Update on Mike Reid and Tony Miano, with special guest, Kevin Jandt

Apologetics Live

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00:03

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

00:20

You know, this is not Andrew Rappaport tonight. This is not Andrew Rappaport. This is

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Anthony Silvestro, and I'm finally back. I know I've been gone a lot this summer. We've had just a busy speaking schedule, a lot going on.

00:33

But we've had we had a special show about six weeks ago with Sarah Cleveland on for to be able to talk about abolitionism.

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And now I'm back for another special episode, bringing back on Kevin Yont again. So thank you for being on tonight,

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Kevin, and a new guest to the show, Todd Pearson. So thank you also for being on.

00:55

And so thank thank you. This is. Yeah. So so for the caption of the show, the reason why we are doing this is because we have

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G3 right around the corner. We're talking a week and a half away. And and I distinctly remember

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I was just telling you this, Todd, is is that I remember a couple of years ago before the last

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G3, you had put out the fleece and said, hey, can somebody please go up to Mike Reed and have a conversation with him about what's going on and how my friend

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Tony, my good friend, Tony's gotten sucked into this, you know, cult -like church. And I was

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I was one of those guys that took the bait and and started doing some homework. And for those of you who follow the show, you've seen a bunch of shows in the last year and a half that we have done here with Kevin, Kevin and his wife and others to go through what is going on in that church.

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Mike Reed's terrible doctrines, as well as Tony Miano and his his unending support of Mike Reed and and how it brings clout to Mike Reed.

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So so we're doing the show tonight because we want to kind of rehash some of these things. We want to talk about some updates since then, since our last shows.

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And we also want to put it back out there, the warnings regarding this, what we should call cult, not church, right?

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Grace Fellowship cult of Davenport, Iowa. And so and there's really honestly, there's not a lot of grace there either.

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So, yeah, well, we had we did have a couple of shows with with Churchill stuff, right?

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And Tony, Tony's own words on what cult -like behaviors are. And you could have just substituted the name

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Grace Fellowship Church of Davenport with Cult of Wells, and you would have had the exact same show.

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I mean, the similarities there were shocking. And as you know, I worked with Andrew on putting all that together, going through a three hour show that Andrew, Tony, some other people were involved in these similarities.

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I mean, there was you know, we provided quotes, we provided everything to show just the similarities that were there.

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It was it was beyond eerie. Yeah, that's right. I actually said that early on to to Kevin and everybody, please forgive me if I refer to Kevin Yont as K2, it's an inside thing.

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And it's very like he's in my phone as K2, so it's not intentional. But Kevin and I actually talked,

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I remember distinctly even bringing up to you, Kevin, when you started to see some of the stuff, especially with Tony, I said.

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Does anybody remember Tony doing the Church of Wells stuff? And how he called them out for being a cult and Church of Wells came unglued.

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I mean, they they went out on a tangent about how they're not a cult and they did all their damage control.

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Eerily reminiscent of what's happening with GFC. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, you know,

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I mean, it's been a while since I've been on the show, Anthony. I mean, there are new viewers or people that don't remember who

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I am. I mean, I'm just I'm just some guy, no big deal. We happen to be involved with Grace Fellowship Church for nine years.

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I served as a deacon there for four years. And I have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the of the church.

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And, you know, and so that's who I am. I mean, it's again, it's not a big deal.

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But what I have seen is that so many people have been damaged by this place that after a period of being gone from there for close to two years,

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I decided to speak out publicly because we were always kind of hoping that they would come back around and speak with us and and, you know, come back and say, hey, we know we excommunicated you.

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That was we didn't do that rightly. Who is Todd? Todd is a good friend of mine.

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He also has a ministry called If Only Even One. He also does some political stuff called

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Minnesota Black Robe Regiment. Todd and I have been friends for I don't know how long, five, six years.

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We've become very close friends over the last three or four years. And, you know, we just we've we're grateful for you,

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Anthony, because because you did take the bait, I guess, so to speak. You researched this.

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You put I don't know, what are you up to? You're at least at 100 hours of research on this.

05:26

Yeah, I've kind of lost count, actually. Yeah. So, yeah. So do you want to introduce yourself real quick as well and kind of what role you've played in all this before I start to get into some things?

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As we were talking pre -show, Kevin and I met through another Kevin K1, and it was refreshing to me because.

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In the grand scheme of things, through social media, Kevin was relatively close at the time, it was a four hour drive.

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But we could both drive, you know, even talk about driving two hours, two and a half hours to to be able to meet someplace to do evangelism.

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And the very first time that we actually met face to face was in Davenport. Kevin had invited me to come down and stay at his place, and my son and I drove down there, and this was several years ago now.

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And we drove down and met them to do some open air preaching and some and some street evangelism, one on one personal evangelism.

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That was the very first time I met Kevin or anybody else from Grace. And we had interacted,

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I had interacted with people from from GFC for the entire time that I had connected with Kevin through Facebook.

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And quite honestly, there had been a lot of generosity and kindness and whatnot directed towards me.

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There had also been some things like, well, hey, have you ever thought about relocating? Have you thought about leaving your work and maybe coming down here?

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And I said, no. They could have set you up with a job with one of the elders, right?

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Right. Yeah. Which that'll be for later in the show. But but I I'm like, no,

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I really I'm not interested in relocating. I believe I am where I am for for whatever purpose and whatever reason.

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And and there again, you know, there was I don't want to say there was no further talk about it, but it was definitely something that had been talked about.

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And so finally meeting everybody face to face in Davenport for the first time was interesting because one of my very first interactions with Mike Reed was

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I just want you to understand this is coming from him. I just want you to understand as much as I appreciate your experience with street evangelism and whatnot.

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You're not going to be allowed to open your preach because I don't know you. Now, at the time,

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OK, I can get it. But looking back on it in that moment.

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They ran with a here, let me say it this way. You should be very cautious about allowing somebody to come alongside you to do evangelism, period.

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And if you are a church who does engage in open air preaching and street evangelism and whatnot, you should not affiliate yourself with someone that you have never met and do not know and you cannot trust.

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That was not the case in my situation. The my record in this is not meant to be arrogant or prideful, but my record and my video and my presence through social media and whatnot, ultimately really kind of spoke for itself.

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And I really thought about that a lot on my drive home after after that first interaction. And that was really.

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Kind of where I started to wonder what's going on here, and I didn't bring it up to Kevin right away, but that was our very first interaction.

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But it did it did open the door for me to start asking some questions because we even had a

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Bible study the morning the morning after I first got down there and even discovered.

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Go ahead. Just out of curiosity, was Tony already at the church at this time? No, not at all. Even before he was out there.

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This was before Tony. So I knew Tony well before I knew any of them. Tony and how much backstory you want right now?

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Well, I, you know, I just think for the listeners to understand kind of where you're coming from, that's what we're trying to get to on this.

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So Tony and I had actually I. I knew Tony before Kevin Yont.

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I knew Tony before Mike Green. I knew Tony before Nick or anybody else at GFC did.

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I met Tony through a website called Adventures in Christianity years ago.

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It's it's defunct now. I think a lot of it was absorbed. A lot of it was absorbed. The people from Adventures in Christianity were absorbed into the

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Way of the Master website into their training program and whatnot. But the very first interaction

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I ever had with Tony Miano, besides hearing him on Way of the Master radio when it was, you know, Tony, the lawman,

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Miano doing street fishing. Was on Adventures in Christianity.

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I put out, hey, where can I get tracks? Inexpensive. I don't have a lot of money. You know,

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I got it. I got a young family. This I mean, this was 15 years ago or more.

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Yeah, and Tony was really kind to you throughout this. Yes, he he reached out to me immediately and I think immediately and said,

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I've got you back. I've got your back, brother, and sent me a case of tracks.

10:49

Yep. See you immediately. And this is what's so puzzling for so many people is that is that everybody has really good stories about Tony pre

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Mike Reed. Yeah, that's true. I have my own. I know I've never known

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Tony very well, but knew him enough from open air circles, Jeremiah Cry Ministries, Herald Societies, through other people that I know.

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So I've known Tony from that perspective. And one of things I'll never forget is when he put out an open call to say, hey,

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I'm writing encouragement letters for people. If anybody wants an encouraging letter, just Facebook message me.

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And I did. And you know what? Tony wrote a wonderful letter to me that I still have saved to this day. My son has engaged in in letter exchanges with Tony.

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And has the letters, and one of the first things he said was, man, that was a really great letter. It was really kind and very much so.

11:44

Yeah. What beautiful penmanship. I mean, how can you argue with that? Yeah. So the same thing with me when

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I first met him at Shepard's Conference. I told him my dad was in law enforcement and he said, I'll get you a book.

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And he got me one of his books that he wrote, brought a nice note in it. Very kind, beautiful penmanship.

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Yes. Yep. So I've talked to so many people, right, because I mean, the open air community is a big community, but it's also a small community, right?

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We all know one another within like within one or two degrees of separation, right? Much less than the

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Kevin Bacon stuff. And so, you know, I've talked to literally hundreds of people in the open air community and and nearly all of them.

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But for a scant few don't talk to Tony anymore. They used to talk to him and now cannot figure out what's happened.

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And and he's kind of completely shut the door on them. So having said all that, let me let me launch into a couple of things here, because, you know, why are we doing the show?

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This is what what this what people want to hear, right? Why are we doing this and why are we making this call out to people to if Mike and Tony show up at G3?

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We suspect they will that they should be asked these questions. Because they should be accountable to these questions.

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And so a couple of things I want to say first and foremost is that, you know, we have asked questions in the past about about Mike Reed and why this is so important because of the platforms he has to to give his junk out there.

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Right. And so one of those platforms was the G3 ministry with Josh Bice. And and Mike used that ministry to validate himself.

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He got himself pictures on the G3 website. He was one of the star pastors or whatever you called it in that section.

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He had a little bio written up about him all the while, nobody knowing, at least in the

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G3 ministries, all the heinousness that was going on in this guy's church. And so I'm happy to say that that Josh Bice has taken those things down off of the

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G3 website. So he's Mike is no longer in any promotional videos. So that's a good thing. I'm happy for that.

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I don't know how far else it went. I mean, I would hope that Josh and others have called Mike to repentance.

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I would hope that they would have seen the videos that we have done and not just about the videos we've done, but the eyewitness testimony, the things that that happened to actual people and the harm that was actually caused to people such as your wife,

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Kevin. Like, I am still blown away at the idea that, you know, in the talks that us three had.

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And by the way, as you would know, we, your wife and I never spoke alone, even over the phone or computer.

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Right. We, I understand those boundaries unlike, you know, Mike Reed, but in our conversations,

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I remember her, her telling me a number of just heinous things that happened to her within that church.

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She only shared a fraction of those live on camera for people to hear. She wouldn't even want to do the rest.

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And I know that she only told me a fraction of what actually happens. I mean, the viewers only heard probably 1 % of, of everything that, that happened to her that really affected her.

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So, so harshly. Well, I know you, you want to get to these questions and there's things that you want to say, but you, you've kind of, you know, cracked open this can.

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So I should probably jump in a little bit because, you know, the reality of it, you know, you know, this

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Anthony, because you've seen it. You've seen the pain, you've talked to these people, you've heard them, you've heard them weep, no doubt about it many, many times,

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I mean, like sobbing. Oh yeah. And so, you know, that these people aren't faking it there.

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They have been seriously spiritually and, uh, mentally abused and damaged.

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And these, these are things that church, uh, pastors, churches,

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Christians aren't supposed to do. If you have more people that have left your church and are damaged and are willing to talk about the damages they've received, then you actually have still at your church.

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You've got a problem. And you know, and I can't, I can't say that strong enough.

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I can't articulate that with enough emphasis to let people know that this, this group that you're, that we're talking about, that we are dealing with systematically down through the years has done more damage to people than they've even come close to helping.

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And I've got more to say about that later, but I just want to, I just want to put a stark emphasis on what's actually happening here is people are being hurt.

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Yeah, absolutely. And that's a big reason why we're doing this. Right. And so, um, I want to,

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I want to, I want to, if I can break in for just a second, what you just saw from Kevin is the closest to anger you will ever see him.

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Well, in public, I don't know. There's probably been a few conversations with me where he's hung up the phone.

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Um, cause I could be a little, I could be a little pigheaded and stubborn at times. I don't know. Kevin will acknowledge that.

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But, um, that's the closest to anger you're ever going to get with him in a, in a, especially in a situation like this.

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And this is also probably the closest you'll ever see any, any Christian to truly being righteously indignant and it's deserved.

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And here's the other issue. Kevin and his wife and his family and other families across the board.

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And I, and I've talked to many of them myself. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Damage, damage, damage, damage, damage over and over and over again.

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Um, but there are other people that are being hurt too. And, and those are the people that are caught up in this cult who aren't seeing it.

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And that's not only Tony, Tony's responsible for himself, Tony, but his wife is being hurt.

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His wife. And I know you guys talked about this, but his wife, her salvation was questioned.

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Upon, upon going to GFC and his, and his daughters is the one daughter in particular.

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And he denied that. And yet we have screenshots of one of the newsletters that he posted.

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It's been removed from his website, but we had means to be able to get that anyway. And we were able to show people, um, screenshots of, of his newsletter.

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He put out on his website, uh, back in the day regarding the stuff with his wife. So, you know, you're absolutely right about that.

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And that's what I want people to understand. The people that have, that have left. They're damaged, but they're on the road to recovery.

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And Kevin and I have talked about this a lot with him and his family. They're, they're on the road to recovery. And I pushed him on this, frankly, um, maybe not so gently sometimes, but, uh, the people that are still there, they're, they're under constant threat of fire.

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Constantly, whether they want to be there or not, if they're roped in with their family, this is a constant problem.

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They are constantly under the gun here. And, and I recently interviewed a young lady, uh, who went through much the same thing of all places in Iowa, and it was in Iowa city.

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And she was, went through much the same thing in her story. Kevin listened to it. Her story was verbatim what they went through until she finally had had enough.

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And she still suffers years down the road. Um, yeah. For lack of better terminology,

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PTSD related to what she went through with them. Yeah. Well, I, there's no doubt that people have, have years of hurt and years of recovery.

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After all this stuff, here's a captain black Eagle. I don't know who this is, but, um, it says my number one rule from the day

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I joined the military until present day was never be alone with a woman. And you know what, as, as I was doing these shows last year, you know,

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I had people ask me, does your pastor know you're doing this? Yes. My pastor knew I was doing this. I asked my pastor about this.

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My pastor was very clear. He's like from, from day one in his ministry, he's never been alone with a woman like he, like this, this is something that you just know not to do.

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Numerous pastors have told me the same thing that I've talked to you about this. It is a unique thing to people like Mike Reed that thinks that it's okay to meet alone with women.

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And then as we'll get into later, ask them the questions that were asked, but, um,

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I want to push on a little more. You see that Jennifer just commented. Yeah. So Jennifer, so Kevin's wife commented, yes.

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Freedom from authoritarian, legalistic, abusive, lying, divisive, twisted, narcissistic men.

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Thank you, Jesus for freedom. Can I, I want to, I want to use Jen's comment to launch into something that, that we were sharing and just so everybody knows

20:53

Anthony reached out to us a few days ago. This is not, this wasn't some big surprise and he launched on us. We've had some time to talk about this a couple of days.

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Yeah. But can I, can I ask you before you get into that Todd, hold that thought because I do want to clear a couple of things out first.

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Um, just being towards the beginning of the show. Um, first and foremost, there's a, uh, this, uh,

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Dropbox here link that I put up in the comments. Anybody can go to this Dropbox. These are documents that, um, go through when

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Kevin and I did the interview last year, was it may, I believe as the first time we, we had a show on this.

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And, uh, this is the document that shows all the timestamps and all of the, uh, pertinent things that we had talked about by topic.

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So you can actually, anybody can go to this Dropbox, pull this document down and go to the video.

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There's a link for it on this document. You can go watch the video from last year. I think we went three, three and a half hours. And, uh, you can go to exactly what timestamp you want to listen to whatever you want regarding what we've talked about.

21:56

It's a fantastic document. If you want to cut to the chase on certain things. And I'll, I'll find that and share it on my, uh.

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Yeah. So that, so that's there. And I've got a couple other documents that you can look at for proof stuff that is, that is out there.

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Mike speaking in his own words, through telephone conversations, as well as video, uh, conversations.

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So, so please use that Dropbox link, um, to go do that. Yeah. I can't say he's

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Ron Hughes on the Christian Apologetics Facebook group. So thank you, uh, Ron for being on. Um, here's a couple other things about Mike Reed, you know, so one, he used

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G3 to validate his platform. It looks like that's going to stop now. Um, he's also used pastor's names to validate his ministry.

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Um, he's, he's dropped Phil Johnson's name before. Phil has come out with a statement.

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He did this over a year ago saying that he has warned Mike and Tony to stop using his name as if they're good with Jesus grace community church in Sun Valley, California.

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Tony is not in good standing in terms of how he left there. And, and Phil is not me.

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He, nor Mike Riccardi are in favor of, uh, Tony in his move to Mike Reed's church.

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So they've, they've denounced this publicly, especially Phil. And, uh, and then they've also,

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Mike has also used Voti to, to push himself and give him more cloud validators ministry.

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And, uh, I don't know how much Voti knows, but I'm going to make sure it's a point that I go up to Voti and talk to him at G3 this year.

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And I make sure he does know about this because I know Mike was hobnobbing with Voti at a conference last weekend.

23:31

Yeah. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted to bring up. If I could, Anthony. Yeah. So that's a good time now then to go ahead and do that.

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I want people to understand that Mike Reed and others from GFC showed up at the fight, laugh, feast, uh, conferences last week, whatever it's been now.

23:48

It's probably longer than that last week. Yeah. Boy, you know, this is where you're going to lose some, some viewers.

23:57

Um, I, I tend to find myself as, as a reformed

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Calvinistic Baptist going to a Presbyterian church, explain that one to everybody. Um, I tend to find myself drawn oftentimes to a lot of the material and the content from the fight, laugh, feast network.

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Um, I am, I read a lot of Wilson. I'm, I, I read, uh,

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C .R. Wiley, who is also interconnected. I also have read and listened to a lot of, uh,

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Vodie Bakum who is also connected with FLF and with, uh,

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Phil Johnson. If any of those individuals were truly aware of what

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Mike Reed stood for and, and what he, he advocates for and promotes and actually knew what his idea of what

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Christian headship you know, father rule or, or federal headship was

24:58

Doug Wilson would soundly rebuke him. And if you've never been rebuked by Doug Wilson, it wouldn't be as pleasant as it would be coming from someone who isn't quite as gentle.

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If Doug was aware of those things, fully aware, Mike Reed would never show, show his face at any of those kinds of conferences.

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Again, he, he's, I'm going to tell you, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm going to tell you from experience.

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He showed up at FLF precisely because no one knows him and no one there is aware of what's going on.

25:31

Oh, I'm sure that's true. There's a lot of people. I mean, Tony is still getting into some churches here and there to teach on evangelism, even though he's been dropped by nearly every church that has brought him in.

25:42

There's only one that continues to bring him in from before. There are others that have brought him in, in recent, in recent times.

25:48

So there are a lot of people who still don't know. But kind of going on. So thank you for that ad.

25:55

So Mike Reed, he also uses other means to validate his ministry. He, he was doing African missions. I didn't, he was part of an

26:01

African missions ministry, which through some of the work that you did, Kevin, he lost that ministry opportunity.

26:06

Although he is, he's still been going there on his own without the ministry to, to import his or export as dangerous doctrines there.

26:15

Yeah. I find that ironic. I quickly add because, you know, it was always, everything is about an authority structure in his world.

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So, you know, having the international church planters who has apparently removed them from their roles, at least that's what

26:34

I had heard. I can't verify that. I don't know if anybody knows anything about it. Apparently it was because of these shows that pressure was put on.

26:43

I think his name is Ryan Bush. Dr. Ryan Bush. It sounds like a godly man from what I've heard of him.

26:49

Pressure was put on him to get them removed. And I believe they did. Now, I don't know if somehow they got back in or if they just decided to go on their own.

26:57

I think they're on their own, but if they go on their own, I find it ironic because who's the authority structure.

27:04

Well, obviously, and that's the key. Mike Reed is always the authority structure. That's it. That's a senior authority structure that doesn't agree with Mike Reed.

27:12

And I know I'm interjecting here. I didn't even ask. No, you're right, though. Yeah. What you have to understand, and I learned this early on from doing, and Kevin will attest to this,

27:24

I did hours and hours of abortion mill ministry at the

27:33

Emma Goldman Clinic with Kevin and other people from GFC hours.

27:43

And Mike Reed is the authority. And anyone who does not agree with Mike, no matter what clout they may have, is automatically disqualified from having authority.

27:54

Oh, knocking my mind. I'm talking with my hands. I got to remember I'm not street preaching. Are you

27:59

Italian, by the way? No, I'm not. I'm Scandinavian and German. So that might explain some things.

28:08

But there's a reality in that there's a subjective stance that Mike Reed gets to declare for himself who is a valid authority and who is not.

28:23

And the minute you disagree with Mike Reed on something, you're no longer a valid authority. And he won't tell you that, but he'll point to how he can show you in scripture how your position is incorrect.

28:34

And he will then browbeat the living out of you. I'm getting fired up.

28:42

He will browbeat you until there's no more arguing with him.

28:49

And it's not because you don't have an argument. It's just you can't go any further. You cannot go any further with him because he just he won't listen because he's the authority.

28:59

Yeah. And so in a number of the people that I've talked to last year in preparation for these shows,

29:05

I found out that that's the way that he and the other two elders worked is they would sit somebody down to have a discussion.

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But it was really a one -sided discussion. You didn't leave the room until you agreed with them as the authority figures.

29:19

You experienced that firsthand, Anthony. And I experienced that firsthand, which I was going to get into just next.

29:25

So thank you. Yeah. So I experienced that firsthand. Shocking to me. Yeah. Right. So for people who think that these were just hit pieces, because I know

29:35

Tony and Mike have put it out there. These are hit pieces. These were not hit pieces. I spent a long time doing research and talking to people, talking to witnesses.

29:44

I went far above and beyond the two or three witnesses necessary in scripture to be able to gather the evidence.

29:53

And that when I had done this, I gave Mike Reed every opportunity beyond the show. So Kevin, you had the questions ahead of time, right?

30:01

You knew what I was going to ask you before you came onto the show. Some questions you liked, some you probably didn't like.

30:08

And you had those questions. I said, I'm going to ask every one of these. You can decline to answer, but these are the questions

30:16

I'm going to ask. And I did the exact same thing with Mike Reed. He had questions ahead of time sent to him.

30:23

These were the questions I was going to ask. He knew what was coming. I said, I would not get away from this list to be completely fair with him.

30:32

But what I was not going to do was erase questions out of this list. So what they did is they had three meetings with me over Zoom that took six to six and a half hours total trying to explain to me their position as to why

30:46

Mike should be allowed to answer only the questions that they provide for me, not the ones I wanted to ask.

30:53

And we went through all kinds of stuff for six to six and a half hours over those three. So I got to see firsthand what this brow beating was like.

31:01

How you have the different personalities among the three elders. How the one throws his hand, Nick Roland, throws his hands up in the air, pounds tables, slams doors, walks out, comes back in five minutes later.

31:12

I watched that a few times. You see Mike trying to explain things.

31:17

Tyler trying to come in and do a different cunning method. It really is amazing how those three work so well together to browbeat people.

31:25

So if people had to deal with even a quarter of what I had to deal with, if females who are the weaker vessel had to deal with even a quarter of what

31:32

I had to deal with, I can imagine why people have gotten so hurt over the years in this ministry.

31:40

It's uncanny to me. So imagine this, right? There were some things that came out because of doing these

31:50

Apologetics Live videos. A lot of stuff came out. We heard from a lot of people. We've talked with a lot of people afterwards.

31:59

And I praise the Lord that He is using this evil to perpetuate good.

32:04

We have been able to have conversations with couples that have come out of difficult church situations, abusive authoritarian churches.

32:13

We've been able to have discussions with people and I think help them to some degree at least.

32:20

But what's interesting is, I don't want to say too much, a pastor reached out to me and said,

32:30

I watched all of this stuff and I have some questions for you. And we went back and forth and had some good discussions.

32:39

And there were some things that I tried to help him maybe understand, because he probably has never really dealt with someone like Mike.

32:47

I mean, nobody has dealt with somebody like Mike, I can guarantee it. So in the course of these discussions,

32:54

I learned that there's this private video that the elders of Grace Fellowship have put together their own video that's in a hidden secret place that nobody can watch except for who they want to watch.

33:11

And they sent it to this pastor under the promise that he wouldn't share it with anybody, presumably me.

33:19

So in my discussions with this man, I said, okay, how can

33:26

I possibly answer? I can't cross examine. I can't tell you what's being said.

33:31

He couldn't tell me what was being said because that would be betraying what he said to them. So anyway, he says, maybe you can ask

33:38

Mike if you can see the video. So I sent Mike an email. Hey, I understand you've done a video response.

33:45

Why don't you send it to me so I can cross examine. Proverbs 18, 17.

33:51

This is a verse Mike Reed uses all the time, very, very frequently.

33:58

And he wouldn't dare allow us to do this privately without screaming from the mountaintop.

34:08

Well, I write him an email. He uses this as an opportunity to say, well, you've refused to do this and yada, yada, yada.

34:15

We've tried to participate with your elders in Albuquerque. They're uninterested in doing this.

34:21

And so I wrote them a very lengthy email, number one, correcting his bad memory.

34:30

Okay. I'm going to say that sort of in tongue in cheek because the man has an outstanding memory.

34:36

He doesn't forget that I did all these things, but he just sort of leaves them out of the conversation to paint the picture in his best light.

34:46

So, you know, there's this private video out there that nobody gets to see, except for the people that he wants to see in order to respond to us.

34:57

But we don't get to respond to this video. And I can, it's so funny because I could almost probably tell you what they say.

35:06

Um, but I can also tell you, they leave out crucial information. Um, you know,

35:12

I'm sure they don't, Mike doesn't talk about how we ask women about their sexual preferences, how frequent their positions, their things of this nature that go on within the congregations bedrooms.

35:24

I'm sure he doesn't mention that in this video. I'm sure he forgot to. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'll let you go.

35:30

No, no, don't apologize. But I just want people to understand what, what Kevin's talking about here. This, this may sound absolutely shocking to people, but Kevin and I talked about this before any of these videos ever came out.

35:41

We, we, we, we danced around, if you will, the periphery of this. And this is real.

35:48

Okay. Kevin's not making this up. That this is debased, perverted debauchery.

35:57

And this is real. And, and the reason that video is private, if you have nothing to hide, why are you hiding?

36:08

Yeah. And I'm not the kind of person, and I'm not the kind of person that says that lightly. Like I'm, I'm the guy who will tell you when you get pulled over and the cop says, do you know why

36:18

I pulled you over? You don't volunteer an answer. You make the cops tell you, but you know, like, well, if you don't want to answer, you know, if you, if you don't want to answer,

36:27

I'm just going to assume you're guilty of something. No. The reason why Mike Reed and Nick and, and what is it?

36:33

Tyler now, and, and, and, and some of these others are this, the reason why this video is private is, is specifically because they don't want the people with the answers to tell the truth.

36:50

They want to be able to put it out there to a select crowd to, to sow seeds of dissent in the scriptures.

36:57

Tell us that, that, you know, the divisive, divisive, infectious man is the one that should be put out. That's my greed.

37:04

And that's what Kevin's getting at. Yeah, that's right. So, um, so humble clay says, so what more can y 'all or we do to make

37:11

Vodi aware of this? Well, I mean, people just have to go talk to them is really what it comes down to.

37:17

It's going to take about 150 or so start sending this email to him in an email to his ministry.

37:25

So he understands that, that it's not just a couple of crackpots from that. He doesn't know. He needs to understand this coming from people.

37:32

Well, for one, Mike knows Vodi because we all, you know, we went to Israel with Vodi, me and Jen and Mike and his wife,

37:42

Emily. Um, so, you know, we were sort of, I guess, responsible to some degree of making that, making that arrangement.

37:52

Uh, doesn't matter, uh, what, what really matters and see, you know, at least to the last of my knowledge,

38:00

I don't know if they still do any, nor they were supporting Vodi Baucom's ministry on a monthly basis. So, you know, uh,

38:07

I guess, I mean, I think Vodi is a man of integrity and honor, and I'm sure if he really knew these things and really had an opportunity to examine them, he would want nothing to do with Mike.

38:19

But if he just knows it on at a very surface level, it's all fine and well, and they're going to hug at a conference and say hello to one another and all that kind of stuff.

38:30

So, you know, if people know Vodi or they have an opportunity to share these things with him, they should.

38:35

They should. That's right. So, uh, so your wife brings up something interesting, Todd. She, I'm sorry, Kevin. She said, uh,

38:42

Anthony heard both sides hearing many, many people that had left GFC in countless minutes hours with GFC elders, but Mike will say

38:50

Anthony is not what qualified to weigh in. Why? Why not Anthony? I find, I find this really interesting.

38:56

Right. And, uh, yeah, yeah. What qualifications do I have? I don't know that I'm a Christian and, and, uh, we should be looking into these things for people that claim to be brothers.

39:05

Like Mike Reed does appeal to authority, logical fallacy or disqualified. Well, yeah, exactly.

39:11

So, but so here's something interesting is that in the discussions with Mike Reed, one of the things that he pointed out when it comes, you know, so he's, he's tried to verify his ministry with G3, verifies ministry with guys like Vodi and Phil and others.

39:24

He also has been telling people, and he told me this on those videos.

39:30

He says, I got, I left, I let three people come into this ministry, come into this church and, and have complete access to talk to whomever they wanted and do their own research and investigation to see if these things are true about me.

39:44

And he gave me three names, Sonny Hernandez, who I know Bobby McCreary, who

39:51

I know. And one guy is whose pastor says he's permanently disqualified from ministry, who

39:56

I know. And I have talked to all three of them in regards to this.

40:01

All three of them personally told me that they did not do any investigation whatsoever.

40:08

In fact, Sonny laughed at that proposition that's, that's he was, he had done research on this stuff.

40:15

So Mike has told people that, yeah, there's people who've, who've, who've come here to this church. They've talked to people.

40:21

They've done, they've done their investigation. It is, it is patently false. It is an absolute lie that he is, that he is spreading to try to validate his ministry and that he's, he's done no wrong.

40:32

Yeah. So it's not the first time that, you know, we have caught him in a lie and, you know, we know of a fairly significant lie that he has lied to the congregation regarding.

40:47

I want to be careful because I want to protect the person that has told me, and they were an insider, a very insider regarding something that Mike was supposedly giving the congregation input into, but Mike had already made the decision.

41:06

And this man has evidence of that because he brought it up to Mike and it resulted in a pretty extreme shouting match until it was broken up by, by Cal Volkama.

41:17

So if, if any of them are watching, they'll know who I'm talking about and they'll know who, who told me that and they'll know it's true, but see, this is the deceit and this deception he is used to getting away with because he can usually talk his way around most of this kind of stuff.

41:35

Just give him enough time and he'll wear you down. And, you know, that's, you know, when he sent me back this, this email saying we're going to, we want to, you know, adjudicate this before the congregation, this needs to be tried in front of our church, not on Facebook, not with Anthony or Andrew, not with any of these people.

41:56

Well, my, my simple response was, you know, that's, that goes against your confession and you've tried this before with Sycamore Baptist church elders and it, it failed.

42:09

So we, we know this is, this is just smoke and mirrors. This is just way of, of distracting what, what's really going on there.

42:17

Yeah, that's right. So Anthony, if I could, yeah, please do. I know, I know you got

42:23

Jen's comment there, but, um, and my apologies, honestly to Andrew, he sent me an email.

42:29

So when you talk to him again, uh, he sent me an email a while ago, a while ago asking if I would link the, the series about GFC in this, um, essay that I wrote for the, if only even one website.

42:45

And I told him I would, and I just looked and it didn't go up. So I have to go back in and fix that.

42:51

But, uh, I just sent you a link in messenger. If you want to put that up there for those people who, who say that we're just all a bunch of angry, you know, vitriolic, vindictive people who want to take our, our anger out on Mike and Tony for them not wanting to associate with us anymore.

43:12

I dare you to read the piece that I just sent and I'm going to get a little emotional here.

43:18

Because I lost a friend. I lost a friend in this.

43:27

The very first time that I ever met Tony face -to -face was at an abortion mill in Iowa city.

43:38

And Kevin was there years of communicating via social media and email and whatnot, years of, of bouncing ideas off of him and asking him questions.

43:54

And I was finally able to wrap my arms around the man that I had loved from afar as a brother in Christ who has now separated himself from me because I dared to ask some questions.

44:07

So don't, don't dare anyone to message me and tell me that I'm just doing this out of a vindictive, vitriolic nature.

44:17

Well, and sadly, that's the, that is the experience of many with Tony that were his friends.

44:24

And, and what Jen says here, and I'm glad that you put that up right away is, is, and I watched this play out in her message here.

44:32

If you want to read it, this, I saw this happen with Kevin constantly striving for the approval.

44:38

And Kevin, I love you and I'm sorry, I don't mean to put you out there like that, but I watched Kevin strive for the approval of Mike Reed and others because they kept stringing him along saying,

44:50

Oh, you, you'd make a good elder. You just have this, you got to take care of. You just got to fix this.

44:55

You just got to do that. And it was nothing he did was ever good enough ever.

45:01

And so what Jen is saying in this is that they use the same tactic with the wives, with the, with the women, the daughters and the, and the wives and the single women.

45:11

No man has ever, ever as good as Mike Reed. And it's, and that's exactly what, what happened with Tony and all of these other relationships that he's lost.

45:22

I mean, look at Chuck. I mean, you know, Chuck, that relationship,

45:29

Chuck and Tony, that goes back even further than Tony and I do, and definitely a lot closer, you know, and look at where that's at now.

45:38

Because we, we, we had brought stuff up in the show with, with Chuck. When I interviewed him, I think it was the week after Kevin and, and Chuck showed all these pictures of, of them together, you know, from, from the face, from Facebook and Tony looking up to, to Chuck as his number one confidant, the guy that he bounced things off of it was

46:00

Tony had a great, great respect for Chuck and his discernment. And he, and he listened to Chuck about all these things up until Mike Reed.

46:11

Right. So yeah. And I mentioned this earlier, and this is going to come off as really hard.

46:17

This is why, this is why Kevin was okay with me being on because I could be the bad guy. I want people to understand.

46:27

I still, to this day, I love Tony. There isn't a week that goes by that I do not think about him down there, but what, what people have to understand in what

46:43

I'm saying about how I love Tony is that part of loving someone, and Kevin has done this to me, both the

46:49

Kevin's K1 and K2. When you love someone, you got to go, Hey, there's something going on here.

46:55

Something's wrong. And Lord, please put a guard on my mouth right now.

47:10

The reason that Kevin, or excuse me, sorry, Kevin, the reason that Tony's in this position is because his pride gets in the way every single time somebody points something out to him that needs to change.

47:23

It has ruined him relationship wise with a couple of different ministries and a couple of different people.

47:32

And that's exactly what's happening here with GFC and Tony.

47:40

He's too pridefully blind to understand that we don't hate him.

47:48

We love him and we want him and his family out of that environment because it is destroying him and those of you out there, and I don't know if Bobby is still supporting him and defending him, but Bobby, if you love your brother, you have got to weep for him and call him out of that place and tell him his pride is blinding him.

48:14

Yeah, Todd, I wasn't good with you on because you're a mean or a bad guy.

48:20

I knew that you had good insights into this situation. And I mean, you and I have talked so often and so much about it.

48:28

Your knowledge is extraordinarily good regarding this whole situation and many other things theologically.

48:37

So I'm grateful for that. I think you're spot on with Tony, and it's just like,

48:44

I don't know how does a guy lay down at night and go, man, listen, look, how many friends have

48:50

I lost over this? Do all of these people really hate me? Do all these people really just have they just cut me?

48:57

Have I just cut them out of my life because they're being mean about Mike Reed? I don't know how a guy doesn't like the light bulb doesn't come on somewhere along the line.

49:11

Help me. Help me, Anthony. What's going on here? You know what? Math was one of my majors in college, right?

49:16

I was a math and chemistry major. And statistically speaking, nearly everybody in your life is now out of it.

49:25

And there's very few left. But you've got a pastor that's still in it who everybody is really against.

49:32

At some point, you have to say, you know what? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe. And that's the part that Tony obviously hasn't gotten to yet.

49:40

And everyone prays his eyes are going to open up to this at some point. Obviously, it hasn't happened yet.

49:49

So your wife, Jen, had a couple more comments that we should read here. Number one, every week for years, meeting alone with women.

49:54

That's Mike Reed. This usurps the authority of the home. This could open up paths of sin for Mike and the women.

50:01

Which we've said all along, right? We don't believe Mike has, at least

50:06

I don't have the knowledge that Mike has ever crossed the line from speaking things that he shouldn't be speaking to women privately in his office, asking about sexual positions as he does in his counseling sessions with all the women of the church, asking about the frequency, all that kind of stuff.

50:24

As far as we know, he never crossed the line. But yet all this stuff would be behaviors of somebody who is grooming as a sexual predator.

50:32

So I mean, that we know for sure. So yes, Jen's right. This can open up paths of sin for Mike and the women.

50:38

The women come to see how they need Mike because Mike is so much better at leading them and their homes than their husbands.

50:44

They come to idolize Mike. The husbands can never measure up to Mike. We know of at least one divorce that occurred directly because of Mike's intervention in their marriage.

50:53

Pastors, I thought were supposed to help marriages get stronger, not rip them apart. Sorry, Todd.

51:01

Let me say this really quick. What she says right here, my wife,

51:07

Jennifer, they come to idolize Mike. The husbands can never measure up to Mike. The women come to see he's better at leading them in their homes.

51:14

Listen, one of the beginning for me to wake up to this whole thing, one of the things

51:20

Mike said when he was meeting with me and Jen, me and Jen were called in to do marriage counseling with the elders.

51:30

Did we need marriage counseling? No, it wasn't for marriage counseling. It was to see what's going on in their marriage and in their lives and what can we work on.

51:42

But one of the things Mike said to me in all of this thing after Jen left, this was a meeting that I wish

51:50

I'd got. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm a Christian, but I'm going to say something very unchristian. I wish

51:55

I would have got up and smashed him in the face. Sorry, that's how I feel about it now. There's a precedence for that.

52:02

Yeah, Luther did it. St. Nicholas in... Oh, that's what it was. That's what it was. Yeah. Anyway, that being aside,

52:09

I probably really, I really wouldn't have. But what he said to me is I'm doing a job.

52:16

That happened to my wife? I'd have done it. And my wife would have expected me to do it too. He would have deserved it.

52:22

He would have deserved it. And that's not a critique of you, Kevin. I'm just a hothead. No, I got you. But he said,

52:28

I'm doing your job. And you see what Jen said here? Mike is better at leading them and their homes than their husband.

52:37

Kevin, I'm doing your job for you. He's putting himself in that position as being the leader of home.

52:47

How can I measure up to that? Right.

52:53

And then if my wife doesn't have the type of personality that she has, and she didn't, she buys into it.

53:04

Oh, yeah. He's so much better at leading the home than Kevin is. I mean, what do I need that guy for? And I mean, this is the subtle way that these things come about where he...

53:16

How long does somebody need to be in marriage counseling in your church if you're a woman every single week or counseling with the wife every single week?

53:27

That's what happens there. And this undermines that home structure. And this is where, if I can interject here too,

53:37

Kevin and I have talked about a lot of this headship. I think Kevin would acknowledge.

53:43

We've talked about everything from Romans 13 to federal headship. And we even have a little bit of a variance right now on what father rule and what biblical patriarchy and whatnot, all that is.

53:58

What Mike Reed believes in is not... I don't care if you believe in biblical patriarchy or not.

54:06

What Mike Reed teaches, even though he's going to look you in the face and tell you that what he's teaching is biblical patriarchy, it is not biblical patriarchy.

54:18

No person within, and not to use a no true Scotsman fallacy, but no advocate for biblical patriarchy or father rule or federal headship the way a lot of people understand it now would advocate for what

54:36

Mike Reed does. Not one. And you see that you brought up the term earlier, grooming.

54:47

Mike Reed made an argument for a convicted, and I know you guys discussed some of this, a convicted sex offender.

54:55

And not just an average, not that there's an average, but a sex offender whose targets of choice were not very old.

55:06

Yeah, pedophile, right? Targets of children, right? Yeah, I'm trying to watch the

55:12

YouTube algorithm there. So I'm cognizant of these things now where I never would have been before.

55:21

He argued that this person, because of the shed blood of Christ and the saving grace of God, this person could now be trusted to be a pastor, an elder.

55:33

Now, I'm going to say no, not that this person can't be saved, but there's an abundance of caution that should be had.

55:44

But when you couple that with some of the things that Mike Reed teaches and does and ask questions of women and wanting to meet with women, and we can bring up even the issue of the kissing, and Kevin and I have our own somewhat interesting story about holy kisses.

56:02

It's, there's something going on there.

56:08

And then he asserts, and I know you guys spoke of this as well. Well, I can't fall to that kind of sin anymore.

56:18

No, that's balderdash and hogwash. I don't care if you're

56:23

John MacArthur, and I have a profound amount of respect for John MacArthur. R .C.

56:29

Sproul, either one of those two would tell you if they had the opportunity, there's no such thing as being so holy and so removed that you could never fall to that kind of sin.

56:41

You tempt a person, I don't care how righteous they are outside of Christ, sooner or later, they're going to cave into that sin or die.

56:50

That's it. If you tempt them far enough, if they do not flee from it. And when

56:56

Mike talks about meeting with women and wanting to do it alone because it's best for them, there's something going on there, and it's got nothing to do with the spiritual well -being of a family.

57:10

At all. Period. He is, Jen said it, he is undercutting the authority of the husband, and there's a reason for it.

57:20

And people have to make that, come to that conclusion on their own when they weigh out the evidence.

57:25

It's weird. And some of the people I've talked to that know Mike have said, and even one of them that was supposedly checked out his ministry last year, the year before, says that, well,

57:37

Mike, maybe Mike's just thinking like this is a perfect world, right? So when he gave his holy kissing sermon, it was under the pretext that if the world was a perfect world, we ought to be able to give a holy kiss to someone and it not mean anything.

57:57

Now, okay. Even if we want to think in a perfect world that this could be the case, we don't live in a perfect world.

58:04

Right. We live in a fallen, sinful world. This never should be a thought that comes across our mind, never should be taught from the pulpits.

58:12

We should never be into even interjecting these ideas into people's minds that could even possibly remotely be okay to do holy kissing with somebody else's wife or husband.

58:24

It's just whacked out this stuff. And that's why it looks so much like grooming. All of these things that we hear about from people regarding the teaching of Mike Reed.

58:35

If your goal is to rightly divide the word of truth, which he would claim that's his goal, that's what he wants to do.

58:43

Then, I mean, his sermon on that, as I look back on it and would re -listen to it now, it's so elementary.

58:51

It's so juvenile because it's like, why do you take a verse like that from Romans 16?

59:00

It's obviously inserted into a cultural setting at a time in space that is not relevant to our modern day context because we just don't behave like that anymore.

59:13

You know, and so you must have a goal when you take that scripture and you do that to it and you try then to get your people to do that.

59:25

You're trying to loosen inhibitions or something.

59:32

You've got a goal in mind, but it ain't rightly dividing the word of truth because I think if you've listened to a hundred decent preachers, nobody would be advocating for that today.

59:45

They would understand it in its cultural context. Absolutely right.

59:50

And I brought this up before. I mean, I'm Italian. I'm a first generation Italian. So my dad was actually born in Italy.

59:57

Most of our family came from Italy and I'm myself and brothers and cousins are all first generation.

01:00:04

So we saw a holy kissing in a cultural aspect come into play, right? It's usually, you know, cheek on cheek type of deal.

01:00:12

You blow a kiss in the air and this is what you do to family members who you've known for years, right?

01:00:17

It's like the tour de France. When they win a stage, those girls, they do that and they don't even really get close to the guys.

01:00:23

A lot of times you don't even touch, right? You just, you're kind of close and you kind of kiss the air and that's all it is, right?

01:00:29

Like, so yeah, it's really ludicrous to think about that you could kiss even on the lips, quote unquote, for my greed in his story.

01:00:40

Thank you for bringing that up because I'm going to use two examples here and I asked Kevin if I could bring this story up and now that we look back on it, it was awkward in the moment for me.

01:00:55

But Kevin and I have hashed this out already. But I'm going to tell, I'm going to give two examples. I have a very, we have a friend of our family.

01:01:03

Kevin knows her, that we have been discipling for a long time and she has become like a sister to me.

01:01:15

Literally, she, like people do not, she is a very short Indian gal and when

01:01:22

I say Indian, I mean Dot and she'll get it when I, because I'll share this video with her and she'll make fun of me for saying this.

01:01:27

Dot, not a feather. I knew exactly what she meant, by the way.

01:01:34

She's a very short Indian gal. Love her to pieces the way you would any sister, literally a sister.

01:01:43

And she introduces people to me. She goes, oh, this is my big brother.

01:01:48

And people are like, he is whiter than snow and you are

01:01:56

Indian. Well, now we have the kind of relationship where when

01:02:01

I see her at worship and she has followed us to several churches, we've been trying to find a place to settle down.

01:02:08

When we see her in worship, she comes up, we give each other a hug and I will give her a brotherly peck on the top of her head because that's where we're at.

01:02:18

And it's not in, there's literally right in front of my wife. It's just that natural.

01:02:26

Just like I would give my daughter a kiss on the cheek. It's almost what it's like. Huge difference between telling your congregation that as the pastor or any other man in the church, you should be able to give a woman a kiss on the lips.

01:02:43

That is a level of intimacy that should not ever be advocated for in any family.

01:02:53

And the danger, not danger, but the discomforting part of this teaching is that Kevin and I had that experience.

01:03:04

I gave him a hug one time as we were leaving, doing abortion ministry and he gave me a kiss on the cheek.

01:03:11

And I walked away going, did I imagine that? And we talked about it down the road and then

01:03:18

I figured out it came from Mike's teaching. Now, you do not kiss a

01:03:24

Scandinavian German guy from Minnesota on the cheek in Iowa and not expect that he's not going to think about that for a while.

01:03:32

And I'm like, I imagined that. And I never mentioned it to anybody else.

01:03:38

I know Anthony's laughing because he's Italian, so. Yeah, this is hilarious to me. But, and I asked him, so I did not put him on blast without his,

01:03:49

I asked him, but here's the problem. The truth sets us free, right,

01:03:55

Todd? Yeah, truth sets us free. Here's the issue.

01:04:03

Kevin had been sold that this was normative for our culture today.

01:04:10

It should be normative for the church culture today. And Kevin, I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, but this is kind of how

01:04:17

I'm paraphrasing it here. When it's not, it's not normative.

01:04:24

It's hard for a lot of American men to even hug in the church. And Kevin knows

01:04:30

I'll hug a brother. I don't even care. But if somebody tries to kiss me on the cheek, if you're not my son, we're going to have a word.

01:04:39

And especially if it keeps happening. And that's a surface level danger, but that tells you how much influence that he has.

01:04:51

Kevin, am I wrong? Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's well said because, you know, it really is.

01:04:58

When you're there, it's hard to imagine, you know, because the teachings, they not only maybe occur on a

01:05:05

Sunday morning, right, from the pulpit, but then there's the Sunday night where you sit around and you talk about it.

01:05:13

And then it's a Wednesday night. We talk about it again. And then the men's Bible studies, you talk about it.

01:05:18

And the women's Bible studies, they talk about it. And it's just repetition, repetition, repetition, drill, drill, drill.

01:05:25

And I really became aware of this. I mean, this is brainwashing. I mean, quite frankly, purposely, honestly, through the book that has really probably been most beneficial to me in all this is

01:05:41

Churches That Abuse by Ronald Enroth. Just a great book, just a great read for anybody.

01:05:47

But especially if you've been in a orthodox Christian cult or cultish type church, it'll really help you see that this repetition is an important part of any sort of indoctrination.

01:06:01

And so when we teach that this is okay, well, we, you know, as we're bought in, we believe it, you know, we believe that it's okay.

01:06:09

And we learn the arguments. We learn how to argue for that position.

01:06:16

Listen, now that I'm out and my mind is not cluttered by it anymore. And actually

01:06:22

I'm going to a legitimate seminary that I'm getting good teaching and good training.

01:06:28

You know, I can see so clearly how so much of that teaching was just really bad.

01:06:36

Let me give you an example. Juvenile, it's juvenile. Let me give you an example.

01:06:42

Kevin and I, and I had mentioned this earlier, Anthony, Kevin and I had a lot of conversations about how far into your familial life does the rule of the elders or the pastors, whatever terminology you want to use, how far into your familial life, your personal private life, does that rule extend?

01:07:06

And in our conversations back and forth, Kevin may or may not remember this.

01:07:13

He sent me a essay or a piece that was written from the perspective of GFC.

01:07:21

To justify a total rule over your life.

01:07:28

And Kevin, I don't know if you remember that or not. Was it an article I wrote?

01:07:33

I can't remember if it was one you wrote or if it was one, a position piece. You know, it very well may have been something that I wrote.

01:07:41

And what's interesting is not too long ago, I wrote a piece considering that same topic and saying, here's what

01:07:48

I said back then. And here's how my mind has been changed. So yeah,

01:07:54

I don't doubt it. But it wasn't, here's what I'll say. It wasn't

01:08:00

Kevin's writing. It was Kevin parroting Mike Reed and others who parroted

01:08:08

Mike Reed. Because my contention was, and you guys know this from your conversations with others.

01:08:14

If you want to take a job, you had better get the counsel and the approval of your elders or your slash pastors before you do that.

01:08:25

Because they need to tell you whether or not that's the right job for you. Now, Kevin knows this because I'm in a situation right now where I might be needing to get a new job.

01:08:36

I'm going to talk to some people that I care about, people who I trust. But does my elder have the final authority to squash that decision?

01:08:49

And what GFC will tell you is, not only does your elder have the final authority to squash that decision and tell you what you should do.

01:08:56

But if your elder tells you to do the exact opposite and take the job for minimum wage, because it's better for you, because you can't afford to miss

01:09:05

Sunday services, all of them, you had better take that job. Or you might get brought to the church and accused of sin.

01:09:15

Period. And that happened. I know several situations where that happened.

01:09:21

And these guys were miserable. I mean, it wasn't holy enough to sell cars.

01:09:28

Interestingly enough, one of the big donators in the church was a car salesman, but his dad owned the dealership.

01:09:36

It made all the difference in the world whether you could sell cars that way or not. But for this one guy, you couldn't sell cars.

01:09:43

So he had to go work at some restaurant. And man, it didn't take long for him to see that that wasn't a good idea.

01:09:52

But this is just kind of the stuff that happens there that we could go on for days talking about.

01:10:03

Here's what it is. This is just how this church intrudes into the lives of their people under the banner of holiness.

01:10:17

The goal here is to be more holy, is what they'll tell you.

01:10:24

And so I got to ask the question, to what end? Perfection?

01:10:30

Do you eventually, if you get so holy, you get perfect? You know,

01:10:35

I went to a church this morning and the pastor said he was teaching through the

01:10:41

Ten Commandments and he says, I'm not here to tell you what to do. He said,

01:10:47

I am here to present God's Word to you. And if you have to deal with God on the subject on your own, that's between you and the

01:10:55

Holy Spirit. Well, isn't that a doggone crazy concept?

01:11:02

I mean, let the Holy Spirit work in the lives of Christians? No, no.

01:11:08

Let the pastor do it because that's his job is to make everybody more holy. And this is where they're so backwards, but it's even more invasive than that because it's not just really even that, it's about garnering and gaining control over people.

01:11:24

Because if you need that pastor to make you more holy, then I don't even really need

01:11:29

God. All I need is Pastor Mike and he'll manage my family for me. He'll tell me what truck to buy.

01:11:36

He'll do everything for me. And everything, and this is where people need to understand how this is a cult.

01:11:43

Everything that Mike decides, if you are a good member of GFC, everything that Mike decides is for the good of GFC, period, period.

01:11:55

When you look at Philippians and we read, you know, and Paul's writing to the church, don't look out just for your own interests, but look out for...

01:12:03

And I'm paraphrasing, of course, so Anthony, don't chastise me too hard. Don't just look out for everybody else's interest or for your own interest, but look out for everybody else's.

01:12:13

What's happening in that moment? And I've used this in actually conversation about mask dates a lot for those

01:12:21

Christians who are just absolutely losing their minds on this issue on both sides. But in general, when

01:12:29

Mike Reed looks at you and tells you to do something, what he would tell you is that you have to be watching out for everybody else.

01:12:37

And what that passage is actually teaching us is in our love for one another, we should be watching out for one another in such a way that our first and foremost drive is not to have our own way.

01:12:54

When Mike Reed tells you something, it's to have his way because Mike Reed is

01:13:01

GFC, period. He is GFC, end of story. And I saw this play out over and over and over and over again on numerous occasions of doing abortion ministry.

01:13:13

Yeah, and he's got two elders that are on the same page with him, right? So they do it all together.

01:13:18

Because they're sycophants. I'm going to tell you they're sick. I know that's a hard term. People don't like it. But they're sycophants.

01:13:24

And they've been granted those positions because they echo and parrot and agree with everything that he says.

01:13:31

Yeah. And that's why Kevin was never allowed that position, because nothing that Kevin ever did was self -sacrificing enough.

01:13:40

You don't rule over your wife well. You don't rule over your children well. You don't do it. You know, as soon as you get that in order.

01:13:46

Kevin, how many times did you hear that over and over and over again? You need to do this. You need to do this. And you need to do this.

01:13:52

And Jen, I know you're watching.

01:14:01

And you know I love your family. And I am sorry that I was not more forceful with Kevin earlier on when

01:14:07

I saw this stuff. Because I was worried for you guys. But I also didn't want to lose my relationship.

01:14:13

But I was afraid that if I said more, if I pushed harder, I would lose

01:14:20

Kevin. And Kevin, I'm sorry for that thought. Because that is shallow.

01:14:26

No, brother. I think you handled it well. Because here's the reality of it.

01:14:32

You can't see it. You could have pushed really hard. And maybe it would have pushed me away. Maybe it wouldn't.

01:14:38

I don't know. You could have pushed really hard. It wouldn't have made... I don't think it would have made the difference.

01:14:45

It had to make a difference when the Lord was ready to reveal it to us. You know, listen.

01:14:51

But I don't want to hide behind that either. Because I have responsibility in being in there.

01:14:58

Just like Tony has responsibility. I should have left a long time previous to that.

01:15:04

But it's not as easy as that, as you may know or you may not.

01:15:10

I don't want to make excuses for myself. Because I'm fully responsible for keeping my family in this situation for as long as I did.

01:15:21

And it was an abusive situation. And we are suffering the consequences of that.

01:15:28

We're dealing with that. We're continuing to deal with it. But by the grace of God, He is working this out for His ultimate good.

01:15:38

This hasn't been in vain. And so the reason I'm so grateful for an opportunity to speak.

01:15:47

And I'm so grateful for all the work that Anthony has done in particular. But Andrew has as well.

01:15:54

But especially Anthony. Is that now we get a chance to put this out for people to examine.

01:16:01

Listen, we talked earlier about the private video. The GFC response in a private video.

01:16:08

I've done nothing in secret. What does the Bible say about people that do things in secret?

01:16:15

Right? Mike, you're in secret?

01:16:21

Why are you being in secret? Why don't you put this video out there so I get to respond to it?

01:16:29

So that makes for a good transition here. So first and foremost,

01:16:34

Todd, you wanted me to post this for everybody. This is one of your blog posts, right?

01:16:41

So I have it up on the screen right now. I prefer essay. It sounds smarter. What's that?

01:16:47

I prefer essay. It sounds smarter. It's your essay. That's good. Todd's essay.

01:16:52

You can find it in the comment section on the screen here. You can also go to my Facebook page. I posted it on my timeline.

01:16:58

So you can go there and listen to it. Or I'm sorry, read it. Chris wrote this.

01:17:04

Have any of the GFC pastors answered any of the 12 questions that were in the Striving Fraternity article on GFC?

01:17:11

And wouldn't you know it, the first Dropbox or the

01:17:17

Dropbox link that I put as the first comment today has a copy of those 12 questions.

01:17:23

So anybody can go in there to my Dropbox, print this off, and take it with you to G3 and ask those questions.

01:17:33

You did not just. Oh, man. I did just do that.

01:17:39

That's worse than my call out. You could literally print this out. But I am going to do you the favor and read these 12 questions because this is when it comes down to this secret video.

01:17:51

I've heard about that video too, both from you, Kevin, and elsewhere, that there's a video out that Mike Reed has answered all of the challenges that we have put forth.

01:18:02

He has done a great job. He and his elders to answer these questions. They're in the clear.

01:18:07

They're okay. Except that they're not actually sharing it publicly. They're only sharing it with a few select people so that there's no ability to cross examine.

01:18:17

And here's the reality. Mike refused and he has elders refused Mike to come on to the show where they had the questions ahead of time from me.

01:18:26

My rules were clear. You answer the questions or you can pass. I'm okay.

01:18:31

You pass a question. You refuse to answer it. That's fine. But I'm going to ask him all these questions. They didn't like those ground rules.

01:18:38

And so what we did is we took those questions and kind of put them into a neat little package of 12 very simple questions for Mike Reed.

01:18:46

And these are the questions. Number one, do you meet with women alone on a regular basis? Easy. Yes or no question.

01:18:54

Number two, do you ask details about spousal intimacy? Easy question. Yes or no. Number three, have you ever said to not trust the elders is to not trust

01:19:02

God? Again, yes or no question. Have you ever said whatever the elders would counsel you for your life is perfect?

01:19:11

Number five. You've ever said that GFC is the only true church in the Quad Cities. Number six.

01:19:18

I can answer all these for him. Every one of these is. I know you can. Number six. Do you believe that the elders have nearly unlimited authority in the lives of their congregants?

01:19:26

Number seven. Have you said if someone owns a gun is in the military police, they have premeditated murder in their hearts?

01:19:34

Yes, they have. Number eight. Do you share details about counseling sessions with other members? Ouch. Yes, they do.

01:19:42

Number nine. Did you ever imply that men and women should be able to kiss someone on the lips that is not his or her own spouse? Number 10.

01:19:48

Have you ever shared details of your own sexual intimacy with any of the people in your counseling sessions with members of the opposite sex?

01:19:57

Number 11. Do you believe you are infallible against sexual immorality? And number 12. What specific pastors, theologians, and or teachers have condoned the practice of meeting with women alone in counseling sessions?

01:20:11

The answers to the numbers one through 11 are yes.

01:20:18

Of all the people that I've interviewed, including Mike himself, the answers are yes to every one of these questions.

01:20:25

Number 12. He's never provided a single name of somebody who has condoned his counseling sessions.

01:20:32

He tried to use Phil Johnson's name for this until, you know, somebody who knows Phil, like myself, asked him about this.

01:20:41

What Mike does is what social media influencers and others today, and I jokingly talk about them from time to time, is called clout chasing.

01:20:50

He's clout chasing. He he he links himself to other movers and shakers in modern, conservative, reformed,

01:21:02

Calvinistic, man, I'm doing it again. Me and my hands. That's the Italian in me somewhere,

01:21:07

I guess. It's Italian PowerPoint. Yeah. Don't throw me off,

01:21:13

Sylvester. He links himself to these people.

01:21:20

But you mentioned Kevin Bacon earlier, like the seven points of Kevin Bacon or seven degrees of Kevin Bacon.

01:21:26

He links himself to people by showing up their conferences or or or whatever. And then he could say, oh, well,

01:21:32

I was at this event. I was at this conference. He doesn't talk about why he was there, who he talked to or what was going on.

01:21:40

How many of these conferences is he actually spoke at? Hey, Kevin, how many times did

01:21:46

Mike Reed speak at any of the conferences at Grace Community Church, any of the ship cons or anything?

01:21:54

Yeah, of course. None. And that was probably the desire, I'm sure. Was was he ever allowed to ascend the platform at G3?

01:22:03

No. No. Did he speak at Fight, Laugh, Feast? I wouldn't have that.

01:22:10

I'm here, but I sure doubt it. You know, let you know, and I don't say that, you know, just because you don't doesn't mean you're not a good pastor.

01:22:17

No, I know that. There are millions. Listen, listen, he I know why they would go to that conference because, listen,

01:22:27

I'm telling you, they won't be at G3. I'll fall off my chair if they are.

01:22:33

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm telling you they won't because their name has been soiled enough through these videos and these podcasts that, you know, and they know that people like you will be there,

01:22:48

Anthony, that will confront them. So, Kevin, I respect what you're saying, but I don't

01:22:54

I I don't know. I hope you're right to some degree. I also hope you're wrong, but I also believe to some degree because of your.

01:23:05

I don't know that he's I don't know that he's that humbled.

01:23:11

At all, I again, I could be wrong. I could I think he believes he can show up there and snowball his way through it because he's done it with dozens and dozens and dozens of people.

01:23:23

Maybe I'm sorry. As far as I know, Bobby and Tony are still tight. It's the last

01:23:29

I knew. But I wouldn't know because Bobby blocked me or unfriended me.

01:23:34

I can't interact with him. Yeah, that's the last of my knowledge as well. Yeah, so and Bobby is a quintessential.

01:23:44

Street evangelist, he's sharp, he's quick, he knows how to answer retorts.

01:23:50

He's he's able to to rebuke people in in the spirit of the

01:23:56

Lord on the street. But he can't see through this. It's because Mike Reid's got people snowballed.

01:24:02

Or he or he knows if he if he does, Tony's gone. Tony will kick him to the curb.

01:24:08

And he he appreciates the friendship more than that. Listen, you know, I Chris asked a really good question here,

01:24:15

Kevin, that I think that you can ask Chris Calculus man Hudson. We're just going to have to ignore the math part of that.

01:24:25

You math people. That is unchristlike. This if I could have their smiles video on fractals.

01:24:34

Yeah, you lost me at frack. I did not see this question. But this is a really good one.

01:24:40

Chris, the answer to that question is yes. There have been elders in particular.

01:24:46

Yes. Have there been any GFC? Let's read it out loud. Have you there ever? Has there have there ever been any

01:24:51

GFC stories where people left Christianity or secularism because of abuse experience at GFC?

01:24:58

Oh, absolutely. Yes, I I can pull off a couple right off the top of my head.

01:25:06

If I talk to my wife, I bet we would know of of of a few more. Now, listen.

01:25:13

Oh, well, we'll get the argument. Well, they were never Christians to begin with. Just so you know, your wife is asking you not to use names.

01:25:22

No. Oh, yes. No, I was not going to use names because I actually know of of to myself in some of my work in the investigative work.

01:25:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. Yes, they have. And they've renounced the faith and, you know, they've walked away from the faith.

01:25:40

And I have no idea whether they were saved or ever would be saved or whatever. But I'm telling you what, when you go around abusing people, what in the world do you expect?

01:25:51

You know, this is just this is just this is terrible. I want to get back because I don't want to forget this.

01:25:58

This will go out of my thin brain if I don't say it now. I think one of the reasons that they're showing up at a conference like what they did in Tennessee is that, you know, a guy like Jeff Durbin was there.

01:26:13

And as far as I understand, Tony still has probably a decent relationship with him and with James White.

01:26:22

And so now they can go rub elbows with these guys. And maybe, you know, if G3 is off the table, let's slide in over here with these guys.

01:26:31

They don't know us real well yet. This is a, you know, this is a good, you know, the eldership there shares a lot of Doug Wilson stuff.

01:26:41

So, you know, they can kind of slide into that groove and not not dismissing what

01:26:46

Todd said earlier about what Wilson may say to Mike Reed. That that's irrelevant to my point.

01:26:52

The thing is, is they're going to try to find a new place to land, a new group to, you know, slide into with and gain some credibility because, you know, listen,

01:27:06

I don't know Jeff Durbin from the man on the moon. I think I might be Facebook friends with him. He could care less who

01:27:12

I am. But if anybody actually knows this guy and they want to warn him about what's going on there, that might be a good idea.

01:27:23

Yeah, well, and, you know, and there again, I want to I want to reemphasize, you know, in the interest of transparency,

01:27:30

Kevin and I are not in the same place on some a couple of points, doctrinally and theologically, but pretty much lockstep on on all of the, you know, the importance of epic stuff.

01:27:40

Like if you're not a Calvinist, like you're out, like you're done, like we're we just can't even be friends.

01:27:46

And I started to tell you, what was that? And I say that tug in cheek, obviously, but I do go to a reformed

01:27:56

Baptist seminary. So, yes, I'm fully reformed. And and Anthony, you might you'll never talk to either one of us again.

01:28:02

I'm really pushing him towards the Amil thing. So you guys are allowed to be wrong about something.

01:28:09

That's OK. Yeah, I'm a millennial. So all of that aside, look, and I just want to emphasize this again, like as much as we might have some differences on a couple of these things,

01:28:22

I'm telling you that the guys at Fight Laugh Feast and people like Durbin would would like they would pull a

01:28:32

St. Nick on him if they heard this stuff, if they knew this. But see, brother, I think here's the here's the issue is because they don't they don't share his view on this.

01:28:41

Right, right. Well, Tony's the wild card, if you will, in this. And that's the that's the that's the guy.

01:28:48

See, Mike needed somebody like Tony able to get. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, hey, this is my pastor,

01:28:54

Mike Reed. Oh, hey, well, you're going to meet you. Yeah, right. He's Tony's pastor.

01:29:00

He must be. He must be reliable. He ought to be OK, which. Yeah, exactly. And that's and I'm telling you right now,

01:29:07

I saw this and I told Kevin this the minute they start started courting

01:29:12

Tony Miano. I said it's only it is only to give their their their ministry credit.

01:29:22

That's it. That's it. So it was a really, you know, is a really good move on their part,

01:29:29

I suppose, to some degree, although I think it's backfired because they would have never got the attention had

01:29:34

Tony not come over there. They would never got the attention that they're getting now because Tony's name.

01:29:40

Let's just let's just put this in perspective. And I want to emphasize again, read read my essay.

01:29:48

I love Tony, and that's why I'm on here today. I love him.

01:29:55

And it's not that I don't love the people at GFC. I grieve for them. Kevin knows that I want nothing.

01:30:02

Honestly, I want nothing more than for that place to dissolve in every one of those people do it to be absorbed into a sound church and to be healed of the damage that has been done.

01:30:14

And there are many, many, many who have left and moved on and had that happen.

01:30:21

Yeah. But Tony is working a job for the first time.

01:30:38

Well, and this happened, you know, a couple of years ago, Tony has had to go out and get work.

01:30:45

For the first time since I've known him, because of of.

01:30:54

One, the damage to his credibility. And and to.

01:31:02

The way that GFC manages his finances. All the money that comes in to Tony still whoever is still giving to him.

01:31:14

People need to understand this. It's not going to Tony. It goes first to Mike Reed.

01:31:21

And let's just be honest, the elder board is Mike Reed. The other elder, the elders that are there are there to rubber stamp his decisions.

01:31:32

That money goes. And Tony has written about this. He has stated this.

01:31:37

You need to. And he said it. And I'm paraphrasing. If you if you are going to continue to give to my ministry, you need to understand that that money goes first to my elders so that they can oversee how it's being used.

01:31:49

Let that sink in. Yeah, yeah. I can tell a lot more about that.

01:31:56

What's that? Go ahead. I was just going to say I could say a lot more about that. I think it's one of the reasons they will leave me alone to some degree is because, you know,

01:32:08

I've served as a deacon there for four years, knowing them intimately, being in good standing in a lot of conversations.

01:32:16

I know a lot of those details and they don't want those to come out. And I don't have any intentions of sharing those.

01:32:24

But, you know, there's a lot of things that could be said financially about GFC that, you know,

01:32:34

I won't say probably won't say because I want to hold that.

01:32:42

And I'm not trying to use that as a threat or anything of that nature. I'm just simply saying I possess information that they probably wouldn't want me to say publicly.

01:32:51

And and I'm going to to not do that in order to be preserve, you know, just my own integrity in those matters, because I think it's it's only the right thing to do.

01:33:02

But they do know that I know a lot of stuff about the internal workings there.

01:33:10

Yeah, well, you know, so we did podcasts last year and we

01:33:17

I think we shared screenshots, if I'm not mistaken, if not, and anybody wants to see him message me and I'll send you a

01:33:23

Dropbox link for that as well. But we have screenshots of where Tony does state explicitly on his website that any money that comes in for him goes directly to GFC because he's a ministry under GFC.

01:33:37

And so, yeah, if you're donating money to Tony, you are donating to the church first and foremost.

01:33:44

And he is having to and I'm going to be honest with you. And Kevin knows this.

01:33:50

People had encouraged me to go full time street ministry. And Kevin, I talked about this a little bit. Oh, you should be doing this more often.

01:33:56

I'm like, well, first of all, you don't live in Minnesota from about the end of September, October.

01:34:02

No one wants to be on the streets, even a preacher. But that aside, one of the things that I said is

01:34:12

I'm never going to go full time and I'm never going to ask people to support me for that. I might eat those words now that I'm looking for work, but it's the sad thing of this is is that.

01:34:26

Tony hasn't had to work since he started doing this full time. Now his finances are being managed by GFC and Tony's had to take any number of I mean, he's done he's doing a couple of different jobs now, hasn't he,

01:34:40

Kevin? Uber driving. I mean, working at Cal Bolkema's place.

01:34:47

I don't I don't know for sure, but certainly, you know, and I mean, there's a lot of.

01:34:55

I mean. Stuff that's out of balance. People, my point being is the people who are giving that money to Tony.

01:35:05

Have every reasonable expectation to not like chase down Tony and say, you don't have a right to feed your dog.

01:35:14

But when you're giving money to a person for the ministry that you started giving them money, giving money for and he just he chooses instead to funnel that into GFC and say it's under the umbrella and under the auspices of that particular church.

01:35:30

And now he's having to work. Not only does that indicate that he's lost a lot of support, but two, are they meeting the needs of Tony?

01:35:41

And what is GFC doing to stand in the way of that? They've they have effectively put

01:35:48

Tony in a position right now where if he does anything. Anything at all to cross them, to step on their toes, to to to put himself in a position of not being in good standing with with the elders anymore, they can ruin him.

01:36:08

I mean, they in many respects, they have already. Yeah, there again by his own decisions, but they have a lock on him.

01:36:15

Now, if that's not a cult. All of my Christian brothers and sisters out there who may stumble across this, and I don't care if you're you done if you've done street ministry standing next to Tony shoulder to shoulder while he's getting yelled at and screamed at and and arrested.

01:36:30

And I'll have news for you. I showed up at Tony's trial in Iowa. How many of you did that?

01:36:39

I sat there when he was convicted. Where were you? And I brought friends.

01:36:48

Where were you? But you give money and those of you that continue to support him, ask yourselves.

01:36:56

Are you going to be there? When it all comes caving net, crashing down and it's ruined, because at some point this is going to fall apart.

01:37:07

This will fall apart. Every cult falls apart.

01:37:13

At some point at a local level or a wider level, and this is a local cult trying to spread itself internationally.

01:37:22

Where are you going to be for Tony when all of this comes crashing down because you didn't love him enough to call him out of this?

01:37:30

Because your friendship with him was more important to you than the truth.

01:37:37

And that's why Tony doesn't talk to me anymore, because I started to talk about these things before a lot of other people did.

01:37:43

And now he doesn't talk to me anymore. And I'll tell you what, if Tony calls me tomorrow and says,

01:37:50

I need to get out of here, can you come get me? I have time on my hands, so it's easier for me, but I'll go and I will put

01:37:59

Tony and his wife up in my house. And there's a lot of people that feel the same way. I mean,

01:38:05

I know I've talked to them, a number of them, a lot of them. And I mean, we know that.

01:38:12

We know that when he comes to his senses, there's a lot of people ready to give a hand.

01:38:19

Absolutely. And I'm not discrediting them, but I'm talking about the people who have stood doggedly beside Tony and through all of this and said, no, no, no, no, it's not what you think.

01:38:28

Yeah. When this falls apart and it's going to, I'm telling you, there's something else going on under there somewhere.

01:38:35

We're going to find it. At some point, all of the all of the stuff is is geared towards Mike Reed.

01:38:43

He's he's grooming people for a reason. I don't know what it might be, but when all of this falls apart, who's going to be there to pick up Tony?

01:38:52

Because all of his other relationships have been shattered, shattered, and they did that intentionally.

01:38:57

It's the number one. It's the number one active tactic of a cult. Separate your members from everyone who cares about them and loves them, period.

01:39:09

Yeah. And so here's a comment by Humble Clay. I know a lot of people love Tony, but where's Tony's discernment?

01:39:14

Right. And Tony, who is considered to be very good in discernment over all these years, his discernment is obviously gone, missing, lacking, whatever in California and called out the

01:39:25

Bethel Church in their in their church during the service. Yep.

01:39:33

It's amazing to think about that stuff. So, OK, as we're as we're kind of going through these these things and sharing a lot of stories about this stuff,

01:39:44

I want to ask you guys these questions for Mike Reed. Right. And to give your answers on these and maybe a touch of background doesn't need to be a whole lot, because the goal of this is that these these are legitimate questions asked.

01:39:59

These are questions that I was going to go much more detail on with with Mike. And we've kind of whittled it down to these 12 simple questions.

01:40:07

And we've I've even given Mike the ability to answer these questions, say that this was his position and he's changed his position.

01:40:15

Right. So like giving him every out possible in terms of of what he actually believes today, because all we've ever gotten is, well,

01:40:24

I don't I don't really believe that or I haven't really said that or they try to nuance everything. Yeah.

01:40:30

They never actually then tell you what they believe. But yet we have tons of video recordings and phone recordings that seem to be exactly what

01:40:39

Mike believes. So, OK, having said all that stuff, do you meet with women alone on a regular basis?

01:40:46

Kevin, you were there. You were a deacon for several years there. You were under his ministry for,

01:40:52

I think, nine years, if my memory serves me correctly. You know, over one hundred and I think twenty people or so that left the church during the time you were there and for the few years after you had left there.

01:41:04

Does Mike meet with women alone on a regular basis? Yes, he does. What percentage of the church would you say this is large percentage?

01:41:15

Yeah, large percentage. You know, I think he'll probably he'll probably try to skirt this question by saying, oh, there are some people we don't have to meet with at all or we never meet with.

01:41:25

We meet them with them based upon whether we believe they need it or whether maybe their husbands come to us and say they're having some kind of an issue or a problem.

01:41:36

Well, then then we'll meet with them. Well, you know, I mean, that's that's nuancing.

01:41:43

That's, you know, that's trying to skirt the question. The bottom line is they have and or they will at some point in time meet with every single woman in the church.

01:41:56

And and then they will they will also gauge probably the importance of that relationship within the church.

01:42:05

What does this mean to the overall budget? What does this mean to our credibility?

01:42:11

You know, it might be different for Maria Miano, because if we get too pushy in that regard, that could push

01:42:21

Tony out the door over the edge. So we got to really handle this one sensitively. Same with other prestigious members of the church.

01:42:29

And there might be some poor single woman over here that maybe, oh, maybe she's not so attractive or maybe she's this.

01:42:41

Older or whatever, we don't need to bother with meeting with her because there's really no benefit in it in that regard.

01:42:49

So there's a ton of nuances to all of this thing. Yeah, I get it.

01:42:56

OK, so question number two, then, is does Mike ask details about spousal intimacy?

01:43:02

I mean, the claims are that and I heard these firsthand from from females over the phone that he asks.

01:43:11

Women, they're there, how often they are having sex with their husbands, what positions they're they're having with their husbands, they if the women don't and every one of the women

01:43:24

I talked to said that they were embarrassed at first when they were asked this question, so they didn't want to answer him at all.

01:43:29

And the way that he gets them to answer this question is by sharing his own sexual details with his wife, his own positions with his wife in order to coax the female he's meeting privately with to share those details.

01:43:45

So that's that's the background for this question. But I'm going to ask you the generic one first. Does Mike ask details about spousal intimacy?

01:43:53

Yes. Yeah, the straight up answer is yes. And he would have to answer it. Yes, too, because he knows he does.

01:44:00

So I said of my wife, of me, of of other people that I know of, of people that have given testimony of that on this show, people that have written about my blog in the testimonies blog that I that I put together with with people asking about things like, you know, pretty disgusting things.

01:44:21

Yep. And by the way, the Dropbox link that I've posted at the top of the the comments list, that Dropbox link has your blogs on there,

01:44:33

Kevin. I don't have yours, Todd's, but yours, your latest one is at least up there now. But because I did this a year ago, over a year ago.

01:44:40

So, Kevin, those links are there. Anybody who wants to go see those articles and see what you had handwritten before we ever did a single show before I even knew who you were.

01:44:49

Yeah. Those are some of the blogs you've done and posted and all that info is in there now.

01:44:54

And by the way, I want I've kind of danced around this, said it, whatever. I've talked about Mike being secretive in his responses to me.

01:45:02

I'm not. I haven't been secretive about anything. If anybody wants to ask me direct questions about anything,

01:45:11

I will answer you. I will talk to you on the phone. I will meet you over a video chat.

01:45:16

I will sit with you in person. I will give you every bit of information. I will give you my original departure letter.

01:45:23

I will give you their response, my response, their responses, our responses, our blog posts, our email exchanges.

01:45:31

I will show you anything. And anybody here is welcome to investigate this stuff because probably the one thing that Mike really hates about me is my meticulousness.

01:45:45

I have been meticulous in keeping notes, keeping record of when text messages, what they said, and I've used it in my letters back to them to show him how he has distorted the truth.

01:45:57

And I'm sure that he doesn't appreciate that. And that's quite honestly, that's why he likes to be in front of you talking to you rather than doing it through email or letters or things of this nature.

01:46:09

And I just determined a long ago that I was going to keep everything in a written format so I had record of it.

01:46:17

And it's served me well. Yeah. I mean, you've showed me some of those things last year and it was just jaw dropping for me.

01:46:25

Some of the stuff you were telling me and then I got to see it right out of his community email.

01:46:30

His own words. I've not doctored anything. Everything is original and I've kept it and I've been meticulous about it because I wanted to be able to protect myself, to protect my family, but I also wanted the truth to be known.

01:46:45

I wasn't going to get cornered into a room with three guys coming after me and manipulating me and badgering me and bullying my wife or me.

01:46:57

I wasn't going to let that happen anymore. I learned my lessons along the way. Yep.

01:47:02

That's right. Todd, in regards to this question, when did you and Tony lose contact?

01:47:11

Did you know firsthand when Tony's wife, because it was that first weekend that he visited

01:47:18

Mike Reed's church, from my understanding, that he made that decision in secret to move and he didn't tell his board, starting with Chuck O 'Neill, didn't talk to Phil Johnson and Mike Riccardi, who were his pastors, told nobody until the decision was made to make that move.

01:47:36

It actually reminded me a lot of LeBron James when he left the Cleveland Cavs for the first time. Yeah. You lost me at basketball.

01:47:44

I ignore you. Those of you in Cleveland, that's still a heartache when that happens.

01:47:50

We were doing so good. You kept bringing up math and now you start talking about professional sports and it's over.

01:47:57

Sorry. Clevelanders understand that. I'm taking my talents to Miami or South Beach.

01:48:06

You knew Tony, you were still talking to him at that time, right? As the story goes,

01:48:11

Maria sat down in a meeting. I don't know if this was private or not, but you probably have a little more insight into that.

01:48:21

Me? Actually, all of this, I think Kevin probably wasn't caught off guard because he was privy to a lot of the inner workings and he had actually indicated that negotiations, if you will, since you wanted to use the basketball analogy, negotiations were in play to bring

01:48:43

Tony to the Midwest. And one of the family, I immediately said, why?

01:48:49

He's got such a good thing going out in California. I mean, and the answer and Kevin, I don't know if you remember this was, well, it's centralized.

01:48:58

Do you remember that? Did I say that? Well, it was one of the reasons that was given whether or not you said it or not.

01:49:05

It's, but I know it was one of the, one of the reasons that was given. And I'm like, it'd be one thing if we were still getting around by Studebaker or a horse and buggy, but like a pre -couf virus from 2020 days.

01:49:23

Um, but there was absolutely no reason for him to be worried about being centralized.

01:49:32

Well, that was the big pitch. And so a lot of this stuff started to come out and we start hearing, you know, well, and then there's quite to, to paraphrase, there's questions about Maria's salvation.

01:49:44

And I was like, this is just, it was odd to me. It was odd to me.

01:49:50

But a lot of the things that GFC were odd to me. Yeah, well, I haven't told me about meet people wanting, you know, about him,

01:49:58

Mike wanting to meet with people, people's wives, men's wives alone. And I was like,

01:50:04

I sure hope you're not allowing that to happen with your wife and daughter. And I'm sure Kevin and I talked about that a lot.

01:50:11

I'm just like, that's like not a fat chance, bro. Not with my daughter and wife.

01:50:18

Well, you know, and so all of those things were just as it, as it relates to Tony coming to Iowa.

01:50:25

I mean, I think that, I don't know when the plan was hatched. I remember all of a sudden, you know,

01:50:32

Nick Roland was really high on this guy, Tony Miano. And I had seen a video or two of Tony's and it had encouraged me.

01:50:40

It maybe even encouraged me to, to, you know, sort of be wanting to street preach or whatever.

01:50:46

But, you know, the, the, the plan was probably launched in elder meetings and it was before we went to the shepherds conference in 2015, where we met

01:50:56

Tony and we arrived on a Friday night and Tony was having, I think it was a Friday night. Tony was having no, it was a

01:51:03

Tuesday night. It must've been Tuesday because it's always a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Right, right. Okay. Yeah. So we went down to wherever that North Hollywood bus station is where Tony used to do ministry all the time.

01:51:16

And I remember, yeah, North Metro, you know, walking up and it was like, wow, this is so cool.

01:51:23

You know, people were preaching and it was just like, it was pretty, it was pretty interesting. And I got to meet a few people that I had seen their names on Facebook.

01:51:32

And so, you know, we went, we went to eat with Tony after that event.

01:51:37

And I'm like, wow, this is pretty special. You know, I mean, we get to go out with this guy to eat and man,

01:51:43

I mean, the conversation it wasn't like come to Iowa, but there, it was like, it was, they're really kind of probing the whole situation.

01:51:51

So that was really like a, that was a recruiting trip is what it was, you know?

01:51:57

And I didn't know it at the time. I mean, I was kept in the dark on that kind of stuff, but it wasn't long after that, that, you know, the wheels were in motion.

01:52:07

Yeah, like they, like what they did is, and I, and there again,

01:52:15

Tony, Tony thrives. He would deny this, but Tony thrives on the recognition.

01:52:22

He thrives on the, on the familiarity of, of people. And it's a very small community.

01:52:28

We all, we all know all you need to do is go out and, and stand somewhere in your local community and preach the gospel in the open air.

01:52:36

And you realize just how small the neighborhood really is. But, but there's an, there's a recognition to it.

01:52:47

And Tony is that guy. Many of us, you know, cut our, our, our teeth when it comes to public evangelism and open air preaching, cut our teeth on listening to Tony, the law law man.

01:53:00

And I mentioned this earlier on things like way of the master radio, and then eventually, you know, wretched radio and they, when they would still have

01:53:08

Tony on and, and, and rightly so, because a lot of what he did was, was phenomenal, but they went in there and they stroked his ego and they, and they brought him, well, we can do this.

01:53:20

We can do this. We can do this. We can do this. And we can do this. And they convinced Tony to come not.

01:53:27

They can get people get mad at me. They don't love Tony. They want Tony's clout.

01:53:33

And we've said this before. They want, and it keeps coming back to that. They want his clout because as long as he's there, people who, who are familiar with the old

01:53:42

Tony will always go, man, that must be a solid church. That's, that's what it comes down to.

01:53:50

It must be a solid church. And how do you dispute it?

01:53:55

Because people aren't paying attention. They're just not paying attention because it's Tony Miano. Right.

01:54:01

They don't care about it. I've had those discussions on Facebook with people that are like,

01:54:07

I know Tony, I know he's solid. I say, I'm sure you do know Tony. And I'm sure he is solid or was solid at the point in time when you knew him, but here's what's going on.

01:54:19

And it sometimes takes a lot of convincing for these people. But, you know, at the end of the day, if more than one person chimes in,

01:54:28

I mean, people begin to realize that there's some kind of an issue there, whether they're willing to really investigate it or not, because, you know, who, you know, we're busy.

01:54:37

We don't want to look at every single thing that comes along. But I think that's why we keep putting these things out is because we keep drawing attention to it.

01:54:46

And people keep hearing about it. They keep going. Maybe I better find out a little bit more about this.

01:54:52

And I'm guessing that's happened with you, Anthony, on these things. I guess

01:54:59

I'm not sure. What do you mean by that? Well, I'm guessing that people have come back to you and said, Hey, give me more information on all of this stuff.

01:55:06

Well, that they have, or usually what I get is people are just shocked and they want to verify with me.

01:55:11

Have you actually talked to these people? Yes. Yes, I have. Yes. I've talked to many eyewitnesses who were actually affected personally by Mike Reed and his ministry.

01:55:21

So that's what I typically get asked is that kind of stuff. So a couple of comments we're going to bring up.

01:55:29

Humble Clay first. This is funny. This could be perplexing. We have the potential to be on Anthony time whilst actually on Anthony time.

01:55:36

For those of you who don't know this, typically Andrew likes to cut off shows at the two -hour mark.

01:55:42

When we go beyond two hours, we call it Anthony time because typically when I run shows, we go beyond two hours.

01:55:48

So yes, I think we're going to be on Anthony time tonight. Double Anthony time, I guess you can call it.

01:55:55

A couple other comments here. Bridget Lorraine, Kevin, I remember when you first told me that Tony was moving out there and you were ecstatic about it.

01:56:02

I could be wrong, but I thought that he was moving out there to be close to you. Oh, yeah. Bridget is a good friend, by the way.

01:56:09

And we met through Facebook. She's a troublemaker. You heard that,

01:56:15

Bridget? You're a troublemaker. We met through Facebook. We've met in person numerous times.

01:56:23

I've been to her church in the Seattle area. So Bridget is a good friend. Yes, you're right, but it wasn't because of me.

01:56:31

He wasn't coming there to be close to me. I mean, I'm just nobody. He just happened to be a guy that I met.

01:56:39

Now, I did quickly become friends with Tony. I mean, I like Tony.

01:56:45

I think Tony liked me, at least until we left. And we would sit and have coffee and we'd have good conversations.

01:56:55

And I always enjoyed my time with Tony. I went to do some evangelism with him up in Galena, Illinois.

01:57:01

We had a wonderful time when some guy tried to run Tony down with a truck. It was really, really entertaining to some degree.

01:57:07

Yeah, it was great. That was fun. Who says that? It wasn't.

01:57:15

I'm just... We got hauled into the police station.

01:57:23

I can't wait for somebody to try and run me over again. What more fun could somebody ask for?

01:57:29

Wow. But Tony, you know, Bridget, to answer your question, no, Tony was not moving there because of me.

01:57:36

He may have even said in some things, well, you know, Kevin, you're one of the reasons

01:57:42

I was coming there. There's no reason for him to come there because of me. I'm just, you know,

01:57:48

I'm not anything or anybody special. There's no reason for them to come for me.

01:57:53

He came because Mike Reed convinced him. And from my understanding, I mean, in some of the work

01:57:58

I was trying to do in this is, I remember early on, Kevin, asking you these questions about how that first visit occurred for Mike Reed and gang.

01:58:08

Because you were one of them that was out there, right? Going out to Shepard's conference during the recruiting mission.

01:58:14

And you didn't seem to really know it was a recruiting mission at the time. And yet, so I've talked to you about this.

01:58:19

I talked to K1 about this, Kevin McDonald. And what it seems to me is that you and Kevin McDonald were both used by Mike Reed and gang.

01:58:32

Oh, for sure. So you were there, but they used you to make a connection with Kevin McDonald somehow.

01:58:40

And I remember how that happened. They sure did. And Kevin McDonald was friends with Tony, and that's how they did it.

01:58:46

And so you were there kind of blindsided. You were part of it, but weren't really part of it. Right.

01:58:51

Man, I was used and stupid. I mean, that's what it comes down to. And Kevin recognized it afterwards.

01:58:58

And he was probably mad without at least, you know, he didn't come to me and say, hey, you idiot, look at what happened here.

01:59:06

Which he probably should have. Kevin's not above that by any means. Yeah, I'll call you right now.

01:59:12

Kevin will call you an idiot when you need to hear it. That's right. And we love that about him.

01:59:17

In case he's watching. But you're right. I said, hey, how do I get ahold of this guy?

01:59:23

I mean, I tried sending him messages. I sent him Facebook requests. This guy just like completely ignored me.

01:59:30

And then finally, I'm like, and Kevin's like, oh, this guy's in a Bible study with me. I'm like, can you ask him to accept my friend request so I can send him a message?

01:59:38

I said, we wanted to try to talk to him. I really thought the church was just going to, you know, support him in a financial way.

01:59:47

And that's kind of how they started off, I'm sure. And then it became, ultimately, it was to recruit him.

01:59:57

And yes, I was used. I didn't know what was actually going on. And Kevin got used.

02:00:02

And so really, you know, it was all really disingenuous. And if you go back and you hear

02:00:08

Mike Reed's, you know, he's got three or four ways, the only legitimate ways you can leave a church, death, excommunication, sending, and maybe a mutual consent.

02:00:22

Those are the four only legitimate ways you can leave a church. And there is no such thing as mutual consent with GFC.

02:00:28

You need to understand this. It's there because it's a reality for some people.

02:00:35

Like you literally are, you know, you don't have a choice. Like your parent dies or something. And Tony never left under any of those auspices by any means.

02:00:44

He just said, I'm leaving even against the counsel of his elders. Yeah. Grace Life Pulpit was dead set against it.

02:00:51

And there has been, and I'm just going to, you know, be honest. There has been a little discussion back and forth. I know this between some of the people at Grace Life Pulpit and you,

02:00:59

Kevin, about some of the situation with GFC, but not one of those two elders, especially ever, ever condoned him leaving, counseled him against it.

02:01:11

Yeah. And yeah. But the problem is, is by the time anybody found out Tony's move was already made, he hadn't physically moved yet, but the decision was done.

02:01:22

What's that? Yeah. The plan was in place. The plan was already committed. Yeah. He was, he was committed.

02:01:28

He was moving to the point that by the time he said something to him, he told Chuck, nobody can change my mind.

02:01:34

It's it. So, yeah. Okay. So another comment, and we're going to bring a guest in here in just a moment.

02:01:41

Nora Dunnigan said, will Mike meet or talk with you? Well, for me, no. Initially he was, he was meeting with me only to try to convince me to not do the shows.

02:01:51

After we went through with the first and second shows, he has not chosen to talk to me since.

02:01:58

Kevin, so for you, he, he's offered to meet with you, right? But it's not, it's not on mutual terms.

02:02:06

It's, you must fly from where you live now, go fly across the country and meet there by yourself or with your wife in front of the elders and their church, trying to do the exact same thing to you that they did all these years, which is.

02:02:21

Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah. And I mean, you know, they've gone so far as to offer the elders of our church to be involved.

02:02:30

Well, you know what? These, these men have looked at the situation and they're just like, we're not wasting our time with that.

02:02:38

We can see what you've done. We can see what they are. There's enough information out there that you don't have to dig too hard to figure out who these guys are, whether you talk to them or not.

02:02:49

Now, you know, so I, you know, they're not going to waste their time with that. And, you know, so Mike will try to use that as an, as an opportunity to say, well, see they're, they're unwilling, you know, they're, they're unwilling.

02:03:04

So what I did is in a, in a letter back to them, I talked, they've, they've made the case or tried to make the case that because this is a local church issue, it needs to be adjudicated within the local church, meaning at Grace Fellowship Church amongst the elders that know the situation amongst the people at GFC that know and love us.

02:03:33

And that's where it all needs to be handled. Well, I've pointed out to them, that's, that's not what the, their confession says, that under, you know, under cases of extreme problems like this, it's, you're supposed to call in other church bodies, like -minded churches, and they're not to adjudicate the matter.

02:03:57

They're only to listen to the matter. And then they're to offer counsel as to how to do it.

02:04:02

And I mean, listen, under the right circumstances, I'd be willing to do that. But you see that has been done before.

02:04:10

That has been done. Sycamore Baptist Church is a reformed 1689 church that is literally 10 miles from GFC, maybe a little further, right across the river.

02:04:22

And the elders spent many meetings, countless meetings, countless hours when the first wave of people left

02:04:30

GFC and ended up at Sycamore Baptist. They said, we got to find out what's going on here. Why are we getting all these people from this church?

02:04:37

And they tried to meet with them and go through this process that the confession calls for.

02:04:44

It didn't work. It didn't work because like you experienced in those meetings, it's bullying, intimidation, it's talking over, it's nonstop talking.

02:04:55

I mean, they're, they're like the filibuster elders, right? They will just talk you to death and you'll never.

02:05:02

So, you know, I, I wrote that in a letter to them. I said, it'll never work. It won't work.

02:05:08

You're, you're fooling yourselves. You're not even following your own confession. So let's stop playing games.

02:05:15

So Nora, wonderful question, but there's so much context behind that.

02:05:20

You would just have to understand these guys to know how futile that would be.

02:05:26

And, and what people need to understand too, is that, and we talked about this, you know, well on, on Andrew time, we're now on Anthony time.

02:05:35

So back when we were still on Andrew time, we talked about this, no church.

02:05:40

And this is part of the question that the 12 questions, no church is good enough. There is no true church in Davenport besides GFC.

02:05:50

And, and, and this comes from a guy who won't, won't just suggest people go to the, whatever church

02:05:56

I, when I go out and do street evangelism or open air preaching, I'm very selective about where people, where I would send people because I want them to be in a doctrinally sound, theologically solid place.

02:06:10

But the problem is, is that GFC, no one matches their doctrine and their theology. None of it is good enough.

02:06:16

So Sycamore was never going to be good enough. No matter how many conversations they had with Sycamore, it was never going to be good enough.

02:06:23

And quite frankly, I'll tell you right now that if, if Grace Community Church of Sun Valley, California, were to intervene and say, you know what, it's finally, it's time for us to step in and have these conversations.

02:06:37

They would find some place, they would find somewhere, somehow, something that, that John MacArthur said, that Phil Johnson has taught, that Mike Riccardi has taught.

02:06:48

They would find something, something to discredit them. And they would beat that into the heads of any of their listeners, any of their people that, oh, see, well, you know, yeah, we've been to the

02:07:01

Shepherds Conference, but well, we're probably never going to do that again because we found this and we just can't advocate for that.

02:07:07

No matter what the intervention will be, there will always be a reason why it's not the right church.

02:07:15

You only need one talking point. And listen, there's a way for them to get around this, by the way. Okay. This is important to understand because what they will say, oh, look at that guy.

02:07:27

There's a way around this for them. Okay. Because what they did on the, in the early days is they would say, well, you know, yes, we think we're a true church, but there are other good churches in the

02:07:39

Quad Cities. There is, what was the James MacDonald organization called before James MacDonald imploded?

02:07:48

There was one of those churches. Harvest. Harvest. There you go. Harvest Bible Chapel was in Davenport.

02:07:55

They're no longer called that. They're now called Quorum Day or something like that. They would say, you know, we believe, you know, the pastor there is a good pastor, that Harvest is a good church, you know.

02:08:09

But then he'll say, well, man, we started recommending that as a church and people started going there. Well, then we started losing people.

02:08:15

Well, you know, Sycamore is a sound, like -minded church. Well, all of a sudden people started going there.

02:08:22

So they will say, they'll find a way to say, oh, there's good churches here.

02:08:29

We're not the only true church. But in reality, the way they teach and the way they act and the way they think is they're really the only one that's true.

02:08:38

I do have a point of order. I'd like to ask a question right now. Are you asking

02:08:44

Kevin a question? I'm asking in general. I know Kevin will love it. Well, before you do that, let's welcome our guest on.

02:08:51

Our guest is our very own Andrew Rappaport. So welcome to your own show,

02:08:57

Andrew. Well, let's get to the important things. I know that I missed all the Andrew time, but I think we have to start with happy birthday, old man.

02:09:06

Oh, that's right. How old are you, sir? An old 44.

02:09:14

Shut up. Christ like love. Shut up. He's a child.

02:09:19

He's a kid. I know. I know. You know, and I was going to say it. He looks a lot older than me.

02:09:25

So, I mean, now the point of order that I have is since we brought up Andrew time and Anthony time, are we back on Andrew time now?

02:09:33

So we have another two hours. Yeah, sure. Yes, it resets now. So essentially, essentially, what that means is this doesn't go over to Odyssey, which is our backup to YouTube.

02:09:43

So when they cancel us, like Twitter did, we have to actually manually move all these over.

02:09:50

Or we'll just do another show. Let me, and Grant, I'm coming in late. I have the time.

02:09:56

You know, let me say, let me jump on with some that, you know, Kevin said, because there is a pattern that you see with folks.

02:10:04

And to the question I was asked, you know, to Anthony, has Mike been really been willing to meet?

02:10:10

You know, Mike was willing to meet with me under the condition that we could talk about how sinful Anthony is.

02:10:17

That was the terms. And we dealt with that on, I guess, the third or fourth show we did where I went through his email and I walked through the email so people can see the behavior and the patterns of a person like this.

02:10:32

And that was when he was done. He doesn't want anything to do. Why? Because he realizes, yeah, the gloves are off.

02:10:41

I'm not fooled. I'm not deceived. I'm not going to fall for it. I'm not going to sit here and placate him and be like, oh, well, let's talk about what

02:10:49

Anthony can improve, what Anthony needs. No, Anthony did nothing wrong. And I'm not going to allow you to slander him, period.

02:10:58

And I made that very clear. And therefore, he's done. The behavior you see is someone who wants to talk where he can control the conversation.

02:11:10

So the reason he's not going to meet, you know, look, Anthony can tell you

02:11:15

I'm willing to meet with anybody who has an issue with me. No problem. Okay.

02:11:21

You know, I will go to extremes to try to reconcile with people. This is the pattern.

02:11:27

When we look at your GFC, look at the scriptures. Here's the thing to notice.

02:11:34

What is the scriptures very clear about Christian behavior? We should be those who are forgiven.

02:11:41

We should be forgiving. We should be seeking to reconcile. Okay. Do you see that from them?

02:11:51

No. What you see on their behalf is justification, not reconciliation.

02:11:59

And there's a big difference between those two. And I don't mean justification in soteriology, a salvation sense.

02:12:04

It's that they want to be justified. Okay, so KT's asking a question.

02:12:11

Andrew, did the Timothy Project that Tony did be what GFC used to help pull

02:12:18

Tony toward their church? I can't answer that because I'm not sure. I mean, the Timothy Project, for people that don't know, when

02:12:25

Tony left Living Waters, he was trying to figure out his goals for things and where he wanted to go, what he wanted to do.

02:12:37

And one of the things he wanted to do ministry wise was what he called the Timothy Project, which I thought was a good thing.

02:12:43

Encouraging young men, as an older man, this is what Titus would say, older men to younger men, discipling them, training them, discipling them so that they could not make mistakes that we'd made when we're young in the faith and whatnot.

02:12:59

I thought it sounded like a good model. I don't know how that, Kevin, maybe you could respond how that played out.

02:13:08

Yeah, I can respond to that. KT, I mean, I know we kind of know each other from Gab now that I'm putting all this together with you.

02:13:18

You're accurate. The Timothy Project was used. Donnie Johnson was one of the

02:13:26

Timothy Project projects, I guess. And now

02:13:32

Donnie is married to one of Tony's daughters, Michelle. I think that very early on, that was a carrot, if you will, that, hey, we've got a young man in the church that could be a husband to Michelle.

02:13:50

And so I think I hadn't thought about that. But yes, that's very good, putting those things together.

02:14:00

That's been a long time ago, and I've forgotten all about it. But yeah, that's a very good thought.

02:14:06

I think you could be right there. And so there are people who say that Mike arranged the marriage between Donnie and Tony's daughter for one of many reasons, but one of them being to keep

02:14:23

Tony there. So even if Tony's eyes wake up to this issue one day, that he and his wife aren't going to be able to just leave the church because his daughter's stuck now.

02:14:33

Yeah, and that's a question that someone asked earlier. I jumped in just so I could see all the comments. But there was a question earlier of Tony leaving.

02:14:43

And I think these are the things that people do to make it hard for someone to leave. Because for Tony to leave, he might have to leave family behind.

02:14:51

He knows the behavior, what happens if someone leaves. So if he and his wife leave, he may lose relations with his daughter.

02:15:00

Anyone who knows Tony knows that he is a family man. His family is extremely important to him.

02:15:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And so that would be, I think for Tony, probably the hardest thing in life to do.

02:15:17

And I personally, especially with Michelle, he's very close with her. I think he would be willing to walk through fire for her.

02:15:27

And so to possibly walk away from her, I find that almost impossible for Tony to be able to do.

02:15:37

Well, I think Tony would have to have a conversation with Donnie at some point if his head cleared up and say,

02:15:43

Donnie, I've come to this realization. I've been wrong coming here. There's a lot of big issues. Donnie's a wonderful guy.

02:15:51

I've had him in my home so many times. That kid can eat like crazy. We've fed him so much food that we love

02:16:00

Donnie. But Donnie is a follower in the sense that if Mike tells him something, he will just, like Todd talked about earlier, he will just simply parrot that.

02:16:14

He was preaching the gospel to me so many times in my house that he would be parroting what

02:16:21

Mike said that day in the sermon. And I would have to say, Donnie, I'm a Christian. You don't need to preach the gospel to me anymore.

02:16:29

Okay. And so Donnie is a lovely guy, a great guy.

02:16:34

I really miss him. But I think if Tony would convince

02:16:40

Donnie that this is not where we should be anymore. And I think Donnie would go along with that.

02:16:47

I mean, I really think that's a possibility. But we have you guys. You have to understand they're never going to allow that to happen.

02:16:56

They're never going to allow that to happen. I'm not going to speculate as to whether or not it was an arranged marriage.

02:17:04

I'm not going to speculate as to whether or not it was all pre established.

02:17:10

But the fact of the matter is, is we are where we are right now. They are married. Mm hmm.

02:17:16

And Tony has a powerful personality when he's one on one with people.

02:17:21

And he also has a powerful personality when he's on the streets. Preaching.

02:17:27

However, he has been kowtowed to Mike Reed. Mike Reed runs roughshod over him, just like he runs roughshod, almost roughshod over almost everyone else.

02:17:39

Almost immediately. And Donnie is one of them. But he's also like I said, he snowballed

02:17:45

Tony. I mean, you got the man to question his own wife's salvation just for merely wondering whether or not it was a good idea to move.

02:17:54

Yeah. And they are never going to let Tony and Donnie be in a situation where it's going to develop into a conversation about, well, what would happen if we decided to move?

02:18:09

Or what would happen if we decide? Because the first the first sign of wavering on Tony's part,

02:18:17

Donnie will run right back to the elders of GFC and tell them every little detail.

02:18:24

And the reason I say that and Kevin will back me up on this. The reason I say that is because they have been taught to snitch on one another.

02:18:31

They will tell you they're watching out for each other, that they're they're merely guarding you against the sin in your life and helping you.

02:18:39

But what it is, is it's a constant refrain of spying on you so that they have power over you, so that they have a reason to tell on you so that the elders can come in and be involved.

02:18:50

And that's exactly what will happen if Tony wavers in the least bit. Donnie will go straight to the elders.

02:18:58

That's the behavior. And it all gets shut down. They have his money in their hands. Remember that.

02:19:04

This is the behavior of a cult. That's the whole thing. This is what you end up seeing. It's that what really defines a cult is the control over people.

02:19:14

Okay. And that's the essential thing. I mean, look, there's going to be, you know, and I know you guys probably started out because the purpose of the show is, you know, like a warning with going to G3.

02:19:28

There's going to be people that will see them if they go to G3. We'll see them there. We'll see the behavior. You know, we'll try to talk to them.

02:19:35

And you're going to get some of the same behavior that, you know, we have seen. It'll be, oh, well, just you need to come out and speak with us.

02:19:44

Right. You need to talk with us. You need only our side of the story. Now, anytime that you have someone that they want you to only hear their side of the story and not listen to anyone else's side of the story.

02:19:55

I mean, just look at the major news right now. Big tech, Democrats. That's where you get it from.

02:20:01

It's because they need to control the narrative. Narrative matters to people that want control.

02:20:07

You know, Second Corinthians, let me just pull this up. Second Corinthians 3 .16.

02:20:13

This is something that they can't handle. Okay. Sorry, Second Corinthians 13 .8.

02:20:19

For we can do nothing against the truth, but only for the truth.

02:20:26

In other words, if you have the truth, you can stand up against anything.

02:20:31

You can't twist it. You can't turn it. It's the truth. When you don't have the truth, then you need to control the narrative.

02:20:40

You need to control the situation. So it needs to be just you with a team of elders so that you feel intimidated.

02:20:47

That's one of the private doing private videos, Andrew. You know, so only select people can see them.

02:20:53

Correct. They're going to respond to us. And I guess you guys may have already talked about that. They've done a response video to what all the work that Anthony's done, but we're not allowed to see it.

02:21:03

They've only let people see that video with the explicit instructions not to share.

02:21:10

Right. So are they really responding to us? Are they really? Are they? And here's the question you have to ask.

02:21:16

Are they truly seeking reconciliation? Okay. You know, since these shows have gone on and I forgot,

02:21:24

I wanted to check the date. I don't know if you did, Anthony. And when we've, how long this has been since.

02:21:30

I think last year in May was the first one that was done. Okay. So we're going quite some time on this.

02:21:40

Right. And what's been the response? We've made it clear.

02:21:46

There's, you know, 12, 13 questions to be answered. We haven't gotten answers to them, at least not us.

02:21:53

Supposedly they've answered it on videos for others. Yeah. Crickets is the answer.

02:22:00

I'm like, like, where's Anthony? Anthony's learning how to use his roadcaster. It's just, he has to go off camera to do it.

02:22:07

That was cool. But, but I want you to see, you know, here's, here's been the thing. I have received emails with people that have shared with me when they've emailed

02:22:18

Tony about these things, people have said, why don't you, why don't you talk to Andrew?

02:22:25

What is, what's the answer? It's a shutdown of, well, no, he's just slandering, you know, me or the church and just shut it down.

02:22:33

Well, is that how you handle reconciliation? I've actually had people who called

02:22:39

Tony and recorded it. And I've heard, I've heard him in his own voice saying that he refuses to talk to me because all the damage

02:22:49

I've done. Well, you know, if I've done damage, don't you think we should talk?

02:22:56

Right. That's how reconciliation is done. When you need to control the narrative, then yeah, you don't talk, you do.

02:23:04

It's, it's only one side of the story that should be listened to. And, and so, no, I don't think, I think that, you know, what you guys said earlier, they won't, they're not going to look to respond.

02:23:14

I mean, their behavior, their pattern has been to just say, nope, we're not going to have dialogue with them ignored and maybe it'll go away.

02:23:23

Yeah. That's the, that's the response. If we can't beat you up, if we know we can't win the fight, we're going to ignore the fight.

02:23:31

Yeah. And they ignored me very quickly. I mean, Mike did very quickly. I mean, I think there were only two or three email exchanges because he realized

02:23:39

I responded right back with first defining what slander is. He's claiming Anthony slandered him.

02:23:45

Okay. Let's define slander. Sorry. What Anthony did doesn't fit under the definition of slander.

02:23:51

Unless you're going to say he lied. So what I asked him to do is tell me, what did he say that was false?

02:23:58

He didn't want to talk about that. Well, then it's not slander. If everything Anthony said is true, it's not slander.

02:24:06

Slander is when you lie about someone, you say, son, that's knowingly false for the purpose of damaging one's reputation.

02:24:12

Now, did Anthony do all of his research and do those shows for the purpose of damaging Mike Reed's reputation?

02:24:19

No, he made that clear. He was willing to talk to Mike privately when Mike wouldn't discuss these things, wouldn't answer the questions.

02:24:27

Yes, it went public. Why? Not to damage Mike's reputation to warn those who are there and those who may go there.

02:24:35

Now, if that's the motivation, then it can't fit the definition of slander and also can't fit the definition of gossip.

02:24:41

Now, if it happens to damage his reputation because it's true. Well, then.

02:24:48

Sorry, that's not slander. That means you need to repent. It's love. It's loving because it provides him with an opportunity to see where he is in error.

02:24:57

But people have pointed his errors out to him for 15 years now, and he doesn't have any interest in that.

02:25:05

So the reality is he only wants to do what's good for him. He's not at all actually interested in the truth, in my opinion.

02:25:13

Yeah, thank you. I was going to say, yeah, I'm glad you said the in my opinion, because what you're doing there is you're assessing motive.

02:25:19

And I was going to say you're doing that not because you have absolute knowledge. You're doing it because based on on patterns.

02:25:25

And that's the thing. We can't judge motive, but we can we can see this constant pattern of behavior.

02:25:33

And that's why you're that's why you're better than me, because I'm over here judging all night. I'm like, I'm in here.

02:25:40

And here's why. Well, actually, Andrew, I'm going to I'm going to lean on this. You and I have been interacting on Facebook since I got on Facebook.

02:25:46

You were one of the first. You poor thing. I was going to say, do you even remember me at this point?

02:25:56

But the the issue the issue that I have is that, you know, Kevin, when you were writing your your your your articles, your essays, and you were talking about the the different forms of abuse, and you guys will recognize this.

02:26:10

One of the things you talked about was the gaslighting that happens with people inside. The other part of the problem is that they have what is referred to within these abusive relationships as these flying monkeys, which, of course, is a throwback to the

02:26:27

Wizard of Oz and the flying monkeys of the Wicked Witch. And and here's the issue.

02:26:34

There are Anthony's laughing. I don't the the the issue at hand is they have unwitting flying monkeys that aren't being sent out from GFC.

02:26:48

These people are not being sent out from GFC. These are people from all over the

02:26:53

United States and other places. And the reason that I know this is that I don't have nearly the traction that striving for eternity does or apologetics live does.

02:27:03

And on my video that I did talking about the situation with Tony on YouTube, on the if only even one

02:27:08

YouTube channel and on my essay that I wrote. People have come out and accused me of not handling this in the biblical way.

02:27:18

So they're either taking their their talking points from GFC and being told what to say, or they're just so bought into all of this that that's their only response, because they they do not understand the totality and the seriousness and the severity of this situation.

02:27:36

This isn't a local church situation. This is a damage to all sound churches that actually believe in in public evangelism because of the damage it's doing to Tony's reputation and all public evangelism as part of it.

02:27:49

Let me let me make an open challenge to Mike Reed, Tony Miano and anyone else at GFC.

02:27:55

If you're going to be at G3, Anthony will be there. I will be there. Phil Johnson will be there.

02:28:02

Plenty of other people. We would be happy to sit down at G3.

02:28:08

We'll schedule some time, block out some time. We will sit down with anybody from GFC, especially

02:28:15

Mike Reed and Tony Miano. We will sit down with you. We'll get some witnesses there.

02:28:22

So we can get a, you know, Phil Johnson or someone else and sit down and let's hash out the issues.

02:28:30

I doubt very highly they will take us up. That's right. Okay, and that's the problem.

02:28:37

I mean, look, Kevin, the reaction that happened with you is that you were somehow handling this wrong because this is a church discipline issue.

02:28:46

It needs to be handled within the church and it needs to be that you need to go to them where they sit in judgment over you, right?

02:28:55

Okay. Well, we've laid accusations against them. They, by their definition of church discipline, they need to come to us now.

02:29:06

They're not handling this under church discipline. They don't practice what they preach. They've known about these issues we've raised.

02:29:13

They've known about the issues between Tony and I. That's been known. There's no, they have had zero desire to get that reconciled.

02:29:22

Zero. Why? Very simply because Mike Reed knows he can't fool me.

02:29:29

And that's the whole thing of a controlling personality. They will spend zero time, zero time with anybody that they know they can't control.

02:29:39

It's a waste of their time. And so they try to avoid that person. And so Mike will spend zero time with me at G3.

02:29:47

Guaranteed. Mike, prove me wrong. I dare you to have, to be a man and be willing to meet with me, even just alone.

02:29:58

I challenge you to meet with me alone and answer the questions. Meet with Anthony alone and answer the questions.

02:30:05

You're not a man if you're not willing to do that. Don't tell me how manly you are.

02:30:10

If you're such a coward, you can't meet with us even alone to talk one -on -one.

02:30:18

And in all fairness, we should say this, right? Because I did meet with Mike one -on -one, which is what precipitated all this last

02:30:26

G3, right? Up until you'd started the shows, right? Since then, radio silence.

02:30:33

It's been crickets, right? Well, it's, this is a whole, your scenario is completely different though,

02:30:39

Anthony, because you had never talked to him before. You didn't have the background.

02:30:44

He could do what he does so well, which Andrew has been,

02:30:50

I mean, Andrew's a bright guy. He has been successful and not allowed him to get away with it.

02:30:56

He figures with most people, he can just blow right past them.

02:31:01

He can talk circles around most people. He will tie them up in knots. He will confuse them.

02:31:06

He will make his points. And the first meeting with you is completely different because you don't know anything yet.

02:31:16

Once you gather all the information, once you use your mind to figure it all out, he won't meet with you again, probably.

02:31:24

And what was interesting about that meeting and why I want to bring it up is because when I sat down with him, he was kind, he's well articulate, he's clear in thought, speaks with clarity.

02:31:40

And he is actually, he seems to be a pretty kind person when you talk to him, right?

02:31:47

I mean, I had a pleasant conversation with him to the point that when we walked away, I disagreed with him in almost every point he brought up in his theology and his teachings.

02:31:59

But he's a kind person. And that goes a long way to trying to win people over initially, right?

02:32:04

And so I think that's his initial way of doing things to manipulate. And then once you've got him figured out or you challenge him, then he goes into the authoritarian part of it and tries to beat you down, twist his words and do all that other stuff.

02:32:18

Okay, so let's take a step back. Let's not talk Mike Reed. Let's talk your typical husband who is abusive to a wife.

02:32:27

What do you see as a pattern? Well, when he's in trouble, what does he do? When she's ready to walk out, he's going to love on her.

02:32:36

I'm so sorry. I'll never let that happen again. It was the pressure at work, whatever.

02:32:44

And then she comes back and he's got her under his thumb. Okay. Then once he's got her under the thumb, it goes right back to the abuse.

02:32:52

It's all your fault. I did this because you deserved it. It's because of you. It's never what you made me do.

02:32:59

Correct. So look at that pattern. That pattern is consistent with every abuser.

02:33:07

So when you recognize the pattern and then you look at how he treats his church members and treats people like Anthony, who have the gall to actually say, no, what you're doing is wrong.

02:33:22

Yes. Okay. What's the behavior? Oh, I'll sweet talk you. I'll be nice as long as I think

02:33:28

I can get you on my side. But once I can't, you're dead to him.

02:33:34

Yeah. Humbled Clay has had some good comments here. Yes. I appreciate his remarks that there has been much grace shown.

02:33:43

I believe that as well. But he says here, Andrew, I'm sorry. But as expected,

02:33:49

Mike is pathologically narcissistic. He's three steps ahead in his mind. I am no psychologist, right?

02:33:57

You know, Todd turned me on to this podcast called Disaffected. And this guy is just...

02:34:03

As a disclaimer ahead of time, Todd wore Kevin. It's not a

02:34:11

Christian podcast. Anthony and Andrew, you may not want to follow up on this. Joshua is a phenomenal man in the sense of he's sharp, but he's also an atheist.

02:34:25

He's also just left the left and he's more of a classical liberal now, but he's also openly gay.

02:34:34

But he has a lot of insight into this abusive behavior. And I recognized a lot of things in what he was talking about in some stuff that I have personally experienced.

02:34:45

But I also said, hey, this would be really good for Kevin and some other people that he knows.

02:34:52

So that being said, if you have sensitive ears and are easily offended, please do not listen.

02:35:02

Well, then let me give you some things you can, some resources people can go through and see this.

02:35:08

Ronald Enroth wrote two books that would be very helpful for people in dealing with this.

02:35:15

You'll see the patterns we're talking about. Churches That Abuse and Recovering from Churches That Abuse.

02:35:21

Those are two books from Ronald Enroth. Churches That Abuse and Recovering from Churches That Abuse.

02:35:26

And what he does in there is lay out the pattern. If there's anyone from GFC that's listening to this, my challenge to you, read the book

02:35:35

Churches That Abuse. I dare you to read that book, compare what goes on in your church and see if you're not in a church that abuses.

02:35:45

Yeah. And I did a blog series on that book, five articles just to try to summarize it, because it was just shocking to me how similar these situations were.

02:36:00

And as far as the podcast, this guy has helped me put names to things, understanding that there are personality disorders and narcissism is a legitimate personality disorder.

02:36:14

And I can't specifically categorize Mike that way, but when it looks like it and it acts like it, it probably is.

02:36:27

But you're right, Andrew, those books are phenomenal. What it comes down to is regardless of your position on things like personality disorders and mental health, and Kevin and I have walked through a lot of this while he was in GFC and afterwards, no matter what your position is on this, whether it's strictly an issue of deep spiritual sin that causes these things, or if there's actually something going on in the brain chemically, no matter what.

02:36:54

People who do the things that are being done, and Andrew, you had said, let's remove Mike Reed from the equation.

02:37:00

Let's remove GFC from the equation. When you have somebody in your life, Christian or not, that's performing and behaving this way, period, it's a red flag.

02:37:12

And any husband that was treating his spouse the way that these other people are behaving, the people that were removed from the equation, if you were a

02:37:24

Christian and you saw this, you would confront it. You would confront it.

02:37:31

And what a good section of these individuals' friends and followers have done have ignored it.

02:37:40

That is not, one, loving your brother. Loving your brother is, you know, speak the truth in love, right?

02:37:47

They're not loving their brothers. Two, the other part of that is they're literally turning a blind eye to sin, which makes them culpable in the sin.

02:37:59

And I threw the name out there earlier. People like Bobby McCreary, who are not distancing themselves from this and doing so in a very public way, they're culpable in this.

02:38:12

They will give an answer for this at some point. And that is why people like Tony and Mike immediately distanced themselves from me and others when we started talking about this, because they wanted to make us look like the bad guys.

02:38:30

Well, let me ask a question of Anthony. Anthony, how many people do you have? Because I know that you and I have had this.

02:38:35

How many people, roughly, do you think have you spoken to and they're like, you know,

02:38:42

Anthony, I see everything that you're saying. I agree with it. And you go, well, have you talked to Tony?

02:38:49

I don't want to lose the friendship. If he gets out, I want to be there for him.

02:38:56

Yeah, I've heard that a lot. I've also heard a lot of people who Tony has already shut down and they don't have the ability to talk to him.

02:39:04

Which is the thing, they know that's going to happen, right? They know that's the exact thing that's going to happen if they say anything.

02:39:11

And that's why they don't. But a lot of them aren't, I wouldn't even call them friends with Tony now.

02:39:17

They haven't spoken to him in several years, but are not willing to go confront him.

02:39:23

I've had guys call me in the street preaching community saying, hey Tony, Anthony, let's drive out to Iowa and go show up at their church and try to rescue

02:39:32

Tony. I've had people tell me this. You know, it's but he doesn't see the problem is, unfortunately,

02:39:38

Tony doesn't need rescuing. In this sense, because he's deceived by it.

02:39:43

He's he is he's drank the Kool -Aid and he's promoting it. And and he will he will go down fighting.

02:39:51

But we've said this on previous shows. Tony is loyal. You know, you're saying about Donnie being a follower.

02:39:58

One of the things you have to understand is Tony is in some ways that way, too. Tony has always been one who who submits to an authority.

02:40:05

Tony is a leader, but he's not the leader who leads without being under somebody.

02:40:11

He's never done that. You know, whether it living waters, after he left living waters, he kind of put himself under, you know, different people like, you know,

02:40:20

Jeff Rose or others. Now, you know, Mike Reed, he's always been under someone. And he is he is extremely loyal to whoever he puts himself under.

02:40:31

OK, and so it's not that you're going to go out there and convince him. And he doesn't want to be convinced.

02:40:39

Yeah, that's true. Nope. Yeah, you know, and when he wants to be convinced by something, it takes nothing to convince him.

02:40:48

And that and that's the thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he could switch. You know, he's he is showing that he could publicly switch on positions, long held positions very quickly with very little evidence.

02:41:01

I mean, I think a lot of these people there, you know, they will say things like, you know, I understand it's a little bit weird there.

02:41:07

They do some odd things. It's you know, there's some distorted behaviors and various things like that.

02:41:13

Well, you know, all that is true. You know, they obviously know that and they've, you know, experienced it.

02:41:22

But it's hurting people. And I've said that several times on this show.

02:41:28

I mean, real people. I mean, lots of them. And I mean, deep hurt scars that may never, ever heal.

02:41:41

And if they do heal, it'll take five, 10, 15 years for them to heal.

02:41:47

I mean, these these are serious issues. Again, I'll say it. If you hurt more people than you help.

02:41:56

If there's more broken bodies along the path that you've been on than are currently in your church, you've got an issue.

02:42:05

And I don't know how I can say that any differently to emphasize that there are so many people that have been hurt that have had to go through counseling or are in counseling or have to meet with pastors of their next church to try to pick them up and put these pieces back together so they can at least function in a normal way.

02:42:30

I mean, and it's mostly the women that get the worst of the abuse. It's hard to explain, guys.

02:42:38

I mean, other than that, Andrew, you know this. You've written a book on cults. You understand this stuff.

02:42:44

Anthony, you've experienced these people. Todd, you've seen it in firsthand action. I've lived through it.

02:42:49

I don't know how more we can say this with more urgency for people.

02:42:56

You know, I want to toss something out there. So, Anthony, you were talking about your personal experience on the,

02:43:03

I think, was it a call or a video chat? Three different Zoom calls. Three different Zoom calls.

02:43:09

It was just you and Mike Reed one -on -one. I don't know. Was Mike Reed and his two elders with him?

02:43:14

Yeah, not one -on -one. No, no, that was Mike Reed. That was you and Mike Reed one -on -one. Let's just be frank. It's just,

02:43:24

I know. I mean, Nick Roland slamming his fist into the table and slamming doors.

02:43:30

I mean, spoke some lines. Yeah, those were pre -arranged. No, I'm sorry. But let's just be frank, okay?

02:43:39

It was mostly you and Mike Reed. It was what that was about. Yeah, it was. That's right.

02:43:45

And so, I have never, I've never told anybody this.

02:43:57

My son was, we had found out that he was ill. And I felt like dirt because I felt like we had poisoned him.

02:44:11

And we took him to a therapeutic nutritionist who helped us after research and research and research and research.

02:44:20

We found this person and she helped him. And I'm sitting here going, okay, this lady is a crackpot.

02:44:27

But she told us what was precisely wrong with him and what we needed to do. And she told us, and it was going to be expensive.

02:44:33

And I was overwhelmed. And Kevin, I'm sure you remember this. You're looking at going from, you know, eating a pretty normal American diet to all of a sudden you've got to change everybody's diet because there's just no way to prepare just a meal for a kid whose diet has just been limited.

02:44:49

And it was going to get incredibly expensive. And I just broke down and I shared with K1 and K2 about it.

02:44:56

And a short time later, I got some cash in the mail from GFC.

02:45:09

And it was touching. And it helped us.

02:45:20

But I didn't tell Kevin that to elicit his sympathy and to provoke money from him.

02:45:26

Kevin knows if I really need money, I'll just ask him. He's independently wealthy, you know. If anybody wants his phone number, you let me know.

02:45:35

I can get you in contact with him. Reach me on Facebook. Yeah, just find him on Facebook.

02:45:40

He's a sucker for that. But it came from it wasn't just Kevin.

02:45:49

It was, you know, because, you know, of course, Kevin didn't make any decisions without running it by people.

02:45:56

And they sent some cash, a good chunk of cash to help.

02:46:04

And I don't know if Kevin remembers this, but a lot of that was also then tied into, well, maybe we should sit down and talk about your finances.

02:46:14

Now, is there a place for that in the life from brother to brother? Sure. But I want people to understand that Kevin didn't do that in a way to open the door so that he could talk to me about that.

02:46:29

That was a seed that was planted to ultimately open the door to talk to me, not by Kevin, but to talk to, you know, for Mike Reed and others.

02:46:40

And I'm sure they would deny this. But in there again, I mentioned it. Have you thought about, you know, like maybe switching careers and coming down here, you know, get you out of that that career?

02:46:50

Because remember. It's it was it was sinful for people to work in that law enforcement community.

02:46:58

And being in the military and whatnot, and so the pressure kind of ramped up a little bit, never once mentioned the money, but the idea was like, we helped you out, see what we can do.

02:47:10

Mm hmm. And it was there and it was in the back of my mind, which is what he wanted. They do it all the time.

02:47:16

I mean, they do. They've done it with a family with adoptive kids. They've done it, you know, in a lot of different ways when you're serving, always loving, you know, but it's a love bomb,

02:47:28

I suppose, is how it could be classified. Mm hmm. Well, it gets what the the goal of doing behavior like that for a controlling person is to get you feeling like you owe them no different than the abusive husband.

02:47:47

Remember where you were when we first met. Look where I've where I've gotten you. You were you were nothing before me.

02:47:54

Oh, you're right. I owe you everything. Then you're willing to do whatever for them.

02:48:00

It's an effective technique on certain people, you know, but here's the thing.

02:48:06

Notice the behavior when someone doesn't fall prey to that. We're just going to ignore you.

02:48:14

Yeah, that's why I know my challenge will go unanswered. I dare him, you know, and quite frankly, if Mike Reed knows of this challenge for to meet with Anthony alone or I alone, not with any of his elders and actually discuss these things.

02:48:34

OK, if he knows of it and doesn't do it when he has the opportunity. Don't call yourself a man.

02:48:43

You're a coward. And the scriptures speak very poorly of people who are cowards, and he's not talking about the unconverted.

02:48:52

No, Tony quotes it all the time when he does. He speaks all the time about coward, what a coward does, who flees when they're not pursued.

02:49:02

Right. Always quotes that. Yeah. So I guess, you know, do you as we're approaching the three hour mark, we probably should be

02:49:14

Anthony time soon. But I think we're like we're probably like way off of Anthony time now.

02:49:22

We're probably like somewhere like George Whitefield time. So we can all sing happy birthday to Anthony.

02:49:27

No one wants to hear you sing Rappaport. I'll just pretend you guys were a great choir and we're good.

02:49:38

So what do you guys want to kind of close with? What are your thoughts? What do you want to say to people that are at G3 if Tony and or Mike are there or even if they're not?

02:49:50

I mean, what mess what message do you want to give to our listeners? You want me to go first? Sure.

02:49:55

I've said this already, and this is going to sound an awful lot like my kind. Kevin will back me up on this.

02:50:01

It's going to sound an awful lot like my content from the Minnesota Black Road Regiment stuff. It's time to look past GFC in this regard.

02:50:10

No message is going to get into GFC from us. They're not there as much like they make a video and put it on private.

02:50:18

They, you know, released to a key amount of people. They're not going to hear anything from Kevin or me or Andrew or you,

02:50:28

Anthony, or Chuck or any of the others who have stood their ground.

02:50:35

What needs to happen is every single person who follows

02:50:40

Striving for Eternity, who watches Apologetics Live, who who've watched any of my stuff on my channel, read any of my essays or follow anything on my sociocultural channel at all, anybody who's watching this.

02:50:54

If you're a Christian and you consider yourself in that orthodox reformed -ish or street preaching community at all, your efforts need to be directed at every single one of the ministries they have tried to align themselves with.

02:51:10

You continue to reach out to the people that are showing up to G3 in case they show up there.

02:51:17

You reach out to Votibachum and in love, say, look, they might still be sending you money, but you may want to just return that money.

02:51:26

You need to reach out to, there again, what your views are of the guys at Fight, Laugh, Feast and some of the theological and doctrinal differences you may have, or Doug Wilson or any of that.

02:51:37

Like I said, I can guarantee you guys like C .R. Wiley and Douglas Wilson would rebuke

02:51:43

Mike Reed to his face for the garbage that he teaches and put him out there.

02:51:48

He would have no part. They wouldn't let him in the doors if they knew. And they have to know and they have to hear it from people constantly.

02:51:56

And so, yeah, this is a call to action. They need to be ostracized and cut off from anybody that lends them any credence.

02:52:05

And then you need to find out if you can who's still sending money to Tony. If you have any connection to any of those people and let them know they're complicit in the abuse and the spiritual abuse and torture of people who are trapped in a cult.

02:52:25

They need to feel that kind of pain. That's my personal perspective because GFC is not going to respond to anybody else.

02:52:33

It's got to be people cutting them off from any semblance, any semblance of legitimacy at all.

02:52:41

Period. They need to be cut off and thrown out, shut outside the camp. They need to crumble.

02:52:48

And the only way to do that is to take all of that legitimacy and brotherly fealty away from them.

02:52:56

Yeah, and they have lost. I mean, Tony has lost a lot of supporters.

02:53:01

He needs to lose it all. Well, the thing is, one of the things is GFC has lost some support.

02:53:08

Tony, I haven't looked lately, but we had to the point where Tony, last

02:53:15

I saw, had to take down his endorsements page because he's lost endorsements.

02:53:23

They didn't bring this up, Anthony. We haven't looked at this in a long time. But give me some chance to look that up.

02:53:32

And also in the private chat, send me that Dropbox that you mentioned, and I'll create a shorter link for that that people can find.

02:53:41

And I'll put that up before the show's over. But let me get that stuff on Tony's because that answers the question you're just asking,

02:53:49

Todd, or just mentioning. He's lost so many of his endorsements that he has had to actually, um, he's actually had to remove the whole page,

02:54:01

I believe, because it's become noticeable. You know, because I do know someone who told him to remove their endorsement.

02:54:14

And, you know, and that's when he removed everyone. So I don't know if others reached out and said, you know, remove mine as well.

02:54:21

Well, and I hate to say it, but I'm glad to hear that. But it now needs to be it now needs to be a total financial collapse.

02:54:29

And I hate to say that I really you guys have seen me, you know, Andrew, you haven't seen some of this, but I love him.

02:54:39

I love him. He was there for me when I first got started in my church wasn't supportive.

02:54:47

I don't want that for Tony. I don't want that for his family. But at the same time,

02:54:53

I do. I want him out of that place and I want that place destroyed. I want it destroyed.

02:55:01

I don't want it reconverted. I don't I want it gone. I want it gone.

02:55:08

Well, here's here's something. You know, so here's the the list that I had. Let me try to make this a little larger.

02:55:15

So you could see it on your screen. What this is was before he took down because I actually anticipated that he was going to take down his his endorsements.

02:55:27

OK, just because the behavior when you see how they how they behave.

02:55:33

And so are we sure that Todd's still on there? Well, no one's on there now, but I mean, they're not on there.

02:55:42

But do we know where he stands? Where Emilio stands? Well, let's look at this. There were originally in the beginning, he had 10 endorsements.

02:55:51

Phil Johnson removed. Ray Comfort removed. These are people that reach out to Tony and said, remove me from your endorsements.

02:56:00

Phil Johnson, Ray Comfort, Emile Zwayne, Pastor Mike Andrews, Pastor Paul Yankick.

02:56:11

I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Bill Adams, Adam Gray, Grant Horner, Mark Spence, David Tomin.

02:56:20

All of 10 of those have asked to be removed. The six that were remaining, we do not know.

02:56:27

I know of one of them that said they wanted to be removed and had to send several requests to Tony, but that leaves at least five of this list.

02:56:39

Todd Friol, Saiten Bruggenkate, Jeff Kargelin, George Lawson, Martha Mack, Emilio Ramos.

02:56:47

Well, I know George Lawson dropped out early on in all this. I had a personal conversation with him. He called me.

02:56:53

I know he's not on there anymore. And that's two of them. So probably what happened was when he was forced to have to update this, there were probably so many people that dropped that he didn't want to.

02:57:06

If Todd ended up requesting it as well, or Emilio, or Martha, you end up seeing that or Sire or Jeff, you start losing three of these names.

02:57:19

It might be why he doesn't have the page up anymore. I mean, do you still have connection? Do you still talk to Todd at all,

02:57:25

Andrew? Yes, I haven't brought this up with him. I mean, I haven't talked to him about specifically this, whether he endorses him or not.

02:57:38

You're much wiser and been at this a longer time than I have. And I've communicated at times with Todd.

02:57:43

But I don't know. I think to me, it's worth asking. Yeah, no, it's something that Anthony and I talked about at one point, and whether it's something we should do or shouldn't do.

02:57:58

And whether it's something to, you know, is it our place type of thing?

02:58:04

And, you know, we just never finalized on it. So, you know,

02:58:11

I will say I have his ministry page up across encounters ministry on my other computer right now.

02:58:18

And the endorsement page is completely down. Yeah. So, yeah, there's no semblance of it at all on here.

02:58:25

They still have the partner with us page up. And on this page, it is written by Mike Reed.

02:58:32

That's the money that gets donated to Tony Meano. All the checks must be made payable to Grace Fellowship Church.

02:58:40

Don't place any designation on the check. Leave the memo line blank and mail the checks directly to GFC.

02:58:47

And that they believe it's the church's responsibility to take care of Tony. So they handle all that.

02:58:53

Interesting, because what that means is. So here's the thing, folks. Let me let you know how a 501C3 is supposed to work.

02:59:01

Supposed to work. And the church, by definition, is a 501C3. If you designate money.

02:59:08

That is all that is money that can only be used for those purposes. So, in other words, if people donate money and put

02:59:15

Tony Meano on it, they cannot use that money for anything other than Tony Meano.

02:59:21

Which is precisely why Mike Reed put on that on that page. Do not designate.

02:59:29

And Andrew, do not open doors for me to talk about 501C3. That is another three hour conversation.

02:59:36

Okay, let's talk about 501C3s. You know,

02:59:42

I have time on my hands. So the other two guys have jobs. I'm scared of difficult conversations, you know.

02:59:49

Right, so we'll do it in private and not share the video with anyone. And there may or may not be somebody who might be able to work.

02:59:57

Find this private video and get their hands on it. I'm just, may or may not. You never know.

03:00:04

Private stuff isn't always as private as you hope it'll be. I've also gotten word from Chuck O 'Neill that Tony has had to switch his

03:00:18

Twitter handle multiple times in the last year and a half. Because people find it, start questioning him on it.

03:00:26

And then he switches on the Twitter handle. Switches to another Twitter handle. Facebook, he has pretty much blocked everybody off of it.

03:00:36

So that he can't get confronted on that either. So his new Twitter handle, by the way, is

03:00:42

CrossWalker on Twitter. What was that? Could you maybe put that in there?

03:00:50

Down below? I mean, just on the off chance that somebody wanted to find him on. Yes, I could do that.

03:00:57

I put up the link, Anthony. That's the bit .ly link, the shorter link to that Dropbox that you had earlier.

03:01:03

So people can find it. Just go to bit .ly slash 39HO.

03:01:10

Those are two lowercase letters. L, lowercase l, 9g. So all the letters there are lowercase.

03:01:17

Okay. Yep. So Ed Romine, I hope that's how I pronounce your name.

03:01:23

You asked what you can do earlier. Well, Romine. Okay, Romine. I get in trouble for calling him

03:01:30

Romaine. And he apologized. He actually called me during the show and then apologized in the chat.

03:01:37

I shouldn't have called you. I saw that. So on that Dropbox link contains the

03:01:47

CliffsNotes version of the interview that Kevin and I did last year. It gives timestamps to all the bullet points within that interview.

03:01:57

There's a paper on all of the different videos that are posted out there.

03:02:02

So you can hear it from Mike's own mouth, some of his beliefs. And then there's also the page that have the 12 questions on it to be able to ask.

03:02:13

So they're all there on that now bit .ly link. And I'll put the link to Kevin's article on Dangerous Doctrines.

03:02:23

I'm going to go look for that. But Kevin's articles are linked on one of my pages on that Dropbox too.

03:02:31

Okay. Well, his article, but the one he did on Striving Fraternity that links everything.

03:02:36

Oh, I don't have that one. Yeah. Okay. So let me get that. So here's the thing I would say,

03:02:42

Ed, in response to that. What I would say to do in the case of, and I'm going to put this here.

03:02:55

But if you just go to strivingfraternity .org, you could search for doctrines.

03:03:01

That's what I searched for. And it's strivingfraternity .org and then it's with dashes in between each of the words,

03:03:09

The Dangerous Doctrines of Grace Fellowship Church. So it's The -Dangerous -Doctrines -of -Grace -Fellowship -Church.

03:03:20

I don't know if you can see that, Anthony. I just sent a picture to private message group that we had on Facebook.

03:03:27

If you can share that. I think that for me, my final thought would be if you show this picture is the hypocrisy.

03:03:37

Send it to me and I'll, Anthony, I'll put it up. Okay. So in this article that Kevin wrote, it links all of the episodes.

03:03:46

And there's like 10 hours of stuff, of video that's here that goes through this. And he's given the 13 questions or 12 questions that we've challenged with that we want to ask.

03:03:59

Let me answer the question, Ed. What I would say, if you see Mike or Tony at G3, what should you do?

03:04:09

Well, I would say that what you need to do is they need to be challenged.

03:04:15

They need to have to give an answer for this. They need to not be allowed to just escape with it by saying, well, everyone else needs to follow our definition of church discipline, but we don't need to.

03:04:29

Okay, that's the issue. They need to reconcile with Kevin, with Todd, with the countless people that have been on this show and have not been on the show that have left.

03:04:43

There's 150 people that I know of that have been hurt by this church.

03:04:49

Reconciliation, that's biblical. Okay, the things they've said about Anthony, me, there needs to be reconciliation.

03:04:59

And so the simple question that needs to be asked of them, are you willing to follow the biblical principles of reconciliation with these men?

03:05:09

That's the question. And if they're not, that's going to tell you everything you need to know about them.

03:05:20

It's going to tell you everything you need. So let's see, let me see where this, share this picture that you have.

03:05:33

Hmm, interesting. I can't share. I'm trying to see how to share just that picture.

03:05:42

All right, give me a sec. I'll keep working on it. Now, here we go. Now I know how to do it.

03:05:50

Okay, that is, let me make it bigger for folks to see and take the comment away.

03:05:57

So there's the picture you wanted shared. And what it says is law enforcement lives matter on one chart.

03:06:06

So these are police officers. You have a couple of police officers with Tony Miano, Tony's daughter,

03:06:15

Michelle. And I don't know who the other person is. Kevin, do you recognize him? No, I don't know who that is.

03:06:23

Okay. The only reason for showing that was ultimately that, you know, we talked about some of the things that they teach.

03:06:32

Well, let me, because some people, if they may not, you know, if this goes out in audio, they may not see it.

03:06:38

So it says all three signs say life enforcement lives matter. Law enforcement.

03:06:44

Law enforcement. Romans 13, one to five acts looks like 10, one to 48.

03:06:51

But in the bottom of it, it has two different websites. One is crossencountersmin .com.

03:06:58

That's Tony's website. The other is gracefellowshipqc .com.

03:07:03

Yeah. So that's Grace Fellowship Church. That's their website. So on this chart, this is fascinating.

03:07:13

They're standing outside of a police station with two police officers. You have Grace Fellowship Church saying that life enforcement lives matter.

03:07:23

Supporting police at a police station. While at the same time saying anybody that enters in the law enforcement is guilty of premeditated murder at their official stance.

03:07:37

Or the military. That is, that has, I can heard it with my own ears.

03:07:43

Mike has said that more than once, countless, I don't know, many times.

03:07:50

So, you know, you can ask the question, Anthony, what should people do when they go to G3?

03:07:56

I mean, my challenge is to challenge them to be willing to man up and come on the show.

03:08:03

Contact us. Talk to us. Let's reconcile it. Let's bring these issues to rest.

03:08:10

If you're, I mean, if they're so willing to do a video to answer what has been done on this show and give it to others,

03:08:18

I dare you to give it to us for critique. If you got nothing to hide.

03:08:24

If you have the truth. Again, 2 Corinthians 13, 8. You know, for we could do nothing against the truth, but only by the truth.

03:08:33

If you have the truth. Hey, no reason not to share. But so my challenge to folks that go to G3 would be to challenge them to, you know, basically to man up and reconcile.

03:08:47

Be willing to talk to folks. Come on and answer these things. They've refused to answer any of the questions. These questions that we've asked are most of them.

03:08:55

Yes, no questions that can easily be answered. Did you go through the questions at the beginning of the show? Yeah, we did.

03:09:01

And then we started going through them a second time. At least the pertinent ones. And I don't know if we'd say at the beginning, because it was before you came on, but well into the conversation.

03:09:11

And it's so long ago that Kevin's room has actually gotten darker the longer he's had here.

03:09:17

So Anthony, yeah, he's in the dark. And we didn't even get to Kevin having his closing thoughts.

03:09:25

Yeah, so dark. What's new? Kevin, if you see people at G3, what's your advice to them?

03:09:32

My thing would be that Kevin Yont says he's willing to share absolutely any correspondence, anything that he has said he will answer to or give an account of.

03:09:46

I am an open book willing to share anything. How about you release your private video?

03:09:51

So that can be Proverbs 18, 17. You know, why not allow us to see that?

03:09:58

So we can answer those, that private video that you seem to want to hide behind.

03:10:05

Oh, so that we could actually, that there could actually be a response out there. Oh, okay.

03:10:11

You know, that's, yeah. So Anthony. I will just say this. They either release that private video and make it public, or they're going to have to take it down and not show it to anybody ever again, because I'm going to find people to help me find a way to get that video downloaded.

03:10:27

And I'm working on it right now. So that's their chance. Be upfront and honest, or we get our hands on it and we do our own video about it, period.

03:10:38

And I know people, and I happen to know of a couple of channels on YouTube that would be more than willing to have a conversation with Kevin and put it out there.

03:10:51

So either be upfront about it, or we'll find a way to get to it. So Anthony, let me ask you kind of a two -part question.

03:11:03

One, so what would you say to folks that see them at G3?

03:11:11

Let me start just with that question. What would you want? How would you say if someone sees them?

03:11:18

How should they handle it? I think they should just open up a conversation with them and ask Mike if this is true, right?

03:11:24

And have that list of questions ready. And knowing full well that the videos...

03:11:32

We've gone through these videos, right? We've gone through Kevin's testimony, Chuck O 'Neill's testimony, Kevin and Jen's testimony, others' testimony.

03:11:40

So we've gone through this stuff. And this is built upon some of the eyewitness testimony that I have had in terms of talking to the people that actually were at the church under Mike Reed and experienced or had to deal with these positions that Mike Reed takes.

03:11:58

So people need to ask these questions. Mike, do you still believe this stuff, or has your position changed?

03:12:06

And either way, you need to repent, right? I mean, this is what it really comes down to is a call repentance and then to reconcile with the people that you've harmed.

03:12:18

Which is strange because isn't that a big part of what he preaches about? I mean, he preaches it about anybody that seems to offend him within his church.

03:12:29

And by the way, there's a lot of people that I know of that have said that to him.

03:12:34

You need to clean this up. You need to make it right with these people. You know that you've done harm to them.

03:12:40

You know you need to be on their doorstep seeking their forgiveness. I have a friend of mine that has told me he has directly told that to Mike.

03:12:48

You need to get this straightened up and he ain't doing it. He does not practice what he tells people to do.

03:12:57

So Anthony, a final question for you, just reading through comments, people who have been saying in some comments and all that they know some of the people that we showed on that list of endorsements, contacting them.

03:13:14

Should they contact Tony if they still have communications with him? Should they reach out to Mike Reed?

03:13:22

People who may not be going to G3, what would be your advice hearing this, having concern not only for Tony, for this church, for the people who've been hurt by this church, or the people who are not currently going to church but may go to the church?

03:13:39

What would be your advice to folks with the mindset, not, and I'm trying to be really clear, not the mindset of we have to go after them, not the discernment blogger mindset of we got to tear people down because it's going to get us views.

03:13:54

For the record, if it's been since May that we did the last one, this has been a long time.

03:14:01

I put that article, the endorsements, that was back in December. It's been at least that long since we've dealt with anything here.

03:14:11

We're talking at a minimum nine months that we've dealt with this.

03:14:17

We can't be accused that we're bringing this up for clicks and downloads. Let's just nix that right out of the gate.

03:14:28

Todd, Kevin, you guys haven't been, this has not been the only thing you guys have been doing. You haven't been focused just on this and writing about this every day.

03:14:36

We're not doing the discernment of discernment bloggers where they just like to tear people down. I want to be clear that that's not what

03:14:45

I'm asking Anthony to say to do, but to people who have concern, who are not going to G3, what recommendations do you have for them?

03:14:56

Yeah, first and foremost, if you want to call Tony, if you know him, call him. Be aware of what's probably going to happen is he's probably going to not talk to you anymore after it.

03:15:10

But as we've heard from many other people, right? But it shouldn't stop you from wanting to confront him in gentleness and kindness to do that.

03:15:20

When it comes to my greed, I would say be very, very, very careful. So he's manipulative.

03:15:26

He's a good talker. So just be careful and stick to your guns. The reality is, is again, we did the research, spoke to the eyewitnesses.

03:15:37

We've done a number of shows. Mike has refused to answer them. And so you can go into that with confidence, asking these questions and calling him to repentance.

03:15:46

And again, like you said, Andrew, this is not about being the discernment blogger to tear people down.

03:15:51

It's not to tear Mike down necessarily. It's about calling him to repentance. It's about hopefully that his eyes are open.

03:15:58

He steps down from his quote unquote ministry and that the people that are there can go to good churches and get healed from their issues.

03:16:09

Yeah, that would be my desire for them because there are some people there that we care about them.

03:16:15

We really do. And we haven't done this to attack. We haven't done that.

03:16:21

I mentioned earlier, there's a lot more I could say if I was really desiring to just destroy them.

03:16:29

There's a lot of things that I could talk about, but that's not my goal. My goal is to have people's eyes become open.

03:16:36

They're going to toss accusations toward me. He didn't practice Matthew 18.

03:16:42

He didn't do the right thing. He didn't do it with the local church. There's just all kinds of stuff that they're going to say to try to paint me as the guy who hasn't done that.

03:16:51

I went to Mike Reed four to five times. I sat in an elder meeting and said, they asked, what's the problem in this church?

03:16:58

I said, we've got a legalism problem. And they knew that I was unhappy and that things were not going well.

03:17:05

Mike is not a stupid man. You can say a lot of things about it.

03:17:11

He's a smart guy and he's very discerning. He picks up on things. He knows when people are itching to leave or when things are stirring within families.

03:17:21

He's very, he notices those things very quickly. So he's not, he knew what was going on in my life.

03:17:30

He knew that I was not content. He knew that there was issues. And when I kept going to him with the same issue over and over again, he knew darn well what was going on, which is why he baited me into answering that question in this meeting.

03:17:44

And I said, I'm just going to go for it in my own mind. And so, but then when we send them a letter and say, we're leaving, they're all like, this is the first we've heard of it.

03:17:55

Well, that's not true. You knew this was coming. I will attest, I will attest to the fact that Kevin approached him numerous times because as far as I know, there wasn't a time that Kevin approached him that he did not approach

03:18:12

Kevin McDonald and I, K1 and I, before he went and said, here's what

03:18:18

I'm thinking or here's how I think it's going to go. And then he gave us a rundown afterwards. And sometimes not just in Messenger, but through phone calls where we had this,

03:18:31

I will attest to that fact. And so if anybody tells you that he, that Kevin and Jen did not handle this in a biblical way or in a godly way and that they left under some form of division or discipline, they are a liar from the pit of hell, period.

03:18:51

Because they handled this very well. In fact, they handled it so well. I was impressed because if that had been me,

03:18:58

I would have embarrassed the snot out of my family because somebody, somebody would have gotten more than an earful.

03:19:08

It speaks volumes to Kevin's integrity and in his love for his family.

03:19:16

That he held it together the way he did. And I mean that. I am not saying that a real man would have responded the way

03:19:25

I would have wanted to respond because Kevin is far none, far more controlled and gracious than I ever will be.

03:19:36

And he knows because there were times I was angry for him and he showed so much more love.

03:19:48

So let me, I'll resist the urge based on what Anthony said. Let me just read some of the comments and I want to get in some.

03:19:55

Humble Clay says, God bless you, Kevin. You and your wife have a special place in my heart. And Black Eagle, thanks for the information.

03:20:03

I'll do what I can. Brain is shutting down now, good night. I think your wife made an important comment here.

03:20:11

Yes. Jennifer, GFC is unsafe for families. Don't go there. Warn others.

03:20:16

Please pray for those who still attend. I'm going to resist the urge to go into my entire sermon from today, but.

03:20:24

You sure you're Baptist? Yeah. With what Anthony said, Mark chapter 12, verse 38.

03:20:33

This is Jesus being challenged. Speaking of the scribes, he says, beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes like respectful greetings in the marketplaces and the chief seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets who devour widows homes and for appearance sake offer long prayers.

03:20:58

These will receive greater condemnation. What you heard

03:21:03

Anthony say is Mike's a smart guy. He's good with his words. He's a good manipulator. And I'm not saying that from the personal experience because I wasn't, you know, my conversation was three emails back and forth.

03:21:16

I'm saying it by based on countless testimonies that we've heard here. But the thing is, is yes, as I preached this morning, there are people that stand at pulpits who look spiritual on the outside.

03:21:31

They have everything the way they walk, the way they dress, the way they talk, everything about them is all for show because all the attention needs to be on them.

03:21:42

And they look very spiritual on the outside, but on the inside, they devour widows homes and they're going to receive a greater condemnation.

03:21:55

So when you do speak to them, just recognize, yet some people may have the title pastor, but that doesn't mean that what is inside of them is pastor -like, right?

03:22:13

There are those who put it on the facade. And when he speaks, he's going to speak with a lot of biblical language.

03:22:20

I saw it in the emails. The problem is he doesn't practice it. So when, if you do talk to Mike, the challenge would be, here would be the challenge.

03:22:29

When he uses scripture, like he says that we're breaking Matthew 18 because we didn't come to him privately, ask him if he's done that.

03:22:39

Ask him why he went to others with a video responding to us. Is that the biblical model?

03:22:45

One of the things that I can attest to is Anthony followed the model.

03:22:50

He spoke directly to Mike. Mike wouldn't meet with him alone. Mike's the one that broke the biblical model.

03:22:58

What you see in Matthew 18 is meet alone. Anthony tried. He wouldn't have it.

03:23:04

He wouldn't have the response that he should have. He got the response that we would see in a

03:23:11

Matthew 18 when we're not part of the same church. You know, here,

03:23:16

Ed says this well, so I'll just put his comment. Satan uses scripture too. And so the fact that we have tried to follow the model that we see in scripture.

03:23:29

So my challenge, if you speak to them, is ask if they have. Hold them to their own standard.

03:23:35

When they say that we have to follow this process and everyone else has to follow this process, have they done that?

03:23:42

It's been documented that they haven't. It's been documented that they're not responding to us, to Anthony and I, or Kevin, or whoever else they responded to in this video.

03:23:55

I do know that, you know, Anthony and I were named in it. Okay, because I have spoken to people who have watched the video.

03:24:05

My question to those people, because they said they're not allowed to share it.

03:24:10

They were given it with the promise that they would not share. The one question I asked is, is there anything in the video where I have said something that's not correct, where they say that I have lied or said something that's not true?

03:24:29

Because that's then I need to address. Supposedly, there's nothing that was said that can be substantiated that Anthony or I said that's incorrect.

03:24:43

Now, put the video out like Kevin said, but if they're not willing to do that, if they're not willing to meet with us, if they're not willing to take the challenge that Anthony has made every time he's done this show on these topics, to come on here,

03:24:57

Mike Reed, answer those 12 questions. You don't wanna come on, answer them in writing. It's about what you believe.

03:25:05

I mean, the documentation's out there that you've said these things. You know, the fact that you removed the videos doesn't mean that it hasn't been out there.

03:25:15

So I would say my closing comment would be just that, is if you're gonna speak to them, hold them to the same standard that they profess to believe.

03:25:29

Yep, that's right. Absolutely. You know, guys, thank you for coming on tonight. Todd, Kevin, Andrew, and yeah, we pray that people watch this video and that the ones who watched it, you go and share it with others so that people can see this and kind of get it out there because as we've talked about, some people know, right?

03:25:54

A lot of people at G3 now know who Mike Reed is, who Tony Miano's pastor is, but there's a lot of people at Fight Left Feast that obviously don't.

03:26:03

There's people in other conferences and other Christian circles that don't. So we need to get this out there and pray that Mike Reed comes to repentance.

03:26:12

And that Tony Miano's eyes are opened in all this. That's right. Yeah, I guess now

03:26:19

I can go back to what I was doing and editing this.

03:26:26

Wait, I thought you weren't one of those people. Yeah, this is what I'm editing.

03:26:31

No, I was at this conference that he's speaking at. So I was taking some... Oh, so your new book about how to be wealthy and slay demons and...

03:26:41

No, Justin dragged me there for research purposes. So since I went and I now get email from Kenneth Copeland Ministries.

03:26:52

They let Justin in? Yeah, we could talk about that.

03:26:59

No, we better not. That'll be another... There's a podcast that one day will be released that gives all the detail.

03:27:07

Yes, they let Justin in and we're waiting. There's some really cool things that happen, but we're just waiting for some things to move forward before we release that part.

03:27:19

I wanna thank you guys for thinking to ask me honestly because it's...

03:27:28

And then I'm going to leave because there again, I have too much time on my hands and my family's already gone to bed.

03:27:35

They'd had enough of me anyway today. And so they just use this as an excuse to fall asleep before I can talk to them more.

03:27:46

I would encourage anybody who thinks that I have a vendetta against them to reach out to me as well.

03:27:55

I'm pretty easy to find on Facebook. I really don't hide much of anything. Trust me.

03:28:01

I don't hide much of anything. And your email is noreplyatnotgonatalktoyou .com,

03:28:08

right? Well, I was just gonna put yours in there. So... But... Anthonyatstrivingforeternity .org.

03:28:15

All your email. But I do. Go read the essay that I wrote.

03:28:23

Watch the one video that I did. There's no animosity at all towards anybody there.

03:28:31

I probably sound pretty hard, but I love... In particular,

03:28:37

I love Tony and his family. And I want what's best for them. But I'm to that point now where I'm like, we just can't tread around the periphery of this anymore.

03:28:49

The church needs to be the church on this. And not in the sense of the local

03:28:54

Matthew 18 style, but just... At some point, we have to stand up and say, there's something deadly wrong about this situation.

03:29:06

And it needs to be dealt with and fixed. And right now, the only way that that's gonna happen is for them to make that move because everybody else has done everything they can.

03:29:14

I've watched Kevin and Jen walk through this. And I've seen the hell that it's put them through. And it's not fair to them.

03:29:23

It's not just. It's not just. So... We've done it because we care about them and we care about the future and we care about the kids that are still there.

03:29:35

We care about anybody that might stumble back into that place like Jen had commented. So, we don't like it.

03:29:43

It causes, it stirs stuff up when we have to start going back into this. And quite frankly, that isn't always good.

03:29:50

But, we do it because we think it's important to protect others.

03:29:58

So, I'm going to see myself out. If there's ever anything else you guys need or if there's anything else that comes up.

03:30:11

And I'm going to wait a week. And if that video can't... They're gonna see this probably tonight.

03:30:18

They're probably watching in the darkness somewhere. If that video is not up in a week and they haven't taken it down,

03:30:26

I'll know. And we'll get it downloaded somehow. I'm just, you should...

03:30:34

They don't have a... They don't get to attack people in private, which is pretty... I'm pretty sure is what that video was all about.

03:30:41

So, thanks guys. That I'm sure is a way to discredit us, yeah. Thanks guys.

03:30:47

Thank you for being on. Thank you all for being on tonight. Have a good night. And as Andrew says, keep striving for eternity.