Is the Evangelical Free Church Becoming Woke?

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Welcome once again to Conversations at Matt's Podcast. I'm your host John Harris. Today with a special guest, we have a pastor in the

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Evangelical Free Church, which is a denomination you have heard me talk about maybe once or twice before, but not that often.

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It doesn't, unfortunately, with the Southern Baptist Convention and the PCA and some of these other bigger denominations, that takes a lot of the time and the oxygen in this program.

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But you know what? The Evangelical Free Church is a pretty big denomination, and they're pretty influential, especially if you live in the

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Midwest. I think the Pacific Northwest, there's a lot of churches there, but they're all over the country. We have a pastor with us,

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Jeff Kleewer, who is a pastor at Cornerstone Church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. There's a website that you can go to to find out more about him and the work that him and other pastors are doing in the denomination.

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It's called efcaandsocialjustice .wordpress .com. You can find examples of what we're going to be talking about in this particular program.

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I want to let everyone know as well, if you want to get Pastor Kleewer's books on social justice, you can go to Amazon.

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You can get both of these. I have them both in my hand, Blood Red Church and Woke Free Church. With that,

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Pastor Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to us about this and really help people in the

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EFCA. Well, thanks for having me, John. I appreciate what you say about the

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EFCA. It is a large denomination. I think it's 1 ,500 or so churches. It's biblically sound in so many ways and a rich heritage of where stands it written, just fidelity to the scripture.

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It's a movement that I love. It's a denomination that I love and have been a part of since 2016.

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It's a hard thing to see some woke tendencies coming into the

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EFCA. It's painful to have to address those things. It's not something that brings pleasure to any of us who are making a stand against social justice in the denomination, but it's because of the glory of God.

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We need to uphold the glory of God in all things and the scripture teaching us what is true.

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The souls of men and women and boys and girls are at stake in this dispute regarding social justice because of all the forces that I'm seeing in America today that lead people astray and create kind of, as you've written about,

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John, in your book, Social Justice Goes to Church, it's almost a whole religion that's separate from Christianity.

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I guess I'll just start by sharing a little bit about where I've come from and how I've gotten into this.

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I was an inner city missionary from 2004 to 2016 in one of the worst neighborhoods in America in Kensington in Philadelphia.

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We'd had the blessing of ministering in teen clubs and kids club ministries and saw the hand of God's favor in the ministry and got to baptize maybe 100 or so young people.

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Over the last 10 years, I've seen maybe a dozen or two dozen of those converts apostatize away from Christianity.

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We've seen them run off after things like Islam and LGBTQ teachings, but the underlying theme and the ideology that's driven them away from Christ has been social justice.

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It's been the woke teachings about how the missionaries that came to them were colonizers.

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They were there to push a white religion upon them. The ones who have left have, by and large, done so because of race and somewhat also the

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LGBTQ issue. I've seen the damage that it's done to lives. These are people that I love deeply and care about very much.

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I want to see them come back to the faith, but it's like they're caught in a stronghold of woke ideology.

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It's leading people away from the faith and it's hurting people. It's keeping people captured in a victim mentality.

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Especially in the city where we were, there was a great emphasis upon how society and race is holding people back from accomplishing their dreams and goals.

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I've just seen the damage that it's done, and that's what brought me into the fight. When I saw the tendencies happening in the

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EFCA, I was shocked. I didn't expect it, but then really felt a strong call from God to begin to speak up against it.

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DAVE SMITH Yeah, that's good. I admire your bravery in coming on this podcast to talk about it.

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I'm sure there's other public information out there. We had another pastor on, I know, earlier in the year to talk about some of these issues with the

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EFCA. I don't sense any kind of ax to grind.

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It's just a motivation of love that, as you said, there's people who are captive to these false ideologies.

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We want them to be set free in the name of Jesus. You, not in our minds, but in the minds of some in your denomination, we'll say in the upper echelon,

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I don't know exactly how your polity works, but they haven't really taken too kindly to some of the things you've said.

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Is that correct? BRANDON Yeah, to say the least. Before I tell that tale and how that's gone down,

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I just wanted to underscore the objective fact that woke teachings have entered into the

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EFCA. I don't want to spend this podcast proving that fact again, because that's what that website,

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EFCA and socialjustice .wordpress .com, sets out to prove. But just some of the examples of it is like platforming

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Jarvis Williams at the theology conference in 2018, where he says that, first of all, not all black folk are woke.

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He makes that comment there and he says, you can tweet that. So, this is what he's pushing. But I'll read a couple of quotes from that 2018, the cross and racial reconciliation.

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He says this, racial reconciliation may not be a good term because it implies we ever had a relationship in the first place.

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He said, every system, every structure and our churches were built upon the backs of black and brown people because their skin was not white.

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He says, there is racism by intent and racism by consequence. You can have racism without any individual racists.

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You can't separate evangelicalism from white supremacy. And then speaking of Luke's use of language regarding justice, he says that that, social justice, is the gospel in Luke's gospel.

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And then again, not all black folk are woke. So, that's just one example. This is Jarvis Williams.

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Yeah, he came to the EFCA to speak to these issues and not only him, but Carl Ellis and a bunch of other kind of woke teachers pushed that in 2018.

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Same year that David Platt did the same at Gospel Coalition. It's fascinating to me how, because I've covered

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Jarvis Williams because he's a Southern Baptist and at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It's fascinating to me how cross denominationally these ideas infiltrate and they're sharing speakers and platforms.

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And so, yeah, as soon as you said Jarvis Williams, I didn't even need to hear anymore. I knew exactly what you're dealing with.

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So, he was platformed in 2018 at, was this a national conference you said? National Theology Conference where they took up race as the subject of the conference.

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Okay. Now, this is pre -2020. Moving forward, did things get even more focused on that during 2020?

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Yeah, definitely. All kinds of woke teaching coming through the national website. The denomination has had a diversity officer in place for a number of years until just this last month, somebody stepped down,

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Alex Mandes. He was kind of the main guy, but before him was Alvin Sanders. In fact, here's a book that the denomination paid for and sent to all the

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EFCA pastors. It's called Bridging the Diversity Gap by Alvin Sanders. And the

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EFCA hired Alvin Sanders to be a diversity officer. And along with the book, we were given this letter introducing the book and saying that the

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EFCA wanted to put this in the hands of every pastor. So, therefore endorsing it and sending it to us.

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So, this is May of 2013. So, this is going back at least a decade that they've been pushing. And it certainly hasn't changed since 2020.

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And with the George Floyd stuff, it didn't calm down at all. Well, I am curious, what does a chief diversity officer for a denomination even do?

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I don't understand. That's a great question. So, here's a kind of a quote from his book.

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He's talking about how his job and he has a team of people to broaden the diversity agenda.

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Now, his concern was primarily ethnic, but he said, when you begin to push ethnic diversity, you'll hear about gender and sexuality and other things.

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So, he says, my primary response to these calls to broaden diversity is to frame the whole issue as an in and out group dynamic.

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The other is the other, whether they are the other racial group, the other social class or sexuality group, or the other in the forms of age or disability.

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I have a training team whose primary function is to develop specific training for topics such as poverty, gender, and sexuality.

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So, this is what he says he does. I think he goes at the time. Now, he's not with the EFCA anymore.

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This might have gone three or four years, and then after him came Alex Mandez, and then he's now gone.

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So, it doesn't really last that long, but it keeps recycling. I guess it's to go around to churches and teach them to be more multicultural and not to be so white, essentially, to broaden their diversity, but not only.

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Yeah, it sure did, especially in the language there on page 170. So, okay.

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So, you had Jarvis Williams. You have the diversity officer office, which I'm assuming is going to be filled at some point again.

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Yeah, and I pray not. I pray that the pushback that the denomination has received from these woke free pastors, there's about 30 of us or so that gather monthly for a

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Zoom call, and we're hoping to go and kind of push back against this. I'm hoping that the denomination says, you know what?

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We don't need a diversity officer. Now, they don't use that title, diversity officer, but it's the function of Alvin Sanders and the articles that came up from Alex Mandez during his time holding that platform at the national office.

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I'm hoping that they decide to take a different direction and say, you know what? This is not helping. It's divisive, fundamentally divisive.

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It's tearing churches apart, and maybe they just decide to start focusing on other things. Well, let me ask you this, because I get asked this question a lot about places like Liberty University or where I went to school,

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Southeastern or different denominations. They'll say, John, for example, is Liberty University woke, right?

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That's a very simple question. It's a yes or no question, and sometimes I can't answer it yes or no.

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I'll just say, well, I mean, it's a big place, and there's certainly elements of social justice that have made their way into various aspects, but no,

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I wouldn't say it's given over to that. I wouldn't say everyone there is like, right, and that's the question that I want to pose to you about the

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DFCA. Is it woke, or to what extent?

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So having Jarvis Williams, having a diversity officer, okay, red flags, but I mean, were these things that were just more symbolic because of political pressure and people don't really believe this, or is this making its way into pulpits and into other matters?

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I wouldn't call the denomination woke. I'd be gone. I'd be long gone if it was woke denomination. I've said that there are woke tendencies, and there's a push towards this.

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I think it's coming from certain individuals or a small group of people that have power in the leadership structure of the

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EFCA, and they've been trying to push this to make this the movement, as if the movement of the

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EFCA is toward diversity, inclusion, equity, and they insert it where they can.

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So I'll give you an example. We were at, just not that long ago, a year and a half ago,

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Bill Rydell, who pastors in Washington, D .C., came and taught on politics during the conference, and he had a number of things that were very troubling that he pushed.

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I mean, he bashed the previous administration, the Trump administration. He made a strong point that January 6th was an insurrection.

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He had to squeeze that in to his teaching, that it was an insurrection. But then he offered some legitimacy to the progressive claim that there are societal factors that put a woman in a position where abortion could be a needed option.

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And the point of this is that he's arguing for political diversity. That's what he thinks his church represents, that kind of like David Platt had trumpeted about his church, that you can have a

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Republican and a Democrat sitting right next to each other, and this is like good diversity in the church, but it ignores the fact that the

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Democratic Party platform is for the slaughter of innocent babies right up to the moment of delivering the baby, or maybe 21 days after in some

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Democratic teaching. So there's an ideological difference there that's moral and ethical, and we have to make a

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Christian stand against abortion, but he's seeing the Democratic way of looking at it as just a diverse opinion that we need to honor in the church and respect, and then even trumpet that as a good thing because of the political diversity in the church.

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So he came out and taught this to the conference. I think most of the pastors sitting there, at least the ones that I heard from, all disagreed entirely with what this particular teacher was saying,

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Bill Rydell was teaching that. He also said we want Christians working as staffers in Democratic offices, so you can go work for Nancy Pelosi as a

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Christian and push her agenda and support her agenda. Well, I think most of the pastors in the

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EFCA completely disagree with that, and certainly the people sitting in the pews disagree with that entirely, and yet he's the one who's given the platform at the conference to push that ideology.

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So I was one of the pastors that raised my hand when Bill Rydell taught that, and I said, you know, when the

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Nazi party was slaughtering six million Jews, we didn't say that Christians should work in support of that, but they've gone out of bounds.

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They've crossed a line where you can no longer support that party. What's different about the

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Democratic party that's now killing 60 million babies and wanting that to continue?

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How is that different? I asked that calmly, seated. I had raised my hand. He had called upon me, and instead of answering the question or even deferring, he shamed me publicly in front of everybody and said, are you

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Jeff? And then I said, yeah. He said, well, I've been trying to email you to talk about these things because of your book, you know, but I said

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I never got an email from you. And he said, oh, well, I was copied on a thread in which he was reading what was going back between me and another person.

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And in any case, he said, your question is completely against the tenor of this presentation, and we're not going to address that, and moved on to the next questioner.

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Well, okay, that's evidence that he's pushing this. He kind of has a group of people around him that agree with him.

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It doesn't indicate that the EFCA is going woke. It indicates that some people who have that platform are going woke, right?

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But here's another troubling aspect following that up. Just a week later at the board of ministerial standing meeting, so he's up there in the board of ministerial standing.

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He tells these pastors that I created quite a disturbance at the conference, and he had to rebuke me in front of everyone.

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So, he goes to the board of ministerial standing to kind of poison the well against what

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I'm teaching. So, he has kind of that inroad, this being Bill Rydell, to try to push this agenda and silence anybody who stands up against it, even questioning it.

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But you know, truth doesn't mind being questioned. If we have true doctrine that we are preaching, we should be willing to be questioned and to defend that.

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But here's the thing, John, since I released Woke Free Church, no one has been willing to open the book and address anything written in it.

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As much as I've been condemned, and then we'll get to the story of how my credential is now placed under discipline, at no point has anyone ever provided to me one quote, one page number in the book, where I have erred in my teaching.

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Wow. So, I listened to that speech by Bill Rydell that you just referenced, and it's funny that I missed a little bit of what you just talked about, and I think you're 100 % on point there.

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The thing that jumped out at me was he, and I'll play the clip when we post this, but he makes the case that the left and the right both have these inadequate gospels, and we need them both in order to have a complete gospel, which to me makes me want to ask the question, what's the gospel to you then?

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What's, if it's got this political component that you need these complementary Democrat and Republican pieces to make complete somehow, then that's policy, that's actions the government takes, that would be in the category of works, right?

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Not grace, and it's the same way that Tim Keller has talked about the need for a gospel that reconciles social gospel with the fundamentalist gospel, and I see this as the project that social justice activists in the church have been trying to forward for the last 40, 50 years.

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They've been wanting to try to merge social gospel, and this is heresy essentially, false gospel with the true gospel, and they call it the fundamentalist gospel or the individual gospel, but that's the true gospel.

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That's what we're given. That's what Paul talks about in Galatians. You can't add to this, and they want to add something to it.

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Progressive Christianity tends to gut the gospel. There's a heavy focus on creation.

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God made this world, and it's good, and God made people, and people were made with the image and likeness of God, and we need to uphold the imago

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Dei, and the imago Dei shapes the way we understand the value of human life and dignity and the way that we need to cultivate that, and then we talk a lot about the kingdom of God.

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Jesus is going to come and restore and redeem and renew all things for his glory, and then the responsibility of Christians and churches becomes how do we steward creation well, and how do we bring the coming kingdom in its fullness into our lives and systems now?

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Do you see this? That it becomes about justice and seeing how sin has destroyed earthly systems that we need to see redeemed, and what happens, though, is that there can be a tendency in those emphases to get a little squeamish about personal sin, a need for repentance, a bloody cross, and if you go far enough, this can push toward the social gospel.

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These are not new debates. These are hundred -plus year -old debates in our country alone, and so there can be a temptation toward a gutted gospel on the

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Christian left for progressives to—and if you follow that, you might make disciples, but not of Jesus.

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The irony is that you'll end up looking to politics as your savior, but this perspective fails to account fully for human depravity in a personal level and the need for a personal encounter with the

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Son of God, and so it can implement Christian perspectives and call people to Christian renewal without Christ as central.

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Okay, now we'll go to the right, just in case any of you just got too comfortable. On the conservative side,

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Christians can tend to truncate the gospel. You want to talk about sin, personal responsibility, you are broken, you are fallen, you are depraved,

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Jesus died in your place for your sin, come in repentance and find life in him. Yes and amen, right?

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But there can be a tendency here to minimize the importance of seeing the goodness in God's created world, to have theological systems that enable and enhance an escapist mentality, that we forget to read

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Romans 8, which tells us that all of creation is groaning, longing for what?

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The day of its redemption. And so we get perspectives like, the whole world's going to burn anyway, you just got to get right with Jesus and everything will be solved.

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And we know that that's not the case. And what happens is that the irony here is that often that leads to an over -conflation of civil religion into politics that wrongly conflates, and so you get these calls, right, where you'll see people that will say, you know,

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I don't want to get into all these issues of creation care or justice, I don't, you know,

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God's kingdom is coming, it's not here now, and so we get separatistic, and it can get to a point where you hear the cry of like, hey, just preach the gospel.

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But often that means I want to be more concerned with personal rights than collective good, and ignoring the fact that the gospel is more than our individual salvation stories.

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The route you took was great, I think, to just ask a legitimate question, if we're going to do this moral equivalency thing, and that highlights the ethical issue, but there's a soteriological issue somewhere along the line here that I think is running in the background, at least

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I see that. 100 % John, I would say Bill Rydell would say that the progressive

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Christian at his church is preaching a true gospel, and if I'm wrong to appraise his teaching that way, then he should come and defend what he was really saying.

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He should interact on it, because that is what he was saying in that speech, Politics and Christian Witness, it's available on the

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EFCA website. Oh, it is, okay. Yeah. Well, the other thing you sent me,

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I don't know if you want to go into this now, is another Bill Rydell sermon. Was that just from his church? Yeah, that was just from his church to give you a flavor of what he teaches, yeah.

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Okay, and I'll play some clips from that as well, so people can get a flavor there of the white privilege and things like that he's advocating, soft

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CRT ideas. The problem with colorblindness is that it actually perpetuates white supremacy, and it minimizes the suffering of people that don't look like you or denies it entirely.

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If you are here and you are white, you need to hear what W .E .B.

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Du Bois said in 1903, he said this, it's a peculiar sensation. I say if you're white, because for most of you that are here, that are members of our church, are attending our church, learning about our church, that are people of color, this is something that you know innately that some of us have to learn, that it's a peculiar sensation, he said, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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One ever feels his two -ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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If you haven't experienced this double consciousness of soul, then you need to hear that this exists and it's real, and you need to talk to people in your life who can help you to understand this struggle.

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Jarvis Williams had a book that has been released called One New Man that's kind of technical. It gets into the

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Greek text, but it works through Romans three to five in particular. That has helped shape some of my perspectives here.

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Our history as a nation includes race as a construct that was created by European slave owners who believed that black heathens had no souls.

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All right, so that's Bill Rydell, and so he's been platformed by the EFCA, I guess, in various ways, and your objection, and then the books you've written, like Woke Free Church here, these have led you then on this path to getting,

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I don't know if you want to talk about that next, but getting in hot water with the denomination. Yeah, so from this point, it just,

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I think, moves from one level of bizarre to the next. So for Bill Rydell to go and tell bombs that I created quite a disturbance by raising my hand and asking a question that really did poison the well against me.

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I think for those who were kind of neutral to this conversation, maybe barely read the book or didn't read it, they're hearing from him and probably trusting him that I'm just this rabble rouser that's trying to have some kind of agenda, some personal agenda, rather than genuinely caring about souls and the glory of God and the health of the

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EFCA and churches. John, I'll tell you, as we have continued to preach the truth about these issues,

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Cornerstone has grown, but there's been such unity in our church, in Mount Laurel.

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The genuine teaching of Scripture unites people. Unity comes around truth.

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It's not forced by telling people to be quiet and just agree. It comes from the truth, and I think that's what

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Ephesians 4, 1 -6 includes, of maintaining the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

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You can't neglect the truth in order to attain that. So I say that it's moved from one level of bizarre to the next.

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So I then, after that first interaction, well, in fact, prior to Bill Rydell's speech, the

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EFCA sent a letter to the pastors in response to my book.

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They never contacted me and debated it or, you know, did the Matthew 18 kind of thing. Instead, they sent a letter to the

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EFCA East pastors telling them how bad I am, essentially.

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They said that while I was pursuing my ordination, I was writing a book against the

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EFCA, and then I joined a movement that I was against. It said a number of things of this nature, that I didn't agree with the

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EFCA statement of faith, this letter was kind of like a public shaming rather than dealing with the actual content of woke free church.

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And as far as the timing of my ordination, I joined the EFCA in 2016 when

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I became an EFCA pastor. And then I did the first level of ordination in 2017. And then you have to wait three years until the final ordination, which

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I finished in February of 2021. Well, in the spring of 2021, there was a teaching given by Greg Strand and Michael Rice that I address later.

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I write a book after that in the summer of 2021 and then release it. Well, all this to say, it was bizarre that they would publicly send a letter to the pastors against my book rather than heeding the call to repent in the book.

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The book is gracious towards the people that I criticize. I will quote them and say,

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I will criticize some of their teaching. But for example, with Greg Strand, I was very careful to give praise and honor where it was due.

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His wonderful work on the EFCA statement of faith. When I did my ordination thesis, he gave me great feedback and encouragement.

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And I talk about that in the book, like how he's been a help to me in that regard. But I did criticize his platforming of Jarvis Williams and Esau McCulley and the

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Sam Albury, Vaughn Roberts, Rebecca McLaughlin, people that he was quoting and recommending.

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So, all that to say, this letter was sent to the pastors rather than ever opening the book and dealing with the actual call to repent.

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So, that was one level of it. Should I just move on to where it gets even more extreme?

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So, they send that. And then I'm questioned in February of 2022.

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They send Bill Kynes and the same guy who wrote the letter against me to all the pastors,

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Tony Balsamo, and a couple other people, some who said they hadn't read the book, to come and talk to me.

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This is February of 2022. I have my Greek New Testament and the book,

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Woke Free Church. I give everybody at the table a copy of Woke Free Church. And I'm hoping to debate these things, to look into the substance of the claim that I'm making.

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But throughout the course of that meeting, I kept hearing from them that I've misrepresented, that I've had a bad attitude, that I can't be corrected, but they refuse to open the book or provide even one example.

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One of the leaders kept saying, well, I'm telling you that you've misrepresented and you're going to be reprimanded.

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You're going to lose your credential if you're not careful. And I said to him, I was like, I hear what you're telling me, that I've misrepresented broadly, but you're not opening this and showing me even one example of misrepresentation, which he didn't.

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Instead, he just got, things got more hostile and then they left. And in May of 2022,

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I got a letter from the EFCA, from the Board of Ministerial Standing National, charging me officially with four charges.

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The first one is Christian nationalism. The second one was misrepresentation, which by this,

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I'm understanding that they mean that I haven't appraised rightly the teachings of the

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EFCA or Greg Strand or whoever. Misrepresentation, attitude, because I'm convinced that I'm right, you know, and can't be corrected by those who disagree with me.

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And then lastly, influence, that I have influence. So I was actually told if I don't repent by September of 2022, then my credential would be taken away.

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That would not defrock, but it would be take, I'd have to send it in and it would be held in discipline until which time

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I repent. Wow. Wow.

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I don't even know where to start. These charges are interesting to me because I don't know how influence is a charge, but misrepresentation seems to be the main one behind all this.

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Because Christian nationalism, again, it's a vacuous term to try to charge someone with.

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There's like 10 different versions of it. And you're not a Christian nationalist, as you told me off air.

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So where is this at now then? What's going to happen? You're appealing this, right?

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Do you have any expectation? You might not be able to share that, what's the next step?

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I do have hope. So they did find me guilty on those three charges, influence, attitude, misrepresentation.

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But the winds of Christian nationalism kind of blew in the opposite direction.

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After May of 2022, Al Mohler started saying, well, I'm a Christian nationalist. And so then in October of 2022, they found me not guilty of Christian nationalism.

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So I don't know why they charged me with it in the first place, but I'm glad to see that they've taken that off the table.

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But the other ones remained. And so I'm still under discipline. So I found in the bylaws of the

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EFCA that the board of ministerial standing is accountable to the conference.

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The EFCA has always been a bottom -up congregational denomination.

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It's never been this top -down where you have certain ecclesiastical powers that dictate what you must do and then punish you if you don't.

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It's always been ground up, bottom up. So the conference actually holds accountable this board of ministerial standing.

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So I appealed to the conference and that meets in June, 2023. So I understand from the moderator of the board of directors that at the

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Wednesday, June 21st meeting, the business meeting of the conference, that I'll have an opportunity to speak and to appeal formally the treatment that I've received since publishing

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Woke Free Church. Well, that's amazing to me that publishing this book and then asking a very simple question would be the things that get you charged with these...

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Well, I don't know if it's defrocked, what the term is, but taking away... It's essential. Yeah. Okay. So defrocked.

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And to me, if I was in the... I'm not in your denomination, but if I was, that would scare me to some extent.

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And it's not because I think everyone in the denomination is woke or it's compromised on the church pulpit level in every sense, but I would be concerned that at the top levels, there's some people who want power, and I'm not putting these words in your mouth,

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I'm saying them just from what you've told me, but who want power, who want control, and aren't approaching things in a biblical way.

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They're not taking... They're not even correcting you or giving you the opportunity to repent for specific things if they're not giving you references from your book where they have a problem.

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So my question, I guess, is where do you go from here? And I don't mean you personally, but people in the

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EFCA who are concerned. I know you have this website, efcaandsocialjustice .wordpress

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.com, but what do you want people to do to try to change the denomination into less of what it's becoming?

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Yeah, that's the perfect question. We need them to go to that website and actually sign it. We've asked them to sign the

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Dallas Statement. We didn't think we needed to reinvent the wheel, but just to have people sign that and then let us know on that website that they've signed the

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Dallas Statement, we'll have a list of EFCA pastors and we'll gather momentum that way. But John, the reason that I feel that it's important for me to stand up for justice and how

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I'm being treated, it really has to do with the broader context of other people who will be treated the same way.

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There's another pastor, I think he's in Maryland. His name is David Whitney. And he, during COVID, was preaching very strongly that churches need to remain open and the masking in churches and all that was nonsense.

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And the same people, Bill Rydell, Bill Kynes, and another guy named Guy Kneebone, came to him and said, you're not really part of the

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EFCA. You don't have the same mentality. You're more of a fundamentalist. You need to get out of this denomination.

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And he said, no, you don't really have an authority to tell me to do that. Well, now behind the scenes, they've worked mechanisms kind of on this fishing expedition to find ways to kick him out of the denomination because he teaches such conservative theology and practice.

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And I just think that's not right. It comes to me like Paul, when he had been mistreated and abused, thrown into jail in Philippi, and they realized kind of the error of their way and they say, well, just leave now.

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And in Acts 16, 37, he said, they have beaten us publicly. And then he says, no, let them come and escort us out.

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And I think the reason he did that was because he had concern for the Philippian church that he'd be leaving behind.

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If this is how the board of ministerial standing is treating me, I'm thinking there's gotta be a

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David Whitney out there and beyond others that if they teach quote unquote

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Christian nationalism or anything conservative against the woke movement, the eventual ordination of female pastors or the

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Sam Albury perspective of being same sex attracted, that's sort of something they've pushed largely.

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Rebecca McLaughlin and all that, Vaughn Roberts, all of these. If there's a pastor that speaks up against that, the powers that be are intent on pushing that pastor out of the denomination.

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And the reason I'm speaking out is to say, no, I mean, I could easily take Cornerstone and just be a

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Bible church, right? We're just gonna be a community church. We'll just leave the EFCA. But then it's gonna be the same thing as Desert Hills when they left.

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The denomination just goes rolling on and drifting farther and farther left. But I'm convinced that there are more pastors that are with us than that are against us.

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I don't think that the pastors of the EFCA want to be a woke denomination. Well, you know, this is the same issue in the

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SBC because it sounds like there's a similar polity structure here. They're like, yeah.

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And the denominations are so close. It sounds like they influence one another, especially the SBC influencing the

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EFCA. But it's interesting to me that you have these denominations that are mostly conservative, both politically and theologically.

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And the guys who get into control don't represent those views. And it's always been a conundrum.

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I think I have an explanation kind of for it. But one of the things is the pressure gets immense when you get to those levels and the pressure to conform to the direction the world's going and to appease the world, to ingratiate oneself to power, to make sure that as the world is coming to hunt for the church, you let them know, hey, we're not those evil

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Christians you've heard about. We're different than that. And I don't know if that explains it all, but it's a problem in a lot of other denominations, not just the

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EFCA. And the thing that's needed more than anything is for men who are strong.

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And I would put you in this category, men who have conviction to be OK with being called names, to stand up for the truth and to say, you know what,

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I'm going to be slandered. They're going to misrepresent things. They're going to look through my, you know, my laundry to see what they can find.

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But I'm just going to keep standing here and standing tall and standing up for the truth.

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And, you know, I think that's contagious. People see that and it inspires them to do the same. And so I would just ask anyone listening right now is pray for the

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EFCA, pray for Pastor Jeff, pray for the others who are behind this effort,

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EFCA and socialjustice .wordpress .com, that they would stand strong and that people would stand behind them.

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And that's the only way that I can see the denomination correcting, course correction. But anyway, is there anything else you wanted to share about this?

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The floor is open to you. I appreciate that, John. Yeah, I think just for as many pastors to make it to that business meeting in June 21st,

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I think it is, at the big conference, it's only every other year. So if we're going to correct course and we're going to discuss these things, we need guys to stand up and to be bold and the righteous are as bold as a lion, you know, the wicked flee while no one pursues.

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We have nothing to be ashamed of. If we're speaking the truth, we should be willing. And that's the whole ethos of the free church movement.

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If there's going to be a church movement in America to stand for freedom and liberty and against church lockdowns and forced injections and masking and all the nonsense that the government is going to try to press down upon the churches, shouldn't it be the free church?

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That's the heritage of the free church movement in Scandinavia. Now in America, it was never really that big of a deal because you didn't have government intrusion upon churches.

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But now we do have that again. Look up in Canada with James Coates and Tim Stevens and this guy who got arrested last week for preaching at a drag queen story hour.

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The government comes down hard. They'll lock you up. Well, where are the pastors who are going to stand up and say, no, we're free?

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Why not the free church? This is our heritage. Why don't we return to that? I think the free church, the best years of the evangelical free church in America are ahead.

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As we come together to make a stand, where stands it written? Stand upon the word of God, not upon the woke indoctrination of the world that's going to be creeping in and pushing us leftward.

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No, where is the denomination in America where Christians stand for the truth of God's word?

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And I believe it's the free church. I think that there are enough of us that believe this way, that this is the future of the evangelical free church in America.

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Well, with that, Pastor Cleaver, we appreciate your time and your efforts in this. We'll be praying for you.

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Keep us updated. Let me know what happens, especially after June. I'm going to be curious to find out what directions things go in and the

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Lord will build his church. So we just take comfort in that, that no matter what happens at the denominational level, his plan is going to be accomplished.

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So God bless you. Everyone, check out the efcaandsocialjustice .wordpress

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.com for more information. And John, I want to say on behalf of David Whitney and Craig Chambers, who you had on earlier, thank you for standing in this fight because you do have a platform and people do hear what you say, whereas we tend to be kind of little churches, little church pastors, and don't necessarily have the platform.

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And what really frustrates us is the national leadership pushing their platform in one direction, constantly towards the diversity, inclusion, equity.

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So we appreciate a guy like you and A .D. Robles and others who have made stands and give a voice to kind of the little guy that we want to hold the line and say, where stands it written?

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So thank you. We appreciate you, brother. Oh, well, my pleasure. I don't think, I feel like I wish there was more

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I could do. It's just a podcast, but hopefully this will get to a lot of EFCA churches and members who listen to this.