Search Us with Ken Powers

What I really want folks to know from this episode is the fact that this is a resource.

Let's start church That I want you to think about two different ways one start using it start searching for things when you make this your go -to

To search when you want to go and research something to see of you're gonna get a wide variety of views

Surely because of the number of channels that are represented there Rap report with your host

Andrew Rappaport where we provide biblical interpretation and application This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the

Christian podcast community for more content or to request a speaker for your church Go to striving for eternity org

Welcome to another edition of the rap report. I'm your host Andrew Rappaport here to discuss all things of well

We usually talk about Harmoneutics how to interpret the Bible Theology today, we're gonna go totally off script.

We've done this a couple times before and we're gonna talk Technology, don't worry folks.

It will have a way of working into Christianity because it is Well a

Christian software developer who wrote software for Christian Ministries and we're gonna be talking about it because as we go through this you are gonna see the value especially those of you who listen to these episodes regularly and go

Sometime ago Andrew had this great point and it's very very hard to find that one time that I had a great point, but you remembered it and want to go find that and We are gonna give you the power to do that today with none other than Ken powers

Ken welcome to the rap report. Thank you for having me. You got some superpowers, right?

Because that's your last name Yeah, that's generally the idea. Yeah Okay for the record

I'm not gonna give out your phone number But I wish I could just so that everybody could call your phone to get your voicemail because your voicemail is epic the first time

I heard your voicemail You got some guy with the superhero type voice of Ken powers

So the story there is in the early days of Fiverr I did pay a voice actor for it to record my voicemail and he did a very good job.

Oh, it's epic You can't ever get rid of that with the last name like powers this your superpowers it's great, but we're gonna talk about different power that you have and for folks to know you and I first met at the

Open -air theology conference that was held last year. It's coming up again soon in February We'll talk about that in a moment so that we can encourage people to join that you don't want to miss it

I'm just saying it was one of the better more epic Conferences that I've been to as far as good theology not just in the preaching but also in all of the side discussion

During the breaks after the conference we had great but you and I met there and the history of this is

You had walked up to me and you said I was listening to James White and he said wouldn't it be nice if there's some way to sort all of the back issues or episodes of the dividing line so you could find things and He realized that would be a really really difficult task and it's something

I thought of myself saying how do I go back to previous episodes to find what

I have out there and You came up and said oh I did that I've been working on it for a little while and while I was working on the project

I was listening to back episodes of the divine line and he says man Could you imagine the divine line archives of fully searchable transcripts?

And I was literally like looking at code that would do that same thing my wife Laura She says, you know, he's coming to a conference near here in a few months.

Why don't you go show him? And so went there. That's where I met you. I actually demoed to James White using your phone if you remember, that's right

Yeah, my phone would not get reception you flagged down James White for me You said hey James is a this guy has something cool to show you

You had shown it to me and I was like, this is amazing And so when he got there, I like pulled him over you're right.

We have to use my phone Okay, I love this. I asked you for a little bit of a bio on you and I Completely get this other people in the audience are not going to because I've always said that I my first language is not

English It was basic Pascal C C++ Java JavaScript If something

I'm going what well, I love that the very first thing on your profile your resume is, you know languages proficient in JavaScript typescript

HTML fives Familiar with rust C sharp net framework.

I was expecting to see like English French That's the resume of an engineer right that's right

Developers are a little bit of a different breed and we have a little bit of a different sense of humor So let's talk about let's church now folks

I'm gonna tell you right now if you're not driving if you're sitting at your computer desk do this for right now

We're gonna have this on striving for eternity. It's one of the things on our task to do I don't think our webmasters done it yet But if you go to let's dot church, let's l

ETS dot church That gets you to the let's church website from there

You can click on channels and you are gonna see a plethora of channels that you can search

This is the power that Ken powers has given us of this tool You can find the rap report interrupts rap report rap report daily apologetics live

You can go through all of our striving fraternity videos, but there's more alpha and omega ministries

There's apology, Utah. There's 80 road lists Bethlehem Bible Church Deadman walking podcast is on there revealed apologetics is on there.

You have Wwut most recent edition is fighting for the faith fighting for the faith.

So fight for truth I mean, there's a number of them and it's a grown list because last time I actually went in here

There were nothing that weren't here. What is on there from when we understand the text? and so you have all of these and so the neat thing is

What you can do with this is you could get a Transcript a searchable transcript of even videos of the video in the audio so that you could put something in So, let me give the example.

Can I told you about this when you set this up for us? I am preparing a debate with dr.

Michael Brown on the issue of miracles and Spiritual gifts I quickly went into each of the channels

Apologetics live Andrew apports rap report in the daily and our videos at striving fraternity

I went through them and just put in miracles or gifts and I was able to pull up all the places that maybe on apologetics live we had someone that just came in and asked a

Question and we answered it and I'm able to give him not just the link to the video which you have on Let's church

But you have also The transcript that he could read and he can look so all of that's available folks that you could do on all the stuff that We're producing here at striving fraternity

Karma is up there now folks here familiar with karma Christian apologetics research ministry My friend

Matt slick put Ken in touch with him I got some other people that I told Ken we're gonna be put you in touch with because I think this is such a valuable resource because not only can you go just to apologetics live and Search there.

So if you were to go to let's church under channels, you can go to apologetics live and What you could do is you could actually decide if you so choose to search something by typing it in the search bar

And when you do only those episodes of apologetics live will come up that have things so for example,

I just went in into apologetics live and I typed gifts and For videos pop up have spiritual gifts ceased can charismatic gifts and Benny him be defended

Andrew and Matt slick and Matt disagree on charismatic gifts and a Asian Hebrew Israelite That was a long episode long time ago.

There's a fun one and then continue a cessationism versus continuationism Those are the four episodes that we covered specifically gifts, but if you were to hit it a second time

Now you have oh I didn't notice you have no compromised radios on there you have everywhere now you have 90 different medias and 3816

Transcripts that deal with gifts and clearly our friends there up at no compromise radio

Mike Abendroth has done a lot on it because I see spiritual gifts 101 and he's got a 101 that's part 1 part 2 part 3

My go -to search demos if you type in grape juice and actually Mike Abendroth that comes up as the first result there grape juice

So you could go to let's not church and or let's church calm it'll go there Okay, and you could just go to the search bar front that gives you a search of everything

So I'm gonna give you guys a pro tip here if you're looking for you want everything but just realize everything gives you a ton and it's constantly growing because like can you have pulled in from my

RSS feeds for the podcast and you're pulling that in so that we're able to get that constantly updated so it's it's an ever -growing list and The thing here though is a pro tip is if you are specific you want to go to a specific

Say podcast you heard it on the rap report you go to the channels

Then Andrew reports rap report from there. You will be able to search just that podcast

But the thing I'm letting you know type in what you want It automatically pulls up the search list

If you hit the return button a second time or actually the first time you're gonna get everything so if you're looking for just a specific one go into the channel type what your

Keyword and you can get it pulled up that way if you want everything that let's church has

Just go to the main page hit search and go for it And then while you're on that main search there actually are filters so you can like hit that channels filter right there and filter down to Just specific channels you're interested in you can filter down by the date something was published

So if you remember vaguely when it was so like there are a hundred fifty results for grape juice, actually

Content that's been uploaded. Yeah. Yeah grape juice is a popular topic interesting But so like I see a hundred fifty results for grape juice, right?

But then if I go to channels and I'm like, oh I want fighting for the faith. So I checked that there's only one result now

So in all of 10 15 years, however long chris roseborough has been doing his thing.

He's only mentioned grape juice one time And uh, the result is here have a cracker and some grape juice to remember that Okay, so once we start type once we do the search on grape juice, we can then choose under advance

Is the search phrases you can choose different channels right next to advanced if you uh, if you press channels

Okay, so this is really neat so I can actually choose To search just if I wanted to search apologex live striving for eternity videos

Andrew rap reports rap report and andrew reports daily rap report. I can search all of those in one search

So I just learned something new here folks. So there I can't I talk about grape juice eight times

Huh, I didn't know I even spoke about it. Maybe one time. Well make that nine times now because this episode will be up there

Good point Okay, so this is kind of interesting I talked about grape juice when discussing creation with paul taylor

So now here's the thing let folks know there's a difference with this between media and transcripts what's that difference

So when you're searching media, all that's going to be searching is titles and descriptions Versus the transcript results are i've built it as its own function

So it's like if you're trying to really narrow in on transcript and one big difference there is that like word order won't matter

By default when you're searching media, but word order will matter in the transcripts But it'll compensate for like missing words and stuff like that I'm working on some various schemes to make search simpler and maybe even combine

Media and transcript search into one interface so you don't need to switch between the two But that's the basic difference is titles and descriptions versus what was actually said in the actual video

And so we're going to end up at least at striving fraternity .org We're going to have this where you're going to be able to search

Everything be able to go through and find not just what's on the website But now all of the podcasts that we do at striving fraternity the videos that we've uploaded and so That's going to all be available to you

So the thing ken I wanted you to come in because I want others to not only know this is available

I mean we could stick it on our website and people go. Oh, that's kind of neat But I want folks know this is available so that a they will start using it and b start

Finding other ministries churches that could use this resource and then c

I'm going to talk about this a bit later on as well But you have a donate button and I want to I want it because you have a very different Model, and I want to give time for us to explain it.

So we're going to hold off on that I know we're not very christian. We're holding off on asking for money till we after we talk about the important stuff.

Okay? Yeah But I do want you guys as listeners to see the value of this tool if you've already gone

If you followed my instructions earlier and you were already at the let's dot church webpage

You already are playing with it and see the value of this because you've probably put in some other things and we're going to have a whole lot more that we're going to see here growing because I have a feeling that ken and I are going to do some work together with maybe the christian podcast community

And i'm going to be reaching out to see if we can pull everybody in to that from there

I think it's going to really with over 50 podcasts In the community that really does

Kind of blow it up so that would add quite a bit more content to this But it is a really helpful tool ken i've been using it

Like I said when people ask me when I talked about things I can't remember

I had to go find something that somebody I was teaching at a christian school just recently one of the students

Decided he really wanted to start listening to my podcast in the beginning of the podcast I mentioned a guy that came into the show a long time ago that was teaching sinless perfectionism and this guy

Wanted to hear that episode as if like I know exactly which one that was

Someone that comes in randomly on apologetics live I thought it was going to take me a really long time to to figure out where that was and I told him

I said look It's going to take me a while and I was in the airport on my way home. No, it's not

I went to let's dot church I typed in sinless perfectionism In the just I went to channels apologetics live typed sinless perfectionism and it came up in about 30 seconds

It took me and I was able to send a text to that boy's father to say this is the episode he was looking for And and here's the time stamp where it was said exactly

So yeah, if he wants to watch that's true if the media is there in that case It was he can quickly just grab that look at the media and know exactly what spot to go to so In a show like apologetics live mats like live which is under karm

So when matt started the mats like live when I was on the board of directors at karm We ended up having the issue that We did this podcast and we needed somebody to type in what are the questions that he got asked?

We realized we need to at least put that in the show notes, but I was at back at that time I said look we need to keep a list of these

And say okay. Here's the question. Here's the episode Here's the time stamp and so that was like I mean years ago

Five six years ago that maybe more that we were trying to do that and now it's like oh, okay We do it for the show notes, but now just just search here

That's really the motivation is like speaking for myself I'll be listening to something like doing the dishes or something and it'll plant a seed of an idea

I'm like, hey, when was that said? I'll be talking to my wife a few days later When was that said and now i'm actually able to find it for the 645 days of content that is currently on the platform

Well, you think about it this way like if I was just to take all of the content you have there It's only two years of It would take me to get through everything

But when i'm preparing for this debate with michael brown, what am I going to plan to do? Well, like I just did i'm going to search spiritual gifts

Miracles different words that I think will pop up Prophecy and i'm going to be able to listen to content that's going to be specific to what

I want But I will note specifically where it's discussed and if I prefer reading

I can do that So let's I wanted to start before we say hey, why did you create this? I want people to understand what it does and the power of this

Because I really think that this is a very valuable tool for people to use I want you now if you could explain your motivation for doing it a bit.

What got you doing this? What's your background other than computers which we share in common, but what brought this about?

Really just wanting a solution to this issue like hey, when did I hear that? Who said that I want to go back and hear it again and So I started working on this really before I had like a theology nailed down for like the business model and stuff

Which we'll talk about later But that's really all it is is just like being able to make this stuff accessible So we were talking with james white at the conference, right?

He told me we have 2000 episodes of the dividing line and they are completely inaccessible because there's no index

And here we are probably about it's nine months or so later and it not only is all the dividing line index

But so are 28 other channels. It's amazing to see what you've done with it this is where god gives people different skills your skills with computer programming and For others they were like when i'm mentioning all those programming languages

You were probably laughing because you're like you started with basic And you probably don't even know what pascal is because they don't probably teach that anymore

I am well versed with basic and pascal. I'm, not that young For the nerds in the audience.

I use neovim which is a new take on a 30 year old text editor Wow, okay for the nerds out there.

I learned c That's a programming language but I taught myself c by going through the source code of the corn shell and vi vi is a

Visual editor that is really not visual at the time. It was considered visual

And so that's how I learned c and nobody uses pascal it's taught in schools I actually fought at my university to get c taught as a programming language

I was like the thorn in the side of my Teachers because I was arguing that we should teach c and not pascal

And they didn't want to do that and their argument was that they don't teach computer languages at the school

They teach concepts and I said, okay So I would do all my assignments in c because that's what

I was going to get a job with when I graduated No programs in pascal. That's still very typical of computer science programs today

You're there to learn the science behind computer science and less so like the skills that will get you a job

Now that said there's obviously use cases for the science a .i Being able to make these large language models and all that depending on the program

You're in you are very much in theory land rather than practical application land I don't want to learn a language

I'm not going to be able to use if I want to get the theory but use it In the language that actually will get me a job and I still remember we had a class a statistics class

And I had written the program in c And because we were told any language so I write this program.

We had three programs Do I wrote the first one in c and the professor said there were three of us that did this?

She could tell our programs were different but she couldn't read c So she had to give us an a assuming that it it was correct and worked and so Next assignment.

She says you can't use c So what all three of us came up with the idea of doing is we wrote it in c and we pre -compiled it down to assembler

Code and we hand it in assembly And she then said okay, you can't use c and you can't use assembly

So it's a statistics class. We all knew fortran and we wrote it in fortran And she goes next year.

I'm just gonna have to say it has to be in pascal because that's the only language that she knew These days you can take your code and say hey chat gpt.

Can you make this pascal, please? Yeah Let's take a detour

Let's talk ai because this will be interesting for a lot of folks for people like you and I I mean I have been

Writing ai since the late 80s So artificial intelligence is what ai stands for someone could let our vice president know

Because she had the brilliant statement. I don't know if you heard her talk about ai Uh, you'll have to refresh my memory.

She goes ai contains two letters a and I I get like, okay

Yeah, your your speech writer could have at least said it stands for artificial intelligence Maybe she went off script

But artificial intelligence is basically trying to get a computer not to think that that's the thing everyone thinks that it is

Human beings have an ability to reason it's something immaterial and it's given to us by god

You're not going to get a computer to think it's not going to have an ability to reason because it's not created in the image of god

So when we look at this, what is it? Well, it's Masking what human thinking is and reason because what it's trying to do

Is take what programmers like ken will type in to a computer and tell it how to process data

But a lot of people can have fear with ai and you and I haven't talked about this You have a fear that ai is going to destroy the world

It's going to take over all our nuclear systems and create thermonuclear war. Oh, wait, that's a movie from the 80s war games

I have a computer over there. I can hit it with a two by four. It's not It's not dangerous. So where do you see ai going chat gpt is when people think of the most this

Open ai system it is being used by a lot of folks but there's a lot of others who are doing ai now not all of them having the restrictions that chat gpt does and folks when

I say restrictions there's a non -profit part of the for -profit business just to people understand and the

Non -profit part was people don't have money invested in it. They're not going to make money off it.

They don't have stock They're trying to keep it safe. We could dispute whether they are keeping it safe because Here's a simple thing.

I haven't done this in a while. I did this about almost a year ago But if you type into chat gpt give me eight reasons to vote for donald trump

It will tell you it can't get political But if you type give me eight reasons to vote for joe biden it happily provides them

So ai is only as good as the developers and will have whatever biases the developers have

So just keep that in mind when we talk about it But what do you see is the future for ai and is it a good thing?

Is it a bad thing? Are you even using it? I use it all the time. I always tell people ai heavy emphasis on the a it's artificial

It's a stack of numbers It's a stack of linear algebra that imitates what you might expect a human to do

But it's not reasoning per se if we're talking about chat gpt in these large language models It's predicting it's a mathematical model for hey

What word comes next in the sentence run that again and again and again and then you know? It'll spit out a really nice looking transcript or something

But it's not like reasoning to get there and even things that look like reasoning It's not reasoning in the way that like you and I reason with one another

You end up with these personifying words right that like give it personality even though it has none It's making decisions between different functions that it can perform right, but it's not actually making a decision

It's like oh this is statistics say 80 percent go for that function So i'm going to do that function right which is not at all how actual intelligence operates

Yeah, for example elon musk who actually was early involved in open ai but wanted more

He's more concerned and wants more protections on it He's got his own ai that they're now working difference with his is that it will actually go through all of twitter to get more updated information and so The thing though with his is his quirky humor was programmed in So you get some of that in there you're going to get maybe a little bit more foul language or weird responses

So that's a matter of programming so I don't think people need to be so super afraid of ai

This idea of like ai being an autonomous agent That's going to be like a virus that goes to the internet and take over our nuclear systems

Like sure somebody could probably make a model that can take over a nuclear system

But it's not like autonomously going to get there The way something like that would happen is in warfare concepts that we already have to defend against anyway

Ai is just another tool in that arsenal now. Yeah, and so As we look at it folks don't be afraid of it

I just think through all of the breaks in technology that we've had And there are always the end of the world type folks that think like this is going to be it.

I mean When smartphones came out people thought by now everyone was going to be dead by radiation let alone

The fact that the phones would take over our lives. I think in some ways we've depended on it, but It's not the way that so many people said it would cars sewing machines trucks the list goes on and uh

Every decade there's a new existential crisis of uh, well, this is it now we need we need universal basic income

And that's the thing that we have to realize That there's always going to be folks who they're looking for things that they assume.

Oh, this is it. This is the end This is horrible and yet we end up using it as a tool and that's how

I think we we should just like we use Let's church as a tool. It's something that helps us to be able to search things

Oh, I just noticed you have conversations that matter our friend John harris is there and I should mention to give a plug the reason that we decided to do this episode

Why I reached out to you to do an episode was because You were on with greg more from dead man walking podcast and we met

I don't know if that was the first time you met him But I met greg along with keith falski who his conversations with a calvinist at that same open -air theology conference

He had you on and I was like, you know what i'm using your why don't we plug it more and let others know that?

This is available Like greg did so that's a shout out to to greg there at dead man walking podcast for having you on Brilliant idea that he had and i'm glad he did.

So let's talk about Your business model well, so before the business model I actually did have one more

Ai thought so there are concerns out there Like oh, I don't want to use these ai models because uh, i'm just training them and i'm like training my replacement or something

Like that there has been a lot of progress made in the last year to make these things easy to run on your own hardware on your own computer on your own phone and Without having to reach out to any cloud services without having to send training data off anywhere

And it's still very developer centric right now But the time is coming when you will be able to download a simple model and run it completely locally without any internet connection

Whatsoever, and you won't need to upload any data to you don't need to contribute to the training of these things

Yeah, I mean they are only as good as the training but people should be as a warning don't rely On chat gbt for its answers.

It lies to you often It's only as good as the data. Well, so they call it hallucinating

I asked it early on who is andrew rapaport and it had a totally different university I went to and it doesn't know the difference between me andrew rapap andrew r rapaport

And andrew s rapaport the venture capitalist I don't have his kind of money though Funny true story dennis kominich who was running for democrat for president during the primaries

He didn't know the difference either and he actually contacted me or someone in his staff to he wanted to take me to dinner

Now here's the funny thing. He contacted me at my lucent .com address I worked for lucent when bell laboratories got outsourced, you know got spun off to lucent.

Okay i'm like You don't realize this is not like the venture capitalist company name, right?

I have so of course my response to the email was I decided i'm voting for bush this year

You know, well and that word you use also it doesn't know the difference right that's that personifying language

I'm talking about like the the idea that these models have So -called like knowledge even is it's really it's not what they are

It's like I said, it's a stack of numbers. It's projecting words. So like what it knows per se like so to speak is

What word should come next in the sentence and sometimes it's a good word and sometimes it's a bad word So let's talk about how your business model is because this is sound different And I know that i'll let you explain the book that this is based off of I know of the book

I know he has been on several of our other christian podcast community podcasts I haven't had him on myself because I haven't had time to read the book though You are going to make that available where I can listen to it.

So So I want you to Explain your model, but also mention the durian principle what it is how others could find out about this

Early on working on this I got connected with conley owens author of the durian principle

And he basically provided a theology for something that I had been thinking about in my head for a long time

Like hey, why are churches? Charging other churches to play their songs Why do we have all these restrictions on english translations of the bible?

You can't take more than 500 verses you can't share more than however many consecutive verses and it can't be more than half a book and You can't you can't you can't and going like isn't this the word of god, right?

Like what's going on here? Shouldn't this be free to share if I want to print out the letter of first john and give it to someone in an evangelistic effort, you can't do that with most modern translations of the bible and It's a misconception like oh i'll just use the king james

The king james is also subject to a perpetual copyright from the crown They restrict you to 500 verses and all the rest as well.

The english standard version esv very popular They actually take it to an even greater degree.

You cannot quote the esv In any work that is available to the public with a creative commons license so Meaning like if I write a paper or if I write a sermon and I want that sermon to be available to the public

Basically for free unencumbered that I want people to share my sermon. I cannot use the esv

I cannot quote the esv translation in my sermon because their license specifically restricts that So the dorian principle is taking a look at like hey what does scripture actually say about how we should do ministry finance and and all that kind of stuff and like the the basic concept if I could boil it down to a few words is

Ministry should be supported not paid for and so i'm considering this a ministry. It should be supported not paid for So everything is available 100 for free with no ads

You don't need to sign up. You can sign up you can donate but that's what it is donations welcome

But you absolutely are under no obligation. Yeah, I mean this is how when we used to do our conferences we did our conferences

It's a sad thing because if people don't pay they're less likely to show up Which is really sad because we'd be paying for really good speakers to come in And speak and people would kind of decide the weather's not so nice.

So I decided not to go like really? Okay, and so I get the fact that people say oh, but you should you should charge for it and But when we do the conferences, we don't want money to be an issue

Our conferences were free people just attended and we would do a love offering people can put whatever they want

And we would lose money each year, but we were giving great resources to the hundreds of people that would show up Right, that's the kind of the idea.

I mean folks that you you listen to this podcast You didn't have to pay for the podcast We don't put it behind a paywall And there's many of the listeners who decide to go to strivingturning .org

and support us because of that great We're thankful for that. It helps us to keep doing things like this

But we put the content out and we do this on the way we chose to do content, right?

Similar principle we put it on youtube. We don't charge for that You can take our striving fraternity academy classes for free where other ministries pay for it

The fact that people have that mindset though can is people start to think oh this isn't of value

Or they think you have a couple different ways people think some think if it's free, it's not valuable

Okay, so that's one thing I want you to address The other thing is you have people that just say oh, it's free. I could take advantage of it

I mean, I I remember when you have publishers that publish a book So when we put our books out they're out there

I've had people contact me contact the ministry saying that my book what do they believe? What do we believe should be free on amazon?

Well, sorry amazon doesn't actually work that way Like if I made it free, then it's free for everybody and i'm just paying to put my book out there

I'm sure I could get a lot of the number of copies in print that way But the reality is is that there are the when you do a book especially with a publisher

They put the price on it and it's whatever they decide you don't have that right anymore But I have people that contact me like you're a christian.

You should do this for free Which always go like, okay, do you do you go to work and not expect a paycheck?

I'm, just ask it like because because there are people that think like a pastor shouldn't get paid a salary Which the laborer is deserving of his wages, right?

Like that's scriptural what the dorian principle is saying is how should that salary come about? Is it reciprocity?

Is it like you are paying for this or are you paying out of co -labor and appreciation for something?

So anyone who's interested in a deep dive on that the dorian principle, that's the name of the book The audio book is on let's church conley will happily send you a print copy of the book and the audio book is free

The print book is free and it's a distilled version of a thesis he did in seminary There's also copy .church.

So I own let's .church. There's another website copy .church It has like a list of comment objections and it like outlines everything in a more friendly visual way

So like you brought up that objection earlier people don't value free products Well, they have an answer to that.

We want more people to be able to get it So we need funding in order to spread the word they have answers to all that and everything is tied back to scripture

Like how would jesus have us run our industry's finances essentially and who owns the copy .church.

There are a few people Of various notoriety in this movement. His name isn't coming to me right now

And I there are names coming to me. I don't want to misattribute. It is interesting because they do have a pricing page

So they do have some but I think though for folks What I really want folks to know from this episode is the fact that this is a resource let's .church

That I want you to think about two different ways one start using it start searching for things when you

Make this your go -to To search when you want to go and research something to see of you're going to get a wide variety of views

Sheerly because of the number of channels that are represented there a second thing is if you know of other ministries, maybe your church

Maybe you can reach out to ken at let's church and say hey

Here's someone that maybe you could add and here's their rss feed to the podcast

There are certain things that he's got to look into whether you know Depending where those files are whether he could download them or whether you have to upload them

But you can contact him and ken Why don't you let folks know how they could best reach out to you?

I mean, I know there's the contact at let's .church, but I don't know if you have a better way or just that way

Basically just that way you can also do ken at let's .church That's going to be the primary way to to reach me is those two email addresses

So ken at let's .church is the way to get a hold of ken so that you could maybe add your church your ministry to this growing list

So with that anything else ken you want to talk about with with let's .church I could just say what's on the horizon

You mentioned uh, john harris. So working behind the scenes It's less behind the scenes now because the public announcement has been made but uh, he's been mentioning it on his podcast

So it's not so behind the scenes anymore, but um, there is a church search functionality coming to let's church so that'll also be a free service and so imagine like being able to search for a church and Their transcripts and sermons and everything and have like an all -in -one hub for like anything that your church

Needs for their like public facing technology and all this is only the beginning I want to provide free websites in the future and have that all tied into the media library as well

I was telling you earlier Pushing out to youtube twitter and all the other platforms So this can be like a one -stop place where you can upload files and have them all go out

But yeah, this is only the beginning uh lord willing and it's going to be a great time The more support you get you could then hire other people to not just be doing this on your part time

Or maybe doing this you full -time that's actually probably worth mentioning right now

I'm, not taking a salary from let's church not now Anyway, i'm not committing to that in the same way where uh, like on the about page

It says uh, let's church as a company will never run ads on principle I'm, not saying that I won't ever take a salary on principle.

I'm saying i'm not taking a salary So anything that you don't Anything that you donate right now goes entirely to technology costs because it is not free to transcribe

Over 600 days of content. That's the thing. I was going to say is there's going to come a time where there's just too much work to be done and You're going to need to be working more full -time at this to get everything done or hire other people and that's

Only be done if yeah, lord willing this is a full -time someday with support of others

So folks if you want to support could just go to let's dot church And there's a donate button or page that you can click on the link up there

So now probably be a good time that we should mention if we haven't bored people with technology

Ideas and our nerdiness to mention that if you are a little bit bored Maybe you could go to get yourself a nice pillow at mypillow .com

Maybe for christmas you have some christmas gifts. You don't know what to get for that Specific person that's hard to find.

Well, you can get them as I have done a set of towels or they have robes They have a lot of different ideas you can give to someone that basically everyone always needs

I mean people always need like nice good towels because it replaces the ones that well They probably are not so nice or really really old and it doesn't say that they smell funny and you know

But you can get a lot of different gift ideas just go to mypillow .com And use the promo code sfe stands for striving fraternity so that they know that We sent you and that way they keep supporting us and we get to keep that relationship.

We appreciate them supporting us To do the show. It's one of the ways that we're able to do it And so not just through donations of others, but we take that too

By the way, if you want to go to strivingfraternity .org Support you can support us directly if you so choose folks if you find value in what we provide here

This is a value for value type of thing If we provide value you could buy a pillow and not only get a better night's sleep

But support us at the same time you could go directly to our website. You could support us there We would appreciate either one.

So mypillow .com the promo code is sfe for striving for eternity Let's talk about calvinism,

Ken So you and I met at the open air theology conference and it's coming up again in february

In tennessee and this topic this year is why Calvinism you're planning on going though.

You're a little bit further now. You decided to Leave a friendly state to go to a communist state

And now you have a longer ride or flight probably to get there

But you're still planning to attend the open air theology conference, correct? Yes, lord willing. I will be there this year

It was an hour and a half drive before now It is a two some odd hour flight and a hop and skip and all the rest i'm looking forward to folks

I'll tell you why I like the open air theology conference what jeffrey rice has done with this is

To make it a few more days. So yeah, you may have to take extra time off work to attend the full conference

But he's added in a lot of fellowship time it's like One hour speaker one hour break and there's so much the thing

I find ken that people like about conferences is not so much the speakers though.

That's what brings everyone in When people talk about conferences, it's usually the fellowship and yet a lot of conferences don't make time for fellowship

A lot of the conferences what they do is they bring in a bunch of speakers and they go back to back to back to Back and if you want to have fellowship time you got to skip someone

And what ends up happening and I know because i've been to enough conferences both as an attendee and as a speaker

Ken people make a decision of oh that andrew rapper guy. Well, he's probably pretty boring I'm gonna skip him and i'll skip him so we could fellowship right and people do that they choose which speaker they want to listen to and This conference doesn't put you in that position because there's so much fellowship time the conference

Ends around like five or six at night and every night afterwards We're going to dinner in large groups having great theological discussions great fellowship

And so the way that jeffrey reiss laid it out really is helpful I am looking forward to this year both jeffrey and I are the first two speakers and so it's

It's like get this talk out of the way and now I can enjoy where last year I was like You know, it was I think it was me

And then the q a and then james's debate, you know Something like that. So it was like I was more than on the end of the wrap -up where I got to you know

Like okay now I can relax more But the topic is calvinism big big issue.

A lot of people have issues with it and so I have said this

For this is a conference for people even that don't agree with calvinism because they're going to hear a lot of different topics

My topic is going to be calvinism in history going looking through Where do we get the idea of what we call calvinism?

But there's going to be the calvinism of luther people know that luther and calvin agreed on a lot of things

But they had some disagreements. How does calvinism fit with the love of god? People think those are mutually exclusive and I will say this i'm sure that just like last year

Ken you were in attendance, but the q a were there fireworks? The q a no q a you want to be there for you don't know what's going to happen

There were more fireworks in the debate than the q a And even then the debate was uh, not fireworky.

I think it was very friendly and cordial. Yeah, it was cordial no, I think the thing was that there was in the q a and people would have to go watch that but The only topic that everybody up there agreed on which

I was surprised with all the things that was discussed the only one where there was Unanimous agreement was the meaning of the word teleos in first corinthians 13 10

Teleos meaning complete mature. It's translated as perfect Everybody up there agreed that it was a canon and when we said that there in the back was james white vigorously shaking his head

No Disagreeing with all of us It's like the one time we were all in agreement and there's james white

Disagreeing But this is the thing like as you mentioned ken, there's no green room here. You got to walk right up to james to myself

There's no separate room We were hanging out just where everyone else was hanging out having lunch where everyone else was having lunch

So that's kind of a neat thing with this conference. It was a very great time very encouraging time for sure

So if you want let me plug it is go to open air theology .com open air theology .com

You can go there and on that page you will see Basically the front of it is going to be about the conference

So you're from there you can go down see some of the topics But there are tickets available and you're able to click the purchase now ticket

They'll bring you over to eventbrite and you can order the tickets. I don't know how exactly it works

I know that the it says the tickets range from free to 150 So, so I don't know how that ends up working but you can go and see some information about the

Conference there. So it's again open air theology .com And find out more about the conference there.

So I hope to see you there ken I appreciate you coming on and just being able to have this dialogue about let's church what it is

So let me just give some plugs again to websites in case some of you were driving This is where you stop so that you can write these things down But if you want the open air theology conference is just openairtheology .com

We've been talking about let's church and just go to let's dot church to go check that out

Ken any other things you want to share with us? No, I think we more or less covered it good Well folks if you have a church or ministry to that you think would benefit by having searchable transcripts

Maybe there's a podcast. Maybe there's videos whatever it may be if there's a way of Ken sucking that in like if it has an rss feed it could even be blog articles

You can suck those things in although you may not want those all in two places Just saying for seo value that would hurt but you don't want it

But there's different things you might be able to do with let's church. I encourage you to check it out and when the church search option pops up you

May want to see about getting added to that We'll see what their the rules are and how you get added but go to let's dot church to find out all the information

And with that, that's a wrap This podcast is part of the striving for eternity ministry for more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church

Go to strivingforeternity .org Quick programming note. This is the last episode of the year.