Alex Kocman: Immigration, Borders, and Ethnic Diversity! Is it biblical? DMW#246

Dead Men Walking

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:07

Is ethnic diversity the ultimate goal of the church? Stick around. Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between.

00:18

Broadcasting from an undisclosed location. Dead Men Walking starts now.

00:30

Oh, well, hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking podcast. I'm your host,

00:36

Greg Moore. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for telling a friend. Thanks for checking out dmwpodcast .com and our merch site, which helps support the show.

00:44

Oh man, it's been a fun few weeks. Just got back from hunting with my son up north.

00:50

His first time bow hunting. He's been practicing with his compound bow all summer.

00:57

He's 10. No, we didn't see anything though. It's a little too warm in Northern Michigan. I think we were in the mid 60s.

01:03

Stuff wasn't moving around. My brother and his son went. They did see a four point. But other than that, didn't see too much.

01:10

It was a good time. By the time you're hearing this, I'm stacked a few episodes deep. You will probably,

01:16

I'll probably be back from Fort Worth, Texas at the Fight Left Feast Conference.

01:21

And next week we'll be uploading some of our interviews and stuff we did there. So look forward to that.

01:27

This week we had Alex Cockman on or Cokeman on, excuse me. And we talked about immigration borders.

01:35

We talked about, what did we talk about? Ethnic diversity, is it important?

01:42

And let me read you a little bio here of Alex, because I mean, he is just all over the place doing all kinds of cool stuff.

01:50

He's a husband, father, student of four, writer, podcaster, church leader, missions advocate.

01:57

He does the missions podcast. He is the director of communications and engagement for ABWE, which will be linked up below.

02:05

He also did a podcast that I was looking at called The Worldview Cloud of Witnesses, which is a storytelling kind of podcast about some of the stuff that missionaries are doing around the world.

02:15

And like I said, The Worldview on YouTube, which is very interesting as well. We'll have that all linked up in the description below if you wanna click on that, check out what

02:22

Alex is doing. But a very interesting conversation on this shift in churches to really make ethnic diversity the number one goal.

02:33

And him saying, well, you know, that's not what the Bible says. And how do we evangelize?

02:39

How do we do missions in light of the church really taking on this leftist view of social justice and CRT?

02:46

And you know, I think this is a timely podcast, especially with all the David Platt stuff coming out. There's a documentary that got released on YouTube that's getting a lot of traction and kind of how he shifted his church from that.

02:57

We've seen that shift in even like Matt Chandler and those guys in the shifting of making ethnic diversity and really being lax on immigration and rule of law and just saying, oh, well, that's our new mission field.

03:11

And Alex pushed back on that a little bit as someone who is, like I said, in the trenches in this really as the

03:18

Director of Communication Engagement for ABWE, excuse me.

03:26

And it was just a fun conversation, not too long. I think we went 30 minutes or so, but really dug into immigration, biblically what that means, ethnic diversity, what that means,

03:39

CRT a little bit in the churches and how we combat that. So all in all, a very interesting episode.

03:45

I hope you guys enjoy it. I will be back next week, hopefully overviewing, reviewing, showing you guys all the fun stuff that went on at the

03:55

Fight, Laugh, Feast Conference in Fort Worth, Texas. All right, next voices you hear will be myself and Alex Kochman, thanks.

04:03

All right, Alex, hey man, thanks for coming on Dead Man Walking Podcast. Appreciate your time, brother. Greg, it's good to be here.

04:08

Thanks for having me. Yeah, so we talked a little bit offline. We've shot some stuff back and forth on Twitter, but I really don't know too much about you.

04:16

And then I started deep diving into some of the stuff you do on YouTube, obviously some of your tweets. And I was like,

04:21

I'm gonna like this brother if he comes on the podcast, we're gonna become quick friends here. Just give us a little, just a little two minute, in the intro and I'll link everything up, but just give a little intro of like who you are.

04:33

Well, the less you know, the better. But if you insist, so I'm Alex Kochman.

04:39

I'm blessed to have a wife and four kids. We're here in Central Pennsylvania. My day job is as Director of Communications with ABWE.

04:48

ABWE is a global mission with about a thousand workers reaching into 89 countries.

04:54

And so it's super exciting to serve here and get to ultimately celebrate and serve missionaries by telling stories of what the

05:01

Lord is doing through their ministries around the world. Of course, proclaiming the gospel also means engaging culture.

05:06

And so you'll also see, we put out a lot of content here, including shows like the worldview, which you'll see on my

05:13

X page, as well as on ABWE's YouTube. You'll see the missions podcast on every place where podcasts are found.

05:20

We also have cloud of witnesses, which is a little bit more story -driven, talking about what historic and veteran missionaries have done over the years, some of those untold stories.

05:29

And of course, we've got other publications going on here as well. So I'm privileged to serve in that way, also serve as an elder and on staff at Faith Bible Fellowship Church of York.

05:39

And it's good to be here. Nice, I love it. You know, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about what we wanted to discuss today, things like immigration and open borders, race and diversity in the church is because you're actually someone who's doing missions, who is connected to that.

05:57

And a lot of times I see, and not that you have to be doing it to have an opinion on it, but I wanted to get your opinion on these things because you're someone who's like down in the trenches, you're cross -ethnicity, you're cross -country, global.

06:12

I think it gives a unique perspective when you actually work in that. And then on top of that, having a biblical foundation.

06:18

So what I want to touch on today, if you don't mind a little bit, is talking about the immigration and open borders.

06:23

And I'll just set this up a little bit that we have really seen a shift within liberal Christianity, a softer shift within big

06:30

Eva, big evangelicalism, that we don't really necessarily need borders or if we have borders and they're not being enforced, that's okay because immigration allows us to kind of enter the mission field.

06:44

And I see this very pacifist kind of Jesus being presented as in like, we don't really need rule of law, amen, just go and love people and don't really point out sin and don't really point out what

06:58

Christ did on the cross. But if we can just socially love people, I mean, that's really being a Christian. And we kind of see this over the last five to 10 years, really taking root.

07:07

So I want to talk to you a little bit about that. Like what is the biblical foundation of immigration and open borders?

07:13

Do we have one at all? Or what should we model it on? I know that's a lot of subject matter there to just dump on you, but where do you stand on that?

07:22

And what's your biblical opinion on that? Well, I love the way that you set up that question because my passion is not to discuss issues that are merely political.

07:31

I mean, the political realm matters, but my primary interest is as someone whose role it is to advance the

07:38

Great Commission through the local churches that we partner with. And yet you can't send workers to take the gospel to the nations without first asking, what is a nation?

07:47

It's sort of interesting, that question of what is a nation? You know, Jesus said, make disciples of all of the nations,

07:53

Pantata, Ethne. That's a question that missiologists have thrown around for years. And suddenly I'm finding mainstream political commentators vexed over that same question.

08:02

I actually think that the missions community has something that we can offer people on that particular question.

08:09

One of the beautiful things about scripture is that in the Eschaton, at the destination point of history, you see every distinct nation gathered, worshiping the

08:20

Lamb, which tells me, number one, the focus is not merely on the smattering and multiplicity and collage of human cultures.

08:28

The center is the Lamb, right? He's the one we should be most passionate about. But then secondarily, that nations and peoples do matter.

08:37

And they don't lose their identity at the end of history, they retain it. And it's through that unique identity that they glorify

08:44

God. And so however you exactly want to articulate your view of what the nations are, their distinctness matters.

08:52

And for us as a mission agency, we're sending people from one nation, one context typically to another.

08:58

And not always, sometimes we're working with partners and we're working with near neighbors of one people group going to another.

09:04

But very oftentimes we're talking about sending someone from one nation and language and culture and context into another.

09:11

I remember a conversation with my friend, Brooks Buser a few years ago, he's the president of Radius International.

09:18

And he shared that after he got off the mission field, he served reaching the Yembe Yembe people in Papua New Guinea and they were able to take them from a totally unreached language group to a people among whom there's a thriving church, there's scripture available in their language.

09:34

And he was able to do all of that through the type of difficult, traditional pioneering type of ministry work, missionary effort that used to be historically celebrated.

09:46

And nowadays we're afraid to advance that model of missions for fear of appearing colonial or imperial or something to that effect.

09:54

But when he came back and he was in the States, he attended a large conference, primarily pastors.

10:01

And he was told there by someone like, well, you're not woke enough because you don't understand your privilege.

10:08

And he looked at that and he's like, I don't think you know what I do. And that was a source of conversation, of course, relearning what was happening in American culture while he had been away on the mission field.

10:21

But in many ways, I feel like the modern tendency to want to blur distinctions between nations and peoples and advance sort of this modern secular hollow view of multiculturalism.

10:34

I think in a lot of ways, it's a counterfeit of what scripture actually gives us, which is this holistic picture of each nation with all its distinctness, redeemed, standing before the lamb, adoring the lamb, and then taking all of their uniqueness of language and culture and music and everything that each people group contributes and then using that to glorify

10:56

God ultimately in the new creation, but then even now in the kingdom of Christ. And so when it comes to nations, borders certainly matter.

11:05

I think we can all agree that rule of law is something that comes to us from God and there has to be order.

11:11

We are a people who Romans 13 submit to governing authorities. And so when we see some of these modern agendas that want to blur all of those distinctions,

11:19

I think what's actually being sold to us is a counterfeit of missions. And I think the biblical picture of winning the nations to Christ is actually a far more compelling picture than sort of the hollow secular globalist version that's offered to us instead.

11:36

Yeah, so a couple of things there. Let me see if I'm tracking with you. So, because I'm not too concerned about the policies of the pagans and the secular and the leftists, they're gonna have those policies and their father or their children of their father, the

11:50

Lord of this age, Satan. And so I'm more concerned with seeing some of these churches adopt this.

11:55

And I think you touched on it by saying they're being sold a false bill of sale.

12:02

Basically, this is what missions look like when it isn't actually biblical missions. And just to interject and not to get too crazy conspiracy here though, but if I was

12:10

Satan and I wanted to manufacture something that looked like light that was anti -Christ,

12:17

I would promote things like abortion and homosexuality to stop the procreation. I would create things like diversity and culture and all these keywords to mimic what it looks like around the throne in the end times, but is obviously, like you said, just a bad representation of that, a copy of that.

12:34

So I do see it as twofold. There are physical things going on in the world and people being fooled. There's also spiritual battles that we battle against and all

12:43

Satan does is just try to copy God. He can't emulate him perfectly like he is.

12:50

So I'm concerned with what you're seeing in churches adopting some of these things of going, well, we got 25 million, 11 million, 30 million, who knows?

13:03

Undocumented, illegal aliens essentially, but that's a bigger mission field for us. And do we really, it's mean if we say you can't come here.

13:11

They're just here because they want a better life, right? You hear all these things. So when you're talking to a believer, such as your friend did, who said, you're not woke enough and he's in, what would you say,

13:21

Pope, aren't you kidding? He's serving and doing all these things. It's insane to me that people use that type of language because it's just that they wanna label something but no action behind it.

13:31

Here, your friend is actual action and they say you're not woke enough. So when we're talking to a

13:37

Christian that kind of leans that way and says, well, I don't necessarily think enforcing the border is important or immigration needs to be open for all.

13:45

We just need to be nice and loving. What do you say to that believer in response biblically?

13:54

Well, first, I think biblically, it's actually fairly simple to look at Romans 13, to look at what

13:59

Peter says in first Peter two, and we are to be subject to the governing authorities, which sometimes is easier said than done, but ultimately the

14:08

Christian position can never be one of abject lawlessness. Occasionally the

14:14

Christian position can be one of civil disobedience, but never abject lawlessness, especially against the powers that God has ordained in the civic sphere.

14:22

But beyond that, I look at a church like ours and in our church, our church has had over a hundred year history.

14:29

We were planted in 1914 and our church has been through multiple deaths and resurrections.

14:37

And by God's grace, we've grown significantly since the pandemic. I think there's a lot of people looking for solid expository preaching, but in our church, we've seen a diversity of ethnic backgrounds and cultural backgrounds come into the church.

14:52

Now, don't get me wrong. It's not exactly the United Nations. It's a pretty culturally homogenous area.

14:58

Thank God for that though. Well, right. Yeah, on that level, yes. It's a pretty homogenous area, but we've definitely seen people maybe even leave the type of church that they're used to in their subculture and join our church, even though the music might not check all of their boxes and maybe the majority culture in our church is one that's very different from what they're used to, but they've joined because the gospel is preached with all of its jagged edges.

15:26

Christ is exalted. And the thing that we miss in all of these conversations about church planting, and I've seen it firsthand,

15:33

I've probably participated in it. There's this real managerial temptation in the church consulting, church planting, missiology world, where we wanna just take the perfect strategy, the perfect sociological insights, and just lay that over the church and expect the throne room scene to spontaneously manifest itself.

15:56

And in reality, when Christ is lifted up, he'll draw whomever he's drawing. And can we do things to get in the way of that?

16:03

Sure. And should we do things to get out of the way from that happening? Absolutely. And that's what missionaries do when they contextualize.

16:11

But for us, we didn't get to the point of having the people at the church that we do by aiming at that.

16:17

We're simply proclaiming Christ and the Lord is bringing or not bringing whoever he chooses to bring.

16:24

And so I think we have to bring that approach to the mission field and where we get ourselves in trouble is when we assume that missions is somehow different from that, right?

16:32

That here in the States, we're gonna lift up the word of God. We're gonna trust the spirit and the means that he's appointed in his word.

16:39

But then when we get to the mission field, it's almost like check all of that theology at the door and listen to just this expert consulting class with their strategies.

16:48

And we would say, no, we trust the gospel to do what only the gospel can do in drawing all of the nations to Christ.

16:56

We trust it as much to do that overseas as we do at home. And so that's the first level on which I would answer that question.

17:01

And then the second level as well is this is where I am privileged and I'm not in the trenches so much myself.

17:08

I am here at our headquarters. I have the privilege of this vantage point where I can see what other missionaries and workers in the world are doing.

17:16

And I love things like ABWE's Afghan initiative. So you were probably as appalled as I was when the

17:24

US pulled out of Afghanistan, what two years ago. And we saw people hanging off of airliners trying to get out of that country.

17:34

And we just saw awful things from a humanitarian standpoint, from a political standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint.

17:40

We saw this veil of darkness fall over that country again. And yet what

17:46

I love that ABWE did is where there's so many voices that wanna say, welcome the stranger, welcome the refugee.

17:53

And there's a place for those types of ministries. ABWE specifically said, let's work with believers,

18:02

Christians who are part of the underground church in Afghanistan who needed to find not only a place of refuge and safety, but also a place from which to minister.

18:12

And so we were able to bring several key Afghan families over who now they have fruitful evangelistic ministries to other

18:20

Afghan migrants and refugees. And some of the Muslims that they're reaching here in the

18:25

States are here legally. Maybe some of them aren't quite here legally. They're dealing with the mission field as it is, but they've been through it.

18:34

They've been chased by the Taliban, literally. And they're able to bring the gospel to their

18:40

Afghan brothers and sisters. And so I do think we can walk and chew gum and we can look at the cultural landscape and at the political sphere and say, man, here's a policy where if we're not enforcing it or if we're ignoring the rule of law, we're gonna be in trouble.

18:54

It's gonna be chaotic. And yet the Lord's opening doors evangelistically and churches are actually being planted with Afghan converts because we're able to look through some of that haze created by the culture and see where are the believers who are committed to the work of the gospel in the midst of this, and let's partner with them.

19:14

Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, and I'd be remissed anytime I hear Romans 13 quoted, I have to follow it up with verse three that says for rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.

19:25

Do you want to have no fear of that authority? And I think Paul sometimes gets twisted a little bit because he was so great at asking a question or making a point and then answering it right after that.

19:38

And then we kind of dropped the second part of that. So yes, we submit to authorities and then he's laying out, well, what do God ordained authorities look like?

19:45

And it's one who basically brings justice to evildoers and protects the righteous. And when you have a government that doesn't do that, that's where I think it gets a little fuzzy.

19:53

And you were talking about your mission stuff you guys did in Afghanistan.

19:59

I feel like I saw something about that. Like, did the national news media pick up your organization? I feel like I saw it somewhere.

20:07

Was it A -W -E, I mean, not that I'm aware of, man.

20:14

I feel like I saw that somewhere nationally. Like they were talking about a Christian organization that was doing that.

20:20

If you find that, send that to me. In reality, I think it's one of the angles of this that we don't look at because we do debate immigration at this public policy level, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

20:34

And are there missions doors being opened through it? Yes. Is there chaos happening globally?

20:40

Yes, both are true. And we should solve both problems in their respective spheres, in the church sphere and in the political sphere, the civil sphere as well.

20:50

Okay, so let's shift gears here for a minute because I also hear this a lot within the broader Western church, mostly a little more liberal churches.

20:59

When they link, you know, cause we're gonna jump from immigration to ethnic diversity, but they link those a lot.

21:05

And there's been a push and you've touched on it earlier, a push within churches to just go like, like ethnic diversity is like the number one thing.

21:14

Right now, as of this recording, and this might be a week or two later when people are hearing it, but the

21:20

David Platt documentary is very big this week. And you've seen guys like David Platt and even Matt Chandler and kind of shift over the last few years and really go towards the most important thing we can do in a church is be ethnically diverse.

21:34

And they don't really expand on that anymore, except for they kind of follow some very, I don't know,

21:40

I would say light CRT teachings of white man bad and everyone else good.

21:45

They don't have a lot of biblical documentation for that, but it feels very CRT and very progressive, even though they might not fully be immersing themselves in it, you look at that and you go, hmm, that seems a little concerning.

21:58

What's concerning for me is where do we find that in the Bible and of, you know, ethnic diversity being the number one thing.

22:07

And then two, what are some things when you have that as your number one goal that can actually blindside you to preaching the gospel, building the church, glorifying

22:15

God, all those things. What are some bad things that can happen if you focus too much on that?

22:21

And then ultimately, is it good to have ethnic diversity and is the terms we're using even the same?

22:26

Because I sometimes think sometimes we're using that differently. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I have plenty of concerns about some public voices and some ministries, especially over the last five years that have, yeah, it seems like there has been an influence, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

22:43

And I think even sometimes with the best of intentions, things like critical theory, I've not seen this

22:49

David Platt documentary that's going around. And so I can't comment on specific individuals, but I think overall there is a feeling and you used the word feeling,

22:57

I think that's the right word, that there's some concerning things where if nothing else, we're sort of picking up the world's value set in some way.

23:07

And again, I think some of the vision behind diversity and inclusion, it's

23:12

Christian in its source because only the Christian faith gives us this worldview where the multiplicity of nations is a beautiful thing, where including the weak and the marginalized and the downtrodden is a priority in the eyes of God.

23:27

And so they're Christian impulses, but they're stripped from the Christian context and the

23:33

Christian moral frame. That said, I recorded a video recently on diversity.

23:40

And for as much as we talk about it, when I look at Jesus praying for his people in John 17, he prays for their unity.

23:50

Diversity is too low of a goal. Hell is diverse. We talk about every nation and tribe and tongue being in heaven.

23:58

Well, every nation and tribe and tongue are also in hell. We forget that. I think we have to remember that diversity itself is not the end goal.

24:07

Now, the fact that Christ, when he's lifted up, draws all peoples to himself, yeah, that is a part of the end goal of history.

24:14

But when Christ is interceding for his people, he prays for all of those, there's the diversity, all of those who will be drawn through the ministry and the preaching of the apostles.

24:24

But then what does he pray? He prays that they would be one, even as the father and the son are one.

24:30

And so in some mysterious way, we're participating in this solidarity of the relationship, even between father and son and spirit.

24:38

That's a beautiful thing. And you feel that when you're involved in missions, if you've ever spent any time with a believer from a foreign context, you may not speak their language, you might not feel super at home in their church or around their family, but you have a deep and abiding unity with that person because you love the same

24:57

Lord. And so I think unity is the piece that's lost in here. And you comment on how that tends to override some of our gospel priorities.

25:05

It's one of the things that I love serving with ABWE about is because about a hundred years ago in 1927, our founding missionary,

25:14

Dr. Raphael Thomas, he was a medical missionary with the Northern Baptists in the

25:20

Philippines. This was at a time where in the midst of the fundamentalist and modernist controversies, you had the modernists in the church saying, let's not care about evangelism, let's not care as much about conversion and let's focus what then was essentially what we would refer to now as social justice or social gospel.

25:38

It was, well, let's heal bodies and let's not so much think about the soul. And we don't want to impose a certain worldview or way of thinking.

25:46

Again, we don't wanna be colonial, we don't wanna be imperialist. And so he was told by his mission board at the time, just to focus on the work of medicine and not on the work of winning souls.

25:57

And he took a stand to say, we're not gonna do that here. And so in one sense for a hundred years, people at ABWE have been saying, no, our priority is the work of the gospel and other things, including caring for the body, they play a part.

26:11

After all, we're not only given a great commission, we're given a great commandment as well. And so caring for the body, yes, is a piece of that as well.

26:19

But we have to get the order right. And the gospel is what unlocks all of those things. If we start with all of the things we wanna see in culture, hey, we wanna see people included that are left out.

26:30

Well, if you pursue that apart from Christ, you're going to end up down the road where we are now as a culture.

26:36

And it's gonna get not only out of proportion, it's gonna become perverse. But if we pursue

26:41

Christ, we will get those other things as well as a part of living life in his kingdom. But it starts with prioritizing the gospel and proclamation and what he's doing in local churches first and before anything else.

26:54

Yeah. So if you're a church, let's say, and you're an elder, so you're in a church, everything seems to be going well, preaching the word, attendance is good, small groups is great, the church is growing, you're giving to missions, all the things that we wanna do as church, helping the poor and the downtrodden.

27:14

And you look out and you go, we've got 400 people in this church and 390 of them all look the same color skin.

27:23

Is that something a pastor and elder should then go, hmm, we need to do something about this.

27:29

We need different colors in our pews or in our chairs. Is that something that should even enter the mind of a pastor, you believe?

27:36

Or do you say the Lord saves and he'll bring who he wants to this church?

27:43

Because that's what we're seeing. We're seeing consultants going into churches and going, yeah, you guys aren't diverse enough, whether it's the skin color, whether it's the culture, and you need to change.

27:52

And otherwise, very good functioning church. And I would say it even goes the other way too. You could say that in a black church and the 90, 10 is flipped and you're saying, oh, you need to diversify.

28:03

Is that something that a pastor or elder should even be thinking about? Yeah, in other words, should we have the Sherwin -Williams color swatch, paint swatch held up to the congregation and we're looking at all of the tones of skin.

28:15

And we laugh, but there are some people who almost advocate that sort of approach.

28:22

It sounds that way. And for us, number one, it's recognizing the sovereignty of God.

28:28

Again, the Lord's gonna draw whomever he draws. Now, if I'm living in a 100 %

28:34

Korean community and yet there's only Caucasians gathering in my church,

28:40

I might need to ask some hard questions of our outreach team and really figure out is there something that we're missing here?

28:46

And so on one level, we invite those questions. But on another level, the whole point of belonging to Christ is that those distinctions are taken away in Christ, that there's no

28:57

Jew, there's no Greek, there's no male or female or slave or bond servant or free, but rather all are in Christ.

29:05

And we see that statement multiple times in Galatians, Colossians. We see that throughout the

29:10

New Testament. And so the problem is though, there is this underlying desire to trust the experts.

29:17

We throw around that phrase, but there are entire cottage industries set around critiquing the church in those areas.

29:26

And people gain a foothold in churches and ministries with this managerial mindset, whether it's diversity or anything else, to come into a church and say, here's the world's strategies.

29:37

Now go ahead and compensate me. And if you adopt this strategy, you'll see worldly success.

29:43

And what we're trying to do, and what I would encourage others to do is let the leaders of the local church and let the people of God in covenant together, together in prayer and together wrestling through scripture, seek how we're supposed to be about mission.

29:58

Don't let someone from the world bring in their ideologies and tell you how it's to be done. Seek the

30:03

Lord together, like you see in Acts 13. The leaders of the church are praying together.

30:08

And then that's when the first missionaries are identified, Paul and Barnabas, by the Holy Spirit and sent out.

30:14

What if churches gathered together and said, okay, here's what we're going to do on mission, which by the way, ABWE seeks to do that.

30:20

We don't come into the church and tell them what to do. Rather churches come to us and say, hey, we have a missionary we want to send, or we want to reach not just our

30:28

Samaria and the ends of the earth. We want to reach our Judea, help us reach our community. And we'll work with churches in that regard too.

30:33

But we have to trust the Holy Spirit to work through his normal means, which is what happens when God's people are gathered seeking him.

30:40

Seeking to obey his commands and not what happens when we bring in worldly ideologies from the outside.

30:47

Yeah, it's always amazed me that we've kind of lost the plot on understanding that even from the early church, even in the

30:54

New Testament, your churches were based on geographical areas and peoples that did have some diversity, but they reflected the community, meaning the racial makeup, the ethnic makeup, the cultural makeup.

31:07

I mean, we have books of the New Testament literally named after geographical areas, Ephesians, Colossians, Galatians, right?

31:14

And it reflected the community. And we don't do that now. We see a certain church and we go, well, let's say the population is 95, 94%, 6 % of three certain ethnicities.

31:28

You're probably going to see that reflected, hopefully, in a local church.

31:33

And the goal is to make that whole community Christian, right? Not just in the church, but it seems like we've just kind of thrown out logic and reality.

31:42

And we say, oh, no, no, we have to force feed this and usurp the Holy Spirit, usurp the sovereignty and the election of God, usurp all these things.

31:50

And really, it fits in very nicely with seeker friendly theology, which then says it's up to you to get people saved.

31:58

You've got to do the gimmicks and the tricks and all the stuff to get them in the church and have a light show and have this presentation.

32:04

And in fact, it's God who saves. Go ahead. And Greg, if I could speak to that. So this is an area where, actually, the missions world has had an outsized influence on the

32:13

American church. And what I mean by that is that seeker driven mindset that comes from missiology.

32:21

So all these churches that want to say, hey, let's be cool. Let's get the rock band. Let's do all the things because our target persona is the 25 year old male.

32:30

And we want to build everything around how do we reach him. That's inherited. And maybe perverted along the way, but inherited from what missiologists for years have called the homogenous unit principle or the homogeneous unit principle that was developed by Donald McGavern after working with Hindus and working in the caste system and recognizing church plants and evangelistic efforts tend to be more effective along the lines of these subgroups and keeping them within these homogenous units rather than trying to assemble a church of multiple castes.

33:08

And what started out as an insight of just looking at what tends to happen became a driving strategy for what should be normative, right?

33:17

So we can say, well, of course, people who are alike tend to congregate together. That's true. And that's why now you look out and there's a church for any number of preferences that you can pick in the

33:28

American shopping mall of church preferences. You can go to a biker church. You can go to a whatever church, right?

33:33

For any affinity group. But that's different from what scripture gives us is that we preach the gospel indiscriminately.

33:39

And then whoever the Lord draws is who he draws. And yeah, they're going to congregate geographically and they're going to probably have to speak the same language in order to worship together.

33:49

And so there's going to be some homogeneity that results as as as a part of that. But what's so funny is that we're at this point where we're concerned that maybe our churches are too white or too all one thing or another.

34:02

But so much of that comes from a bad missiology that slipped into the church years ago with this mindset that says, well, you have to have your one target customer persona.

34:12

And so we're going to do this type of music. We're going to have this type of fog and light show rather than just starting with let's preach the word.

34:20

Let's trust the spirit of God. Let's trust the ordinances. Let's trust church membership and discipline. Let's trust what the spirit of God is present, has covenanted himself to use to advance and build up his bride.

34:32

And unfortunately, we're replacing one worldly ideology with another. We just need to get back to scripture. Yeah, well said.

34:39

You know, it's it's too bad that we're idolizing skin color and culture over the true thing that bonds us, which is the blood of Christ.

34:47

And I've said this many times on my podcast, there are people in my church that I feel closer to, trust more, have a better relationship with than some of my extended family just because I'm bonded to them by the atoning work of Christ on the cross.

35:04

And for those who can't understand that, feel free to text message us in the description below and we'll have a conversation.

35:10

But it's just too bad that the church is starting to idolize that. I love to see organizations like yours,

35:16

Alex, that are not doing that, that are standing firm in what God calls us to do in the

35:22

Bible and the mission work. I absolutely love the content that you're putting out. And I know you have a lot of different places where people can see you, but we're going to link it all up down below.

35:31

So if you're listening or watching this right now, you can go right there, click it, find out what Alex is doing, but maybe throw out the top one or two places you might want to send someone if they want to know more about you or what you guys are doing.

35:41

Absolutely. So the top place to go is abwe .org. That stands for Association of Baptists for World Evangelism.

35:50

And sometimes when you throw that out there, they're like, oh, they're Baptists. And I like to say we're Baptists. We're not angry about it, but we are

35:57

Baptists. But abwe .org. Look, again, we work with churches locally to help multiply the global church so that if that's you trying to reach your community, if that's you seeking to send long -term pioneering church planters to an unreached people group or anywhere in between, our goal is to come alongside church leaders and help them find their next steps.

36:19

And then we're putting out a ton of content. You can follow me on X. You can go to at A -J -K -O -C -M -A -N at A .J.

36:30

Kochman. And there you'll find links to everything that we're doing, including the flagship podcast of A -B -W -E,

36:37

The Missions Podcast, where we talk about missiology from a sovereignty of God perspective.

36:43

And we do this. We take, OK, what are the strategies that people are doing? And is it biblical? And what would a biblical strategy look like here?

36:50

And how can we have a global vision of Christ drawing all the nations to himself? And how can we start that in our local churches?

36:57

So whether you're a goer, whether you're a sender, whether you support missionaries or you're doing the work or you're just praying for people that you know, we're trying to think about those things biblically.

37:06

And we'd invite everyone to join us. Alex, thanks for your time today. Appreciate you, brother. Thank you, brother.

37:12

Hey, guys, thanks for listening to another episode of Dead Men Walking Podcast. As always, you can find out more about us at dmwpodcast .com,

37:18

all social media accounts, except for X, real DMW Podcast. They wouldn't let us have that. But at the

37:24

DMW Podcast, you can check out the merch page. It helps support the show. We've got our fun one on right now,

37:30

Job 13 .5. Why don't you shut up and let that be your wisdom? Sometimes you just have to quote scripture to the pagans, even if they don't like it.

37:37

Also, we've got the Wynham Dynamo Romans 9, which seems to be selling very well, along with some other fun shirts.

37:44

Alex is laughing. It's all right. Hey, ready for that. Yeah, you weren't ready. You got a rowdy

37:49

Presbyterian here. That's good. We get snarky on the website, but guys, yeah, that supports the show.

37:54

By the time you're hearing this, we'll probably next week be having some Fight Laugh Feast coverage coming for you with some of their speakers.

38:01

So tune into that. As always, remember, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. God bless.

38:07

Be sure to check us out at dmwpodcast .com where you can purchase the best and snarkiest merch on the internet, support the show, and leave us a review or message.

38:13

Dead Men Walking can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at Dead Men Walking Podcast, and on Twitter, at Real DMW Podcast. The Dead Men Walking Podcast is part of the

38:19

Fight Laugh Feast network. For exclusive show content, be sure to download the Pup TV app and become a member. If you're a business that needs to reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers in your demographic, podcast advertising might be for you.