CRU Goes Down the Woke Hole
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Jon reviews the sessions from CRU's (formerly "Campus Crusade for Christ) 2019 staff conference and reveals how it could have been worse! Also, Jon discusses some of his thoughts and experience with college ministry in general.
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Mentioned in this podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRgjEPFf904
- 00:00
- Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. One of the things you probably don't know about me is that I used to be heavily involved in campus ministry.
- 00:08
- A few colleges in New York, one in California, different roles, but it all started when I was 18 years old and I went to a normal, run -of -the -mill community college in my hometown.
- 00:16
- And I could not believe some of the things that professors were saying. I remember a sociology course required for every major and I, of course, had to take it and the professor told us to go experiment with homosexuality over the weekend.
- 00:30
- He was a fan, or she, I should say, was a fan of Karl Marx and Darwin. And that goes for my biology and my physics professor as well when it comes to Darwinism.
- 00:42
- I remember three professors off the top of my head who said outrageously sexually inappropriate things constantly, things
- 00:50
- I could not repeat in this podcast because they were so foul. I remember one professor after class telling the students to go vote for Obama as if it was a class assignment.
- 01:03
- And I realized, and I've realized since then, that my experience was not unique.
- 01:11
- This is a very common experience for people all over the country who have gone to college within the last 10, 15 years.
- 01:19
- And I don't think that those in my parents' generation always understand what the campus community life is really like or the college experience.
- 01:27
- Some do. Those who are my age who have not gone to college, they may not realize what it's like, but it is bad.
- 01:33
- It is anti -Christian, anti -Western civilization, anti -American, anti -conservative, and if you come out of that still holding to traditional values, then it's, in my mind, almost a miracle because you have listened to countless hours of people trying to dissuade you from those values.
- 01:53
- Well, I was one who came out and still held to traditional values. And one of the reasons
- 01:58
- I think that happened, and not just for me, but for others like me, is that we had a grounding before we came into college.
- 02:05
- I was a Christian. I knew what I believed. And there were certain foundational convictions that were not up for grabs.
- 02:13
- And one of the things I realized is that for a lot of students coming in, they did have convictions up for grabs.
- 02:19
- In fact, most of the time, they came from broken families. And of course, they're not getting their values from this fractured society, but they had insecurities, instabilities, lack of belonging, and they're just looking for a community.
- 02:30
- They have even peer groups that function almost like a family because they're looking for some kind of source of stability.
- 02:38
- And I have a burden for them because I really do think that the college campus is the untapped mission field in our country.
- 02:46
- I'm very much for getting involved on college campuses. And the more secular, the better because they're hearing garbage and they need a counter, to have a voice that counteracts that.
- 02:56
- And it's actually not, it's labor intensive, but it's actually not as hard as some people may think because many of these students who are just looking for belonging are looking for like a mom and a dad.
- 03:08
- And I've seen people in my parents' generation who have functioned in that capacity with college students, and it works quite beautifully.
- 03:15
- They can provide some of that stability that was broken. And so, that's my plug to get involved with college ministry.
- 03:24
- One of the things though, the reason I'm telling you this is to preface this thing, I'm working towards it.
- 03:31
- One of the things I wanted to say is that on the five or so campuses that I've worked on in different capacities or volunteered on,
- 03:37
- I should say, one of the groups was a
- 03:42
- Campus Crusade group. So I am slightly familiar with Campus Crusade. I also, when
- 03:48
- I was essentially running a campus ministry group, I had to look through the different para -church organizations for college campuses and determine whether or not we should be involved, our group, with one of those.
- 04:00
- And at the time, we had some legal trouble with the college, they were discriminating against the Christian group that I was in, and we wanted just someone to call to say, hey, can we get some support?
- 04:09
- And so, I think that campus ministries are great. I think they should be rooted in a local church somehow, which is one of the big problems out there that they're often not, but I think it's great to have a para -church that can work with a local church and get on a college campus and help mobilize students, and not just students, but mobilize older folks to come share their wisdom and get involved with young people, which
- 04:29
- I think is the more biblical model. So, that's where I'm coming from as I give you the information that I am about to give you.
- 04:38
- This is a sample of the crew they're calling themselves now. Used to be
- 04:44
- Campus Crusade, and when I was involved, it was, but the crew conference, staff conference from this past summer.
- 04:52
- Here we go. We are not
- 05:13
- Democrats, we're not Republicans, we are the church. Our fellowships need political diversity because it allows us to welcome in our neighbors.
- 05:24
- Oneness and diversity is not a political issue. It's not a social or cultural or organizational issue.
- 05:31
- It is a gospel issue. Inequity in housing and education are not political issues to care about.
- 05:39
- They're human realities. Just as I'm growing in my ethnic identity and God is using me to share the gospel,
- 05:45
- God is also mobilizing others in the spaces that he has uniquely designed for them.
- 05:51
- I wanna come alongside students as they live out their cultural identities and empower them to make disciples of all nations.
- 05:58
- Friends, it is important for us to be awakened to the racial inequities. You may not be racist or whatever, but we all still live in a racialized society.
- 06:10
- Even though you don't see slaves out here, even though you don't, Jim Crow, you don't see the signs and all of that anymore, what you have to understand,
- 06:19
- I said this at the very beginning, this country was built by white people for white people, well, no, by slaves for white people.
- 06:27
- It was built, right? So that people could generate wealth. We know that sin has implications that go far deeper than what we can ever imagine.
- 06:36
- We know that when we study the real story of our country, because when you know what happened to the first Native Americans, the first citizens who were here, when you really begin to study what happened to them and you look at how they were stripped from them being created in the
- 06:53
- Imago Dei and somehow to be put on this European framework as if that was godly.
- 06:59
- You know when I say, Father, forgive them, but they know not what they do. And they would have no idea of the implications of making that, of doing that, because it would rob us of any kind of identity as a
- 07:13
- Christian nation. But it doesn't stop there. We all know the legacy of chains.
- 07:22
- We all know that because of chains and hundreds of years of slavery, and why can't we talk honestly about that?
- 07:30
- Why do we have to not be ashamed? Is he gonna bring up Whitefield and is he gonna bring up Edwards again?
- 07:35
- They were just a product of their times. No, they made decisions. Whitefield, the revivalist, the evangelist, made it possible for slavery to still exist in Georgia and even used slaves to build an orphanage.
- 07:49
- Father, forgive him because he had no idea what he would do and that it would cripple the witness of the church even today.
- 07:54
- Just because our country is unrepentant, it doesn't mean that we have to be unrepentant.
- 08:02
- The Slave Trade Act, the Slave Trade Act, prevention of slaves being imported into the
- 08:09
- U .S. in 1807, which led to slaves being breeded as cattle.
- 08:15
- The Indian Removal Act in 1830. This is one of the things where lands were stripped from the natives and given to elite
- 08:26
- White men. The Dred Scott case. In this case, the
- 08:31
- Supreme Court ruled that basically African Americans were and could never be citizens of the
- 08:39
- United States. That was stated by our Supreme Court. We need to understand that.
- 08:46
- The Compromise of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes ushered in the end of Reconstruction and began the reign of terror and domestic terrorism toward brown and black bodies.
- 08:56
- The 13th Amendment, it evolved into slavery by another name through mass incarceration.
- 09:03
- The 14th Amendment granted all citizens equal protection under the law. Plessy versus Ferguson basically said that after the 14th
- 09:15
- Amendment that we would have separate spaces, so separate but equal.
- 09:21
- And this was not overturned until Brown versus the Board of Education. We're so glad we come from so many different places to gather in this space together with no mention of whose land we are standing on and how we got it.
- 09:36
- No justice. When they were debating over taxation in the Constitution and black people were called three -fifths human in the
- 09:42
- Constitution, it was one of the clearest depictions we ever gave of the lie of racial hierarchy.
- 09:49
- It was saying White is five -fifths, black is three -fifths, and then everybody else has human value. If you're an immigrant from Asia or you're an immigrant from South America or an immigrant from Mexico, if you're a native, your value is determined, based on a lie, your value is determined on your proximity to whiteness and your proximity to blackness.
- 10:04
- This is 20 ,019. And that year is significant because this marks the 400th year of the first African -Americans that were brought enslaved to America in 1619.
- 10:21
- And maybe that's something you didn't know. And that's by design. This is the chapel that's in the midst of a slave castle.
- 10:32
- This is a chapel that's in the midst of the brokenness. What were they doing singing songs when women were being raped?
- 10:43
- What were they doing when the injustice was going on all around them?
- 10:51
- And this put me on notice because one of the things I'm afraid of is that we still have chapels in the midst of brokenness in our culture.
- 11:00
- And we're still singing songs and talking to ourselves. Listen, I'm telling you, you had better have conversations on social justice.
- 11:09
- Immigrant children, detained, incarcerated, and trafficked are not political issues to speak on.
- 11:22
- They're my pastoral realities. So I cannot come to you today, crew, and not speak the place where I stand, watching the church sing their songs in stadiums all across the country, raise a banner for Jesus, and stay silent while we experience another
- 11:49
- Holocaust. You see, Christ died so that we can be reconciled to the
- 11:54
- Father. And in turn, because of that reconciliation, we can be reconciled to one another.
- 12:01
- Historical truth is important to the work of reconciliation. When it comes to the historical truth, we're often okay with this partial truth.
- 12:11
- If we're not starting from the same common memory, that creates a barrier. If we're learning history differently, that creates a barrier.
- 12:20
- America has intentionally erased, misinterpreted, and created new narratives for our history, and we must take this back.
- 12:29
- Jesus came to start a revolution against evil and injustice. In light of the incredibly hurtful words being spoken recently in our country about people of color,
- 12:46
- I am reminded that if one member suffers, we all suffer. Be careful of that American baggage that you have taken on, because when you say minorities, it says less than, and we know as biblical people that words have power, because he spoke and the world came into order.
- 13:06
- I'm not your n -word. I'm your brother in Christ. But Terry might come up to me and say, Matt, man, you preached that, you dropped it.
- 13:14
- And I know that's right. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And we just move on. Chasing justice starts with speaking truth to power, and about the powers at play.
- 13:24
- Greed, idolatry, white supremacy. Let me understand the words of the prophet
- 13:29
- Amos, not from a place of power and privilege, but from a place that is most acquainted with the injustices.
- 13:38
- Immigrant neighbors, youth on the west side, women of color in primarily white institutions, men who are incarcerated, who have spent most of their lives behind bars because of something they did when they were 16 and 17 and were tried as adults.
- 13:56
- This generation of God -seeking, good -seeking worshipers resonates with the feeling and the tone of Amos as they look at churches that are disconnected from the reality of suffering and the cries of the people they hear in their own backyard.
- 14:15
- And our complicity in racist structures, and they want to vomit. In the book of Amos, over and over again, he tells us that trampling on the poor through purchasing from companies that exploit workers and harm and endanger human lives and cause war for our luxurious jewels and our electronic batteries is not worship.
- 14:37
- This should break our hearts. This should make us angry, because it's making
- 14:43
- God angry. We're called to be connected. Very America that you defend, you have to go in a segregated army, and then you come back home, and you don't benefit from the wealth of the
- 14:55
- GI Bill, and he has to put his uniform away because you see black soldiers would be lynched.
- 15:03
- And so yeah, he had problems with the systemic realities. There's something that isn't even real in the first place that was created, this thing called white people.
- 15:14
- Race is not something that God created. Makes me crazy when people say there's one human race. No, there's not one human race.
- 15:19
- Race is a construct. It was created, most people who study race would say it's 500 years old or so, right?
- 15:25
- Race was created to justify all these barbaric and evil things that happened, and we could talk all day long about the social inequalities that have come from race, and those are very real, but race at its core is a deeply spiritual issue because it's built on a set of lies.
- 15:41
- Race is built on a lie that human value does not come from God's authorship. Human value comes from where you fall on this humanly created racial hierarchy.
- 15:51
- We must understand that God didn't create race. You see, race is a social and political construct.
- 16:01
- That doesn't mean for us to, she said race doesn't exist, so therefore I don't see anybody.
- 16:08
- I don't see your color. I'm not telling you to take a colorblind approach because that is a lie.
- 16:14
- To say that you don't see color, you see me. And if you don't see, first of all, if you say
- 16:22
- I don't see color, then you don't see who I am. You don't see my pain.
- 16:28
- You don't see my joy. You don't see the systemic things that are impacting me.
- 16:34
- My friend Michael was at a ministry conference similar to this, where he shared about ways that he had experienced racism while a black student at UCLA, and he was told by a kind, respectful, loving older white woman in his small group,
- 16:50
- Michael, when I see you, I don't see your color. And Michael didn't want to be rude, so he didn't say anything back, but he was thinking,
- 17:01
- I'm a black man from Los Angeles. I grew up during the LA riots. If you say you don't see my color, you might as well not see me at all.
- 17:12
- We have been discipled and formed in a theology of intellect and intention, not a theology of embodiment and action.
- 17:22
- True worship cannot exist without justice. Young, black, brown, and yellow bodies.
- 17:31
- Go to Pew Research. I don't have time. Go to Barna. I don't have time. The research is out. The future of the church looks like me.
- 17:39
- If you hold a complementarian view of women in leadership, and you happen to be the team leader, that doesn't give you the right to make that the de facto position.
- 17:52
- Cruz's position is we don't have a position. We have a practice, and that men and women can all lead.
- 17:57
- I'm gonna read this, and then you say we lament. Lord, we acknowledge that we have learned to do right.
- 18:04
- We did not seek restorative justice that benefits all. We have not defended the oppressed.
- 18:10
- We have not taken up the cause of the fatherless or pleaded the case of the widow. Instead, we have mocked and punished the poor with our partisanship and our apathy.
- 18:20
- Lord, have mercy. We lament that we stood by as systemic and institutionalized racism became founding pillars and structures in America and within the church.
- 18:35
- Lord, have mercy. We have allowed agendas of empire to become prominent within your church.
- 18:43
- We understand the empire aims to take and oppress. We have replaced your kingdom with the empire mentality.
- 18:52
- Lord, have mercy. We have formed and developed church structures and denominations while excluding the voice of your global church due to racism and racial segregation.
- 19:05
- Lord, have mercy. We acknowledge the racial hierarchies and structures of privilege many have benefited from.
- 19:13
- Many have been oppressed by. Lord, have mercy. We have ignored the cries of children because they were not our own.
- 19:21
- We have discounted the pain of mothers because they were not our own. We have turned a blind eye to the affliction of brown and black men and women because they were not our own.
- 19:34
- Lord, have mercy. We have replaced your supremacy with idolization of a nation and racial identity.
- 19:42
- Lord, have mercy. We have not required justice. We have not loved others well.
- 19:49
- And we have not walked in humility and in our brokenness. Lord, have mercy.
- 19:55
- We cry out to you, oh God, our Redeemer, as the only one who can save us from ourselves.
- 20:01
- Show us our blind spots. Don't let us hide from you in our shame and guilt. Restore us to your perfect union that can only be found in Jesus Christ.
- 20:10
- Lord, show us how to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with you.
- 20:18
- Lord, have mercy. Jesus, come to me. Jesus said, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
- 20:30
- Lord, with deep sorrow, we lament. In the powerful name of Jesus, let it be so.
- 20:37
- I grew up in Ohio. My parents were the first ones that went to college.
- 20:46
- My grandparents, my grandfather worked three jobs in order for his kids to go.
- 20:55
- Ancestry's been done on both sides. And there's no trace of slavery that has been a part of my family.
- 21:05
- And so, it's so hard for me. That I just keep feeling beat up over the issue.
- 21:14
- When is it gonna, when are we gonna say sorry enough? Your family was not a part of that, but your family benefited from the opportunities of being white.
- 21:27
- The evil one looks to divide. So, if you came to this conference this week thinking that the evil one would never attempt to divide, then
- 21:39
- I think you're gonna be disappointed. Woof.
- 22:07
- Now, some of you might be getting used to watching these, but for others of us, it's still a little shocking when you see this.
- 22:13
- And especially if you're a crew staff member and you walked in there thinking that the theme of the conference was going to be what the theme of the conference actually was, only to find out it was a conference on social justice and racial reconciliation, you may have been surprised.
- 22:26
- There's a lot here. We could spend a lot of time on this. I wanna make just a few observations though, kind of off the top of my head here.
- 22:34
- There is a redefinition of the gospel. If you went to this, you would know what the gospel is if you had not known previously.
- 22:44
- If you were flying the wall, you weren't saved and you're attending crew 19, I don't think you'd know the core doctrines of Christianity that are essential for salvation.
- 22:52
- Who Jesus is, what he did, how to repent and trust him. It wasn't there. I mean, you don't even hear words like substitutionary atonement, doesn't come up.
- 23:03
- They don't talk about it. Instead what we hear is race and racism are gospel issues because race is a construct,
- 23:09
- Christ died for reconciliation which means also rewriting history. Diversity is a gospel issue and we need to read the
- 23:15
- Bible through the lens of the oppressed. That's what you would have thought is the gospel. And there was one old white guy who did a session.
- 23:25
- I watched most of these. I'm friends with the enemies within the church guys. I've known about this for weeks. And before I did this video, I wanted to just make sure
- 23:30
- I got everything in context. And yes, there's a lot that was cut out that could have been included. This was crew 19.
- 23:36
- There was one session though where there was an older white dude, right? So we can dismiss him, but he sort of shared a rudimentary gospel and just tried to pump people up for evangelism.
- 23:46
- Other than him, there wasn't any gospel anywhere. The claim is that we're racist and we need to repent.
- 23:53
- That's why you had all these, the whole staff rising up and saying, we lament, we lament. This weird civic, almost like ceremony of some kind.
- 24:03
- You need to read C .S. Lewis on national repentance because this was tailor -made for that essay.
- 24:10
- But man, man, this is a new religion. This is a new religion. You're not apologizing for things that you've done against God.
- 24:17
- You're lamenting structural injustice, supposedly, that's been there that you're complicit in and you're not even really going to God and having it done with.
- 24:27
- You're just lamenting it. And it's an endless lamentation. I mean, look at that lady at the end. That's the, these are victims of this.
- 24:35
- I mean, you want to talk about, they talk about victims all day. Look at these white people that they're pounding.
- 24:40
- I mean, she's in tears almost. What can I do? What can I do? It's almost like Tetzel and indulgences.
- 24:47
- She's saying, what can I do to obtain forgiveness? And they look at her and what does the lady say to her?
- 24:53
- Well, your family may have not owned slaves, even though they lived in grinding poverty for three generations, but you also benefited from structural injustice.
- 25:03
- Oh my gosh, there is no forgiveness. There is none. This is not the Christian gospel. So we're racist.
- 25:10
- We need to repent. We need to lament. The proof is revisionist history and inequities. And most of these people don't realize,
- 25:15
- I think, that they're basically, this is just the historical discipline now, but they're reading everything through the
- 25:22
- Howard Zinn approach to history. And everything is broad -brushed. Everything is oppressor -oppressed.
- 25:27
- There's no nuance to anything. America was built by slaves. Really? Just slaves. Slaves were the ones that built
- 25:33
- America. You're just gonna make that blanket statement? Native Americans were put on a
- 25:38
- European framework. Really? This is just a blanket statement? This is just what happened? It wasn't like maybe there were different tribes and different European groups coming over.
- 25:46
- I mean, look at David Brainerd. Look at those who were translating Native American languages.
- 25:52
- Look at the Pilgrims. When they came, it was an empty area. The tribe before had died of smallpox, and there they were.
- 25:57
- They weren't responsible for that. They settled there. I mean, there's different situations, and there's injustice.
- 26:04
- Yes, that happened. But you're painting with a broad brush. You're painting because you need to have a clear oppressor -oppressed for this to work.
- 26:11
- Edwards, Whitfield, they were slaveholders. I did a whole episode on this. Go check it out. We stole native land.
- 26:17
- Again, no nuance. Three -fifths Compromise said blacks weren't people. That is absolutely false. That was a political,
- 26:24
- I don't even, I don't want to get into this too deep. Essentially, the Three -fifths Compromise was about representation.
- 26:30
- Southerners were saying, hey, we want, like, they're human beings. We want them to be counted as a person. A lot of Northerners were saying, that'll give you too much representation.
- 26:37
- We have different economic ways of viewing things, and we don't want that. This was at a time when women could not vote.
- 26:43
- This was at a time when landowners were the ones that were voting. So, children didn't vote.
- 26:49
- I mean, there's a lot of people that didn't have representation necessarily in the government, or a voice,
- 26:55
- I should say, in the government. And to say that this was just saying that you count for three -fifths of the person, this was not a statement of human value at all.
- 27:03
- It's just so ignorant. I can't even, it's making me mad. Anyway, 1619, the first slaves come. That's wrong.
- 27:09
- They were indentured servants, and they were already indentured servants from Europe here before that.
- 27:14
- There were Native Americans who were enslaved before that, or indentured servants. And it's like, they don't know the nuance between those things, but to then broad brush and say this is just America, America didn't even form.
- 27:27
- If you wanna say 1776, you can say that. If you wanna say when the Constitution was ratified, you can say that.
- 27:35
- 1787, but this is 1619. It's in Virginia. So it's like, there's no concept of localized events and nuance.
- 27:45
- Veterans after World War II were lynched. Really? All of them were lynched? If they put on a uniform and they were a person of color?
- 27:50
- That's what happened? He didn't give an example. What if there was an example? What if there was one or two examples out there that put on their
- 27:56
- World War II uniform and they were lynched? Does that prove that that was America? The whole country was like that. A legal history of discrimination.
- 28:03
- I went through a bunch of stuff. That was mostly false. And here's the reason they're bringing it up. It's not because they care so much about history.
- 28:09
- It's because they want to tell you that we're part of this long line of guilty people and we haven't progressed.
- 28:14
- So you bear all that guilt. We still have the equivalent of slave chapels. We still have mass incarceration.
- 28:20
- We have a modern Holocaust because ICE is running around rounding people up. We have inequities in housing and other things.
- 28:27
- I mean, it's like America has not made any steps towards progressing or anything.
- 28:36
- So the call to action is don't think in terms of being colorblind.
- 28:42
- You need to do justice. And what does that mean? If all the problems presented to you are basically
- 28:47
- Democratic Party platform talking points, what does that mean to do justice? What kinds of things should you support if that's true?
- 28:55
- Think about it. Don't listen to people who tell you about the past who get the present wrong.
- 29:00
- That's my advice. Don't listen to people who tell you about the past who get the present wrong.
- 29:06
- If they have present solutions and they read the present wrong, I wouldn't listen to what they're saying about history.
- 29:15
- I'd be skeptical about it. Now, in all of this,
- 29:20
- I think it's very interesting to observe that the third way, as I call it, but this idea that you can be from whatever political party, have whatever political affiliation and still be part of the church is very much present.
- 29:30
- There was a whole session on it that I listened to most of it. And so here's the insinuation.
- 29:36
- Here's the idea that's being carried forward there. If you have
- 29:43
- Democrats in your church, don't try to convince them to change. Just let them alone.
- 29:50
- They support a party that's responsible for millions of abortions and forwards that and tries to, it's part of their party platform.
- 29:57
- Don't try to convince them to change. I mean, abortion was never brought up, this whole conference. Talk about a real biblical injustice going on presently.
- 30:04
- Nope, nope, don't care about that because you know what? Democrats and Republicans can both exist side by side in our church because we need to be about inclusion, diversity, that's a gospel issue, and young people, they need to come to the church.
- 30:16
- Well, so the only things that you talk about are things the Democratic Party cares about and thinks they have solutions for, which include bigger government solutions.
- 30:23
- That's what you talk about. You don't talk about abortion. You don't talk about fatherlessness, inner city crime, family breakdown, generational welfare.
- 30:31
- I mean, look, all these, just because you have some disparity, it doesn't mean it's because of this system necessarily.
- 30:38
- There's other reasons for disparities. I could do a whole episode on this, but there's other ways of looking at this and seeing cultural differences that might make a difference in how people are living and the situations that they're living under.
- 30:55
- You'd think that'd be a more Christian approach too, to look at things through that lens because evil comes from the heart.
- 31:02
- But no, it's inequities. And of course, and I've said this a million times, if there is a law that's actually racist you can show me, let's change it.
- 31:09
- There's a law that says like, if you're a person of color, if you're Hispanic or whatever, you don't have this privilege because of who you are, then let's go change it.
- 31:21
- Conversely, I think if you're a white person, you don't get certain privileges in the legal system or whatever, I'd say change it too.
- 31:26
- I think that people should be treated as people. But of course, colorblindness should be avoided as well.
- 31:33
- So I'm racist for even saying that. So you see how the system is rigged. Now, like I said, the motive is to welcome in people that are neighbors who might be
- 31:43
- Democrats, young people. And abortion is not a gospel issue apparently.
- 31:49
- One of the, this stood out to me, if one brother suffers, we all suffer, right? That was said by,
- 31:55
- I think it was James White. If one brother suffers, we all suffer. Unless they're unborn apparently. Unless they're unborn.
- 32:04
- So one of the observations I had was, this is very external. The focus is on the body.
- 32:09
- You even hear it. Brown bodies, yellow bodies, black bodies, they focus on the body, external things. They're not focused on, and systems, external systems.
- 32:17
- They're not focused on what Jesus said about evil coming from the heart. In fact, I'm gonna read for you, James chapter four.
- 32:25
- It says, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? So what is it? There's all this division, right? Is it not the source, your pleasure, that wage war on your members you lust and do not have so you commit murder?
- 32:36
- You are envious and cannot obtain so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
- 32:47
- You adulterous, you adulterouses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward one another? Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
- 32:56
- So look, guys, scripture is clear on this. You go for the heart, you go for sin that actually comes from the heart.
- 33:04
- The issue is not the systems of oppression. The issue is not external, the issue is internal.
- 33:11
- And Crew has lost a concept of this. And if you thought that was bad, well, it could have been a lot worse.
- 33:19
- And I'm gonna show you this. This was given to me. This is from an internal Crew Facebook group.
- 33:24
- This is Matt Mikalotis, I think I'm pronouncing his name right. And Matt, this is 28 weeks ago, said that, he's talking about the conference that we just talked about, the
- 33:34
- Crew Staff Conference. And he says in this that he tried to get Kaitlyn to come to the conference.
- 33:40
- Now, who's Kaitlyn? Well, it's Kaitlyn B. Curtis. And I'm gonna tell you more about her in a minute. But Matt says, we're trying to get
- 33:46
- Kaitlyn to come. We invited her and she said on her website that she was invited. And then so Kaitlyn says, a few months ago,
- 33:55
- I turned down a speaking event. This is in June. For ethical reasons, I was asked to sign a document for a religious organization that basically said
- 34:02
- I would go against their statement of faith in my talk. For them, the statement doesn't mean much. For me, it meant everything. The problem was, if I signed that contract,
- 34:09
- I'd feel silenced before I ever began speaking. And so she goes on, you can read it if you wanna stop to screenshot this or whatever.
- 34:16
- But Kaitlyn's saying their statement of faith doesn't mean much. Their statement of faith doesn't mean much. I was asked to speak at this event.
- 34:22
- Now, John, how do you know it's Cru? Well, I don't 100%, but it lines up.
- 34:27
- Now, it could be something else. But Kaitlyn put on her website before this that she had a speaking engagement with Cru.
- 34:34
- And then right after it, she doesn't speak at Cru. And this is what she puts on her Facebook. I was asked to speak for,
- 34:40
- I mean, it lines up perfectly. Now, this was sent to me, again, by someone within Cru.
- 34:47
- They're telling me this is what Kaitlyn said about this, essentially. And they're also telling me, because through these screenshots, that Matt Mikulatis was also trying to, he was looking at getting
- 34:58
- Catholics to come. He wanted to have a priest in 2017 come to paint these amazing paintings of the stories of Christ.
- 35:05
- And he was open to it in 2019. So they have a very loose statement of faith. If a
- 35:10
- Catholic can sign it, and there are Catholics in Cru, then you would think that most people can sign this statement of faith.
- 35:16
- But apparently, not Kaitlyn. Not Kaitlyn. Now, why would that be? Why would they invite someone who can't sign their statement of faith?
- 35:24
- Well, I'd like to show you this. Here's Matt, just to show you. He's who
- 35:30
- I'm talking about, Matt Mikulatis. He's a program director at Cru. He's been there about seven years. Here's Kaitlyn.
- 35:36
- Her Twitter handler is Kaitlyn Curtis. And her tagline is, Kaitlyn, probably a pagan, Curtis. Kaitlyn, probably a pagan,
- 35:42
- Curtis. And who does she write for? For Sojourners, Jim Wallace's organization. Yeah, Heretics.
- 35:48
- So Kaitlyn, probably a pagan, Curtis. She has a website. And she is, according to, well, here's her latest blog.
- 35:55
- Are we saved or traumatized by American Christianity? Yeah. You can't make this stuff up.
- 36:02
- But Kaitlyn, probably a pagan, Curtis. What does it say? She's a young Native American Christian mystic who portrays the sacredness of the human condition in everyday language through her writing.
- 36:13
- Now, imagine with me for one moment if Kaitlyn, probably a pagan, Curtis, was allowed to speak.
- 36:22
- She was allowed to speak. She was the one that had her standards and couldn't sign a statement of faith she didn't agree to.
- 36:28
- She's a heretic. So she's like, I can't, this is too orthodox for me to come to Cru. But they wanted her.
- 36:34
- Imagine if she was there speaking. Imagine what that would have been like. I mean, you think that what you saw was bad?
- 36:40
- It could have been a lot worse. So this is the direction of Cru. And I'm gonna close it with this.
- 36:46
- I've got some good friends. One in particular I'm thinking of. I got a good friend who's in Cru. And I would encourage supporting her.
- 36:53
- I would encourage supporting. If you know a Cru staff member who's great, support them and them alone.
- 36:59
- Do not support this organization. That's my advice. They're going down the woke hole. They've gone down the woke hole.
- 37:04
- I'm not sure. There's no process here. They've capitulated. This shows that what's being pumped out of our seminaries and our secular institutions is having an effect on the ground with real people who are trying to do what they call is ministry.
- 37:18
- There's a great need for college ministry. And it's sad to me that you have a parachurch like this going down that road because there's no hope in it.
- 37:29
- If you wanna be involved in college ministry, talk to your pastor. Get involved through the church on your local college.
- 37:36
- Get to know students. The relational aspect. I'm just gonna say this. I know someone at a big college, big prestigious college, who has students over for dinner every
- 37:48
- Sunday, drives them to church. Sometimes like 15 of them. Just makes a meal for them and invites them into his family.
- 37:55
- His wife and his kids are there. Some of them, most of them probably at some points are not saved. Some are.
- 38:02
- But he does this. Man, man, if we had more people like that, you don't have to file an official paper with the campus to say you're an organization.
- 38:13
- Just go meet people and talk to them. So that's my advice and that's my heart. So I hope this was helpful to you.
- 38:20
- If you're giving to Crew, I hope you reconsider how you're doing that. And I hope Crew will repent of this.