And We Have Lift Off!

The New Mobile Studio and a Thank-You to Supporters

Well, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line from the new mobile studios here in Kerrville, Texas is where we are right now. My apologies for last evening. I managed to try to do this in a black hole of the internet.

The park Wi-Fi was non-existent. The cell coverage was utterly insufficient. And the positive thing is that we now have Starlink backup and operational. And so that's a backup if we need it. But we are in a place right now we've got good connections.

So here we are. I can't believe that this is actually happening. It's funny. It's ironic. In fact, I was in Fort Stockton. I realized this last night. I was in Fort Stockton last year when I all of a sudden realized, hey, wait a minute.

If I found an RV that had bunk beds in the back, it was maybe only like 34 feet long or something like that. We could convert the bedroom up front into a mobile studio. And I didn't find any grand designs that did that.

Next place I looked was Jayco. I found this one. I looked at many other places, but this was the one that I found sitting in that park. The web worked enough that I could at least do things like that.

And so that's where it started. And that was about six months ago. And so I shared the idea with Rich. And that started a long process that was really not all that long when you think about it. That has now led to, here I am.

I am looking at, the problem is you can't see all the stuff that I can see. I am staring at a 4K camera in front of me. And I can then go over to another 4K camera over here from another angle and say hello to everybody there.

And then I can, as we will do later on, show you a little something that I really want to be able to do. And that is Accordance Bible Software. And I will be able to write on that and do everything that I like to do with that.

And then come back to here. And I'm controlling it all with a switcher. I'm in control of it. Rich could control it, but I'm not going to let him. Well, he might be able to take over anyways. I don't know.

It's possible. But this way I get to put up what I want to put up when I want to put it up in essence. So I've got my microphone here, my laptop here, the touch screen over on this side where I have Accordance.

And I'll be able to do all that kind of stuff and show videos and do things like that. And there's a streaming PC over here, which is how we're connecting out into the world. And our 5G thing over there, like I said, if we need to have Starlink up, we've got good connection here so I didn't have to set it up.

But we have that as a backup now in case I fall into another black hole like we did yesterday. And so here we are. There's a screen in front of me with I don't know how many different things. Rich says a couple of them are completely irrelevant and he'll eventually fix them, get rid of them.

But I have what's in preview and all sorts of stuff up there that's telling me what's going on. And it's probably too much information, honestly. But there you go. So here we are. And let me start off by expressing thanks on a level it's really hard to put into words.

Because once we came up with this project, well you had to fund it. We had already started moving toward a different tow vehicle for safety reasons. We had been told initially by Derek Melton to get a diesel.

And he was right. But we didn't listen. And so we had a different vehicle. It was a wonderful vehicle. It really is. It's a beautiful truck. But it wasn't a diesel. And there is just a world's difference in ability to pull and ability to stop.

As in slow down down a hill between a diesel and a gas-powered truck. And if you've never pulled with both, I won't bother to go into it right now. But there's a huge difference. We had already started to go there.

A dear, dear brother who I won't go into details now made it possible for us to get that truck that I have that is now parked in the shade tree next to the unit here in Texas that works just so, so well.

And I get so many people in the parks wishing they had as nice a vehicle as we do. Because they all know what a difference it makes going up the hills and going down the hills. Then we got the unit. And we came to you all.

And we began a fundraiser. And I'm very, very thankful that we have paid this unit off. And the only thing left on the fundraiser that we still need your assistance with is what it took to convert a bedroom.

Because I would be sitting pretty much right toward the top of the bed right now. If you could sit, which you couldn't anyways. Converting a bedroom into a fully functional 4K camera, multi-camera, mobile webcasting studio where we will be able to do debates and all sorts of incredible stuff even while on the road.

And so it's the stuff we've had to get to be able to do that that is still there. And we're making progress toward that. And it's all because of you folks. Every one of you that bought a knob in the kitchen that eventually became air conditioning units and wheels and the automatic level system on the units and everything else.

You all made this possible. We came to you. And you all have been so generous to make this happen. And so we're going to do everything we can to utilize this to the glory of God and to the edification of God's people.

So we thank you for it. Please pray for our safety. Yes, we have insurance on everything. But as someone said, we need to pray that the truck and the unit will be like the shoes of the Israelites in the wilderness that did not wear out.

And that certainly has been my prayer as well as we look at this. But all of that, like I said, I came up with the idea of the unit and how for me to sleep in the back in bunk beds and trade in a little of my comfort for making this available.

I had almost nothing to do with what you see in front of you right now except for the colors on the wall behind me. That was about my only contribution is I did find the really super cool sort of waterfall type colors lamp that's behind me.

I found that and I think that's about it. I cannot think of anything. Well, I did only last week or the camera at a different angle over there. And so that's why it's at the angle that it's at. And that's about it.

Everything else in here is the result of the most famous French person from Prescott. Rich designed all this stuff. And if you've not ever seen what a studio looks like or recognize like the amount of cabling in here, for example, the number of HDMI cables and brackets, because this has to be a studio that can undergo 20 earthquakes a day, maybe more.

And that's what it has to do. So these cameras are smaller cameras, but they're super high quality cameras, but they need to be protected. I can't leave them up. So there has to be a quick disconnect stuff because, you know, initially, I think Rich probably just want to be able to walk in, hit a couple buttons and we can go.

Doesn't work that way. You just can't protect electronic equipment. Let me just give you an example. It happened to get on this trip. I have a little closet place in the very back of the unit because I sleep back there.

I have a little place to hang shirts and some drawers for socks and stuff like that. I have to, I've just got to realize this now. I keep putting shirts back there on plastic hangers. I can't. It bounces so hard.

It snaps the heads off of the hangers and they end up in a jumble. It already happened on this trip and jumble on the floor. That's how much bouncing takes place, especially on I -40 in New Mexico, anywhere in New Mexico and Louisiana.

Both states are definitely competing with each other for having the biggest holes in the road possible. And so you've got to protect this stuff. And so I have a drawer over here. I take these cameras down.

There's three cables I have to insert in each one. By the way, Rich, we need to take those plastic things off camera too. You took it off that one, but we need to take it off that one. Anyway, he bought the super high quality styrofoam stuff and cut out the stuff to put the cameras in there and the microphone in there.

And I've got one light over here. The other light over here is called a window. Natural light going on right now. And so you've got it. So all these cables are zip tied in place and they're organized and they're all hooked into the right places.

You got power run all over these places. It's all home last week or the week before. And I get a phone call and I hit it. It's Rich. I hit it on the truck. And Rich says, as soon as it picks up, Rich says, never mind, it popped back in.

And I'm like, what popped back in? My knee. He was in here working. And the only way to do this I mean, where I'm sitting would have been open before underneath the bed. I would have no place for my foot, for my feet.

So he had to build a platform, bought this desk, looked for this desk, lightweight desk that still has some substance to it. And then he attached the table to this platform and had to attach the platform to the floor where the bed used to be and match the carpet to the carpet that's along the floorboards in here.

And while he's doing all that, you got to get down on the ground. I've had to get down on the ground in here a number of times. And I'm going to tell you something, at our age, getting down on the ground is not as fun as it used to be.

And his knee went out. And it had been out for a half hour. And he finally gave up, so he's calling me to come get him to take him to the ER. And as the phone's ringing, evidently, his guardian angel didn't want him going with me anywhere.

Because I've taken Rich to the ER before. I'm not going to tell that story. I've taken Rich to the ER before. As he gets older, stuff like this happens. And so his guardian angel popped it back into place.

But there was one day, he got to my house when I had it parked out in front about 8 .30 in the morning and left at 4 .30 that night. It takes time to do all this and to do it well and to do it right. And it's been done right.

So look, if you enjoy what we're doing here, if you're appreciative of the stuff that we've got coming up in the future, there's primarily just one person to thank for all this hard work. And it's not me.

So I know Rich already has a little cult following out there. You're coming up to me at various churches when I'm speaking. And evidently, the password to get into the cult is be nicer to Rich, something along those lines.

I am nice to Rich. I really am. But hey, if that's how you get into the group, that's cool. But seriously, this is a massive amount of work. This guy could have made a whole lot more money in other areas of work than working for this ministry.

I can assure you of that. Because if we had paid somebody to put this together, it wouldn't have been any more efficient or looked any better than what we've got. Well, we did pay him to do that, but that's not anything special.

That's just what he does. The studios at the office, he did all that stuff. He did all the painting. He did all the paneling and all the wiring and all that stuff, which obviously was behind all of this, too.

He knew what needed to be done, what kind of power requirements there were in cabling and all the rest of that kind of stuff. So please, however, do not write in and ask Rich to moonlight, to design studios for anybody else.

He's ours. He's not looking for anything extra to do there. So anyway, very, very, very thankful for all that Rich has done here. It is just an amazing thing to look at. It really, really is. So what I want to do today, I did a little driving line that Rich posted as well, commenting on some of the stuff going on on other subjects right now.

You don't want to get into that type of thing. I wanted to celebrate what we're doing here. Oh, goodness. I'm sorry. I have my Twitter set on a thing where it refreshes every little bit, and so sometimes a video will come up.

It's sort of like, ah, what on earth was that all about? There's just a lot of weird stuff going on in the world today. Anyway, what I want to do today is I want to sort of go back over the history of this ministry.

It is our 40th anniversary. We're going to be doing some cool stuff later on. Of course, that's coming at us so fast that it probably just could go flying right by us. Anyway, since we're sitting here in our new unit doing this, I was thinking back about when this ministry began, what we were focused on, and just how different things are today.

Most of you know that our first focus was Mormonism. I had met with two more missionaries just a matter of weeks after my marriage in the summer of 1982, and Elders Reed and Reese were their names. I started teaching a class on how to witness to Mormons at the very large Southern Baptist Church that I was a member of at the time.

That class then started bringing together the first people that made up Alpha Omega Ministries. When it started, there were four of us, Mike and Linda Beliveau and my wife Kelly and I. It wasn't too long after that that Mike took over teaching the Mormonism class that I was teaching, and I started teaching a Christian doctrines class.

Now, some of you will find this very interesting. The primary book that we used was by Charles Ryrie. I'll give you an idea of my background at that particular point in time. It was also pretty much around this time period that still being three or four years down the road before I was in seminary when I started to discover Reformed Theology.

It was while I was teaching the Christian doctrines class that after one particular session, a fellow walks up to me and introduces me to his friend who was wearing a maroon members-only jacket. I will never forget it because he looked a little charismatic because he was.

That was the first time I met Rich. Rich had a lot of learning to do at that particular point in time in his life, but that was where we first met while I was teaching that particular class. Then Rich started coming out to the LDS Easter pageant, which we started tracking.

1984 was the first year that we, in any organized way, went after doing that work in Mesa. It was 1983 that Kelly and I drove out there for the first time to the pageant. We rode out there on a Kawasaki 440.

The next year was when Wally Tote went with us out to the Easter pageant. That's where I learned a lot. There was nobody who could pass out tracks and witness to Mormons like Wally Tote. He was the energizer bunny.

He was an odd fellow. There's no question about it. I've mentioned before that we let him stay at our apartment. He literally drove our Persian cat insane. The cat was never the same after he stayed in that apartment.

I don't know what happened. I'd love to have video, but remember, this is long before the internet. This was before cell phones. This was before pagers. This was when you carried a dime around to make a phone call at a payphone.

It was a very different time. We started doing newsletters and stuff like that because that's the only way to communicate with people. The computer had been invented. We bought our first computer and we used it to write what we call the information sheets, which are still available on our website now, and design our first tracks that we used with Mormons and things like that.

That was also when we first headed up to Salt Lake City. We had no idea what we were doing. We almost ruined the poor man. We took Dave Warner up there. I don't know that he ever witnessed a Mormon again.

We didn't give him any training. Well, we did. We trained him all through the night as we drove from Phoenix to Salt Lake City. That's not the way to do it. When you're 21, it makes sense, but yeah, that wasn't the way to do it.

Mormonism was our major, major focus. In keeping with that, I wanted to remind everybody, if you're going to be witnessing to the Mormons or anything like that, of at least one text that I think is really, really useful.

It's right here in Isaiah 44 .24. It says, Yahweh, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb. I, Yahweh, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by myself and spreading out the earth all alone.

Now, this is the Legacy Standard Bible. If you're going to be talking to Mormons, you want to probably be reading from the King James if you just simply want to simplify things for you. But the point is that here, Yahweh says he is the maker of all things, and then notice the two phrases, stretching out the heavens by myself and spreading out the earth all alone, without any other, is literally what the Hebrew says.

Why is this important? Well, part of it is to tell you a story. Once we started doing this with more and more people over the years, somewhere around 1985, I forget who it was, but we got ahold of somebody at the church that did silk screening of t-shirts.

And I came up with something called witnessing with the word t-shirt. I'm wondering if Rich still has his witnessing with the word t-shirt, because I think you had a yellow one, if I recall correctly, at some point.

I do not. You did not have a yellow? You didn't have one at all? Oh, I had one back then. I had one back then. I don't have one anymore, though. Rich is not down here on the floor. People are going to wonder, oh, you've got him underneath the floor.

He's in a little cell down there. No, this is where the streaming PC is, and so if Rich wants to talk to me, it's down there. So I just sort of automatically look to where the voice is. I wouldn't have to do that, because it doesn't really accomplish anything, but I just want to make sure that none of you think that I actually have Rich.

He's actually running everything, because I'm incompetent to do any of that. Anyway, so we had a witnessing with the word t-shirt, and the reason I mentioned Coogee's is it was very colorful. It was a color fade type thing, and that was my idea.

I designed it, and it had Greek and Hebrew on it, and it had certain verses. Now, we had started, even at that point, while I was doing the class on Mormonism, I would take questions at the end of the class, and people started asking questions about Jehovah's Witnesses.

I'm like, well, that's not the subject. Pretty early on, it was within the first two years, I'd say, I had to start studying Jehovah's Witnesses. Some of the verses had to do with the deity of Christ.

I think Colossians 2 .9 was one of them, and then the other verses had to do with witnessing to Mormons. I'll never forget, I was wearing that shirt when I had to drive. I had to get up in the middle of the night from the Motel 6, because we've always stayed only at the best places.

Motel 6 in Salt Lake was where we would stay. There were a bunch of people in a single room. We were all young guys. Why not? I had to get up. A fellow by the name of Tony DeLute was flying in at 2 o 'clock in the morning, and I had to go pick him up at the airport.

I was wearing my Witnessing with the Word t-shirt. Do you know how long ago this was? You could just walk to the gate and wait for the person to come. It was pre -9 -11. I'm standing there, and I'm half asleep, waiting for them to deplane.

This guy walks up to me and starts speaking to me in Hebrew. Like I said, I'm half asleep, but I'm like, I'm sorry, what? And he motions toward my shirt. Of course, there's Hebrew on my shirt. Well, as soon as I explained what it was about, a Christian ministry was just highly offended that we dared to use their Hebrew.

I'll just never forget that particular instance there in the Salt Lake Airport, many moons ago, before going out the next morning and passing out tracks to the many, many people there in Salt Lake City.

This was one of the verses, Isaiah 40 -24. And why? Because in Mormonism, in the Mormon temple ceremony, Elohim, who is God the Father, sends Jehovah and Michael down to organize the earth. Not to create the earth.

The Mormon God cannot create anything, ex nihilo. He cannot say, let there be. He can only organize pre-existing matter. And so it's Elohim sending Jehovah and Michael to organize the earth. But here, Jehovah says, he's the maker of all things, which include the planet that Elohim lived on.

He says, man, stretching out the heavens by myself and spreading out the earth all alone. Not being sent down by Elohim and not being in company with Michael. So the monotheism of Isaiah 44 -24 is directly contradictory to the concepts enunciated by Joseph Smith and Mormon Church.

It is interesting to realize that I really wonder how many Mormons today that you would talk to would even be aware, would even have thought through, even if they're temple Mormons, what they have seen.

Because I'm pretty certain that scene's still in the temple ceremonies. Though, there have been some major revisions to temple ceremonies since we started this ministry. There's been at least two, maybe three, major revisions of the temple ceremonies since we started.

So there you go. So like I said, then pretty early on, I started building my Watchtower library. And again, one of the things I am most thankful for, and I don't know where it came from, I grabbed hold of the reality that if you're going to, as a Christian, deal with other faith systems, whether you call them cults or false religions or whatever it is, you need to hear what they themselves say.

You need original sources. When I studied Mormonism, I didn't have that. I didn't have it. I didn't have anybody to guide me. There was no one at my church. There were some people at my church that were a little concerned about what I was doing appropriately.

I'm a young guy. They tried to give some guidance along those lines, but I didn't have anybody to tell me. And somewhere early on, I realized I'm reading all these references to the Journal of Discourses and Doctrine of Salvation and Mormon Doctrine and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

Marvelous work in a wonder. Wally Taube said, it's a marvel, more don't wonder. He had different names for all the books. Anyway, I started going and getting them. I started building up my LDS library.

I had to do the same thing with Jehovah's Witnesses. I had to get their books and read their material. So I started building that up. I subscribed to the Watchtower and Awake magazines and things like that.

We started dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses. One of the key texts that I would highly recommend to people that you memorize is in Colossians 2. You know, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, and not according to Christ.

That's something you probably know. But the verse to memorize is Colossians 2 .9. For in him, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. And it's short enough that if you read Greek, you can memorize that as well.

And just simply be ready when the time comes to deal with one particular issue. And that particular issue is the fact that the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses mistranslates this text. Well, it gives a purposefully misleading and inferior reading of this text.

And that is that it translates the term theatetos, which means that which makes God, God. It is a very strong term referring to the very essence and nature of God. It translates that as divine quality.

To get around the fact that what Paul is actually saying is, in Christ, the fullness of deity dwells somaticos, in bodily form. This was a slap upside the head to any Gnostic whatsoever. They would never use this kind of language at all.

And so you can see right there in verse 9, the fullness of deity in bodily form. That is a great verse to memorize to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses because it's not one of the verses that they're automatically going to be ready to respond to.

John 1, 1. John 10, 30. As I've said so many times before, they can respond to those texts in a comatose state. You're not getting any thought process going in the mind. Colossians 2, 9 is not nearly as regular a text that they have to deal with.

So for quite a while then in the ministry, we're dealing primarily with Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses. Early on, I still remember when I was in Bible college, my parents coming back from visiting relatives at Tennessee Temple University and telling me about the King James Only movement, splitting churches and doing all sorts of stuff like that.

When I opened up my UBS text, third edition corrected, I think, and I saw all those notes at the bottom of the page, I asked Dr. Barrett, I said, what are these notes? And he says, that's where the Greek manuscripts differ.

I remember which direction I was facing. I remember which room I was in. That building's gone now, sadly, but I knew then I have to master this stuff. It's really funny. Only a few years ago, I was sitting with Dr. Barrett and he and I are colleagues now.

It was only a decade and a half later. I started teaching Greek at Golden Gate. He was teaching Greek at Golden Gate. He teached the advanced class. I teach the beginning class. We became colleagues and he told me, he said, oh, you went past me on text criticism by your second year.

I just had to make it look good because I knew already I had had far too many conversations with Mormons not to know that this is something you need to understand. This is something you need to know and be familiar with.

I wrote the King James Only Controversy in 1994. That whole subject was added to what we were doing, but we had already, of course, begun doing something else. That was dealing with the subject of Roman Catholicism.

I never ever wanted to be the Bible answer. I always felt that you can only do so much well. If you try to do more, you have to get shallower and shallower and shallower. Everyone has to make a choice.

I teach church history, but there are some people who do that all the time. They can do deep, deep, deep dives all the time. They can't tell you anything about Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, textual criticism, Islam.

They couldn't teach Bible study if they liked it, but they can go deep in an area like that. You can try to do everything and only go so deep. You can try to just do a very small number of things and go deep, deep, deep, deep, or you can be somewhere in the middle.

I suppose as an apologist and professor and teacher, I'm sort of somewhere in the middle. I was hesitant to expand too fast and get into stuff. It was a man by the name of Benny Diaz. Benny was at North Phoenix Baptist Church as well.

Roman Catholicism, Catholic Answers, and the First Debates

During this time period somewhere, and this is right at the same time that Rich got involved with this. Do you still have your name badge, Rich? Do you still have it somewhere? I do not. I do not have a name badge.

What? You got rid of it? I did. Yeah. Yeah. A long time ago, actually. I know you can't hear him, but see, I had a name badge made for Rich. Oh, they heard me. They heard me just fine. They can hear you?

Yes, I'm running through the sound of the board here. So yeah, they can hear me. Oh, okay. All right. I just figured there was that little voice over there and it was going to go into my microphone. So we wanted this to be a joyful program, but it won't be any longer, I'm afraid.

I had a name badge made for Rich because when he first got involved with this, he was just like, well, I'll just do anything. And so, you know, there were lots of projects that weren't a whole lot of fun to do, but somebody had to do it.

So give it to Rich. And so I had a name badge made for him because I had a name badge made for me to be Elder Lucas, so I could role play Mormons. This is before YouTube. So I could do that because no one had any idea who in the world this young guy was, so I could look like a Mormon missionary.

So I had Elder Lucas, Lucas is white in Greek. And so I had one made that simply said, slime. And you can have a different color. So it was white with green. It's green slime. Because I forget exactly what it was.

I think we were doing a newsletter or something. And Rich just made the comment that he was just sort of the slime around there. And we found the passage in the Bible that he pulled me out of the... What was that?

We were in the studio at KXEG. It was you, me, and Mike. And you introduced yourself as the president at the time. He was the vice president. And you both looked at me and didn't know what to call me.

So I said, just call me slime. There you go. There you go. Slime. Because I had a name badge made up, which he has not kept. My heart is empty now. So anyway, another individual. This was right around the same time that we heard about, I think, as I recall, how various people around the country were getting phone numbers.

And they would put an answering machine on it. And they would have phone messages from different groups, primarily for Jehovah's Witnesses. Because Jehovah's Witnesses, they won't take tracts from you.

They are hard to evangelize. And so eventually, we had three phone lines. 266 -2JWS, 266 -2LDS, and 266 -2RCC. And I just realized, eventually, we had a computer do that. It was an 8088. And there was this program, remember that?

You could call in and you could choose which one you wanted to listen to. And there would actually be a menu of which messages you wanted to listen to. And we eventually did that and took those numbers down.

We just had one number to call. And you could listen to messages for Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Roman Catholics. Oh man, I remember that. That was so long ago. Anyway, so we would get together at our little apartment, Kelly and I's little apartment, after church.

And we have pictures. I know this one picture of Mike Beliveau and I standing there. And I would write messages each week, and we would record them for the various phone lines. And one of the guys that would help us with that was Benny Diaz, who is no longer with us.

He passed away about five years ago now, I think, somewhere around there. And he was a former Roman Catholic. And he really pressed me. He says, look, everything you're saying about the Mormons, they deny scriptural sufficiency.

Rome denies sola scriptura. They have an unbiblical source of authority. Well, you've got the papacy. They've got an unbiblical gospel. You've got purgatory and the mass and stuff like that. And so we started getting involved in that area.

Before I go into that, though, I have to, sorry. I was thinking about the picture that I have somewhere of Mike and I. We didn't have microphones like this. We literally had the little plastic microphones that came with the phone answering machine.

And so I'd print out the script, and we would record it. And sometimes there was a conversation. And so in this particular, sometimes you'd get the giggles. Sometimes you'd get the giggles. And in this particular one, Mike had to say, Wilford Woodruff.

Wilford Woodruff. And he developed Elmer Fudd syndrome, no matter how many times we tried. Wilford Woodruff. I'll never forget that night. We all gave up on it. I don't know how we did it. But yeah, it was good.

It was wonderful. Those were the days. So anyway, toward the end of the 80s, I started reading more and more on Roman Catholicism. And that's when I encountered Catholic Answers, This Rock Magazine. I was getting ready to graduate.

In fact, I graduated in 89 from Fuller Seminary with my first master's degree. And one of the classes that I had taken there that I had just, I loved because I had a professor who loved his field, was church history.

Nate Feldmuth was my professor. And he gave me a love for that subject. And so once I started seeing the historical aspects of what Catholic Answers was saying, and specifically Jerry Matitix, who at that time had just converted Roman Catholicism.

He was a former Protestant, he and Scott Hahn. And I started listening to their debates on cassette tapes, of course, with a Walkman. That's how you listen to that kind of stuff. And was the reason why, when the opportunity of writing came up, in God's Providence, we met a man by the name of George Bonneau, George and Aline Bonneau.

He had begun a publishing house to publish Robert Morey's materials. And he gave me an open invitation. You write it, I'll publish it. And so everybody assumed my first book would be on Mormonism. It wasn't.

My first book was called The Fatal Flaw. It's available in PDF on Kindle. And once I got it done, we realized it was too long. And so we split it up. And The Appendices became a separate book called Answers to Catholic Claims.

Those are the first two books that I had published. I'll never forget opening that first box. And we sent, I think it was just The Fatal Flaw at that time, we sent a copy to Catholic Answers. And within a week, the phone rings and it's Jerry Matitus.

And that led to August 1990, Long Beach, California. August 16th, I believe. Debate number one at St. Cyprian Catholic Church in Long Beach. First debate. I had not debated in high school, didn't debate in college, because neither had debate teams, had never studied it.