July 11, 2018 Show with Kirk van der Swaagh on “Compassion Without Compromise in the Heart of a Liberal City”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth.

We're listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 11th day of July 2018.

And today we're getting our swag on on Iron Sharpens Iron, or should I say we're getting our swa on because we have as our guest today

Pastor Kirk Vanderswa, and he is pastor of the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village in New York City, and he is returning as our guest today after a very long absence, and we are going to be addressing the very important subject of compassion without compromise in the heart of a liberal city, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron after a very long time,

Pastor Kirk Vanderswa. Well thank you Chris, I'm looking forward to our conversation, and so it has been a while, but I remember our our conversations fondly, so thank you.

Yes, in fact it's been at least since 2011, might be earlier, because I believe the last time you were on was when we were broadcasting out of New York on WNYG radio in Babylon, Long Island.

I'm almost certain that you are part of the Pastors Roundtable. That's right.

In fact I'm hoping to relaunch that as a Friday feature of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, for those of you listening who are unfamiliar with the old show,

I think we started to do it every Friday after a while, perhaps it started once a month, but I think that after a while we had every

Friday the Pastors Roundtable, which featured between three and five pastors from different congregations who would just field questions on any subject that the listeners wanted to ask, and at that time we had a call -in show, but if we relaunch that it will likely be an email -in show like we have now, but if by the way if anybody would like to email us with a question for Pastor Kirk Vanderswa, our email address is

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, that's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com,

and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA, and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and we look forward to hearing from you with your questions.

Before we go into your personal testimony of salvation, because when we have guests on, and I know that you're not a first -time guest, but you are a first -time guest on the new

Iron Chirp and Ziron Radio, broadcasting out of Pennsylvania, and we have a lot of new listeners that had not heard of us when we were broadcasting out of New York, so we will have you, if you don't mind, giving a summary of your testimony of salvation, but before we do that,

I want you to tell our listeners something about the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village in New York City, and also about the

CCCC denomination otherwise known as the Four C's. All right, well,

Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, we're on Bleecker Street, which is kind of, I guess, the main route through Greenwich Village, and Greenwich Village is probably a place that people have heard of.

It has a reputation, indeed, it has a reputation, and it used to be known as a place of kind of bohemian living, and artists, and musicians, and that doesn't quite exist here anymore.

There are still plenty of places, clubs, and jazz, because it goes on, but it's become so expensive to live here.

There aren't many artists living around here anymore, but it has a well -deserved reputation for that kind of thinking, and our church has been here since 1973, started under someone else as a

Bible study in the neighborhood, and they felt like they had a core people, and they incorporated, they bought the building that I'm sitting in right now in 73, and we have, by God's grace, been here, and I hope, please, please, that we've been trying to hold forth the gospel in this place, and it's a great place.

Greenwich Village is a really interesting, great place, a lot of intentionality about it.

You know, people don't just kind of roll with the punches here. They have an agenda, and that makes things kind of exciting.

And as I mentioned earlier, your church is a part of the denomination known as the

Four C's, which stands for the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference.

If you could tell us something about that. Yeah, the Four C's came out of a larger group called the

Congregational Christian Churches, and that was formed, I think it's 1936, so I've got that date right.

And what that was is joining a very large denomination of Congregational Churches, which you think of, like, mostly in New England, though there were more than that, but mostly in New England, the old

Puritan and Pilgrim Churches, and a combination of them and some of what are

Christian Churches. They're kind of, maybe the Campbellite Churches one thinks of, they find also various expressions, everything from the

Church of Christ to other things, Disciples of Christ these days, and they were coming together, merging together, creating one very large denomination.

There was a group within that denomination, though, of ministers who were concerned about the theological drift that was taking place.

And so they tried to sort of form a group within the greater group that had conservative theological distinctives, and it didn't really find a place.

And so they separated, and that was back in 49, if I remember correctly, 48.

And where they formed, then, the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. So the conservative being theologically conservative, congregational still holding fast to that history as well as polity,

Christian recognizing that it isn't just the Congregational Churches, but these other stream of churches. And they wanted to call it a conference because they didn't want it to be a denomination, but you know as the saying goes, walks like a duck, talks like a duck.

But it is, it's a good group of people, and the thing that really defines the

Four Seasons, it's strongly evangelical, it is conservative theologically, it is not a confessional body, even though we do have confessional documents within the

Congregational tradition. It's not confessional, but it has a clear evangelical statement of faith, and it is a resting place for a fairly broad spectrum of churches, from Reformed to what you could say are community churches, and even though the

Congregational tradition has Paedo -Baptists, there are Credo -Baptist churches in it.

So the distinctive becomes polity, much like in the Baptist tradition, you know, the autonomy of the local church, and really an important distinctive of Congregationalism, and it really grew out of their relationship with Presbyterians back in England, is the idea of unity with diversity.

So we have unity on major things and allow for diversity on, well, some people wouldn't think they were minor, but on some minor things, like mode and whose recipient.

So that's kind of where it is there. The offices are based in Minnesota, and the largest core churches are indeed in the

Northeast, and when the frontier moved west, congregation tended to move along the northern route, and so there were churches planted in the upper

Midwest, and then even far out into the Pacific Northwest, and so that's where the major part of our churches are.

We have a few in California, not very many at all in the Southeast, and have some across the

Plain States, and so on. And you said that the conference is not confessional, but are there congregations, and perhaps yours, that are?

I know that the Great Savoy Declaration is the confession of the

Congregationalists going back centuries. In fact, I am a

Reformed Baptist, as you know, and our church, Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is a very historic

Reformed Baptist Church, one of the core churches in the particular

Baptist resurgence of the 1950s and 60s. Walt Chantry was a pastor where I am a member for 40 years, and the man who planted the church was

Ernie Riesinger, who is a key figure in Reformed Baptist history. But we adhere to the 1689

London Baptist Confession, and as you may know, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, or the framers of that confession, openly borrowed heavenly from not only the

Westminster Confession, but also the Savoy Declaration. Tell us about the Savoy, whether you officially adhere to it, or just make it available, and so on.

If you could tell us a little bit about that Yes. Savoy, indeed, 1658, so it's about 10 years after the

Westminster and what they called independence, though they didn't like that term, were part of the assembly at the

Westminster and forming what became the Westminster Confession and the other documents. And it's really the product of, frankly, about 10 years worth of working with the

Westminster. And there's minor additions to it as it went along, mostly some additional words.

There is an additional chapter in it having to do with the

Proclamation of the Gospel, which of course is present within the Westminster, but it's an independent chapter on that.

It's really quite a lovely chapter. There were some interesting changes and additions and deletions that Willison Walker, who's a church historian, particularly of congregational churches, and that as noted, and you can find that online too, for that much, the differences.

But it's very much like the Westminster in doctrine and certainly in emphases, with this distinction of primarily of polity, the difference in polity.

So it acknowledges the local churches being, having full ecclesiastical authority.

And yeah, as I say, the Four Seasons is not a confessional body. There is a group of which

I'm a part, I'm actually the co -moderator of it, called the Reformed Congregational Fellowship, which is made up of churches and pastors that do, are confessional.

And we have a yearly meeting, a nice small meeting, but I tell you, it's one of the best things that I do every year.

It takes place in Massachusetts, takes place either before Easter, depending on where Easter falls, and what it is, it's three, it's an evening, full day, and then a morning of taking the next chapter of Savoy, pastors developing like six papers out of it, whatever they feel they're drawn to within that chapter, the paper gets written, gets presented, read, and then discussed, and it's such an edifying time, because it's usually highly practical, it gets down to practicality of these great doctrines, and how they play out in church life.

So those guys, well, they're confessional, and so we indeed in our church list

Savoy as a governing document. And so it's a great document, and so much as the and indeed the

London Baptist Confession. Very helpful, you know, when people have taken the time to sit through, sit down, and work their way through just what does the

Bible teach, and what is it that we believe, and what are the implications of that. And you know, you would agree, this is not holy writ, it's not something that supersedes the authority of Scripture, but they're important.

They're important documents, and so it's just, I'm grateful to have it.

Amen. Another important document, by the way, people are not familiar, is the Cambridge Platform, which was developed by the

New England Congregationalists, having to do with the governance of the church. It is a great document, and Presbyterians, Baptists, a lot of people would find a lot of good in it.

It just lays out a very helpful biblical explanation of what the church is, and how it ought to be governed, what are the expectations.

That's also a kind of companion document, historic document, for Congregationalists. Now why did the neighborhood church of Greenwich Village select the

Four Seas as a conference to join? Out of all the denominations and fellowships and so on, why was this specifically something that attracted the leaders at that time that that decision was made?

What was it that drew you into that? Well, it's a somewhat interesting story, is that the church, when it was founded, was independent, and its theology was a little touchy.

I mean, it was, you know, frankly, I started attending this church before I was a

Christian. I came here several times, was converted, and I know we can talk about that in a little bit, and my wife and I settled into this church.

And so I was first discipled at this church, and this church, the theology, the more and more

I learned about theology, the more I studied Scripture, the more and more I realized, hmm, there's some things a little wackier.

But I became an elder in the church, and two weeks later,

Chris, the fellow who started the church, he had, we had been installed as elders one

Sunday. The following Sunday, he had an aneurysm of aorta in the afternoon.

The following Sunday, he died. Wow. So two weeks after the first leadership, other than the fellow who started the church, were in place, the

Lord removed him off the seat, and so we led in the plurality, and eventually

I took over the pastorate and got a seminary degree in the process. But what happened was is that I got involved in Operation Rescue back in the late 80s, if you remember.

Oh yeah, yeah. And so I was involved in that. I got arrested in front of abortion clinics up and down the

East Coast, and I ended up, after one, in jail in West Hartford.

And I became very good friends with a fellow there, a fellow inmate who also had been at that rescue.

And we just hit it off, and we remained good friends. And he was a minister within the

Four Seas here in the city. And so when I came out, when we, you know, life moved on, he introduced me to another

Four Sea church up in the Bronx. You might know Bronx Household of Faith. Oh yeah, they had a very landmark legal decision there made when they were worshiping in a school at the time, right?

That's right, yeah. And so that's a Four Sea church, and so David, my friend

Dave, introduced me to them, and we started just getting together as pastors and, you know, praying for one another, talking, chatting, having lunch, and developed a really strong bond which

Well, at one point, I felt the church, shifting away from its previous history and its emphases, that the church needed to become more identifiable as an entity.

At that time, well, it still is, I guess, but it was even more so. The village was a fringe place, and we were a fringe little church, you know, and I just thought, this is not good.

I mean, we want to be part of a larger body that has definition that people go and look to and say, ah, remember them?

They said they were okay, then they must be okay. And when we started looking around and really sort of doing some study, we discovered, well, frankly, we were

Congregationalists, and here in God's Providence, I had met a couple of Congregationalist ministers, and really, that's where our distinctives lay.

And so, when we, when we were thinking about it, we looked at a couple of other expressions of denominations, but having that relationship with my friends, looking at what we had scriptural commitments on the idea of the autonomy of the local church, the local distinctives that could play out, and yet wanting to have intentional identification and fellowship with the larger body.

Plus, also, by that time, I had developed more and more

Reformed theology, and I appreciated the Reformed tradition that was part of Congregationalism, though it's, again, not necessarily present, but there was a place there that I could hold on to.

There's a lot of things that just kind of came together. And one of the things, also, just to, now,

I can stop talking, but the interesting thing that happened, I went to the first, we have an annual gathering for the

Four Seasons, kind of business meetings, but also other things that go on, and the first one

I went to, there was a church being received at the fellowship, and this was in, let's see,

I think it would have been 93, it might have been 92, I have to think about it again, but there was a church that, since 1693, had had a consistent gospel witness in its community in Massachusetts, 300 years of consistent gospel witness in their town of Massachusetts.

And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, the founding pastor was a grandson of someone off the

Mayflower, I mean, you know, that kind of legacy. But they had held fast to the gospel, and it made such an impact on me.

I came back to my church and I said, listen, what do we need to do if the

Lord carries for another 300 years, that at least while on our watch, we've done what we needed to do to make sure the gospel is still being preached in Greenwich Village 300 years from now.

And that made an impression. We ended up changing some things and thinking through some things together, and so all in all, you know, it was a bit of providence and probably a bit of personality and other things that drew us, and we landed in the fourth season.

And if you could, some of our listeners may not be confessional, they may be not

Reformed, they may be novices or new believers. If you could, give us a summary of what distinguishes a congregational polity from other forms of polity like elder rule and others.

Well, traditional congregational polity would look very similar to a

Presbyterian polity, with the exception of that level of Presbytery. So the idea, then, that the local church has full ecclesiastical authority to choose its own ministers, to depose its own ministers, to choose, to decide who comes into covenant relationship with it.

The expectation is that there is personal belief, so it's not a parish model, it's not, you know, a state church model, it's a local church, the members of it,

I think Thomas Hooker, if I'm not mistaken, said, you know, if the church is made up of living stones, we ought to at least try to find out whether they're alive or not.

And so there's, I'm paraphrasing wildly, but there's an expectation of what was called a narrative of grace for someone to be able to become a member of a congregational church.

And so, made up then of covenanted believers, they have, that's the foundation of the local church in congregational history.

So it isn't, even if, again, I understand it's distinctive properly, a local church is not, if I understand it correctly, within Presbyterianism, you have to have offices in the church before there is officially a church.

That's not the case within Congregationalism. If you have a covenanted group of people, that is the core of the church, from which they might choose, they can choose their officers, or they might bring in, you know, elect to bring in a pastor from outside, and so on.

But traditionally, there are elders, deacons, and so on. However, I know this is true in certain

Baptist circles, as well as in congregational circles. Somewhere along the line, the whole office of elder got tossed out, and everybody's a deacon, whoever is a leader, and they have this kind of morphed leadership, and where they're kind of responsible for the church, but they're really thinking they're more in terms of, you know, making sure the lights are on, and you've got a board of trustees, and you know, all of those things have come into play in a lot of Protestant churches.

But historically, congregational policy was indeed a plurality of elders leading with a pastor, or there was distinction made between ruling and teaching elders within the church, and then, as I said, ecclesiastical authority rests in the covenanted group of people that are there.

A hierarchical, but there's also expectation for intentional relationships with other like -minded churches.

Yes, and I happen to have a gorgeous print of the famous painting of the

Westminster Assembly, where the representative of Congregationalism was standing up to say a few words.

Are you familiar with this very famous print? No, if I'd seen it, I don't recall it.

Yeah, if you saw it, I bet you'd say, oh yeah, of course, I know what you're talking about. By the way, you could get that poster at reformationart .com,

reformationart .com, and forward slash Westminster dash

Assembly dash poster. I think that that should get you there.

But anyway, this is a, I think, an important thing for us to do, so we really get a good idea of where our guests are coming from, and their history, and their background.

And for those of our listeners who don't remember you from our old interview in New York, and have been unfamiliar with you since, perhaps if you could give us a summary of your salvation testimony, what kind of religion you were raised in, if any, and how our

Sovereign Lord drew you to Himself, saved you, and drew you to the doctrines of sovereign grace.

Well, I did grow up going to church. I lived in a small town northeast corner of Connecticut, a very pretty sort of picture postcard

New England town, with the big white church in the inn, and the white houses around the common, the whole thing.

And we literally lived in the shadow of the church. Our house was behind the church, and we could just walk 100 yards, and we'd be at the front door.

Beautiful church building. In fact, it remains kind of my image of a lovely, lovely church.

It was kind of elegant simplicity about it. And, but we went there, and it was, you know, it was just, it was part of there,

I think, of my mother was mostly the driving force behind it. And we went.

One of the things, the most significant thing that I remember about my time there, I was there until about seventh or eighth grade.

The significant thing that I remember was, and you'll appreciate this, Chris, being a Baptist, was that there was a woman teaching my fourth grade

Sunday school. And she was indeed a Baptist, and the local Baptist Church had closed down, so she came as part of this congregational church.

And I remember her asking us, our little group of students in fourth grade, she said, do you know

Jesus? I know Jesus. And a tear came to her eye. And you know, that's just logged in my brain.

I couldn't explain it, didn't know what it meant, but the image of that was something that the

Lord brought back to my remembrance often. Secondly, while I was living there, and growing up in that town, again, a small little town, and they, this church, and it was a nice, tall, steep lawn, and it was lit at night, and this might sound perhaps a little odd, but I was walking up the street, up to the kind of center, just a crossroads in the town, and I looked up, and there was, there was like a cloudy, cloudy night sky, and there, projected onto the clouds, was a cross.

And again, it was just something that just kind of said, wow, I can still, as I'm thinking of it, I can remember exactly what it looks like.

Then, later on, when I was in high school, I was singing in an all -state choir in Connecticut, and one of the things we had to audition with was something from the

Handel's Oratorio. Everybody had to sing the same thing. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd, and like a shepherd gather them with his arm.

And that, too, remained in my head. These things, I look back as these kinds of seeds that, you know, that God in his mercy and grace is going to use, that just indicates to me that his hand had been on me, that I had been, you know, found to be in Christ before the foundation of the world, as he says.

And he used these things, some of these things, to just keep that alive.

But it got more concentrated later on when my wife was raised a

Christian, was a Christian. Her mother became very ill. I wasn't her husband at the time, but her mother became very ill, her friends.

And I went out to support her from where she grew up, and I was thrust into the middle of a community of believers that really came alongside her mom.

And I watched the Church in action, and it made such an impression on me. And when I came back to the

East Coast, I was talking to somebody who said, oh, those born -again Christians, blah, blah, blah.

And I said, no, I don't know. I was just with a bunch of them. And, you know, they just, again, it was really just God using them to begin to influence me.

And finally, just the last part of it, my wife and I did get married. I wasn't a believer at the time, and she was, and both of her parents were dead.

She didn't have people over her. She did something which I counseled Christians not to do, which is marry an unbeliever, but nonetheless, she did.

And, you know, one night, I was responsible for taking care of our bank books, and I didn't do a very good job with it.

I've gotten a little bit better at it, but it was bad. And we were a young couple, and she looked at me and said, well, you're just gonna have to do something about it.

And she turned around and left the room. That thing, I mean, it was like that silly thing in the long run, but just confronted me with my just inability.

I mean, I had to assess up to the fact that I wasn't who I thought I was. And I prayed, and I said,

God, if you're there, like all these people keep saying you are, I need your help. And it sounds a little bit like a

Frank Capra movie prayer, but when I looked back over, it was the Christian God I was praying to.

I was recognizing my weakness, my inability to help myself, to deliver myself, and it really was something that I'm just very grateful for.

And just one last anecdote related to this. The next day that I, after that evening, the next day

I was on my way, and actually to the church I'm now sitting in, I had agreed to help some men down here do some work, to refurbish something in the basement.

And I walked down 7th Avenue, I got to this church, and I looked at them, and I knew

I was one of them. And I had been to a lot of churches. I've been to Boyce's Church in Cincinnati, and, excuse me, in Philadelphia, and Jerry Kirk's Church in Cincinnati, both

Presbyterian churches. And I've been to some good churches, gospel -preaching churches, and I just knew every time

I wasn't one of them. I saw these men. I said, I'm one of them. And I just have to trust that was the

Holy Spirit bearing witness with my spirit that I was a child of God, and I wasn't before them. And yeah, it was just a really a work of grace.

And then the more I studied, the more I looked at things, the more and more I was drawn to the

Doctrines of Grace, and I realized this is the most comprehensive, most faithful articulation of biblical truth.

And I try to grow in that and articulate that to my people here, as well as other opportunities

I might have. Well, when we come back from the break, I'd also like to hear about how you knew the

Lord called you into the pastoral ministry, and then we'll move on from there to our major theme of the day.

And for those of you who just tuned in, our theme today is Compassion Without Compromise in the

Heart of a Liberal City. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away.

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Chris Zarnes, and if you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, our guest today for the full two hours, with about 90 minutes to come, is

Kirk Vanderswaal, although if you tried to Google that you probably never guessed how that's spelled. In fact,

Kirk, I think you're the only person I know whose last name is three words, three separate.

Vanderswaal, but it's pronounced swa, as obviously you know. S -W -A -A -G -H, and I'm assuming that is

Dutch. It is Dutch, yes. My father was from the Netherlands, came here after the Second World War, yeah.

And Kirk is obviously the Scottish word for church, which is a providential thing, since you were not a born -again believer in Christ until later on in your life.

That's right, I mean I often think it's almost biblical, you know, how the

Bible, people are given names that say who they are, right? And so here

I ended up pastoring a church, I live about a seven -minute walk from a church, and my name is

Church. Well tell us about the providential circumstances that arose in your life that made you aware and become convinced that the

Lord was calling you into the pastoral ministry. Well, I said a little bit about it in the last section when

I talked about the nature of how I came into leadership. And what happened with that was that, as I said, was involved with two of the men, the first elders the

Church had, the fellow that started the Church, and that was about 12 years into its existence at that point.

And that was largely because it really was a very bohemian, unstable neighborhood.

I mean, there were just a lot of people who couldn't have work, or they all wanted to be folk singers or whatever. And so myself and two other fellows had been here for a while, we had taken our studies seriously, we had taken the life of the

Church seriously, and even though, as I think I indicated before, some of the theology was not great, nonetheless, we were here.

And so we were put in, we were all about the same age, had about the same amount of years in the

Lord and in the Church, and two weeks after we were installed, the pastor dies.

So we lived in the plurality for about a year, and into that process, we began to think someone was supposed to take a lead.

And so we began to, it was a very edifying time, we would meet, I was working actually at that point,

I was doing construction, I was running job sites for a fellow here, and another fellow was an architect, and the other fellow was a single brother who was actually working for the pastor previously, not as an assistant pastor, but like an assistant to the pastor, helping him with things, doing things.

And so that's who we were, and we began to, as I said, say, you know, someone needs to take a lead.

And so we began to do a kind of spiritual gift assessment, and we brought pastors who knew us and knew the

Church in to speak with us. And it was a total of five pastors, we had one group of three and another group of two.

And the first group of three said that they felt, the fellow who had been working as an assistant, who also felt as though he should be the one who was being led to take over the part.

Well, by that point, I had also started to just feel like, hmm, I think this is something that I'm supposed to do.

And so these pastors came, and our council asked us questions, and they brought their wisdom to bear on things, and they felt, wow, we think that this other fellow should be it.

So I said, okay, well, we still have two more to go. And then the other two came along, and they asked questions and brought their wisdom to bear upon it, and they said, well, we think

Kurt should be the one who does it. So there we were, right? It was just, there we were.

We had that information coming in, and but I still, by then,

I was feeling a creasing conviction that I was supposed to take on the role of leading the

Church in that way. But I didn't feel it was something I could grasp. I, you know, if we had these differences, this other fellow felt very strongly as well.

Then I decided to sit and wait, try to be faithful. I continued my work. I had asked at that point if I could take over the role of preaching on Sunday morning for a while, and the other two fellows let me do that.

And at that point, I started preaching through the Book of Romans. And I remember,

I think it was Barnhouse, I read that Barnhouse, when he showed up at 10 Presbyterian in Philadelphia, in his first, as a young pastor, his first three years he spent going through the

Book of Romans. And I don't know if I've got that story right, but that was in my head. Anyway, so I started preaching my way through the

Book of Romans, and that was very formative for me to have to really wrestle with the stuff there that's in that book.

But back to the other, so the sense of calling was there, but again, there was,

I wouldn't call it conflict, but just a lack of clarity. Well, the other fellow and I went on a trip together one weekend to a conference on Christian education that was taking place in upstate

New York, and we had a nice time driving up. And while we were there, he said to me,

Kirk, I really think the Lord wants you to take the lead on that. So that was something that kind of confirmed, we came back, spoke to the church about it, and that is what happened.

So I answered, I took over the pastorate in 1987, of Neighborhood Church, so it's been 31 years.

Wow. Yeah. Well, I think the first, go ahead, I'm sorry. Oh, just interestingly enough, the other fellow, indeed, moved from the city, became an associate pastor of a church in upstate

New York, and has been that since that time. So he was sensing the time.

Great, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, the first time I met you was at the congregation once pastored by the voice, or the man behind the voice of that ad that everyone heard just moments ago,

Bill Shishko, who was once the pastor of, until very recently, of the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Franklin Square, and what a dear friend he has been since the 1980s when

I was first saved by God's mercy, and he is now a domestic missionary with Reformation Metro New York, and host of the radio program,

A Visit to the Pastor Study, and I believe I met you at his annual ministers conference, or ministers gathering.

Well, that must be a very special province, because I think I only got to one of those, and that's why I met you.

Wow, that's something. You know what I remember about that, and I've mentioned it at times, is that I asked,

I brought a couple of guys with me, and we left, and I said, you know, what did you notice about that conference? And he said, well, you know, did you see that there was a table of books there?

I said, that's Reformed thinking, you know, there's a table of books out there. And I remember that and pointed that out, that's, you know, because you go to other conferences, and there are maybe vendors selling some books, but there was a whole stack of theological books ready for people to engage with, or take copies of, or I don't know, but it was telling.

Amen. And Bill used to kindly invite me to that every year, even though it was exclusively for ministers, ordained ministers, pastors, and I was not in that category, but because I was working in radio,

Bill used to invite me every year because he had a burden for churches to use the radio as a tool to spread the gospel and to teach biblically sound truth, and Bill being a radio man himself all the way back to his college days, he would invite me every year, so I met a number of people that have become lifelong friends at those annual ministers conferences.

Well, now we are going to dive into the subject at hand, compassion without compromise in the heart of a liberal city.

First of all, I know you've already done some description or given some description for Greenwich Village, New York.

To many people in and outside of New York, it is known as a hub of homosexual activity.

I don't know how much of that identity dominates Greenwich Village today, but it certainly at least fits a stereotype that many people have in their minds.

How much of that stereotype is actual reality? Yeah, it's still very much a presence here.

Our church is located just a five -minute walk away from Stonewall Inn, which is where the kind of birth of the gay rights movement back in 69 happened with the riots, and it's still here.

Now, there still certainly is a significant population, but the kind of more vibrant expressions of that or, you know, kind of more community -minded have moved to other neighborhoods in Manhattan, but it's still very much a presence here.

It's a given that this is just, you know, to be accepted and to be embraced, and so that's the orthodoxy of the neighborhood.

It is also the case that the annual Gay Pride Parade, which takes place in New York last

Sunday of June, terminates down here right in our neighborhood. So, because again, it goes by the

Stonewall Inn. Christopher Street has long been identified. Oh yeah,

I can recall when I used to work for WMCA Radio, when it used to be located in Rutherford, New Jersey, then

Hasbro Heights, New Jersey. I know it's in Manhattan now, but where it actually began in the 1920s.

But I remember taking the PATH train from Hoboken and when, or actually originating in New York, going to Hoboken on the way to work when

I had to go to sales meetings, and I can remember the PATH train early in the morning, like 6 a .m.,

maybe even earlier than that, maybe more like 5 a .m., passing through Christopher Street, and I remember surrounding the car every time

I passed through that stop. You just saw crowds of what were obviously transvestite prostitutes hanging around there by the car.

But obviously, at least back in the 90s when I worked for WMCA and through the early 2000s, a prominent sin in that area.

Yeah, yeah, and that dynamic is still present, though not nearly as present as the time that you're describing.

But it is still very much here, and there's still, you know, I mean, over the weekend, the last weekend of June, there's plenty of flags out and plenty of people present.

And so, if nothing else, I mean, it is a kind of, just a given, right?

It's a social orthodoxy that's very much part of the neighborhood, and just presumed that everybody agrees with it.

Well, one of the reasons I wanted you to have a discussion on Iron Trip and Zion Radio today is because it is a difficult task for Christians when they are reaching out to a lost community surrounding them.

It's hard enough when you're dealing with your average American lost person, your average suburbanite who is just a, perhaps, a blue -collar worker who just can't wait to get home from work and turn the game on, and they want to sleep in on Sunday, and then when they wake up they want to watch another game, and, you know, they want to have a barbecue, they have no interest in going to church.

It's hard enough to reach out to those folks with the love and compassion of Christ, but infinitely easier than when you have a hostile community that is spiritually hostile toward you, very often politically hostile toward you, ideologically hostile toward you.

And how is a Bible -believing church, a church that believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, believes that the condemnations against homosexual activity as well as any sexual activity outside of marriage, how does one maintain faithfulness to biblical orthodoxy without compromise when you're trying to not scare away or turn away or unnecessarily offend those around you, because obviously the gospel is going to offend any unbeliever unless the

Lord regenerates that person's heart and opens their eyes and ears and minds. But if you could, give us a brief explanation before we go to our midway break, and then you can continue with that explanation.

Okay. Yeah, I would say it's been a changing reality over the years.

I've been here for, as I said, for three decades, and so when the conversation dramatically shifted to where it wasn't just that you had the homosexual community advocating for themselves, when you had media, politicians, some entities within the greater thing that we call the

Church, or at least they bear that name, advocating, it became, it has become a different dynamic in terms of how do we, how do we, how are we present among them?

And so where before we would show up at the gay pride parade and hand out tracts and put up signs and gospel signs and so on, you know, that we were no longer speaking from a frame of reference that people understood, and the conversation was just being taken over.

We no longer had a mic in the conversation anymore, and so we decided at that point that we needed to rethink what our presence means here in this neighborhood.

I don't know how long you want me to go on about that, but there is... So we made a decided effort to say, we want to be present here, we want to be faithful to the gospel, our doors are open, and as opportunity arises, we will speak to whomever, we will offer the love of Christ to whomever, but the kind of sort of more street corner, not in your face, but you know, out in the middle of that, was not being, it was being seen strictly as hostile towards them, and we felt like our message was getting garbled.

And if you could, if you could pick up right where you left off there, because we have to go to our midway break now, and if anybody would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -S -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

USA. Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages with Kirk Vanderswa.

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So don't forget to mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Before I return to our guest,

Kirk Vanderswa, of the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village today, we have some special and very important announcements to make as far as special events are concerned.

We have our friends at the Fellowship Conference New England conducting their annual conference

August 2nd through the 4th at the Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine.

And the speakers this year include Pastor Tim Conway, Pastor Mac Tomlinson, Pastor Jesse Barrington, and Pastor Nate Pikowitz.

If you want more information about the Fellowship Conference New England, go to fellowshipconferencenewengland .com,

fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, and that's August 2nd through the 4th in Portland, Maine.

Then coming up in November from the 9th through the 10th, the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their annual Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology.

That's being held at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quaker Town, Pennsylvania, and the theme is

The Glory of the Cross. The speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortlund, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Nguyen.

If you'd like to register for that conference, go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org, and then click on Events, and then scroll down to the

Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, November 9th through the 10th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quaker Town, Pennsylvania.

Then coming up in January, I am so excited like a kid in a candy store, like a kid waiting to unwrap his

Christmas presents, for the G3 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

They are expecting over 4 ,000 people to attend the G3 Conference, which stands for Grace, Gospel, and Glory.

It is a Reformed conference being held at the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta, and this will be my third year there.

Manning and Exhibitor's booth for Iron Trip and Zion Radio. The conference will be held Thursday, January 17th through Saturday, January 19th, and there will be a

Spanish -speaking edition of the conference on Wednesday, January 16th.

The speakers at this phenomenal conference include Paul Washer, John Piper, Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, my favorite of all preachers, pastor of the

Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, and chancellor at African Christian University. Tim Challies, Phil Johnson of John MacArthur's ministry,

Grace to You. Josh Bice, who is the director of the G3 Conference. Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, and many more.

If you would like to register for the G3 Conference, go to g3conference .com, g3conference .com, and click on G3 Conference 2019, and not only can you register to attend that conference, but you could also register to have your own

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Send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line. That's also the email address where you could send an email to Pastor Kirk Vanderswa of the

Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, and the email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside.

But good old USA, only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Before we went to the break,

Pastor Kirk, and by the way I apologize, I forgot to tell you if you didn't know already that our midway break is very long because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a 12 -minute break between our two major segments because they air their own commercials and public service announcements during that period.

So I apologize for forgetting to remind you since you were probably waiting there for a long time. But before the break, we were talking about how those in the community of Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village who are, for lack of a better term, enemies of the gospel, they were viewing your evangelism and your expressions of compassion and outreach to them as nothing but hostile attacks against them, and if you could pick up where you left off.

Yes, well it really has to do, right, I mean at least within our culture, if there was another country or at least somewhere or something in our culture, it's the

Church that has an objective standard by which we're saying this activity, certain activities are just not pleasing to God, and you mentioned them in the lead -up to the question.

So the reality is that it's the Church within this culture that has that standard that we articulate and hold when somebody posits a different idea or a different ethic or a different morality.

And when things in particular are done around here that are very open, such as, let's say, the

Gay Pride Parade that takes place last Sunday, then, as I said, we used to go out every year and hand out tracts and put up gospel signs, but two things were troubling.

One, the police ended up putting us in with a bunch of people in the kind of, quote -unquote, protest area.

And suddenly our message became very mixed, because there were people there that were not there out of the grace of God trying to encourage people, warn people, direct people to Christ.

They were there with other hearts. And so we moved out of that.

We decided we're not going to stand there. We're going to stand along the parade route and stand wherever we want to and hold up our signs.

But when years passed when we had done that, there would be people who would say something or not say something as we walked by, and we would try to, whether you're shouting something out or handing something out or getting a conversation with people.

It became clear after a while, I mean, a number of years, and I can't pinpoint exactly when it was at this point, but that our mere presence provoked hostility.

And, you know, we could say, okay, well, that's a given. But our intent was to try to communicate. And when the immediate response is one of where they're not looking at what we're saying, they're just responding to our presence.

And whatever their presuppositions are about who we are are completely lost, overwhelmed, swallowed up.

Then we thought, well, this just isn't an effective way to try to engage this issue.

So we stopped going, frankly, to the parade. And we decided what we needed to do is we're here.

We're not going anywhere. We own our building. We can't be pushed out of it. And so we belong here.

And so we shifted our presence to think in terms of how can we show that we're good neighbors.

And, of course, someone shares the gospel, you're a good neighbor. But how do we demonstrate that we know a gracious God who helps people like us, who need his grace and need his mercy, need his help, need his power in our lives?

So we focused our efforts really by beginning to open up our door under something that we call the

All Things Project, based upon Romans 11 .36. For of him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be glory forever.

And in that, then, we try to offer things that have to do with, because human beings do these things, it's inevitable and it's not inherently sinful, we are trying to engage our community aesthetically, intellectually, spiritually, as well as materially.

So that we are, we're trying to sort of be a presence here that, as the scripture says, even if they should say something negative about you, you know, they have no just cause to do so, right?

That we are, we're here, and we understand ourselves, in ourselves, the need for God's grace.

So with that in mind, then, the focus has, you know, that particular demographic that we've been talking about, the homosexual community, gay community, is something that is certainly part of where we are, but there's other people living here, and they are concerned about politics, they're concerned about art, they're concerned about, you know, ideas, there's people practicing

New Age spirituality, there's these kinds of things that are prevalent, and certainly the Christian voice, the

Christian presence, is not very present. I mean, most of the churches, well, with the exception now, there's been some church planting going on in our general area, but, you know, there are places that have historic significance in our midst that are no longer preaching the gospel.

I mean, we're very close to us. Just a couple blocks away is Judson Memorial Church, Adoniram Judson. In the cornerstone is his,

I believe it was the Burmese Language Bible that he created. And, but the pastor, the former pastor there, was funneling women off for abortions in 1970, before he even became legal through Roe v.

Wade. So, I mean, that's been their stance for a long time. So, and there's the oldest

Anglican church in our neighborhood, and so on and so forth. So, but the gospel has departed from those places.

And so, in terms of where, what we had to offer, we felt like, you know, we want to remain faithful to the things that we said, have our doors open, try to engage people in ways that are not bait -and -switch, but kind of in the

Kuiper tradition, you know, saying, this is, human beings do things. They do things. And God has a claim upon all that we do.

For us, Him and through Him and to Him are all things. So, to try to engage people, giving them a different point of view about some of these things.

So, we have some monthly music shows. We've done film series. We've had some lecture series.

We've, things like that. And we're having a summer, five summer seminars on becoming truly human again, the strange freedom of following Jesus, it's called.

And so, we've offered one, and every month we have the next coming up tomorrow night.

And so, ways in which we hope the doors are open. But I'll tell you the most important thing that has changed is that we have, and I almost hesitate to mention this on air, because we've tried to be very clandestine about this.

That is that there are brothers and sisters in the faith who struggle with same -sex attraction.

It's just a given. And they're not numerous, but they're present.

And they, in the world today, there's a tremendous amount of pressure upon them to yield, right?

I mean, just the orthodoxy is that, wait a minute, that's who you are. That's your identity. That's who

God made you, if they even want to bring God into the conversation. And yet, there are men and women who struggle with this dynamic in their lives, and they want to be faithful to biblical sexuality.

They want to be faithful to biblical identity, and they need support. And so, a number of years ago, we started a discipleship group for men and women, two different groups, for those brothers and sisters who are struggling with this particular issue in their lives.

And we feel that that is, at this point, a real important focus for us in relationship to this particular sin that we're talking about, because we feel that our primary focus first has to be, right, good for all people, exactly those who are the household of faith.

These are people within the household of faith that are dealing with this issue. And here, right in the middle of the

West Village, two blocks away, the birthplace of the homosexual rights movement, we feel like we're the

French Resistance, you know? That we're present, offering the truth about things, and we're encouraged by the fruit that it's bearing in people's lives.

So that has become our focus in relation to that particular dynamic, that particular entity.

So we try to open up our doors to engage our community in those other ways we're talking about, because we believe that the particular conversation of the gospel, it's a message that takes place in the real world, with real people doing real things, real sin, real striving, real dealing with the fallen world.

And so if we can kind of engage the whole,

I mean, it sounds rather grandiose, but try to engage the whole sort of human experience of what that means, then we feel then the particular conversation about, this is what

God has done for us, about our humanity, about our fallen, broken humanity.

This is what God has done for us. Then we think that conversation maybe has more of an opportunity to be heard.

But then within the relationship of that particular issue that was brought up, we're concentrating on brothers and sisters who need that kind of support.

And we're very careful about that. We've got a couple of people sort of infiltrated, as it were, and want to stir up trouble, where we go about it in a very careful way.

But if any of your listeners in any church, and listen, I know, maybe

I don't want to presume, but I know it might make people uncomfortable to think that indeed in their church there could be somebody there struggling with these issues.

And it's not something that can easily be brought up for a lot of people within churches.

It's just, for whatever reason, either they're embarrassed or they feel like, you know, would be responded negatively, I don't want to cast that on brothers and sisters.

But it is a real thing, and we want to be responsive and loving and supportive, as we would for anybody struggling with any particular issue in their life.

And so we're trying to do that. And if there's anybody out there that wants some more information about that, they're in the metropolitan area, they can certainly contact me through your radio show.

But that's how we're trying to respond, to offer that grace, that support, that discipleship for our brothers and sisters.

We have a question from CJ from Lyndonhurst, Long Island, New York. And CJ says, while I recognize that what you are describing is indeed a true phenomena, sometimes

I have seen something that I believe to be theologically and spiritually dangerous, where churches and denominations and individual

Christians place people struggling with same -sex attraction into a category as if they are a third gender, that God made them that way, and therefore the most they can hope for is a chaste life rather than a transformed life, where they actually become not only born again, but they can also enjoy a maritable life as a heterosexual.

What is your reaction to what I just said? Well, I would agree with that.

In fact, we've had several marriages come out of our group, men married with children.

We don't set that out as necessarily a goal in so much that then we know you have really arrived when you've been married.

I mean, I've got single people here, heterosexual, who are probably never going to be married. Right, and there are eunuchs in the body of Christ.

Right. Yeah, so... But indeed, the key to that is really not accepting the idea that our desires define our identity.

And so if someone has desires, and desires... Actions can be simple, desires can be simple, the

Scriptures tell us. But what happens is that in this particular phenomenon, desires get to be the defining characteristic of someone.

And so when we work with people, we just project the idea of a gay identity.

It is a sin. It's a desire, it's a practice, that's a sin, and needs to be confronted and thought through, and what are the issues, just like we would with any other sin.

So if we just even move away from those ideas of categories, and we're just dealing with human beings, human beings who are sinful, human beings who are...

that some human beings struggle with certain sins, other human beings struggle with other certain sins, what we're offering to provide is not a unique category, as the questioner asks, but rather support.

Because for some of these people, they weren't finding it locally, or they were looking for some particular...

they are looking for some particular voice and help. So, yeah,

I don't know if I've answered it, but I would agree where it's not a separate category, it's not God made me this way.

A lot of people have these desires, and have found themselves with them coming from a lot of different places.

Sometimes it's due, as often spoken of, as abuse of younger, or someone, an older person prying upon a younger, but not everybody.

There are some men and women who just as soon as sexuality begins to really dawn on them, that's where they've been drawn.

And that's obviously a product of the fall, and obviously the reality of a brokenness in the world and in themselves, as we all are.

But it does require, then, a particular thought process, or a particular, I don't know, a thought process, a particular approach, thinking about it.

What does it mean? What does it look like? How do we walk faithfully before Christ?

Amen. For other people, it could be with greed, you know? There's plenty of greed to go around.

Right, right. Plenty of wanting it to go around. My dear friend, Dr. James R.

White of Alpha Omega Ministries, was the first, probably in the early 2000s or so, to point out a point of view that I had never heard articulated before, because I was among those that had nothing but a gutturally knee -jerk, angry, nauseated reaction to the idea that people could be born with the proclivity to homosexuality, and I said, no, no, no, that can't happen.

But James White pointed out to me, and he's a Reformed Baptist, a strong believer in the doctrine of total depravity, and he said, well, if we are all, by nature, born totally depraved, conceived totally depraved, that would entail all kinds of proclivities that would develop in us from the earliest development of our childhood, and some might have a proclivity towards anger or to murder or to thievery or to alcoholism or all kinds of things.

Why would homosexuality be any different? And he was not saying this to condone that activity at all.

He was just saying that we can't rule out that in the depravity of the human soul that that might be a proclivity that someone has right from when they first start to develop the capacity to think sexually.

Yeah, well, I would agree with that, and I do think the

Church needs to hear that, because I'm telling you, the men and women that I know from this, they are some of the most courageous

Christians I know right now. If you think about the context in which they are trying to do this, in which they are trying to be faithful, when they've got media, a world, they've got the former president of the

United States, they've got laws in the land all telling them that they're wrong, all telling them that this is not something to resist, this is something to celebrate.

Yeah, I mean, in fact, they look down upon all of us who are Christians who have a biblical view of this as a sin and as a damnable sin, they look at us as monsters and morons and just outright evil people.

If we're not celebrating it, they don't want us to just tolerate it, they want us to celebrate it. Yeah, so if you think then you've got brothers and sisters in the faith who are saying,

I know that's what they're telling me, but I see what the Scripture says.

I know that I want to honor Christ with my body and with my heart and with my mind.

Boy, given our current context, these are where the warriors are right now. I mean, these are warrior people because they've got a real, well -heeled, well -funded, powerful voice against them.

And the Church needs to come alongside our brothers and sisters and say, you've got a refuge in this place.

You've got a refuge. You've got a place that you can have a rest from all of that, all of those voices and all of that pressure.

You can come here and you can confess sin just like we have to confess sin. You can find discipleship help just like we try to find discipleship help.

What's your issue? What my issue is, what's your issue? And to take them as born -again,

Bible -believing, Christ -honoring people that are trying to find how they walk in faithfulness.

That's what the Church is there for, right? That's what we're there for, to be fellow disciples, fellow allies in the struggle.

Amen. And I think it is, though, as our listener indicated in his question, I think it's very important that we not view the romantic desires of homosexuals, or I don't even like using that word, of those prone to desire same -sex activity, that we not look at the desire as something innocuous or benign.

The desire itself is sin. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's what

James says, right? We're drawn away by our desires. So there can be desires that are sinful, absolutely.

And we know that in that problem as well as in lots of other problems.

If I'm coveting my neighbor's wife and I'm coveting his house and his garden and his servants, there's my desire at work, and that's sinful.

That's something that's not an act. That's an interior reality in my soul.

So, yeah, absolutely. And just to reiterate about the fact that you cannot use a proclivity that you may have had since birth or since early childhood as an excuse to do something, there have even been studies, whether they're correct or not, but there have been studies that I have seen involved in documentaries where men who have a very extremely high level of testosterone are more prone to murder and violent activity.

Well, that doesn't excuse that, just because you may have this high level of testosterone. Whatever people may think gives them some kind of an out or a way to excuse sinful activity.

You don't have it. You have to flee to Christ for the covering of His blood and for the regenerating power of His Holy Spirit.

Amen. Well, you know, Chris, human beings, quality beings, are self -justifying machines, aren't we?

I mean, that's what we are. We're always self -justifying ourselves, that we're finding reasons to feel good about ourselves.

And yet, you know, we have God's Word before us. It tells us, really, who we are.

And the remarkable thing is that we can put off an old self and put on a new, and we can be renewed in the spirit of our minds.

We, in the New Covenant, that's, isn't that extraordinary? God promises right as long as He takes up residence within us.

You know, we're not those who are of the flesh or of the spirit, and there really is hope.

We can be, we can pursue who we are supposed to be as human beings because we are in Christ, we're united to the

One who is the only normal human being that ever walked the face of the earth. Jesus is the only normal human being who ever walked the face of the earth, and we can be united to Him.

And in union with Him, His life in us, we pursue that normalcy that He offers us.

And that, we all need that. Oh, my goodness, we all need that. Well, it's interesting that you're saying that we would pursue normalcy, but at the same time, we are a peculiar people, aren't we, as Christians?

We are unique. Yeah, we are unique, uniquely. That's right, we certainly are unique.

Unique in that we have been, by the grace of God, pulled out of our wretchedness and set apart in Christ so that we can find out what it really means to be.

Amen. Well, we have to go to our final break. It's going to be a lot briefer than the last one. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question, do so now or forever hold your peace because we're running out of time.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. And only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

I can see this topic very easily lending itself to a personal question. So give us an email before we run out of time.

chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back, God willing, with Kirk Vonderswaag. ♪♪♪

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This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest has been for the last 90 minutes and will be for the next 20 minutes,

Kirk Vanderswa. Pastor of the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village in New York City.

We are discussing compassion without compromise in the heart of a liberal city. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com and do so now if you intend to because we're rapidly running out of time. We have

Bob in Westchester, New York. And Bob wants to know if you ever heard of the book

When the Wicked Seize a City by Chuck McElhenney. You know,

I know the title and I'm sorry to say I have not read it. That's an excellent, it's excellent.

Yeah, okay. Chuck McElhenney was the pastor at one time of the

First Orthodox Presbyterian Church of San Francisco, California. In fact, my landlord was also once the pastor of that church.

I believe before Chuck, but I can't remember if it was before or after. I think it was before. But Chuck was the pastor there and when the organ player at that congregation was discovered to be an unrepentant person involved in homosexual activity, when he was told that he had to repent or he would be put under church discipline, he refused, was excommunicated, and he sued that church for being fired as the organist and for being excommunicated from the congregation.

And the homosexual activists of San Francisco unleashed their fury on this congregation, leaving hundreds of answering machine messages.

This is back in the day when they actually called them answering machines, threatening to kidnap, molest, and murder his children and all kinds of grotesque things.

They actually attempted to burn the parsonage to the ground when

Chuck and his wife and children were fast asleep in their home. Thankfully, Chuck woke up in the middle of the night and saw the light flickering outside his window and realized the house was on fire and they all escaped unscathed.

And it's quite a remarkable book. There was never any arrests made in San Francisco for this crime.

But Chuck McElhaney, I've got to say, in spite of this kind of attack from the homosexual activist community, he remained steadfast in reaching out with compassion and love to these people.

And even after this incident, there would be transvestites and transsexuals even visiting the congregation and they were out of curiosity or out of just a curiosity to see if there was truly hope in Christ and in Christianity.

And he and his wife developed friendships there. So they never became bitter and hateful, even though they received that kind of reaction.

And they remained there for quite a number of years as the pastor there. Well, as you relate to that story,

I remember it now. I do recall that incident. Well, we ourselves here, too, early on in the early to mid-'80s when

New York City was considering adding sexual orientation to their nondiscriminatory hiring practice and then also adding homosexuality to sex education curriculum, we were encouraged in our church by the founding pastor to go down to City Hall for a public review.

There was an opportunity for public speeches and you could go and sign up and give your two -minute speech or three -minute speech, however much they were giving you.

And we, at that time, with a couple of exceptions, depends on which year we're talking about, were really the only evangelical church that was showing up, or the

Catholics were showing up and Orthodox Jews were showing up to express their opposition.

And we went down, and as a result, our church, we had bomb threats left on answering machine, we had swastikas painted on the front of our building, bills plastered on the front, and the last incident was on the 25th anniversary,

I think it was, of the Stonewall riots when there was a march through, and they stopped some of the old guard,

I guess, stopped in front of our church and paintballed the front of the church. So we've certainly not anything to the level of that brother in San Francisco, but, yeah, it's been part of it.

And, I mean, it hasn't happened to us in a while, so somebody might say, well, that's because you're not being annoying enough,

I guess. But it's, as I said earlier, I mean, at this point in time, we feel our focus, given the national reality, is to really offer a refuge to brotherhood.

We're replacing our emphasis. One main thing of interest in that whole story with Pastor Mikulhani, and by the way,

I have interviewed him on a number of occasions on the old Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio program. If anybody wants a recording of one of those or all of those interviews, they can email me.

But the secular media did not cover, none of the secular media in California or anywhere in the

United States that they're aware of covered that story. And you could imagine if a group of people professing to be

Christians, like the God Hates Fags cult, if they had done something similar, burned down a community center that was populated by homosexuals or something, you would hear about that on the television in Siberia.

I mean, you would have heard that everywhere in the world. Absolutely. And it's amazing how the reverse was not true.

Yeah. You know, I think that's a phenomenon, and it leads me just to think of one thing, and Chris, you push back or just say, ah, we don't have time for that.

I mean, there is a way in which this particular phenomenon, and because it has gained such ascendancy and so much power, and it is so explicitly contrary to Scripture and to nature, that when we as Christians respond to it,

I think there is a tendency, or there could be, I'm a thinker, I don't want to categorize it, but I mean, you know, we could respond defensively in so much that we're trying to protect our turf, we're trying to protect our way of life, quote -unquote, or whatever that is.

And for me, the most grievous thing about it all is that people are being fed a lie, and it's being ratcheted up and given all of the possible affirmation and legitimization that could possibly, a country like the

America could give it, again, with media, politicians, all kinds of things.

And I think we just want to remember that, you know, what's at stake is are there souls of people in this?

And I remember when I went out to the Gay Pride Parade over years, and there would be

Christian contingents, well, church contingents, let's put it that way, right? Some local church, Judgement Memorial, let's say, has a banner, and they're showing their support for this definition of sexuality.

And I think, you know, what a great tragedy that is, that people are being told that under the supposed name of Christ that this is acceptable to God, when in fact we know that it's not.

And, you know, it's in a list with all other kinds of sins that are not acceptable. And yet this one has found legitimacy, and I think we want to pray and have a heart that says, to this, we're not defensive.

We're on the offense for the sake of truth and for the sake of the souls of those people that are being caught up and persuaded.

And what's interesting to me is that there has actually been an uptick in participation in the group that I have talked about, because there are men and women who just know.

They know the truth. They know that they need to drown out the drone in their ear.

And we don't... It's not so much that we need to protect our turf or protect our right to speak in the public square.

I mean, we want to protect our right to speak in the public square so we can preach the gospel. Amen. And so that we can tell people about the hope that's in us, that you started out.

And that really should be our motivation. And though I totally understand when we feel like we're being threatened and overrun and ugly things like that that happened to our brother out in San Francisco, but his response was absolutely right.

He's going to stay there. He's going to keep his doors open. He's going to love people. And that's...

And you understand, we love people without condoning their sin, without giving a credence.

It's... But I think we err on... If we are reactionary into the terms of where we feel as though somehow we're no longer being respected or we've lost our ground or so on.

You know, Peter says, we should not think it strange when fiery trials come upon us.

I mean, that's just the reality of it. If we're gospel -preaching Christians, we're going to get slapped in all kinds of ways.

And the goal we have is to remain faithful, to keep that hope within us and let that hope be known to other people.

And yet, at the same time, I recognize the power and the threat that this current phenomenon represents is really powerful.

And we are the target because we are, as I said earlier in the show, we're the only institution in America that has an objective standard that is large enough to be able to say something on a national scale.

And so we've become the target. So we shouldn't be surprised by that. We shouldn't feel offended by that.

You know, the gospel is what's offended. And anyway, I don't know if I've made sense. Oh, yeah, you've definitely made sense.

In fact, we have a listener who wants to ask you a question about what you said. We have

Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who said, Although I agree with much of what you said, and perhaps the part that I disagree with,

I am misunderstanding, but I don't believe that it is outside the realm of appropriate behavior for Christians to be involved politically as individuals to stop the institutions of higher learning and other places, especially where children are being educated from the lie that homosexuality is to be celebrated to continue and to dominate there.

Yeah. No, I'll stand with him on that. Absolutely. What I'm talking about is what motivates our hearts in that.

Is our heart motivated? Is it self -defense? Or are we motivated out of love for the sake of those children, for the sake of those who are being caught up in the lie that can we pray and find that kind of grace?

I hope that doesn't sound wishy -washy to anybody because I don't mean it in any kind of wishy -washy way. To find love for your enemy, and it is an enemy, to find love for your enemy is hard.

And yet I think that's what it's called. I mean, we're enemies, right?

I mean, we're enemies of these people. And we feel like they're enemies of us.

And yet to find the grace from God to think, okay, how can I go after this?

How can I talk to my school board? How can I get that legislation? How can I do this?

Again, not so much out of love, out of love for the other. It's got to be in there anywhere, somewhere,

I think. It has to be in there somewhere and not just trying to preserve something so that we feel more comfortable in our day -to -day living.

And again, I'm not saying everybody says that, but I'm just raising this issue. Loving the enemy is hard to do, but that's what we're called to do.

Yes. The Christian church is the only institution where we are called to rescue our enemies.

And not to give them aid and comfort to remain in their sin, to call them out of their sin, but at the same time approach them with love, let them know that they're wrong.

In fact, one of the things that disturbs me about those that profess to be evangelical who pamper, for lack of a better term, pamper those involved with homosexual activity out of political correctness, they're pampering them out of fear, perhaps, of legal ramifications or just becoming unpopular.

They act as if they're doing those involved in homosexual activity a favor by candy -coating what's going on.

They're not doing them any favor at all because it is a damnable sin, among other sins. It's not the only damnable sin, but it is damnable.

Yes, and when someone professes that out of Christian love we're going to accept something like this, well, then,

I mean, accept this as a given reality, which is a reinterpretation of reality, right? I mean, that's what the serpent did in the garden.

He reinterpreted reality for Adam and Eve. He said, no, no, the tree's okay. Don't worry about it, just eat it.

That's a reinterpretation of reality, and this is a reinterpretation of reality. And people do that, even if they want to say they're well -meaning, and if they do it out of Christian love, well, if you're offering someone unreality, that's not love in the long run.

It might make you feel good and make them feel better in the short run, but in the long run, reality is reality, and you have to deal with it.

And yet we can do that humbly. We can do that lovingly. We can do that with courage.

We can do that with an acknowledgement that we ourselves are in that place.

Yeah, and it really is grievous when people who have the title of evangelical just cave on this stuff, and I know,

I don't know, I guess in their best moments, it's out of love. I think sometimes it's just out of some sort of pride that says, you know, we're cooler than those other guys, and I don't know.

But it is, it's a wrong tact to take. It's not saving anybody. It can feel good for a moment, but eternity is lying out there.

Well, I'd like you to now give us about a minute of summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners before they leave this program today.

I guess I'd go back to what I was just talking about. It's just become something that I feel kind of passionate about, is that we are called for Christ to take up a cross, and that is not just having a sprained ankle or an illness.

It's to take up the cross, to bear the witness for Christ, and that is a cross that deals with sin, and yet deals with it out of a heart of love.

And I struggle to find that love for my enemy, but that's what I need to do, and I think that's what we need to do.

And then I think our voice sounds clear. We don't sound like we're for self -interest, but we are for the interest of the other out of love, out of the love of Jesus.

We do have time for one more anonymous listener who wants to know, what organizations or ministries do you most highly recommend for those struggling with same -sex attraction that desire to repent and be obedient to Christ?

I would point them to Restored Hope Network. Restored Hope Network is an umbrella organization that formed in the wake of Exodus International.

As you might recall, that organization used to be an umbrella organization for these kinds of ministries that imploded because the leader of it just gave up the ghost.

He just collapsed, imploded, and said it's not an issue anymore, he's not going to talk about it.

So Restored Hope Network is a kind of umbrella organization for these kinds of ministries.

In fact, ours belongs to that, Restored Hope Network. Great. And I want to make sure that our listeners have all of the contact information they need for you.

First of all, the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village in New York City, their website is ncgvnyc, or Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, New York City, ncgvnyc.

Also, the denominational, or should I say the conference website, is cccusa .com,

that's cccusa .com. And I know that the Reformed Congregational Ministry website is reformedcongregational .org,

reformedcongregational .org. Do you have any other contact information that you care to give? Just at the end of the ncgvnyc is .com.

Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. And our phone number, we have a phone number, 212 -691 -1770, 212 -691 -1770.

And an email address, well, you can get it off of that website. You can email us through that. We're happy to respond to anyone, and we welcome you to worship with us

Sunday mornings at 11 o 'clock. Amen. And I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

I want to thank you, Pastor Kirk, for being on the show. I look forward to your return. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater