Dead Men Walking Podcast: Joel Webbon

Opening Banter and Introductions

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking starts now. Well hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking where Jason and I Indian leg wrestle every night after each episode to see who's right.

Is it a mil or is it post mil? It's pre-mil. Nah, I'm joking. We're not those. Nah, I'm joking. We're not gonna switch when the camera comes on next week, right?

We're gonna hold strong. Yeah, I'm gonna hold strong, man, even though Joe Biden's about to be president. I'll be alright.

Oh, is that too far? Didn't we talk to Stephen Benkars about positive confession? We did! We did. We gotta be easy with that. So I'm Greg, to my left, and if you're watching to your right, my right, is Jason.

How are you, sir? How's it going, man? Pretty good. Excited about this episode. Absolutely. We have someone on the line, so we're not gonna wait too long, but I did want to say, are you enjoying that rain sleet we have in Michigan?

Oh, it's disgusting. So no. The guy on the line that we're gonna introduce, he's probably sitting in like 80 degrees right now. But you know, maybe not for long. I know. Because that's what we're gonna be talking about today.

Joel Webbon’s Background and Move from California to Texas

Yeah, on the line, he's the pastor of the Response Church in San Diego, California. He has a book called Am I Truly Saved? We picked this up down at Fight Left Feast in October. It's a great book. I advise you go take a look at it, take a read.

On Instagram, I really appreciate those like six to ten minute video clips, and I love when he does them. Yeah. It's Right Response Ministries on Instagram. And for the listeners, check that out as well, because he gets on there and he just preaches the word, man.

He brings the fire, and he packs so much into that five minutes. Yep. You go, oh my gosh. I love it. I just got black and blue from this five minute sermon. Right. I got more out of that than I did out of my hour at the Emerging Church.

Yeah, right. Hey, yo. Hey, but it's none other than Pastor Joel Webben. Joel, sir, how are you? Hey.

The crowd goes wild. Yeah. Hi, guys. I'm doing well. Honored to be on the podcast. Yeah, right now, I'm still in San Diego for just a little bit longer, and I'm actually leaving with my family next week.

Actually, Christmas Day, my wife and our daughters are going to fly. Flights are about a third of the price on Christmas Day, and I'll be bringing up the rear, driving a lot of our stuff, and I'll meet them there the next day.

So yeah, San Diego, the weather's great. When I was talking to Daryl Harrison from the Just Thinking podcast just last week, and he and I both agree, we are shocked by what Christians, especially, are willing to sacrifice for good weather.

It's truly shocking. The weather is great, but man, it's not that great. It's not quite worth the price.

Before we get into that move, too, can you just, for our listeners, and I know you were on for a few minutes and just brought us a little perfectly exegetic sermonette at Fight Left Feast, which was one of our most popular episodes about the assembly and how important it is.

So some of the listeners know who you are, but for those new listeners that we have, just give us a little two, three-minute bio of who you are, where you're at, what you've been doing, and then we're gonna get into your move to Texas.

So my name is Joel Levin. I was born and raised in Texas, moved out here 2009 to San Diego, California to plant a church. We planted the Response Church. I took three of my best friends from college with me.

They made the journey. We planted a church by God's grace. We were too young and too stupid to really have any business planting the church, but God was really gracious. So it's been just about 11 years at this point, and now two out of those three guys are moving back with me to Texas.

One of them is staying. He's got a junk removal business that's doing really well out here, and so he's gonna be in the San Diego, California area for at least the time being, and we're all kind of secretly hoping and praying that he comes with us.

So anyways, the Response Church, I've been doing that for a while. I started Right Response Ministries. Just recently, really, we took a lot of the social media impact that we were having with the church.

We, early on, decided to start recording the sermons in high quality, clipping them up like you were talking about, those five to six minute clips, taking highlights, like a sermon highlight reel, and using clips and memes and articles and blogs and all those kinds of things.

And so we really invested in social media early on, years ago, with the church plans, and then we transferred all that over, bifurcated it, made it its own nonprofit ministry called Right Response Ministries.

And so I'm the president of Right Response Ministries, and we're gonna continue leading Right Response Ministries from Texas. We'll be building, over the next few weeks, a new studio in the Texas area where we're moving to, and continue that, and then I'll be planting, Lord willing, a new church called Covenant Bible Church.

And I've got 17 people, including my wife and I, 17 adults, who are making the move with me. Two of the guys, original guys, who came out to San Diego from Texas to plant the Response Church, they're coming back with their wives and kids, and then we've got, you know, we've got a total of 17 adults, you know, and their children all coming with us to plant the new church.

So, planting the new church, it was an easy sell. I said, hey, how do you feel about planting a new church, you know, pushing towards expanding the mission of Christ and His kingdom? And they all said, that sounds pretty good, and I said, okay, let me ask it a different way.

How do you feel about leaving California? And then, boom, they just started signing up. That is awesome.

That's awesome. Yeah, so, I mean, that's a big move.

It's hard to get 17 people just together for lunch, or, you know, a couple rounds of golf, or dinner, let alone moving them across state lines and planting a church. So, can you talk a little bit about where this idea came, because it sounds like you're from Texas, you went to California, and now California back to Texas.

Does the political climate have anything to do with it? Was it something you'd been praying about for a while, and the Lord commanded you to go there? Like, what led up to that?

Definitely, yeah. No, that's a great question. So, I mean, it's something that I think I've always kind of had in the back of my mind, but I was very, very committed, wanted to stay in San Diego long-term, because, not so much because I love the area, certainly not because I really love living in California, but because I simply love the church out here that the Lord empowered me to plant.

So, I love the people here. And so, the biggest thing for me that kept me here was I just, I couldn't bear to leave my congregation. I still am wrestling with that. It's still really hard to leave people that you love.

But I think part of what kind of won me over, a number of factors, but one of them was, you know, I started thinking, all right, I don't want to leave my church. But then I just began to realize over the course of 11 years of pastoral ministry out here in San Diego, I realized that although I didn't want to leave my church, inevitably my church kept leaving me.

And what I mean by that is, like, the church, who cares about the entity that is, you know, the response church, right? When we say we love the church, what we mean is we love the people. We love the congregation.

And the people, you know, like clockwork, every two to four years, they kept leaving, because San Diego, it's just such a rotating, you know, door. There's always an influx of new people, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you know, ready to achieve the California dream, you know, but for the most part, they're gone within, you know, two to four years.

And so there's a lot of military, but all the people in the military, all the wonderful people and faithful members in our church for the time that they were with us, they all come with an expiration date.

You got college students, but most of them get wise, you know, by the time they graduate. Some of them will stick around because they love the church, but a lot of them are going to move. They're going to go somewhere else.

San Diego was, a couple of years ago, they were actually, San Diego was rated by, I think it was bankrate .com, some website, they did a survey and a study, and San Diego was rated the number one worst city in the United States of America to build wealth.

So even places like, you know, Washington, D .C. or San Francisco, there are other places, not many, but a few places with a higher cost of living, but San Diego, in terms of that gap with the cost of living and jobs and, you know, income level, San Diego is the worst.

It's one of the highest cost of living, but the lowest in terms of the ratio, one of the lowest income cities for that high cost of living. So most people just don't make it. So I just started realizing, all right, I love this church, but this church, they're leaving me.

There's very few people. I started to realize, you know, in 10 years from now, you know, looking back 10 years and thinking who's still with me, you know, and then looking forward, I just realized there's very few people who are still going to be here.

And so when I say I love this church, I'm saying I love the people who are here right now. I love these people. But these people, one by one, you know, are, for the most part, a good 80 of them are going to be gone within just a matter of years.

And so my wife and I just started developing more and more of a burden, really, not even a burden, but just a desire that we wanted to have lifelong friendship. And that's what we always wanted out here.

And we have had a core of people who stuck with us for, you know, for seven years, eight years. But for the most part, like I said, you know, people come and go. The city just eats you up, I mean, economically, politically.

And then now in 2020, we've seen three, you know, three freedoms, religious freedom, economic freedom, and political freedom, and all those deteriorating. And so, you know, we had, you know, 20, I think 22 adults leave this year, COVID related, because of jobs, moving back home to, you know, mom and dad, or moving to another city to start work, you know, where they could find a job.

And so, yeah, so we just, we want to do lifelong friendship. We thought that we could do it out here. But that was in the early days, where the church was primarily, it was made up of singles or young married couples without children.

But now everybody's having their second or third kid. And we're just realizing, man, it's just most people are not going to be able to live here over the course of their life, and have, you know, have a family.

So that made it a lot easier. Another thing, another factor that was persuasive was Doug Wilson, back in February, before COVID hit. I was in Moscow, and I had breakfast with him. And that was a big thing that we pressed on.

I wasn't really planning on talking about it. He actually brought it up. But he just said, Hey, what are you doing in California? And then he just proceeded to spend about two hours making a case for, for leaving California.

And it was a pretty compelling case. Yeah, yeah. So that was a big factor as well. And then just over the years, part of, I mean, the last factor is really just me and my elders with COVID. It just kind of highlighted some of our disagreements, some of our theological differences.

And so we're aligned on, you know, 95 of things. But that 5 that didn't always get the limelight, really, really, you know, came into our view due to some of the stuff with COVID. And so even that was a factor in realizing, man, I just, I don't know if we should continue to minister in the same local church long term.

We love each other. They blessed me to go and to plant. But we just realized, man, we just, we see things differently, and like whether churches should gather, you know, that was something that we, man, we fought on that one for weeks and weeks and weeks.

So between all those things, some division with the elders, the economic stuff, the religious stuff, the political stuff, wanting to do lifelong friendship with people in a place where people don't just live for two to four years, having children, our children getting older, we just had our third baby, all those things kind of just compounded.

And then that conversation with Doug Wilson and God's providence with 2020, all that just kind of made the choice pretty clear.

Church Gathering, Repentance, and the Fear of God During COVID

Right. Yeah, you know, there are a lot of small businesses across the states that we're hearing about right now that are just shutting down, you know, losing, the people are losing their lives. And I think a lot of times, you know, us in the Christian community, we're not thinking about how churches are impacted.

And now I just hear the other day about Joel Osteen getting a $4 million PPP loan. You know, that is just incredible to hear, you know, but to hear about different smaller churches getting shut down because of orders to not meet and, you know, for these people to abide by that COVID disagreement law that we all, you know, we all pretty much disagree with what's going on.

Most people do anyway. But, you know, how are you guys, you know, when you get to Texas, I mean, how are you looking at, you know, going forward, you know, with everything COVID related? And I know this isn't, you know, a church isn't a business and that's not what I'm trying to say here.

I'm just trying to say, you know, how are you going to go forward during COVID times, you know, as a church?

Right. Yeah. So for us, very early on, so we started gathering again, we live streamed for, I think it was four weeks. And then very quickly, our church started gathering in person again, we started gathering outside at first, and then we did cars for a little bit.

And then, you know, now we're for several months, we've been back indoors with no masks. And so we definitely have been breaking the law for California. But yeah, so I mean, our church, Covenant Bible Church, we plan to gather in person.

You know, at first, it's going to be, you know, just a few of us. So we'll probably only have about 20 adults, and we're going to be doing church in my home for, you know, Lord willing that, you know, the first, at least the first few months before going public on the Lord's Day and getting, you know, some kind of neutral location, whether that be, you know, school or another church or something like that.

But yeah, man, it's, it was, it was just, it was really hard, making, getting, you know, you said, like, everybody, you know, everybody's on board with gathering and things like that. But that's just, I mean, that's not the way it was, right?

Everybody is really, really quickly kind of changed their position. Yeah, it's, it's funny how, you know, something that bothers me, I think sometimes, so when we think of repentance, so repentance is to change.

But I think there's a change in word, and there's a change in deed. And I think the nature of true God honoring, God pleasing repentance is both. So it's a change, it's a recognition and acknowledgement that we've been going one direction, and that that one direction is contrary to the will of God, it's displeasing to God, it's sin.

And so now we're recalibrating, we're changing direction, but in that change, I think that change has to be constituted by both word and deed. And what I've seen is a lot of pastors all over America, finally really changing the last few months, in deed, in action, right, the church is gathering now, you know, but not in word.

And I think here's the problem. So on one level, that is, I would say that is a partial repentance, it is a change. And our repentance is never perfect, right? If we could have perfect repentance, we wouldn't need repentance, right?

Because if we could repent perfectly, then we could just live perfectly, right? So even our repentance is painted by sin. I've never, in the same way that I've never lived sinlessly, right, which is why I have to repent, why I have the need to repent, well, I've also never repented sinlessly.

Even in my repentance, there's wrong motives, you know, there's godly sorrow, right? It's the fuel for repentance, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, but there's also, it's also a mixed bag, right, where there's heart, you know, there's some worldly sorrow that's baked into the equation, and so even in our repentance, it's never perfect.

And so what I've noticed is a lot of guys are repenting in deed, right, they're gathering now, they've changed that, but they're not repenting in word. And I think part of the problem with that is, well, for one, just when it comes to the optics of your congregation, the people that you're pastoring, if all you do is you change your actions, but you never acknowledge it verbally, right, you never stand before the people of God and say, hey, you might have noticed that we were live-streaming our services for weeks on end, and then, you know, talking about how, you know, as Christians, we should submit to the civil magistrate, and we were quoting Romans 13, and talking about loving our neighbor, but we truncated love for neighbor exclusively to loving the elderly in terms of their physical body and not, you know, spreading the disease, and now we're talking about loving all of our neighbors and loving their soul by actually gathering as a church in person and ministering the ordinary means of grace and preaching the Word, praying the Word, singing the Word, and seeing the Word and the sacraments of the Lord's Supper and Baptism, and we're actually executing Romans 13 in light of being a part of a democratic republic where there's actually a highest civil magistrate that is not a human official by design, but rather a document, namely the Constitution of the United States of America, that says we can peaceably assemble and that we have religious freedom to gather for worship, and so you might notice that we're doing some different things, and I just, as your pastor, what I want to do is I want to call attention to that, and I don't want to just repent, I don't want to just recalibrate change in terms of our actions.

We are live-streaming, and saying one thing, and now we're meeting in person, but I actually want to repent both in deed and in word, and so in word, verbally, publicly, before you today as your pastor, I want to repent.

I want to say, I got this wrong. I believe the press. I didn't exercise careful discernment. I forget, I forgot, as a pastor who should have known better, I forgot that neutrality is a myth, and so I thought that, you know, the New York Times working in concert with CNN, you know, and with the Imperial College model of 2 .2 million people dead by—all those kind of things, I read them as though it was gospel, and it's not, and as a pastor, I should have known better, and I want to apologize for that, and so not only are we going to just all of a sudden change in our actions, namely start gathering again as a church and act like that was always our position, but I'm actually in my word, not just deed, but in my word, I'm going to acknowledge before you, the people of God, that we were doing one thing, and what we are now doing is something different, because what we were doing before was wrong, and I'm sorry, and my concern, I think, is, you know, my concern is I think a lot of churches and a lot of pastors have finally hopped on board, and in terms of their action, in terms of repentance in deed, they're doing the right thing now, but if they don't verbalize it, if they never verbally acknowledge that they were previously wrong, there's two things that people miss out on that I think are paramount.

Number one, they miss getting to see their spiritual fathers model repentance for them, so as a pastor, you're an elder, as a spiritual father, the first thing that we want to model for our people is righteousness, but when we fail to model righteousness, we want to model repentance.

I do this with my three-year-old daughter. There are times where I sin, right? She's wrong most of the time. She's three, but there's some times where Dad is wrong, and when I'm wrong, I have to humble myself and go to my three-year-old and say, Olive, Daddy is sorry.

I sinned against you, and more importantly, I sinned against God. I lost my temper. I was not kind with you the way that I should be. I was quick to anger. I was quick to speak and not quick to listen.

I disobeyed God's word. Would you please forgive your dad, right? That's what we do, and if we don't, if we just change in our actions and just act like that was always our position and we've always been in the right space and the right area, then what happens is, number one, I miss an opportunity to model repentance for the people that I'm leading as a father, as a spiritual father, as a pastor, so I miss an opportunity to model repentance because I'm pretending that I've always been perfectly modeling righteousness, but I haven't, so I miss a chance to model repentance.

The second thing that I miss is in my teaching, in my public ministry of preaching, I lose a massive amount of clarity because what I'm doing essentially is I was conveying one message. We were going one way.

Now I'm going another way, and I'm acting as though nothing has changed, and so what the people are perceiving is both of these are righteous. They're not seeing that there's actually a distinction. They're not seeing that these two things can be compared and contracted, that there's actually a distinction between them, that they're actually in stark contradiction to one another, and so when I'm actually the example, and not just the example, but the message that I'm preaching to my people is that both of these are righteous options, right?

You can just live stream and love your neighbor, you know, just being their physical body and, you know, and submit to the civil magistrate, meaning do whatever the government tells you to do at any moment as long as they say there's a crisis, and all of that is Christian.

All of that is biblical. All that is righteous, or you can do this other thing that we're doing now, and both are viable options. Both are perfectly biblical. Both are righteous and equally pleasing to the Lord, and we were just doing one for a while.

Now we're doing another. See, when we don't admit not just a change in action but a change in word and say, hey, what we were doing previously is wrong, and this is how it was wrong, and here's all the Bible verses that say it was wrong, and this is right, and this is why it's right.

Here's all the Bible, and I'm sorry. I should have known better. I missed it. Please forgive me and follow me as I follow Christ, right, in this new direction that we believe is in line with His Word.

If we don't repent in word and all we do is just recalibrate, change, and repent in action, I think we miss a chance to model repentance for our people, and we confuse our people. We need clarity in our message because we're conveying to our people that you can basically just pick any of these options, and you're good, and that's not true.

And I think sometimes we put all the importance on repentance of the actual action and go, oh, like you're saying, there doesn't have to be an explanation. Unfortunately, what I've been seeing happen, especially even in my state, is one, church is doing exactly what you just said, right?

We had a few here in our community that said, nope, we're still going to get I mean, almost all churches paused for three, four, five, six weeks. Hey, that's discernment. Let's figure out what the heck's going on here.

Let's see how contagious it is. Let's see how deadly it is, right? But the majority of our churches around here, and you can jump in here too, Jason, if you feel the same way, was almost as if they were deciding on how they were going to gather based on whatever CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News was telling them.

The national news media was telling them, oh, well, it's this dangerous, or this many deaths, or you shouldn't do this. And when they had a repentance in deed, as you said, there was no explanation. And I think a lot of them, the reason why you see now, and even around here in our community, many of them are back to in-person gathering.

I don't know if it's either A, they just saw kind of those forerunners like you in your church. We had a few around here that said, no, we're going to stand alone. We're going to stand on principle. This is what we believe the word of God says.

We believe gathering in person is commanded. It is biblical. And when more people came out of that kind of woodwork and started doing that, they went, okay, there's safety in numbers. I don't feel like I'll be ostracized or lose members or have local news media at my front door.

Or they kind of followed national news media and was looking at that and saying, okay, I'm going to let the secular culture influence my biblical decisions over my flock. And that's what was very upsetting to me.

That's one of the reasons why I was so excited when you were on the first time and you talked very directly. It wasn't condemning, but it was very directly and in love about why we should be gathering.

And you did it in a way that obviously made biblical sense, but it didn't sound like you were taking any direction from man. And when I say man, I'm saying the culture or media or anything like that, but in fact said, okay, how do I lead my church rightly and correctly according to biblical standards, which unfortunately I feel like that's the minority right now in Christian, in Western Christianity.

And I'm not trying to point fingers and say, you know, most of the pastors are bad or whatever. I'm just saying when I sit down and talk to leaders and elders, they have a very kind of, well, what are people going to think?

What are the politicians going to think? What are my congregation going to think? What kind of backlash will I get in the news media? And it's like, whoa, man, do you want to be a man pleaser or do you want to be a God pleaser?

Because my knee is going to bow before God one day. And I'm fearful that moment every day, because although I strive for righteousness and holiness, I've done a lot of stuff in my life to where I know I'm going to answer for it one day.

And I really don't care what people say about me. I really don't care what friends and family think. I mean, to an extent, but I mean, biblically, I'm going to be on my face before the Lord one day. And I'll tell you what, if you're a leader in the church, if you're a shepherd, Jason and I just did an episode on Ezekiel 34.

If you're not binding up those sheep, if you're not using the rod of correction, if you're not, you know, taking those hurt sheep and showing them and bringing them closer to God through correction and discipline and in leading, man, the Bible has some harsh words for those shepherds that kind of.

Take advantage of that position. And it is And say they're not going to meet until 2021.

I just, I don't understand that, but you know, maybe there's even a common grace in that or, you know, a silver lining, if you will, that more churches are gathering in person. I just don't see, and this is kind of going back to your first episode, how you can really effectively and rightly meet the qualifications of fellowship under a live stream, you know, once a week or, you know, twice a week or a couple of meetings a week, whatever it is.

Ecclesiology, Fear of Man, and the Nature of True Repentance

So you took that Yeah, and that's what we talked about, you know, at the Fight for Latter-day Saints conference when you guys had me on here, which is, I think part of the problem is you can't convince people that church is essential if you don't know what the church is.

And I think that's a big part of the problem. And so a lot of Christians say, oh yeah, you know, they come around now, they're like, yeah, church is essential, church is essential. I'm like, where were you in March?

Where were you in April? But church is now essential. You know, nobody's actually admitted that they sinned, nobody's actually repented in the Word, but everybody's, you know, because everybody wants to be on the right side of history.

So as soon as it became like, like, all right, 51 of churches are starting to Right, right. And boom, everybody hops on board, right? Because everybody wants to be on the right side, right? So it's exactly what you were saying, you know, it's not, it's not, it's man pleasing, right?

It's man pleasing. It's not fear of God. And that's what fear, like, I love what you were saying, Greg, about just, you know, I'm going to have to go down on my knees before Jesus one day and give an account to Him, right?

Fearing God versus fearing man, fearing man is the fear of man. It's wanting to please man. It's this profound concern that dictates all the facets of my life in terms of, I'm profoundly concerned for the opinions of man.

What does man think of me? How does man feel about me? Fear of God is that I'm overwhelmed by not just a reverence for Him, but I am concerned about the thoughts of God. I'm concerned about the feelings, as it were, of God.

What is God? What is my standing before Him? And we know positionally, our standing before Him because of Jesus Christ and faith in Him is perfect righteousness. But there is a way, and I think we've got to get this back in our Reformed theology, there is something to be said for falling under, a Christian falling under, underneath God's fatherly displeasure.

The Puritans used to talk about God's fatherly displeasure, right? Because we get in so happy to justification by faith alone, and a million times, yes and amen. But there is something to be said. It's not just wholly condemned because I'm in Adam and outside of Christ, and then wholly justified where God is perfectly pleased with me every second of every moment because I'm in Christ.

There's another category where positionally God is pleased with me because of Christ and because of sound in Him, union with Him through faith, right? But even in my union with Christ, where I have God as my father, He never leaves me nor forsakes me.

It's not as though the father becomes the punitive judge once more. No, He is forever now my father by virtue of union with Christ Jesus, but just as a father who will never reject me or never leave me, you can still fall underneath a father's displeasure for a time.

And so all that being said, like, fear of God, that concern for what does my heavenly father think? And so I completely agree with you. I think just a lot of Christians and a lot of pastors, it's just, there's so much, the fear of man is so rampant in the church today and in pulpits today.

And so everybody hopped on board once we had critical mass of churches being willing to meet. Then it's like, oh yeah, but in real terms, it's like nothing changed, right? All the arguments that they were making for why we shouldn't gather, like what changed?

You know what I mean? It's not like all of a sudden everybody has the vaccine, praise God, it seems like a vaccine is rolling out. But churches started gathering before that happened. So it's not like things changed in real terms regarding the science or the virus.

So what changed was basically people's opinion and that they were using one set of verses, and I would say incorrectly out of context, they were using Bible unbiblically, and now they're using other verses.

And it's like, nothing really changed. I think all that changed was they all of a sudden they realized, oh, I can take the right position and it no longer requires courage because the battle already was fought.

It's like just this pipsqueak, little punk kid, there's a bully on the playground and he knows he should stand up because the bully's just, he's a tyrant and he's mistreating people, he's oppressing people, but he's afraid.

And then some other kid finally stands up to the bully and knocks him over and the bully is unconscious and laying on the ground. The battle's already been won. And now the pipsqueak kid who knew he should have been doing something all along, he comes up and kicks him while he's down.

That's, I would say, about 60 of the battle right now. You didn't use courage.

Pats him on the back and says, I was on your side the whole time. I knew you were going to beat him. You know, it's one of those. We're here in Michigan, so we have the Detroit Lions. So in the sports analogy world, it would be the fair weather playoff fans.

You get to sit back and go, okay, who's going to be, who's going to be my, well, that's what I'm saying. We never get there. Everyone says, oh, you're from Michigan. So you're a Dallas Cowboys fan, huh?

So it's the same thing, you know, the fair weather fans and the playoff fans and things like that for the sports analogy. But so as we wrap this up here, can you give us a timeline? Like what are you looking at over the next year when you go to Texas?

So you're meeting in the house to begin with. I mean, do you have plans to get a building, keep meeting in a house? Are you looking at trying to grow or is it a ministry really just based on the local community?

Are you going to be doing outreach into other parts of Texas? And also what part of Texas are you going to?

Church Planting in North Austin and Ministry Plans

Yeah. So no, thank you for those great questions. So we're going to be going to the North Austin area. We're going to be in Williamson County. So we're not in Austin County. That way our police won't get defunded, you know, a little bit more conservative, a little safer, but close enough to Austin to where, you know, guys could, you know, commute and get a lot of job opportunity.

So the town is called Huddo, Texas. It's right next to like Round Rock and Pflugerville. And so we're going to be in that general area, about 45 minutes north of downtown Austin, Round Rock, Pflugerville, Huddo, Georgetown area of the North suburbs of Austin.

I will get there, me and my family and three other families will get there next week. And then we got a couple more of our team that will be trickling in in February and March and a couple guys a little bit later in the summer.

And so what we're going to do is January, February, and probably March, we're just going to get a lay of the land. So we're going to go worship with other gospel preaching churches on the Lord's day with our whole crew, roll up and meet some of the other churches, the people, the pastors.