The Return of County Before Country (and Barnes & Noble)

Owning the Future

The County Before Country conference is coming back in 2027. But first, I need to tell you about a Brazilian steakhouse date and a bookstore.

I love Brazilian steakhouses because I love meat. While I was on the business development team at Maddox, we routinely ate at Brazilian steakhouses, mostly Fogo de Chão. I’d always come home and tell my boys about how much meat we ate, how we got the meat sweats, and how glorious lamb is when it’s cooked right. Eventually, I brought most of my kids to a Brazilian steakhouse to enjoy the experience.

But my lovely wife, Emily, had never been to one.

I saw that Texas de Brazil had a steakhouse up by Kenwood Mall and said, “Hey, let’s just have the girls watch the little one, and we’ll sneak away for dinner there tonight.” She agreed, and we quickly got dressed and went up there.

It was good, but it was way too much food for my wife. She was not quite in a place to enjoy the glory of constant meat coming to your table the way I was. So after talking and having a glass of wine, we decided to take off.

But on the way out, we saw Barnes & Noble and decided to go in.

Barnes & Noble is near and dear to our hearts because it was often the site of our dates back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. We both loved books and people, and we would go to the Barnes & Noble in Florence, Kentucky, or down at Newport on the Levee, grab a coffee, look at some books, and get ourselves into discussions with people we had just met. Those conversations would often lead to discussions about the gospel.

Actually, while we were on our honeymoon on Sanibel Island, we went over to the Barnes & Noble in Fort Myers several days in because we had gotten bored. We struck up a conversation with a couple of strangers, became fast friends, and hung out with them even past closing. We sat on the bench in front of Barnes & Noble talking to them about Jesus and all sorts of things.

So, kind of out of nostalgia, we went in to check it out.

Right away, I noticed that while it had some of the old-school branding, it had a different feel. I would say it felt hyper-curated. Each table seemed to have more thought put into it. Obviously, the store was much smaller than the old stores, which were huge, with upstairs and downstairs.

I went upstairs to look at the trade paperbacks and comics. Sadly, they only had a small shelf, but they had a huge section for manga, which is another interesting conversation about how Japanese comics overtook American comics. But that’s a different article.

We both ended up buying some stuff and hanging out there for about 30 minutes. It was a good time, and it reminded me of our youth.

Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to return to Barnes & Noble. I love the discovery. Amazon is convenient, but it’s just not the same.

That’s been in the back of my head ever since. And recently, I stumbled across an interview with the newer CEO of Barnes & Noble talking about how they’re experiencing a resurgence, which is how all of this connects to a conference on localism.

You can listen to the eight-minute video. I think it’s worth it.

Or skip it and keep reading.

Essentially, Barnes & Noble had been struggling since the 2010s, closing stores, losing profits, and quickly running through six CEOs. In 2019, James Daunt took over to change the model back to being a bookstore that embraced limits and localized. Daunt wanted the locations to think like booksellars. He empowered the local stores to choose what they stocked, reordered, how they displayed, and even had the local media done by their local team. Daunt said they had “abandoned 100%” the old model of headquarters precisely dictating what every store did. Now, he said, “each store curates its own assortment, reorders its own books, does each to their own.” That’s why the Kenwood Store felt so hyper-curated to me. All of this is working; since 2019, they have opened 90 stores. Daunt attributes their renewed success to a form of localism. He said, “Most of that effort is being done at the local level,” he said. “What matters to us is what’s going on at the local level.”

I love this. And something like this seemed inevitable to me which brings me back to the conference.

County Before Country was a concept that came to me first as a tweet and then as a conference on what I called biblical localism. All I meant by biblical localism was the principle that Christians ought to give priority to the time, place, and people God has put around them.

People naturally want to take a principle like that and turn it into a blueprint or roadmap for exactly how to live it out. I’ve always resisted that. I think the principle itself is enough to get Christians unstuck and actually working. So at the conferences, I tried to invite speakers who were practicing what they preached, with a strong bias toward practical application.

For whatever reason, it attracted a lot of homesteaders and people whose idea of resisting the culture often dead-ended in the need for new militias. There were obviously all sorts of other people there, but that particular group was very vocal at the time, and I thought their vision was too small.

I’m all about gun rights. Gardens are good. Raising some of your own food is good. But localism is much bigger than any of that. It’s a principle that can be applied in all sorts of circumstances to all sorts of problems.

And I wasn’t particularly interested in building a brand or even a conference. I wanted a real network of doers. And when I say network, I don’t mean a bunch of names on a website. I mean people you actually know. You have their phone number. You’ve shared meals with them. You’ve shown them what you’re working on, and they’ve shown you what they’re working on.

We got some of that out of those first couple of conferences. So I thought it was better to pause while we were ahead rather than let the thing grow into something that wasted our time or, worse, undermined its original purpose.

Then this year, our church has been in the middle of buying a building, which we close on tomorrow. We appreciate your prayers. So we decided not to have a fall conference at all.

But I think it’s time to return to the topic.

County Before Country will be back Labor Day weekend 2027, and I think the theme will be ownership.

The advent of AI has added a whole new dimension to these questions. More and more of our lives can now be mediated through technologies and platforms we don’t own, operated by people we don’t know, from places we’ll never visit. And I think that makes it increasingly important for Christians to think about what it means to be owners rather than merely renters.

Which brings me back to Barnes & Noble.

The idea that everything can go digital, and that everybody actually wants it to, simply isn’t true. People were made to live in places and meet other people in places. We like physical things. We like places with character. We especially like things that belong to a particular place and remind us of that place. We also are getting sick of subscriptions (a form of renting) and what to own things.

As I’ve been saying for over a decade now, the future is local. The future is limited. The future is analog.

And I think increasingly, the future needs to be owned.

That’s what I hope for us to discuss at next year’s County Before Country conference.