Part 1: The Brave New World is Here
It's time to face it with courage and hope.
Making a commitment to produce regular content here on Substack has been a long time coming. As in years. Over the last year or so, I put up a post here and there. However, the Boss had not released me to make it a priority until now. The reason He waited is clear to me, and I’ll leave it at that. As we hit the ground running in 2025, it is important for me to also be clear about a few things up front.
There is a cacophony of podcasts, Substacks, and blogs vying for a piece of your valuable time. If I thought for one minute that what I’m going to share with you was merely adding to that noise, I wouldn't type a word, because you don’t have time to waste.
The world has entered a vulnerable period of transition, and you need to spend your time with those who will help you understand the times we are living in and/or are empowering you to know what to do. Lord willing, I and those whom I am blessed to work with, can help you with at least one, and maybe both. Before you can have any confidence in that statement, I need to set some important context to support it.
Those who know me well understand that I do not like talking about myself, my family, or my life experiences. I am a pretty private guy. However, recently friends and advisors have told me rather bluntly to get over that. Not sharing what God has done in my life and that of my family means withholding the testimony of what He has done, and is doing, through us.
Additionally, for non-fiction writers to establish trust, they must be open about the life experiences that shape their views. This provides critical context by which readers can weigh the credibility of their writings. If the writer encourages the reader to take action based on what they share, transparency is a must.
“What is Truth?” - Pontius Pilate
We live in a world where discovering and applying objective truth is difficult. Scripture and history are contextualized around a post-modern secular worldview and subsequent “lived experiences.” The remedy for this requires researching the life experiences of biblical writers and historians, understanding the proper context that informed their writings, and applying that context today.
Please know, that to the best of my ability, I will run what I share through that process. Just be prepared. The biblical writers and historians lived in a very different world than we live in today. Understanding the context of their writings and applying their intended meaning in today’s world will often sound radical. With that said, let me briefly build some context for you around what God has led me (and my family) through that shapes what you will find here, either in my writings, or in guest posts.
For reasons only known to God, He allowed me to walk a pathway filled with a diverse set of life experiences. I grew up in the late 1970s on a small wheat farm in southwest Nebraska. I received a degree in business and computer science, owned a small technology business, and became an instrument-rated private pilot. After the turn of the millennium, I co-led a small church for ten years, served as a sidekick on a terrestrial FM radio talk show, worked with state legislators crafting and enacting “sound money” laws, and, at the age of 53, received a black belt in Taekwondo with one of my daughters (it’s never too late!).
Looking back, I can see how God used all of this to lead me on a twenty-five-year journey to discover what constitutes a true biblical economic worldview. Over the last five years, I have written three books on the subject. Each manuscript began by asking the question “why?” over and over again. This caused me to dig into Scripture and history and understand the writer’s life experiences, and thus the actual context of their writings. Doing so exposed a great chasm between God’s intent for humanity and how we, particularly in the Western world, live our lives today.
Presently, I am active in small businesses, oversee a non-profit I founded to educate the body of Christ on biblical economics, and serve as a leader on an international non-profit that builds coalitions of “doers” in the Kingdom of God. My wife and several of our children and their spouses directly or indirectly serve some of these organizations. Meanwhile, our families are establishing small homesteads that we believe will serve our local community in the coming years.
It is relevant for you to know this because the content I create here is not as Doug Tjaden, Founder of Regeneco. Nor as Doug Tjaden, leader of the Rebuilders Network coalition on building Community Resiliency. Nor as a former farmer and pastor. Nor as a current homesteader, entrepreneur, and author.
Instead, what I share is derived from all of my life experiences, along with the wisdom and knowledge of incredible leaders worldwide whom I am blessed to count as trusted advisors and friends. Each in their own way seeks to apply biblical truths in local communities and provide their citizens with the abundant life Jesus came to give.
This deep well of personal experience and collaboration with incredibly humble servant leaders has given me a broad-based perspective on the present-day challenges and opportunities followers of Jesus face. Because of my calling to address the creation and stewardship of value in God’s Kingdom, the overall subject matter will lean in that direction. However, we will also explore how followers of Jesus can and should respond to today’s rapidly changing world by applying time-tested biblical principles. And that leads me to a question:
Are you ready for the brave new world you are being thrust into?
Few followers of Jesus understand the profound changes happening around them today. The noise of social media and the busyness of life have deafened and blinded many to biblical and historical precedents and trends that will soon impact all of us. They have failed to recognize that over the last few years, we have simultaneously entered a combination of a fourth-turning (you’ll hear more about that), a third technology revolution (there is a reason the picture at the top of this article is AI generated), a food and healthcare revolution (RFK Jr. anyone?), and a crisis in the Western church stemming from its loss of a solid biblical worldview.
All of this means over the next few years humanity will live through a degree of change it has not experienced in decades, if not centuries, or maybe ever. As such, my goal is to provide you with thought-provoking content that helps you see the world around you differently. It is to help you see the historical patterns and current trends shaping the pathway to an uncertain yet exciting future. One where God is restoring to His Son and His Kingdom what is rightfully His.
As I said at the beginning, I am not here to waste your time. If it turns out that you do not see value in what I am sharing, I will soon know and will shut this site down in a heartbeat. However, if what you receive here is useful, all I ask is that you share it with others. There is a global movement rapidly emerging within God’s Kingdom to restore His principles and ways in a hurting world. He’s asking all of His children to join in. I’m here with my colleagues and friends to help them do it.