Dead Men Walking Podcast: Joel Webbon

Dead Men Walking

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Exploring Theology, Doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location.

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Dead Men Walking starts now. Well, hello, everyone.

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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.

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Is it our mill or is it post mill? It's pre mill. No, I'm joking.

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We're not those getting on. And we're not going to switch. Whatever comes out next week, right?

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Right. Hold strong. Yeah. I'm going to hold strong, man. Even though Joe Biden's about to be president. Yeah, I'll be all right.

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Well, I'm. Oh, is that too far? Too far? Okay. Stephen Banker's about positive confetti. We did. We did.

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We got to be easy with that. Yeah. So I'm Greg to my left. And is

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Jason, how are you, sir? How's it going, man? Pretty good. Excited about this episode. Absolutely.

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We have someone on the line, so we're not gonna wait too long, but I did wanna say, are you enjoying that rain sleep we have in Michigan?

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Oh, it's disgusting. Because - So no. The guy on the line that we're gonna introduce, he's probably sitting in like 80 degrees right now.

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But you know, maybe not for long. I know. Because that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Yeah, on the line, he's the pastor of the

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Response Church in San Diego, California. He has a book called Am I Truly Saved?

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Guys, 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.

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On Instagram, I really appreciate those like six to 10 minute video clips, and I love when he does them.

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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.

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And he brings the fire and he packs so much into that five minutes. You go, oh my gosh,

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I just got black and blue from this five minute sermon. I got more out of that than I did out of my hour at the emerging church.

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

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Hey! Hey! Hey! Woo, the crowd goes wild!

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Yeah! Hi guys, I'm Joel Webbin. I'm in San Diego, honored to be on the podcast. Yeah, right now

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I'm still in San Diego for just a little bit longer, and I'm actually leaving with my family next week.

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Actually, Christmas Day. My wife and our daughters are gonna 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.

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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

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Christians, especially, are willing to sacrifice for good weather. It's truly, truly shocking.

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

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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 executed sermonette at Fight, Laugh, Feast, which was one of our most popular episodes about the assembly and how important it is.

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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.

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Cool, yeah, so my name's Joel Lebanon. I was born and raised in Texas. Moved out here 2009 to San Diego, California to plant a church.

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We planted the Response Church. I took three of my best friends from college with me.

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They made the journey. We planted the 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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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So anyways, the Response Church, I've been doing that for a while. I started Right Response Ministries just recently, really.

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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 off 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.

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

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Right Response Ministries. And so I'm the president of Right Response Ministries, and we're gonna continue leading

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Right Response Ministries from Texas. We'll be building over the next few weeks, a new studio in the

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Texas area where we're moving to and continue that. And then I'll be planting, Lord willing, a new church called

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Covenant Bible Church. And I've got 17 people, including my wife and I, 17 adults who are making the move with me.

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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.

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And then we've got a total of 17 adults and their children all coming with us to plant a new church.

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It was an easy sell. I said, hey, how do you feel about planting a new church? Pushing towards expanding the mission of Christ and his kingdom.

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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

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California? And then boom, they just started signing up. That is awesome. That's awesome.

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I mean, that's a big move. It's hard to get 17 people just together for lunch or a couple rounds of golf or dinner, let alone moving them across state lines and planting a church.

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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

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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

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Lord commanded you to go there? Like what led up to that? Definitely, yeah, that's a great question.

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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

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Lord empowered me to plant. So I love the people here. And so the biggest thing for me that kept me here was

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I just, I couldn't bear to leave my congregation. I still am wrestling with that.

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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,

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I started thinking, all right, I don't wanna 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 wanna leave my church, inevitably my church kept leaving me.

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And what I mean by that is like the church who cares about the entity that is the response church, right?

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When we say we love the church, what we mean is we love the people, we love the congregation. And the people, like clockwork, every two to four years, they kept leaving because San Diego, it's just such a rotating door.

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There's always an influx of new people, bright -eyed and bushy -tailed, ready to achieve the

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California dream, but for the most part, they're gone within two to four years.

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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.

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You've got college students, but most of them get wise by the time they graduate. Some of them will stick around because they love the church, but a lot of them are gonna, they're gonna move.

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They're gonna go somewhere else. San Diego was, a couple of years ago, they were actually, San Diego was rated by,

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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

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United States of America to build wealth. So even places like Washington DC or San Francisco, there are other places, not many, but a few places with a higher cost of living.

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But San Diego, in terms of that gap with the cost of living and jobs and income level,

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San Diego is the worst. It's one of the highest costs of living, but the lowest in terms of the ratio, one of the lowest income cities for that high cost of living.

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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.

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There's very few people, I started to realize, in 10 years from now, looking back 10 years and thinking, who's still with me?

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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,

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I'm saying, I love the people who are here right now. I love these people. But these people, one by one, are for the most part, a good 80 % of them are going to be gone within just a matter of years.

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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.

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And that's what we always wanted out here. And we have had a core of people who stuck with us for seven years, eight years.

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But for the most part, like I said, people come and go, the city just eats you up.

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I mean, economically, politically. And then now in 2020, we've seen three freedoms, religious freedom, economic freedom and political freedom and all those deteriorating.

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And so we had 20, I think 22 adults leave this year

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COVID related because of jobs, moving back home to mom and dad or moving to another city to start work where they could find a job.

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And so, yeah, so we wanna 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.

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

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And so that made it a lot easier. Another thing, another factor that was persuasive was Doug Wilson back in February before COVID hit,

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I was in Moscow and I had breakfast with him. And that was a big thing that we pressed on.

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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 leaving

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California. And it was a pretty compelling case. So that was a big factor as well.

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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.

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And so we're aligned on 95 % of things, but that 5 % that didn't always get the limelight really came into our view due to some of the stuff with COVID.

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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.

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We love each other. They blessed me to go and to plant, but we just realized, man, we see things differently.

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And whether churches should gather, that was something that we, man, we fought on that one for weeks and weeks and weeks.

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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.

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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 of that just kind of made the choice pretty clear.

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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.

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And I think a lot of times, you know, us in the Christian community, we're not thinking about how churches are impacted.

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And now I just heard the other day about Joel Osteen getting a $4 million

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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.

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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.

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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

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COVID related? And I know this isn't, you know, a church isn't a business and that's not what

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

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Right, yeah. So for us, like very early on, so we started gathering again, we live streamed for,

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I think it was four weeks. And then very quickly our church started gathering in person.

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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.

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And so we definitely have been breaking the law for California. But yeah, so I mean, our church,

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Covenant Bible Church, we plan to gather in person. You know, at first it's gonna be, you know, just a few of us.

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So we'll probably only have about 20 adults and we're gonna be doing church in my home for, you know,

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Lord willing that, you know, the first, at least the first few months before going public on the

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Lord's day and getting, you know, some kind of neutral location, whether that be, you know, a school or another church or something like that.

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But yeah, man, it was really hard making, getting, you know, you said like everybody, you know, everybody's on board with gathering and things like that.

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But that's just, I mean, that's not the way it was, right? Everybody has really, really quickly kind of changed their position.

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It's funny how, you know, something that bothers me, I think sometimes, so when we think of repentance, so repentance is to change.

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But I think there's a change in word and there's a change in deed. And I think that the nature of true

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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.

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It's displeasing to God, it's sin. And so now we're recalibrating, we're changing direction.

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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?

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The church is gathering now, you know, but not in word. And I think here's the problem.

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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?

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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?

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So even our repentance is painted by sin. I've never, in the same way that I've never lived sinlessly, like, which is why

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I have to repent, why I have the need to repent, why I've also never repented sinlessly. Even in my repentance, there's wrong motives, you know, there's godly sorrow, right?

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It's the fuel for repentance, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, but it's also a mixed bag, right?

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Where there's heart, you know, there's some worldly sorrow that's baked into the equation.

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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?

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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?

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You never stand before the people of God and say, hey, you might've noticed that we were live streaming our services for weeks on end.

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And then, you know, talking about how, you know, as Christians, we should submit to the civil magistrate.

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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.

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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 of the sacraments of the

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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

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United States of America that says we can peaceably assemble and that we have religious freedom to gather for worship.

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And so you might notice that we're doing some different things. And I just, as your pastor, what

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I wanna do is I wanna call attention to that. And I don't wanna just repent. I don't wanna just recalibrate change in terms of our actions.

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We were live streaming and now, you know, and saying one thing, and now we're meeting in person, but I actually wanna repent both in deed and in word.

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And so in word, verbally, publicly, before you today, as your pastor, I want to repent.

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I wanna say, I got this wrong. I believe the press. I didn't exercise careful discernment.

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I forget, I forgot, as a pastor who should have known better, I forgot that neutrality is a myth.

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And so I thought that, you know, that the New York Times working in concert with CNN, you know, and with the

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Imperial College model of 2 .2 million people dead by, all those kinds of things, I read them as though it was gospel.

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And it's not. And as a pastor, I should have known better. And I wanna apologize for that.

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And so not only are we gonna 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,

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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.

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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.

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Number one, they miss getting to see their spiritual fathers model repentance for them.

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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.

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But when we fail to model righteousness, we want to model repentance. I do this with my three -year -old daughter.

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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.

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And when I'm wrong, I have to humble myself and go to my three -year -old and say,

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Olive, daddy is sorry. I sinned against you and more importantly,

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I sinned against God. I lost my temper. I was not kind with you the way that I should be.

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I was quick to anger. I was quick to speak and not quick to listen.

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I disobeyed God's word. Would you please forgive your dad? Right, that's what we do.

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And if we don't, if we just change in our actions and just act like that was always our position and that we've always been in the right space and the right area, and then what happens is number one,

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I miss an opportunity to model repentance for the people that I'm leading as a father, as a spiritual father, as a pastor.

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So I miss an opportunity to model repentance because I'm pretending that I've always been perfectly modeling righteousness, but I haven't.

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So I miss a chance to model repentance. The second thing that I miss is in my teaching, in my public ministry of preaching,

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I lose a massive amount of clarity because what I'm doing essentially is, I was conveying one message.

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We were going one way. Now I'm going another way and I'm acting as though nothing has changed.

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And so what the people are perceiving is both of these are righteous. They're not seeing that there's actually a distinction.

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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.

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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?

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You can just live stream and love your neighbor, just being their physical body 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.

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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.

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Both are perfectly biblical. Both are righteous and equally pleasing to the Lord. And we were just doing one for a while.

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Now we're doing another. 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.

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And this is how it's wrong. And here's all the Bible verses that say it was wrong. And this is right.

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And this is why it's right. Here's all the Bible. And I'm sorry. I should have known better. I missed it.

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Please forgive me and follow me as I follow Christ, right? In this new direction that we believe is in line with his word.

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If we don't repent in word, if all we do is just recalibrate, change and repent in action,

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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.

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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.

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Unfortunately, what I've been seeing happen, and especially even in my state, is one, church is doing exactly what you just said, right?

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We had a few here in our community that said, nope, we're still gonna get, I mean, almost all churches paused for three, four, five, six weeks.

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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,

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Jason, if you feel the same way, was almost as if they were deciding on how they were gonna gather based on whatever

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CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News was telling them. Like the national news media was telling them, oh, well, it's this dangerous, or this many deaths, or you shouldn't do this.

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And when they had a repentance in deed, as you said, there was no explanation.

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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.

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I don't know if it's either A, they just saw kind of those forerunners like you and your church.

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We had a few around here that said, no, we're gonna stand alone. We're gonna stand on principle. This is what we believe the word of God says.

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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.

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I don't feel like I'll be ostracized or lose members or have local news media at my front door.

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Or they kind of followed national news media and was looking at that and saying, okay,

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I'm going to let the secular culture kind of influence my biblical decisions over my flock.

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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.

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It wasn't condemning, but it was very directly and in love about why we should be gathering.

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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.

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And when I say man, I'm saying the culture or media or anything like that. But in fact said, okay, how do

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I lead my church rightly and correctly according to biblical standards, which unfortunately

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I feel like that's the minority right now in Christian, in Western Christianity.

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And I'm not trying to point fingers and say most of the pastors are bad or whatever.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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And I'm fearful that moment every day because although I strive for righteousness and holiness,

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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.

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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

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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.

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If you're not binding up those sheep, if you're not using the rod of correction, if you're not taking those hurt sheep and showing them and bringing them closer to God through correction and discipline and in leading, man, the

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Bible has some harsh words for those shepherds that kind of take advantage of that position. And it is -

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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.

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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.

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So you took that - And that's what we talked about, you know, at the Fight for Latter -day Saints conference when you guys had me on here, we just,

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I think part of the problem is you can't convince people that church is essential, right?

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If you don't know what the church is. Right. 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.

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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.

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So as soon as it became like, like, all right, 51 % of churches are starting to push.

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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.

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You know, it's not, it's not, it's man -pleasing, right? It's man -pleasing, it's not fear of God.

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And that's what fear, that 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?

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I like fearing God versus fearing man. Fearing man is the fear of man.

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It's wanting to please man. It's this profound concern that dictates all the facets of my life in terms of,

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I'm profoundly concerned for the opinions of man. What does man think of me? How does man feel about me?

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The fear of God is that I'm overwhelmed by, not just a reverence for him, but I am concerned about the thoughts of God.

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I'm concerned about the feelings, as it were, of God. What is God? What is my standing before him?

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And we know positionally our standing before him because of Jesus Christ and faith in him is perfect righteousness.

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But there is a way, and I think we've got to get this back in our Reformed theology, that there is something to be said for falling under a

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Christian, falling underneath God's fatherly displeasure. The Puritans used to talk about God's fatherly displeasure, right?

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Because we've been given so happy to justification by faith alone and a million times yes and amen.

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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.

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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?

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But even in my union with Christ, I can, where I have God as my father, he never leaves me nor forsakes me.

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It's not as though the father becomes the punitive judge once more.

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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.

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And so all that being said, like fear of God, that concern for what is my heavenly father think?

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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.

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And so everybody hopped on board once we had critical mass and churches being willing to meet, then it's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

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But in real terms, it's like nothing changed, right?

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All the arguments that they were making for why we shouldn't gather, like what changed? You know what

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I mean? It's not like all of a sudden, everybody has the vaccine, praise God it seems like a vaccine is rolling out and but churches started gathering before that happened.

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So it's not like things changed in real terms regarding the science or the virus.

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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

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Bible unbiblically and now they're using other verses and it's like nothing really changed.

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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.

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Because the battle already was fought, right? It's like just this pipsqueak, you know, little punk kid, there's a bully on the playground and he knows he should stand up because the bully is just, he's a tyrant and he's mistreating people, he's oppressing people, but he's afraid.

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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.

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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.

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Like, ha! That's, I would say, about 60 % of the battle right now.

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But he's like, you didn't use courage. Yeah, yeah. Comes up to the kid and pats him on the back and says,

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I was on your side the whole time, I knew you were gonna beat him. You know, it's one of those. Yeah, exactly.

33:21

We're here in Michigan, so we have the Detroit Lions, so in the sports analogy world, it would be the fairweather playoff fans.

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You get to sit back and go, okay, who's gonna be? Wait a second, when did we go to the playoffs? Who's gonna be my, well, that's what

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I'm saying, we never get there. So we get to, everyone says, oh, you're from Michigan, so you're a Dallas Cowboys fan, huh? Yeah, exactly.

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So it's the same thing, you know, the fairweather 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?

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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.

33:52

Yeah, yeah. 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 or are you going to be doing outreach into other parts of Texas?

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And also, what part of Texas are you going to? Yeah, so, no, thank you for those great questions.

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So we're gonna be going to the North Austin area. We're gonna be in Williamson County. So we're not in Austin County, that way our police won't get defunded, you know?

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So we're a little bit more conservative, a little safer. But close enough to Austin to where, you know, guys could commute and get a lot of job opportunity.

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So the town is called Huddo, Texas. It's right next to like Round Rock and Pflugerville.

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And so we're gonna be in that general area, about 45 minutes North of downtown Austin, Round Rock, Pflugerville, Huddo, Georgetown area of the

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North suburbs of Austin. I will get there, me and my family and three other families will get there next week.

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And then we got a couple more of our team that'll be trickling in in February and March and a couple of guys a little bit later in the summer.

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And so what we're gonna do is January, February and probably March, we're just gonna get a lay of the land.

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So we're gonna go worship with other gospel preaching churches on the Lord's day, get our whole crew roll up and meet some of the other churches, the people, the pastors.

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I wanna come into the area humbly. All right, there's guys who've been slugging it out, preaching

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God's word faithfully. I wanna honor those pastors and those Christians, those churches that have been there.

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So I don't wanna roll up like I'm God's gift to ministry. And like now we're gonna really do something because Joel's here.

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That's pretty arrogant. So I don't wanna do that. So I wanna come in and come in a little bit slow and go and honor some of these guys, meet these guys, let them know, hey,

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I'm here to plant the church. And this is kind of our vision. And this is our doctrine.

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So we're reformed Baptist. So our statement, we have a general statement of faith that we require all of our members to affirm.

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But then we have what we call our specific statement of doctrine. The members of the church don't have to affirm.

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The officers of the church do, our elders and deacons. But the members would just have to, we would use the term recognize.

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So they would have to affirm a general statement of faith, but they would have to similar to like, kind of similar to the

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Baptist statement of faith and practice. Something that a lot of people could affirm.

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Our specific statement of doctrine is the 1689. So we're reformed Baptist, so 1689,

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Sabbatarian, covenantal with 1689 framework of federalism, covenantalism.

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And so that's kind of, I just wanna meet these other guys, meet these other pastors, let them know what we're about, what kind of church we are, our vision.

36:50

April, Lord willing, the very first Sunday, first Lord's day in April, I'll start preaching again and we'll be doing services in our home.

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And we'll open it up to the public. So we'll go ahead and launch our website probably, probably

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February or March of next year, about a month ahead of time and do a countdown, let people know, hey, first Sunday in April, come and join us.

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And we'll be in the home. Our plan is probably by either the fall of next year or maybe the beginning of 2022 to try to get a building outside of the home, not buying anything at that point, but renting, whether it be a rec center or a school or another church or whatever it might be, but getting some kind of neutral location facility outside of the home, looking at like fall 2021 or beginning

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January of 2022, looking at that kind of timeline. And then in terms of ministry, even over these next few months, because it's weird for me, having months off of the pulpit and preaching, but I'll still be doing ministry because of Right Response Ministries.

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So basically I think two things, Covenant Bible Church, by God's grace,

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Lord willing, planting that and start having home services at the beginning of April next year, 2021.

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And then, but as of right now, continuing all up until that point.

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And from that point with Right Response Ministries, we're continuing all of our podcasts. We have Theology Applied.

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Actually this next Wednesday, we've got Daryl and Virgil coming on from the Just Thinking Podcast. We just recently had, well, we just recently had

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Toby from - I saw that. Yeah, that was cool. We got

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Doug Wilson coming on soon. And so, so anyway, so Theology Applied will continue.

38:42

Our Questions Podcast, it's like a Q &A. I was gonna call it Ask Pastor Joel, but then everybody would think, oh,

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I should just listen to Ask Pastor John instead. So I had to call it something different. So I just called it Questions. So we got the

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Questions Podcast, we got the Theology Applied Podcast, and then we're gonna be rolling out a new podcast called Daily Truth that I'm gonna be, basically

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I'm gonna be taking those six minute clips and doing them like 5 a .m. on YouTube and all of our social media, but also on podcast platforms,

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Spotify and iTunes, like 5 a .m. every weekday, Monday through Friday, so people can do a quick little theology shot on their way to work, on their commute.

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And so Daily Truth will be coming out in the next couple months. And so anyway, so all those podcasts and sermon clips and articles and blogs,

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I'm working on another book right now. And so all that stuff will continue. And the goal is just to start saturating that area and even doing some social media targeted ads and things like that, targeting a lot of our content to that area, start saturating the area with good gospel,

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Bible content, and then just meeting our neighbors and getting jobs and meeting our coworkers and those kinds of things and start preaching, start evangelizing.

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I'll probably start preaching outside of an abortion clinic as soon as I can, like pick one day a week and just be faithful there and do some abortion clinic ministry there, preaching the gospel and preaching

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God's law. And then Lord willing, in April, we'll start the home service and just start inviting our friends.

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And some people probably find us through Right Response and that content, using kind of Right Response Ministries as a platform for Covenant Bible Church, letting people know we're in the area and then going on shows like you guys with Dead Men Walking and doing what

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I'm doing right now. You guys graciously giving me the opportunity to plug the new church plant. And hopefully from these kinds of things, people will find us.

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But more than that, more than Christians finding us, by God's grace, people will get saved.

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We wanna grow a church primarily from conversion. And so we do wanna be a church that's available for, if somebody is a part of a false church, a heretical church, or sadly a church that has

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Orthodox doctrine, but won't meet, well then I'll take them, right? Because they need to be meeting.

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If that pastor won't have his church gather, well then yeah, I will take his sheep because he's not feeding them.

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So I will gladly take that starving sheep and feed them. And then people who move in, right?

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All the refugees coming from California, moving in, we wanna be a place for them, those Christians. But beyond that, we wanna see pagans come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

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And we wanna build his church through conversion as well. So anyway, that's it. That's awesome.

41:29

God bless you, Joel. You have a big task ahead of you. And you've got a lot of work cut out for you.

41:35

Yeah, brother. It is, it's a big thing to not only plan a church, but to do all that social media, pick up the family, move across state lines.

41:44

I was gonna ask you what the rules were for masks and stuff in Texas, but since you didn't even close down under Gavin Nusselini, as we like to call him out there,

41:53

I don't think it's really gonna matter what they tell you in Texas. I think you'll be okay. I don't know if they're gonna say anything in Texas.

41:59

I don't know. Maybe my dream. I never heard that, Gavin Nusselini.

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Yeah, man. We got Nusselini Jr. out here in Gretchen. We got Gretchelini.

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I wish he would be left out on it. That's so good, Gavin Nusselini. I never thought of that. Well, you know, maybe one day my dream will happen and you're walking down the streets in Austin, you bump into Joe Rogan.

42:24

He invites you on the podcast and you get to see Joel duke it out with Joe. Yeah, right? You guys are both in the same city.

42:31

Who knows? Then I'll use it and I'll give you some props. Yeah. Oh, could you imagine?

42:37

But Joel, thank you so much for being on here. Jason, did you have anything as we finish up? I see you holding the word there.

42:43

Yeah, yeah, we could. He usually finishes up with a scripture. Let's finish up with a scripture here, maybe out of Jude, a call to persevere.

42:50

Jude 17 through, let's go through verse 23. Let's just read it. But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, in the last time, there will be scoffers following their own ungodly passions.

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It is these who cause divisions, worldly people devoid of the spirit. But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the

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Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

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And have mercy on those who doubt. Save others by snatching them out of the fire.

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To others, show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

43:35

Amen. It's a good word. It is. So Joel, why don't you throw out your social media stuff again for the listeners, and then we'll wrap it up.

43:47

Okay, cool. Right Response Ministries YouTube channel. Subscribe to our

43:52

YouTube. Right Response Ministries on YouTube. Download our free app. That's a great resource that you can use.

44:00

So just go to your app store or favorite app store and download Right Response Ministries. We've got all our podcasts, a lot of articles.

44:08

You can get like a free book download and things like that, ebook. And then yeah, just Facebook, Instagram, all the social media platforms you can find us.

44:18

YouTube and the app, probably the best way to go. Cool. Well, thank you so much,

44:24

Joel, for coming on. And listeners, we appreciate you listening. And you can find us at Dead Men Walking Podcast on YouTube, Instagram, Parler, Facebook, all those places.

44:35

Joel's always a great guest. Make sure you check out Am I Truly Saved Too? We grabbed some copies of this down at Fight, Laugh, Feast.

44:40

I read through it. It's a phenomenal book. I'm gonna be looking forward to your book coming out. You said next year, you're working on it.

44:47

Let's hope it's next year. And when you do, make sure you get ahold of me. We'll make sure we cross -promote that and tell everyone about it.

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Joel, we love having you on. We appreciate you as a brother in the Lord and what you're gonna be doing in Texas. And God bless with that because that is a big undertaking.