them to business. I called them to stand up if they felt called to health care. Then this is great. I tricked all these youth pastors and I was like, “All right, hey. Youth pastors, stand up, lay hands on these kids and commission them to the work that God has called them to do.”
[0:25:06] DH: Nice.
[0:25:07] JR: I asked, “Hey, if you feel calling me a pastor, or a full-time missionary, which God knows we need those, you stand, too.” It was an amazing, amazing moment. These high schoolers, a lot of them coming up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes back like, “Nobody's ever encouraged me that this thing could be from God.” Hey, speaking of young people, this is maybe the main reason why I wanted you to come back on the show, to talk about Craftsmen with Character.
Last time you were on the podcast, you were talking to us about this course that you, I think at the time, were just teaching in Wisconsin. Since then, you've been contracted by the United States Navy, no big deal, to scale this course nationwide. Man, I want to learn about how this happened. But first, what is craftsmen with character and why did you create it?
[0:25:52] DH: I'm like many employers throughout the country, that we've got this aging demographic and the demographics are real. We have the Baby Boomer population is aging out, they're retiring, they're moving on, and we don't have enough young people coming into a lot of our jobs, especially in the blue-collar world, because our schools and our universities are very stressed and you've got to get a four-year university degree, which is appropriate for some jobs, but definitely not needed for all jobs.
Everybody's struggling. Where are we going to get workers? We've been working on this for 15-plus years in our little machine shop. I realized we were just poaching from each other. We're offering each other better wages to get somebody for a dollar, 50 cents more an hour, or whatever. I'm like, we just don't have enough people. I was up at our local high school one day and they asked – and the other thing you have to realize is that, and I think people resonate with this. Back in the 1990s, some brilliant professor somewhere, actually from Wisconsin, got a lot of national recognition and said, “Tech ed of the future is not going to be welding shop class, auto mechanics, wood shop, etc. It's going to be lab coats and computers. You're wasting your money and time trying to teach these kids tech ed the old way.”
Schools across the country actually greatly reduced, or shuddered their tech ed departments. Well, we lost an entire generation of kids that are tacit learners. 50% or more of the population learned by working with their hands. I think if any of you have boys, you'll understand that and a lot of girls do, too. Our educational system is geared primarily towards theoretical learners. That's why kids – kids are tacit learners. They just go crazy sitting in their seat when they just have to memorize and just wrote memories, stuff, etc.
When I was up the high school one day, our tech ed teacher asked to come in and resurrect the tech ed department. I'm looking at the equipment that I ran back in the late 1970s and early 80s and went, “Oh, my gosh. This has all been mothballed.” I'm helping them resurrect and bringing it all back up to speed. While I was there, I just felt the Lord talk to me and said, “Take a look at these kids. You were one of these kids 40 years ago. No sense of purpose. No sense of direction. Nobody's investing in you. You didn't do well in most of your traditional classes, but you excelled in your shop classes. Think about your tech ed teachers.” Back then, I had five, and I could name every one of them even right now. They're that impactful.
That just sparked a thought that going, wow, how do we get these kids exposure to the broader world, exposure to all the career opportunities in our community? The other part of it is how do you give them that sense of purpose and calling and affirmation that they belong, that the world needs them in some way?
I actually went back to graduate school at Bakke Graduate University. I spent three years studying all this and they came up with this curriculum called Classroom with Character, that four days a week, we get the kids job shadowing the different businesses throughout the community. One day a week, we get them in the classroom. We deconstruct their worldview, expose their flaws and reconstruct it with basically, a biblical kingdom perspective, without using religious language, because we're in the public schools. But the focus is on character development.
Eugene Peterson has a phenomenal quote that he contends that the primary location for spiritual development is the workplace. I twist that a little bit. I said, I think, the workplace is the primary location for character development. We have to hook the kids up with mentors, people who are living out these character qualities that we all need and want and what God called us to. The character qualities go from words to actual virtues that they can – and skills that they can live out.
We hit magic by God's grace that – and it's an old model. You're putting younger people together with older people. That's all it is. We just saw this radical transformation with these kids. It's a semester long course in a high school. It's just been amazing the impact, not only on the kids, but on our own businesses as well, because it's that sense of legacy as older people. We can pass on something to the next generation.
[0:29:45] JR: I love this. You started this really to solve a problem with Edgerton Gear, right? You guys couldn't hire.
[0:29:51] DH: Yeah.
[0:29:52] JR: Here's this issue, and be like, you are expanding well past that now. You are scaling this curriculum nationwide. You're not just solving Edgerton Gear’s problems. You're really blessing your industry. How did you get to that point where you're like, “Man, this is bigger than Edgerton Gear? I just want to bless this industry and bless these kids”?
[0:30:13] DH: Just the weird way God works. It was funny. We're part of a manufacturing alliance for our county. They wanted me to, on that committee to figure out how do we solve this workforce development issue. I've tried job affairs. I've tried tours. I've tried all sorts, youth apprenticeship, adult, and we do all this stuff. It wasn't getting to the heart of the issue. I finally told the community, I said, “Look, I know Craftsman with Character works. If you want to try that, fine. But otherwise, I’m not a meeting person.”
We held a little function here, and about 70 people showed up and a representative from Frito-Lay was there and one of the local larger schools, that's a multi-ethnic, struggling community, and another large company called Scot Forge and said, we wanted Scot Forge. They're forging house. We want to do this. They did it. They saw the magic happen, because part of the criticism I often got was, “Well, you’re in Edgerton. It’s a little white community. It's special. It can't expand.”
A lot of that, that program was just, it blew everybody away. We had, I think three African-American students, a young Hispanic man, and the Caucasian kids. They experienced the same thing, the transformation with the kids and the businesses. While they were at that graduation, I was invited to a meeting on workforce development and there was a representative of the Navy there. Everybody was talking about our course and how excited they were. She looked at me and she said, “I have one question. What do you need to take this national?” I'm, “Ba, blah, blah. What are – huh? What are you talking about?”
She explained that our submarine industrial base, all of the thousands of suppliers that are out there to help build submarines. She also explained that they're all late and our nuclear submarines are the only competitive advantage we have against our enemies. She said, “If we don't get our nuclear subs up to speed, we will have World War III. China's going to take over Taiwan and Russia's got other plans.” She said, “It's become a top priority in the Pentagon.”
They went out and talked to all their suppliers and said, “Why are you late? Why are we not getting our submarines on time?” It was the same answer from everybody — workforce development. “We don't have enough young people come into our industries and our trades.” They said, “Can you help us and expand this?” Within six weeks, we had a three-year contract.
[0:32:24] JR: Wow.
[0:32:25] DH: Yeah. We're dealing with the government. Within six weeks, we have a three-year contract. Now I'm speaking a lot and helping other communities. What's blowing me away, Jordan, is the number of business owners, Christian business owners, and not even Christians that just have a heart for this next generation. It's just not about their business. They’re realizing that their businesses are – the future of their businesses are at stake for one, because you don't replace your workforce, you don't have a business.
I think this is where God's really moving among the blue-collar world, just the regular working-class folks, is that we have this heart to serve and to help this generation to find its way. That's what's absolutely beautiful to me of what God's doing. If I can help another business, or another community, taking these kids that are often the at-risk kids, they're not doing well academically, but they're brilliant working with their hands and just helping them find their way, it's powerful. That's where I'm really excited is – I think that's what God's original plan was drawing us back here, 30 some years ago.
[0:33:30] JR: Yeah. I mean, it's such a good example of what we know to be true based on Genesis 1 and 2 and Revelation 21 and 22, that God's vision of human flourishing includes good work, right? By providing these kids with a path to a job that will provide for their needs and contribute to society and provide some level of joy for themselves, you're helping them be fully alive and more in line with who God created them to be, right?
Oh, by the way, it's interesting to me that, man, there's a growing mental health crisis, and the data skews, if you're not finding a job, you cited some statistic, or maybe I read this in a different book this morning. If you don't graduate college with a four-year degree – I got to look up the statistic. I'm going to look it up right now. I want to say like, twice is likely to commit suicide in the United States. It’s something crazy to me. Talk about the impact a little bit more that this is having on these kids. Maybe talk through a case study of what you've seen in the lives of these young people.
[0:34:32] DH: I have dozens of them. The common theme, often, are these kids are CDF students, right? They don't fit into, like I said, the traditional classes. Some of the statistics are only 30-some percent, 32% of our population has a college degree. If you look at a sophomore right now, or a class of 100 sophomores, 60-some percent of them will not graduate with a college degree, so what happens to them, right? I often say, that our educational system right now is akin to foster care.
We bring you along until you're 18, but then if you don't go to college, we're done with you. You're out. We have no contact. We have no support for you. That's staggering. I mean, if you got 60-some kids, often from very broken homes that have no support, no encouragement – Bill Cosby always used to joke, which is true, that our brains aren't fully developed, especially with boys, until they're 25. There's this incredibly critical period from 18 to 25, 16 to 25. These kids are developing that we're not supporting them, guiding them, encouraging them, blessing them. We're just leaving them to find their own way. Where do they end up? I mean, my gosh, I mean, we can go down that route.
[0:35:42] JR: They're not finding their way. By the way, I just found the statistic. Let me interject real quick and then you can pick it back up.
[0:35:47] DH: Yeah. Please.
[0:35:47] JR: There’s this author named Robert Putnam in a book called Our Kids says that, “You're more than twice as likely to die of suicide if you have a high school degree compared to a college degree.” That's mind-boggling. God use you guys to help give these kids purpose and good work.
[0:36:04] DH: Well, and what I often say, the two things God did in us, the need he created in us for good reasons, besides food, shelter, and clothing, is to have a sense of purpose and to have a connectedness to other people and to him. Purpose and relationships. A lot of these kids have neither. Our course really focuses on that. We dig deep into their lives and we limit the class size to eight to 10 students, so we can have those small group dynamics of being very personal and vulnerable with each other and share our struggles and finding our way as adults and how we can help these kids. Modeling to them by being on our job site shop floors with other adults and facilitating health relationships. These kids find that, right? That's the discipleship model, the mentoring model that's been around for thousands of years.
When the kids can connect to a healthy adult, while helping them expand and explore their gifts, talents and who God created them to be, it literally feels like magic. I mean, the case studies that we have, and I've told this story, because this was repeatedly, just recently, because this last semester, my middle son, by the way, is our tech ed teacher here in Edgerton now, which is another miracle. He swore he'd never – he swore he'd never come back to, that I joke about. But he warned me.
[0:37:23] JR: Careful what you swear against it.
[0:37:25] DH: Exactly. He warned me about two kids. One in particular that we're going to have in this last semester. I won't mention the young man's name, but he said, “Dad, this kid's a problem. He has 70 some detentions from last year. He got it down to 30 some detentions this year. He's just a loose cannon. He can't sit still. He's a fart in a windstorm.” I mean, that's my dad often say. I mean, the classic squirrel and off he'd go in a different direction. He could not focus.
He joined our class. He was exactly what my son explained. For the first 12 weeks, it's like, oh, my gosh, this kid's driving us crazy. Nathan, my son's telling me stories in the welding shop, or in the machine shop. The kid will just grab stuff and use it, not put it away and just chaos wherever he went. It was at week 13, he shows up in our class that morning and he's just smiling. There's something different about him like, what's going on? He took over the whole conversation for the next 45 minutes. He proceeded to tell us that most of his life, he has been a bad person. He's been in trouble with the law. He hated his parents. He's constantly running away. He's just lived this life of chaos.
He said, “You know what? I've been a bad person. When you're a bad person, there's bad consequences.” He said, “I'm learning to be a good person.” He goes, “Guess what? Being good has good consequences.” For 45 minutes, he just rambled on about this. He goes, “You showed me these character qualities, but you didn't shove them down our throat. You you gave us a choice.” I said, “You mean, we didn't teach it, but you could catch it?” He goes, “Exactly. That's what I'm trying to say.” He showed up the next week and he rambled on again. He said, “My life is completely different because I want to live a life of being a good person, working hard, being someone that people could trust and respect, and on and on and on.”
We just got a text from him. This was last semester going back last spring. We got a text from him about a month ago, Nathan and I did. He said, “You know, this course saved my life. I decided not to finish high school. I got my GED. But I'm now working as a diesel mechanic, living my dream of where I never thought I could fit anywhere. I just want to thank you so much. Please, pass it on to your dad.” I also joke, and he's probably making more as a diesel mechanic than most high school teachers.
[0:39:47] JR: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. No, I love that testimony so much. Let's be clear, you're teaching this in the public schools. You can't explicitly preach the gospel, but you are discipling. Maybe we could call it pre-discipleship. I'm on Craftsman with a Character's website right now. The craftsman code, number one, I am not the center of the universe.
[0:40:09] DH: Isn't that fun?
[0:40:10] JR: Yeah. Number three, there's dignity and purpose in knowing my trade. These are biblical principles and you're using them to help these kids. Number one, I would argue, literally save their lives. But talk to the listener, again. I knew we talked about this a few minutes ago, but let's go there again. The listener is like, “Oh, cool. But did that kid get saved? Was there spiritual redemption?” Sometimes you might not know. Hopefully, that does happen. We do pray for that kid that he would come to follow Jesus Christ. How can you be at peace not knowing whether or not there's been a spiritual redemption in his life, Dave?
[0:40:46] DH: Several things. One, it's not my job to save them. God's more concerned about these kids than I am, okay. Number two, one of my good friend’s a professor from Nigeria has a saying, his name is Dat Reju. He said, “Dave, do you realize that salvation when Jesus had the disciples, salvation was not a prerequisite for discipleship?” I went, “What?” He says, “Think about that. The disciples had no idea what they were getting into. They didn't understand what Jesus was doing, what a salvation was. But he was mentoring in the discipling them along the process, along the road to get there.”
That was a real wake up call for me, realizing that we are all on these spiritual life journeys. I look at these kids, and I needed to understand that there was good and evil, before I could choose good, right? I needed to understand that there was some order to the universe that I did fit somewhere before. I knew I was lost. I knew I was a mess, but I needed to know if there's something there that made sense.
Being a child of an alcoholic — going back several generations, a lot of chaos in my life. I need to know that someone cares. I need to know that their words were more than words. I needed to know that there was even truth to pursue. I call this, like you said, pre-discipleship, pre-apprenticeship, whatever you want to call it. We get them on that path to hunger and long for truth because it makes so much sense once they start living it. What the end result was, and my contention is you give kids a hunger for truth, you know where they're eventually going to end up, right?
Our role is simply to put them on that path to affirm, bless them, remind them that they were meant to be princes and princesses, and bring that alive in them like, wow, this world is fascinating and I belong here and the world needs me. I have no doubt. And we're also in Christian schools, two private Christian schools, where they can be much more open about it. In the public schools, I love it. I want the problem kids because we can put them on that path that's just going to really bring them alive and hopefully, lead to where they're meant to be.
[0:42:53] JR: I love this so much. You're just planting seeds of goodness and truth. You are making goodness and truth win some to these kids who previously loved darkness and lies, right? There's a story I think about a lot of C.S. Lewis, when he was a troubled teenager, whose mom had died, and whose relationship with his father was totally deteriorating. Now, he wasn't working with his hands. He was starting to be an academic. But he was 17 years old, fully committed to a life of an atheist.
He's sitting, waiting for a train one day. He's bored, so he goes over to the little bookstore in the train station and picks up this novel called Phantastes. He reads it.
[0:43:38] DH: George MacDonald. Yeah.
[0:43:40] JR: Yeah. George MacDonald. He points back to this moment for the rest of his life as the moment in which he says, his imagination was baptized. Because even though this novel never mentioned Jesus’ name, he said, there was something good about it. There was something true about it. There was something beautiful about it that caused this hairline fracture in his atheism and caused him to search for joy and goodness and truth. That was only ultimately, fulfilled in Christ. George MacDonald's this former pastor. He knew what he was doing, but he didn't beat Lewis over the head with the Roman’s road. He didn't have to. He had to simply plant that seed of joy. That's what you're doing with these kids. It's amazing.
[0:44:22] DH: One of the exercises in our curriculum is I have the kids from all different backgrounds, identify character qualities that they think are important to be successful in life. It's a fun little project that we take them through, but they come up with a list of character qualities, of goodness, of cooperation, of humility, of work ethic, being teachable, the team player. I mean, the list goes on and on. For 11 years, I've been teaching this. I have the kids in the – I think it's in session 10 or 11, I compare that to the same list that my guys came up with as experienced machinists. It's the same list.
These character qualities, which are all, can all fall under the banner of goodness are universal. Doesn't matter the age, the race, the culture. Universally, God has put it in our hearts. I think Don Richardson coined it ‘eternity in our hearts’, that God put something in us that we recognize, and we long for that. There's that whispering of where we were supposed to be that we've lost, right?
When we can show the kids and help them discover that on their own, like wow. There's that haunting in my spirit that that's what I'm meant to be. That's where I'm meant to end up, right? We just fan that flame and help bring them along.
[0:45:42] JR: I'm going to try to make a connection between two things I know to be true about Dave Hataj. You tell me if I'm wrong in making a connection between the two.
[0:45:49] DH: Okay.
[0:45:50] JR: One is what we've just been talking about. You're doing this incredible work through Craftsman with Character. You're having this tremendous impact in the lives of these kids, right? The second is that decades ago, you decided to cap your personal income. I'm curious if those two things are connected for you. Do you think that that pre-decision –Here's how I'm playing it out in my mind. I'm like, all right. Because you could have just kept Craftsman with Character local to serve Edgerton Gear if your goal was to make increasing multiples on the business, right? Is there a connection here for you in capping your income and the impact God’s been able to have through your work with Craftsman with Character?
[0:46:30] DH: There is. I think I can explain it. I appreciate you bringing this up, because I've been thinking a lot about just what the spiritual life means. The reason we did that is because I lived in Southern California for a period, in Newport Beach, and I saw the extravagances and the traps of wealth. I realized, “Lord, I don't want to be one of those people, because I'm not going to be who you want me to be, or end up where you want me to be if I just get caught up in this pursuit of money.” Jesus says, that you can't love both mana and God, serve mana and God, money.
It's been a spiritual discipline. I actually have written and thought a lot about the spiritual disciplines that we need to keep on the path of where God leads me to be. By capping our income and striving to live a life of simplicity, I mean, we heat our home with wood. One of my favorite hobbies is cutting and splitting wood. It keeps me in touch with the things of earth. This morning when I got up and I started a fire, I don't know why. I knew I was talking to you today. I was just filled with gratitude. Got out of bed. I'm grateful for running water when I could brush my teeth. I'm grateful that I have socks to put on.
I was praying through the house as I was walking over the fireplace, thanking that I had shelter and I could build a fire and I could sit in a soft place and I had food and I could prepare today and talk to you. I think by doing that, it built a life of gratitude, of understanding how blessed