EP 150 Why This Moment Matters for Your Children's Future

I made it through 15 years of formal education without ever hearing this story. And when I finally did, I just sat there thinking….

Why didn't anyone tell me this?

It's the story of William Wilberforce and a small circle of friends and families in England who decided that someone had to do something about the world they were leaving behind for their children.

So they did something. And over 70 years, they changed everything.

I told their story on this week's podcast episode and I think it's going to stay with you. 

This is a little of what you'll hear:

• Why your anxiety about the culture is actually clarity, not weakness
• The moment Wilberforce visited a village so poor that families were living in caves and what he did next
• Why protecting your children from the culture is the wrong goal
• How moms just like you are already doing this work in their communities

This is one of the most hopeful episodes I've recorded in a while.

Because I really do believe that women who are paying attention, rooted in truth, and raising their families with intention are exactly who the culture needs right now.

Come listen. I think you'll feel it too.

And if you're interested, you can sign up for my Free Training "How to Stop Feeling Powerless and Become the Expert in Your Own Life"

AI Generated Transcript

Introduction: The Source of Maternal Anxiety

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and Founder of the Mission Driven Mom. Now, I don't think that mothers feel anxious today because there's something wrong with them. I think that they feel anxious because they see the confusion in our culture.

They see the instability. They see the lost virtues and values. And they wonder to themselves, what kind of world are my children going to inherit? And last time we talked about you and your role as a mother and what it is that you can control — and that is yourself. And how, when you start working on yourself, everything starts to shift.

And it starts with the way that you think. And not really so much like, oh, I've got to just hunker down and control my thoughts. It's like seeing the world through a new lens, through understanding how to see and identify truth. This is a new way of learning how to think that's actually very ancient, that we've lost, that we can start with.

And we talked about how when you anchor yourself in that new lens, and you see the world in a new way, and you think differently, everything becomes different. And when you work on yourself and you tap into your personal power and you learn to lead yourself and better lead your family, then you put yourself in a position to actually be an influence to those around you.

And I know for some of you that may kind of scare you or worry you, and like that's the last thing from your mind. You just want to get your house under control. But I want to cast that vision of how we can link arms and make the culture different. And I want to do it by telling you a story now.

The Declining Culture and the Power of Mothers

I want to do this because when you worry about our declining culture, you're worrying about your children. You're worrying about the world that we're leaving behind for our children and for our grandchildren, because you see that there's increased anxiety in children. You see that there's moral confusion, that there's identity instability, to say the least. There's rapid cultural shifts and there's a huge loss of trust in institutions of all kinds, and there are really important reasons why that's happening.

You and I have the power to turn things around. We can link arms as mothers and make a difference, and I'm going to prove it to you.

The Story of the Clapham Sect

So I'm going to tell you this story about the Clapham Sect. I told you last time, we have a Clapham Team. And our Clapham Team is named after what was called the Clapham Sect or the Clapham Circle.

I'm going to tell you their story for a minute. In October of 1787, a twenty-something William Wilberforce had, just over the last year or two, been through a profound conversion to Christianity. He had grown up Christian, but he had really lost faith in the supernatural and in God, and he'd had a reconversion.

And part of this process of him really coming to God and putting his heart on the table and saying, okay, here I am, and offering himself to God — this is what he wrote in his journal: God Almighty has set before me two great objects. The suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.

  And by reformation of manners, he didn't mean make everybody more polite. He meant something very specific. Manners had a distinctly moral aspect in his use of the phrase. He wished to bring civility and self-respect into a society that had long since spiraled down into vice and misery. He wanted, among many other things, to stem the epidemic of teenage mothers prostituting themselves to pay for their gin habit. It was exceedingly progressive of him to see such actions not merely as crimes, but as symptoms of a larger social condition that required the extraordinary intervention of those in power. He wanted to not judge the poor and suffering, nor ignore them, but rather he would reach out to them and help them up.

So he felt that God had given him this mandate and he devoted the rest of his life — his health, his energy, his focus, his attention, and pretty much his entire estate and wealth — to these projects. He died with not very much money left because he gave everything to this cause.

John Thornton and the Birth of the Clapham Circle

Well, his conversion had been led out by a man named John Thornton, who was his uncle, and he was one of the wealthiest people in England at the time. He believed in what William Wilberforce wanted to accomplish. Not long before then, through a mistake with a law that was made, slavery itself was outlawed on the soil of England, but there was still an immense slave trade going on that England was participating in, and other aspects of slavery that they wanted to abolish permanently. And then this reformation of manners — in other words, making philanthropy and service fashionable — because it wasn't then, it wasn't the thing to do.

In fact, there are so many people now who leave religion and say they don't believe in God, or whatever the case might be, but then they hold on to these fundamentally Christian religious values of philanthropy and service and good works, because they did this in the name of God. They did it to make the world a better place.

John Thornton owned a home — an estate, really, he was very wealthy — about four miles outside of London in a place called Clapham. And his home, Battersea Rise, had a library there. This became the hub of a community of a growing number of people that did good works. And through their efforts over about 70 to 80 years, men and women joined hands and they engaged in good works all throughout England and beyond to change the culture itself. That instead of kicking the alcoholic to the side and ignoring him, it became, not at first socially acceptable, and eventually virtuous, to reach out and help that alcoholic, or prostitute, or whoever it was that needed helping.

Why This Story Matters Today

I have a couple of books. There's not a lot written on them. In fact, a few months ago on our Facebook page — I think it was on Instagram too — I clipped a little video. This was before Charlie Kirk was killed, and it was the interview that Charlie Kirk did with Jordan Peterson, and they're having this conversation about how the story of William Wilberforce is one of the most important stories that needs to be told in the history of the world. Because slavery was institutionalized, it was practiced almost everywhere, all the time, throughout the history of the world. And both Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk make the comment that it was years later in their own personal self-education that they ran across his story at all and became aware of the incredible work that he had done.

This is absolutely true of me. And I was just sitting there nodding my head like, yes, fifteen years of formal education and I never heard about this incredible man that gave everything to eradicate slavery and actually pulled it off in his lifetime. And through this network of men and women that he brought together — two to three hundred of them over time, and probably more. Those were just the founders and the people that were working, but then there were so many local people they brought into their circles.

They did in fact reform the manners of England and beyond in the West. Made it fashionable to do good works. The lesser told story, even more than William Wilberforce, is the Clapham Sect.

The Mission Driven Mom's Clapham Team

I could only find two books on them, but what happened was when I read Amazing Grace, we were in the middle of — I had been working on level three. We were bringing women through the academy, kind of for the first time, and I really felt like there needed to be a place for these women to go and continue to link arms. And now that they had these tools from these three levels of our academy, they needed to have support to be able to do good works in the culture. And we launched it. We actually have our own logo based on an image from the library at Battersea Rise. And we had a couple of retreats and they went amazingly well.

And these women have now actually gone out into the world and done amazing things. One is trying to build — she has gotten land in Mexico and she's trying to service orphans there. Another — you heard from Katie recently on this podcast — founded a charter school in her town. You heard from Amy, who's got a school going in her area. There are women that have been on city council, that are working with other nonprofit organizations. Aaron is working with her community to help the homeless in their area. There are a couple of them that partnered together and put on women's retreats. So they have gone on to do incredible things. This process really does work.

The Clapham Team itself went silent when everything in MDM went silent, which I talked about on a recent podcast as well. But now, of course, we're bringing it back. We're doing it again. We're institutionalizing it. We have new leadership around it, and we are super excited for what it can become.

What the Clapham Sect Accomplished

But the point is that the Clapham Sect linked hands and they did change the culture. I'm going to read you — like I said — just a few things about them.

There was, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a network of friends and families in England with William Wilberforce at its center of gravity, powerfully bound together by shared moral and spiritual values, by religious mission and social activism, by love for each other and by marriage. Their greatest and most celebrated achievement was the abolition of the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire and beyond. They really knocked down slavery in dozens of countries through their efforts.

They were founders of the British Colony of Sierra Leone, of Free Town, of schools and of Christian missions, some of which continue today. A number of them were members of Parliament and used their influence to promote causes from prison reform to the protection of Sunday, and from peace to censorship. They tried to reform the Church of England and achieved the moral transformation of Britain. It is incredible what they accomplished. So much of it outlived them.

I'm going to read you some of the other things. They founded a whole lot of schools. They encouraged girls out of prostitution and helped them get on their feet. They cared for orphans. They helped boys in the navy. They supported Haiti. Prison reform. They founded mental hospitals. They even did work on animal cruelty. Pretty much any kind of charitable work you can think of came to their attention and they tried to do something about it.

The Character of William Wilberforce

As I mentioned before, William Wilberforce gave everything. His health broke. He eventually married and his wife helped nurse him back to health. He was in chronic pain for much of his life, but he spent all of his time and energy. It's amazing to me because he was financially independent — and some of these others, John Thornton certainly, some of these other individuals — financially independent, the quote "four hour work week." They had all the time in the world. And what did they do? They consecrated it to the good of society. They tried to make things better for the coming generation. They looked outside of themselves and said, what problems do we see, and they tried to make a difference. And this is what we can do as moms. We just link arms and we help each other with projects that we see in our communities and we bring principled solutions.

That's the difference between many of the good works that are going on out there. We need to raise them to a higher level. I had one of my past students contact me a couple years ago, and she was doing this. She was trying to make a difference. She was working with a nonprofit organization that had quite a bit of outreach that was trying to help mothers and children, and she could tell as she went through their curriculum that it was not principled, that they had not delineated the core elements that needed to be brought forward so people could have a better understanding of what they were trying to do. And she was trying to bring those principled solutions to real world problems. It was so amazing.

The Story of Cheddar Gorge

I want to read you one last story from Amazing Grace. Go read it if you haven't. You'll read it when you come on the Clapham Team for sure. But this will just give you a little bit of a sense of the kind of people that these were.

On August 21st, Wilberforce traveled with his sister Sally to Cowslip Green to visit Hannah More and her sisters. Hannah's sister Martha, knowing Wilberforce loved natural scenery, insisted that he take a trip to the nearby Cheddar Gorge, which afforded some of the finest scenery in England. Now, this is because he had been working tirelessly on all of these projects and he was worn out and he needed a break. So he went to visit these friends who were also people that were involved in all of these good works, and they told him, you should go out to this place, Cheddar Gorge. It's beautiful. It will help rejuvenate you.

Cheddar Gorge is the largest gorge in the United Kingdom, with the sides of many caves. But during his visit, Wilberforce was less moved by the scenery than by the inhabitants of the area, whose poverty was extreme and, to Wilberforce, shocking. They had no school at all, nor any church. Some of the miserable souls did not even live in hovels, but scratched out an existence in the caves themselves.

On his return to the Moores', Wilberforce was clearly of a mind to be alone with his thoughts on what he had just witnessed. He retired to his room to pray, did not touch his food, and later emerged with a clear purpose. "Miss Hannah More," he said, "something must be done for Cheddar." They discussed various schemes until the hour grew late. At last, Wilberforce declared, "If you will be at the trouble, I will be at the expense." And he meant it. Whatever they would do to help the poor there, he would fund it.

Wilberforce insisted that Hannah not be shy in asking for his money. To do so, he said, would only be pride disguised as false humility. Over his lifetime, Wilberforce gave away more money than we can imagine, and he wrote the first of many generous checks to launch the Moores' work among the poor of that area. Hannah More soon started the first schools in the area and Wilberforce would continue to fund them for many years.

Applying This to Our Lives as Mothers

If we will be willing to be at the work of first working on ourselves, like we talked about last time, and letting that lift us, and letting that lift our families, then we can link arms and we can lift the culture.

Now, just as we finish up, I want to hit on a few reasons why it's so vital that we do this. Because culture always shapes our children. It is the water that we swim in, and whether it's intentional or unintentional, that culture is always affecting them. And if we don't shape their worldview, something else will. Children are always being discipled by something. So the question isn't whether or not our children are going to be shaped by the culture. The question is what's going to shape who they become?

And this moment is so pivotal because truth is being redefined. I mean, think about it. We live in a "my truth, your truth" world, which I never thought we would arrive at. There are literally videos on YouTube where people are approached on the street and asked, "Hey, if I told you I was a gorilla, would you believe me?" And they say yes. Authority is fragmented because so many institutions don't stand on solid principles, and because servant leadership is at such a low ebb. Trust in authority and trust in institutions is at an all time low, and families are being pressured to outsource their leadership — to let the schools, to let the social media, to let the sports teams, to let anybody and everybody else raise their children, tell them what to value, teach them virtue, or not teach them virtue, or beat down the virtue that's naturally in them, instead of the family.

But the family must go on. The family must do the work. It is the fundamental unit of society, and it's up to us to shape the world that our children inherit. The world is rejecting truth and we need champions of truth. And if you and I don't decide to be them, who will do it? Who will rise up and do it?

This Is Not About Panic — It's About Preparation

Now, this isn't about panicking, running too fast, or worrying about anybody else besides ourselves. We can start with ourselves. It's about preparation. It's about just starting with you. It's about doing the thing you can do, controlling the thing you can control, because it will multiply.

I was talking to a woman recently who has graduated from the Mission Driven Mom, who is in leadership now with our organization, and who has gone out there and done incredible works in her community. And we were having this conversation and she was basically saying, "I don't know how to turn this off. Like, I see all these problems in the world now. I see all these solutions that could be brought to my community, and it's just so hard to turn it off. And now all these people are reaching out to me. What should we do about this? What should we do about this? How can we solve this problem?"

And I said, that's because when you lead yourself and your family properly, people see you as a leader. They know that you can help them. They know that you stand on principle because of who you've become. And so leadership will just become a natural part of who you are.

And she said, "Oh my gosh, that's exactly what's happened. I just am seen as a leader in my community and I wasn't trying to do that at all. I was trying to work on myself, work on my family, and serve. That's it."

Why This Works

Now, why does this work? This works because a principled mother creates stability, and stability creates resilience. And that resilience and self-leadership that you gain and that you give your children — they take into adulthood and they help stabilize the culture. It also works because, like we've said, you and I discover our gifts, we put our own lives in order, and then we go out there and we try to serve. We see what we can do to bless the world around us.

We become principled servant leaders who serve our communities and make them better, and that is something that we can do together.

The mistake that a lot of moms make is that they try to protect their children from the culture. They just say, oh well, you can't ever have a phone and you can't ever be on social media, scratch all that. The mistake that many moms make is that they focus on protecting their children from the culture instead of helping their children navigate the culture with truth, because they can learn to see the truth and teach their children to see the truth as well. And that means clarity, conviction, and servant leadership. That's what it means.

Starting With You

That's all we have to do. We have to begin today to work on ourselves. So I'm going to run through what I read to you last time, because ultimately this all begins with you and your education, where we help you to think differently, and then everything changes. I promise, just everything changes.

You become one, a mission-driven mom who works on herself so she can show up differently for herself and her family. A mom who seeks truth, identifies and stabilizes her life with it. A mom who learns to balance her own personal growth with that of her family. A mom who becomes intentional and begins leading her family to more principle-centered, meaningful, servant-leadership-focused living. She is powerful, confident, self-accepting and purposeful, and then she can formally as a Clapham Team member, or informally just in the rest of her life as she moves forward, she's in a role where she's part of a vast community of moms who are dedicated to lifting the culture, reinstating virtue and love of country, who speaks the truth with courage, who sees the problems in the community and works together with other like-minded women to bring principled solutions to real world problems.

And when she does this — when she lifts herself and then lifts her family and lifts her culture together — we can all make the world a better place.

Closing: The Encore Training

And if what I've talked about today and last week is something that resonates with you, if you can see that your ability to discern truth, to build yourself up as a person, to meet your needs, discover your talents, lead yourself properly, to learn to discern principles in the culture, to know how to link arms with like-minded individuals in the community, to link arms with other women just like you, and be lifted and lift your family and eventually be able to lift the culture — I want to share more about how you can do that in the training, this encore training that we're doing in the next few weeks. I would love to have you there.

If you feel an urgency about our children's future, if you're concerned about what we're leaving behind and the world that we're leaving for your children and your grandchildren, come to that training. We'll talk more about actions that you can take right now. I'm going to give you some frameworks and some tools that you can take action on immediately, but we'll help to make a difference in your home. And you can learn more about how we do this, how we link arms and identify truth to make a difference right where we are, by starting with ourselves and leading ourselves first.

So the link is in the description. Sign up for that training. Thank you for joining me today, and I will see you next time.