The White Pill with Rod Martin: Iran, China, and the SBC

on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I hope everyone is having a wonderful Monday after Easter.

In fact, on my calendar, it says Easter Monday. I should probably figure out what that means. I don't come from a tradition that has been the most liturgical, so some of you might be celebrating

Easter Monday today. We're doing it with leftovers from yesterday. We had quite the feast and quite the good time at church.

It's wonderful to focus on resurrection of Christ and what he's done, what he's accomplished.

For me, I actually wrote an article for TruthScript. It's just a short article, but it's particularly special having recently gone to the area where Christ was crucified and then he was at the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

I didn't realize how close those places were. They're both within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today. You can imagine

Christ emerging from the grave, looking upon the area where he was just killed and died for the sins of the world.

I don't know that it makes it more special. It's always special. It's just I have visuals to go with it.

I can imagine a little bit better what it might have looked like right outside the gates of Jerusalem.

Special Easter for me. I hope, like I said, you had a wonderful Easter and things are really coming to a good start here on a

Monday of the following week. I wanted to bring your attention to an article that I just wrote.

I wrote it on Friday. I think I finished it Saturday morning, actually. It is on Nine Marks.

That's actually going to be the topic for our podcast today, the Ministry of Nine Marks, which is an ecclesiastical or ecclesiological,

I think is the put it, ministry. It starts off with the core teaching, which is

Nine Marks of the Healthy Church by Mark Dever. It's a book. From there, there's all these other resources on church membership and polity and revitalization and all of those kinds of things.

A lot of people use Nine Marks because they are seen as the experts in the Reformed evangelical world on ecclesiology.

Now, they are Baptist, so there are some limitations there. Perhaps Presbyterians might not use their resources quite as much, but their resources are used quite a bit.

So, I've had requests for years to do something more comprehensive on Nine Marks.

I've also had requests to do something on the Gospel Coalition, which I don't know that I'll ever do. I don't know that it's necessary either, just because there's so much more material at the

Gospel Coalition. It would take a lot more, and they've been, I think, so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of some.

They still have some influence, but they certainly have been exposed. Nine Marks, not quite as much, and I finally came to the decision to do this, to do a wide or a comprehensive article on everything that they've put out there, at least on their website.

There's more that could have been added, but I wanted to give you a flavor for what Nine Marks themselves have actually put their stamp of approval on and things that are still on their website, still live today, still teachings that they're not deleted.

They're not retracted. They're still up there, and I think this poses an issue because someone could certainly go on their website thinking they're the experts on ecclesiology and get very bad advice on certain matters, which we'll go over, or they could think that all of these things are just in the past and they don't matter, and I'm going to tell you why

I think they actually do matter. There's a track record here if you really pay attention to everything that's been said, and the hope in all of this, because I know

I'll be accused of this, but the hope in all this is not just that people's eyes would be opened to some of the bad material that they've put out there, but that there would be some self -reflection on the part of people like Jonathan Lehman, who

I'm sure would not appreciate this kind of exposure to the compromises at his organization, but people like Mark Dever, people like Isaac Adams, and others who we'll talk about a little bit in the podcast.

I hope there'll be some self -reflection and looking back at the broad scope of what they've put out there that they would realize we've done some damage too here.

We may have done some good things with helping churches get better polity and plurality of elders and understanding what it means to be a church, but at the same time, we've really missed it on cultural matters big time on more than one occasion.

That's my hope, and there are a number of people now who have taken that road, people like Willie Rice, like Rosaria Butterfield.

They've said we were wrong, and we're going to try to retract what we said that was wrong, and we don't want people following that previous advice.

That's the way to go about this, and then to apologize and say, I'm sorry for those that we misled. That's the way to go about this, and those are two wonderful people in my estimation, and I think there's a way back to build trust, but the level of compromise, the years of compromise, the inability to recognize that publicly, that does make building up trust very difficult, and I think

Nine Marks is in a position now. It is very difficult for me to trust them with anything cultural, but even ecclesiology at this point.

I just don't see them as the best resource to go to, and so this is a personal decision. I don't really recommend

Nine Marks. Other people might, and there's nothing wrong with that if they have a good resource like Mark Dever's initial book.

I don't think it's a bad book. At the same time, you need to be aware that there are some compromises that did cause problems that are probably still causing some problems, and there's a track record there, so that's what we're going to talk about in this particular podcast.

I did try to wait to do this as long as I felt I could. I wanted to give as much opportunity to retract and apologize and those kinds of things.

I think what really set it over for me and made me realize I need to do this is the fact that Mark Dever was at the

Shepherds Conference this past year, and he was only on a panel from what

I understand, but I don't know whether Nine Marks is making a comeback in some of the circles that it was previously popular in, and I want to just make people aware that there are some problems here.

Don't get fooled by some of the things that may still even be on the website, that that's the spirit in which

I bring this message to you, this information. You can go to my substack, which is substack .com

forward slash John Harris, or I think it's at John Harris, to find out more if you want to find chapter and verse.

All the links are there. All the articles that I talk about in this podcast will be there.

It is a great place to go and hit the subscribe button if you like what you see and you want to subscribe for more articles that are similar in nature, all the information is right there for you.

So that might be more helpful for some of you who are more readers, but for those who are listeners, I will also put in some information,

I'm sure, some side comments as we go through this article that I did not include in the original piece, and so I think you'll be benefited either way, and that's what we're going to be doing on the podcast today.

So hopefully that sounds good. I will try to take some comments and questions as we get towards the end of the podcast.

Please, if you're going to comment, use a question mark so I know it's a question. That will help me find it more easily, but I'm going to be pretty focused on the material.

So just so you know, I'm going through the material and I'm going to bring a lot of articles to your attention as we go through this particular article.

So that's what we're doing today, and the title of the article is The Problem with Nine Marks.

Roman numerals nine marks, by the way, if you're trying to google that, and it's on Substack, here's what it looks like, and I'm just going to start reading some of it.

There's an introduction that I make, and in that particular introduction, I talk about, I mentioned already,

Rosaria Butterfield, Willie Rice, Josh Howerton, people who have actually said, yeah, we were wrong, we compromised with social justice, and now we're going to try to do the right thing and let people know where we got it wrong so that they don't make the same mistakes, and I think that's a wonderful thing, but there's also a dilemma.

What do you do with organizations, and this is beyond Nine Marks. What do you do with Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary? What do you do with Grove City College?

These are institutions that I was participating in in Southeastern.

I think I probably led the charge with that to say there needs to be reform here. There needs to be some return to the previous standards and their social justice compromise, and neither of those institutions came out and admitted anything.

In fact, both of them said that the accusations against them were untrue, even though there was tons of information, and I've linked you to two videos that I did on it, and do you trust them?

What do you do with those organizations? Things are quieter. I think there's probably been some course correction, but there's not been an admission, and I contrast that a bit with an organization like Liberty University that maybe someday

I'll be able to tell more fully the story there, but with Liberty, they did not go down this path as hard at all, and there was some very early course corrections, and it's a very big university also, so it's not like you have one particular person or group of people that are making decisions for the whole entire university.

I mean, I guess you do in the administration, but it's so many moving parts, so you'd have a compromise somewhere like the nursing school, and it would be minor, and it would be reeled in, and that's the way they handled it, and it's much more easier to trust a

Liberty University because of the fact that they weren't doubling down all the time on errors, and the errors weren't as egregious and weren't happening for as long, so I talk about how frustrating it is to see organizations that try to reverse course but refused, that we tried to at least help them reverse course, and they refused to do it publicly to trust them again, and figures that are doing the same thing.

I use Al Mohler as an example. He changed his position several times on things like same -sex attraction, the Me Too movement, and whether women who seek abortion should be punished, but he never acknowledged that he has changed his thinking at all, like it never happened, and it's like, well, but he did.

You could see his quotes. They contradict each other, but it's like it never happened.

Crew is another organization. Crew had a policy, well, a teaching really that they were giving to their staff members on same -sex attraction, and they've completely reversed their teaching on same -sex attraction but without acknowledging it.

It's just on their website. It's not part of any training so far as I know, and it's like we're supposed to just believe that I guess everything's fine now, but it's really not.

Now, this is one of the things that I want to let people know about because I know this could be very frustrating for some people, especially if you took arrows, which

I did quite a bit during this time. I remember times in 2020 when I was completely alone. There really wasn't anyone to defend me publicly, and it was just organizations really angry that I'm pointing some of these things out, and it's easy to think like I was right about this.

I was correctly identifying compromises, and how can they just not acknowledge that?

There is a frustration, but here's what I want to emphasize as well. It is a good thing when organizations do course correct, even if they're not admitting that's what they're doing, even if there's some kind of a pride or something there.

The fact that they're doing the right thing now is still a good thing, and I reference Paul and how he felt about people preaching the gospel from wrong motives.

I think it's very important for us to realize, though, Paul did publicly point out they were doing it from wrong motives. He did publicly shame them in a sense, and he says, look,

I'm glad the gospel is getting out there. I'm glad the message is getting out there. That's really what matters is this message, but that's as far as his endorsement went.

The endorsement is the truth. We endorse the truth, even if it's coming out of the mouth of people that might have bad motives in telling the truth.

We endorse the truth. We don't endorse the people that are using the truth for their own nefarious purposes or with bad motives trying to preach the truth and that kind of thing, and that's how

I view it. I can't, and I think that's the issue with nine marks, too, is I can't endorse the organization even if they're saying true things now, but there's no admission.

There's no course correction. There's no humility, or I should say some course correction, but not enough.

There's not self -reflection and even pulling down articles that are still on the website that could potentially do damage.

Can't endorse them. There's no trust there. There's no reason to say, in my mind, go to this organization.

They're going to give you good information unless you're very narrow if this particular book is good on this particular topic.

So, that's where I'm coming from, just so people know exactly what my motives are in this and how

I'm thinking about it and why I think it's a good thing to talk about. So, we'll start here. We'll start with the beginning.

Critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, and anti -racism. Did Nine Marks compromise on this? And the answer is, oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, big time. So, I go through some of the introductory things

I've already talked about with Nine Marks, their ecclesiology, their ministry of ecclesiology, but between 2010 and 2021, they dabbled in social justice quite a bit.

And this is more than a decade. And I, along this time that I was, you know, from 2019 to 2021 especially, those few years,

I was really going in on some of the things that they were saying at the time. But if I had been paying attention to Nine Marks in 2010,

I would have found plenty on their website that was already compromising on this issue. Starting around 2010,

Nine Marks started publishing material that suggested white evangelicals were lacking sanctification in their conception of race and treatment of ethnic minorities.

The BDN Abouile suggested that the gospel itself included a certain view on race, that it was a social construct, and that white evangelicals lacked the sanctification to realize this truth, even though ethnic minorities were engaging with it.

And Abouile used words like idolatry and segregated to describe the church's failure to bring about racial unity.

And in his mind, the church was the answer to the racial divide, but it unfortunately had a ways to go.

This drove a hunger for Christians to find what was allegedly so lacking in our churches and why they were under sinful thinking.

Organizations like Nine Marks were positioned to answer this demand with tools and a syncretic mixture of scripture and social justice to the masses that wanted info on this as it became political and public.

In no time, Nine Marks was publishing articles on how to diversify churches, such as Five Steps for Racial Reconciliation on Sunday at 11 a .m.,

Pastoring a Multi -Ethnic Church, and Pastors and Theologians Forum on Race. The forum is particularly interesting because it reveals how early ideas consistent with critical race theory were being introduced into the church.

So let me talk about some of these. I want to show you some of the articles. This is the first one. This is Thabiti and Abouile, and it's called

Many Ethnicities, One Race, published on February 26, 2010. It's pretty new or pretty old,

I should say, when it comes to the critical race theory debate because so many of these things, these teachings, we became familiar with more in 2020.

But of course, they were there before. And I know I had highlighted a bunch of these things. I don't see any of my highlights though, so I don't know why my highlights are gone.

I'm hoping it's not that way for all the articles. I made highlights on all of them to show you exactly where I was getting my information from, but I'll read for you a few as I see them here.

So he talks about system—systematic silence and how the church is silent on the issue of racism, and this has been a problem in the church for a long time.

He talks about how everyone has sin, and this is one of the things that is confusing with many of these articles is you'll find race exists, ethnicity is different than race, but then we're chided for colorblindness at the same time.

If you don't see race, you have to realize we're one race, but also you have to see specific races or specific ethnicities.

You've got to be conscious of that fact. You can't, if you're a white person, go out on your own and say that you know about this topic when there's

Black people that need to offer their perspectives and you must listen, but at the same time, you need to use your voice against racism.

And so there's all these contradictions, and you find some of this pretty early on on the

Nine Marks website. So has God done anything about race and racism, he asks.

Racism, we should be concerned about racism. It's actually a pretty long article where typically you'll see

Ephesians and Galatians used inappropriately, really the idea being that Gentiles don't have to become proselytes to be part of the covenant community.

And they use that to say, well, this is about modern races being reconciled to one another, meaning politically, socially, et cetera.

So let me go to the end of this article and just see the conclusion here. So I write this article.

Actually, let me back up. The conclusion says, a woman from Maryland visited First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman. After the service, she excitedly told me how she had driven around the island looking for a place of worship.

She was drawn to our church because of the diversity. I smiled at her encouragement.

As I write this article, I see that our visitor was almost correct. The church is diverse, yes, but we are not a miniature United Nations. By God's grace, we are one nation, one new and redeemed humanity in Christ.

May it increasingly be so with all of Christ's church. I think the reason that some of these articles landed early and people didn't suspect them of leftism was because of conclusions like that.

The BD drags you through this long article, and within the article are these things that would throw up red flags for any political conservative if they're paying attention.

But you get to the end, and there's a decent conclusion, and that's theologically correct, at least, that in one sense, the spiritual body of believers, the universal church, is one race in a sense.

They're one people in a sense, and so I think this helps some of these things fly under the radar for a long time.

Fortunately, my highlights are back on this one. I don't know why they disappeared from the last one, but this is the

Pastors and Theologians Forum on Race, and this was March 1, 2010. Here's some quotes from it.

Ricky Armstrong says, Growing up in a nation where everything has been divided by the color of a person's skin has made it impossible for the

American church to escape the negative effects of racism. Listen to this. Many whites have been conditioned to deny the existence of racial problems.

Most whites do not have to live in an environment controlled by minorities. Some view racism as a primary and individual issue as opposed to a corporate problem, so they fail to address the institutional nature of racism, especially whites, he says.

Most whites are not aware of the various ways... You notice the theme here. You notice who the problem is. They're not aware of the various ways that the culture is used as a tool of racism.

Most white pastors and ministers have refused to address the race problem biblically or otherwise, and many white evangelicals are more loyal to their culture than they are to the gospel.

So, what's the conclusion? We have muzzled the gospel so that it can fit within our cultural, racial, and religious traditions.

Now, that's kind of a serious charge if you think about it. This is back in 2010. Nine Marks is still on the website.

White Christians have muzzled the gospel. In other words, they've muted it. They've kept it from going forward.

This is a very serious charge, right? Muzzling the gospel, preventing the gospel from going forward, that is a serious crime.

That's what Paul says about those who are persecuting the church in Second Timothy.

Is it Second Timothy? Second Thessalonians, I'm thinking of. Second Thessalonians. They're the enemies. That's a very serious charge, and I don't think people realize how serious of a charge that is.

It's just kind of casually thrown out there. Of course, white Christians muzzle the gospel. Anthony Carter, the unfortunate truth is that there is a racial divide in evangelicalism.

The issue primarily lies in our inability, particularly, again, our white brothers and sisters to live according to Philippians 2 .3,

and if humility can't others is more significant than yourselves. So, whites are the problem. Until we see white men and women doing what black men and women have long learned to do, namely, sitting under and submitting to the leadership and authority of those who are ethnically different, we will not see real diversity.

He says it's particularly evident when this mutual submission is not happening.

It's particularly evident when the majority learn the worth and joy of submitting to the minority. It demonstrates that they fear

God more than men. So, might people having problems here? They're not fearing God.

They're muzzling the gospel. J .D. Greer, in order to accomplish diversity, you have to have a program for it.

Okay, so there you go. Now, Nine Marks is positioned to help you understand how your church needs to diversify.

Whites have a special challenge. Minorities know what it feels like to be in a minority position. Cross -cultural awareness that minorities neatly, automatically develop must be actively learned by whites.

That's Sam Land. Eric Redmond, my white brothers of the faith often miss the race problem.

My white brothers must work at seeing life through the eyes of African or Hispanic or Asian or Native American. It just keeps going.

Evangelical seminaries tend to be overwhelmingly white. That's a problem. Juan Sanchez, race is a gospel issue which reflects an ignorance, distortion, or blatant denial of particular applications of the gospel.

Man, you can't get a break. If you're a white

Christian, you're just getting beaten up by this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, this is early on.

This is 2010 that we're seeing some of this. I talk about some of that and how early on you see this on the

Nine Marks website. I believe one of the things that helped shield

Nine Marks also from criticism, especially in those early years, was the fact that they continued to oppose theological liberalism.

It has often been associated with political liberalism and for good reason. For example, Russell Moore's piece, Social Gospel Redux, took aim at Walter Rauschenbusch and the

Emergent Church for denying the place and power of the individual salvation. As I've often said, though, the social gospel critique did not start out as an attempt to replace the gospel, but to expand it into corporate structures.

Here's a quote from Walter Rauschenbusch. He says, The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified.

The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith and the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes in.

Here's what I'm trying to say. You heard this a lot, and Russell Moore said it on the

Nine Marks website. Social gospel is a problem, but it's because they lack balance. They didn't have the individual gospel as part of the mission.

If you actually go back and you read social gospel writings, Walter Rauschenbusch is saying and acknowledging and promoting the individual gospel.

The same thing Russell Moore is saying that they lack, they're saying they have. Their critique is that the more fundamentalists, the people who are trying to go win souls, are not as involved in activism and making the world a better place.

They're missing this corporate element to the gospel. That's the critique that the social gospel crusaders are using.

It's the same thing you heard from evangelicals who were on the left when it comes to these issues.

They were saying the same things Walter Rauschenbusch is saying while claiming that Rauschenbusch doesn't have the balance they have, even though he's the one also claiming he has balance.

I'm trying to demonstrate this so people can see. The same thing happened with liberation theology. Social gospel subversives and reformed evangelicalism made a similar move by claiming they possessed, so I basically already said this, the balance that both social gospel adherents and fundamentalists focus more on personal conversions lacked.

But all they were really doing was claiming the same balance that many social gospel advocates and liberation theology proponents already claim for themselves while packaging their salvific corporate element in more racially charged and less economically charged language.

So what I'm trying to say also is that, look, when you start saying, look, I'm against the social gospel,

I'm against liberation theology, conservatives say, okay, good, good. We were worried there for a second, but now that you've made the statement, now you're saying,

I'm not Walter Rauschenbusch, I realize that there's individual salvation, we're not going to replace that, then people were,

I think, a lot more accommodating. And Russell Moore kind of could cruise under the radar for a long time with this kind of rhetoric, because that's what people were looking for.

Okay, well, you check the box there, good. But meanwhile, checking the box, they're actually, if you look at what they're actually saying, it's basically what the liberation theologians are saying.

There's really not a big difference. This is seen in a 2014 Nine Marks article by Stephen Harris, and no,

I don't think I'm related, that seeks to correct the problems with liberation theology, including its over -realized eschatology and its framing of sin according to social dynamics instead of a violation of God's law, but also seeks to legitimize its fair critique of some in the evangelical community by exposing what can only be regarded as indifference towards injustice.

In Harris's piece, the gospel was not reducible to anti -racism, but anti -racism was part of the gospel ministry as was opposing institutional and corporate sin.

This was allegedly what many of our forebears who sat on the bench during the civil rights movement failed to see, that it was their duty to support racial, social equality if they were consistent

Christians. Where Orthodox believing Christians had apparently failed, liberation theologians and the new left had succeeded.

And so here's that particular article by Stephen Harris. It's called Biblical Theology and Liberation, and you can certainly look it up.

It says, the mission of local church, no doubt, is the delivery and spread of the gospel message. That's correct. He says,

Christians who submit themselves to the government of Christ should therefore be among the first to recognize not just the prevalence of individual sin, but institutional and corporate sin.

He goes on, he says, there is something of worth that needs to be acknowledged here. Their critique of some in the evangelical community by exposing what can only be regarded as indifference towards justice, albeit couched in Orthodox doctrine.

So you have a foot getting in the door very early on at nine marks. And I just give you an aside here that I saw this attitude myself at Southeastern when

I was there, because I was there at the same time in 2014. And there was this attitude that began to emerge that not only were evangelicals who slanted left right about things, but also there was a point to be made by the

Democrats that they had something of worth to offer that if Christians were thinking biblically, they would realize.

They would see that the Republican party had a few points that were good. Their Democrats had some points that were good. And over time that began to tilt more in favor of the

Democrats. And these are in institutions that are conservative. I saw it firsthand at Southeastern. Even among people who came in there more right wing, there was a shift that sometimes would happen with them.

I saw this with people I know, unfortunately, and nine marks reflects some of this shift.

You can see it on their website and it's in the pursuit of being balanced. It's in the pursuit of being of transcending the political divide that we're going to not be categorized into the

Republican party. Like so often we've been, we want to repel that kind of characterization by showing people and proving to them that, look, no, we think the

Democrats actually have some good points. There's justice issues on race and immigration and climate change.

And the list goes on that Christians ought to be involved in. Yes, of course, the Republicans, they're better on abortion, but you got to balance all of these things.

And can they really do anything to stop abortion? I mean, this is the kind of logic that began to get employed.

And that's why you had people claiming orthodox theology that could say like, I'm going to vote for Hillary Clinton, because it's going to be all in all the outcomes are better that way.

And it's like, how did you get there? You got, they got there by starting out this way. And it's on the nine marks website.

You can see it starting to form around this time on right -leaning issues.

Nine marks seems to use a much softer voice. Jonathan Lehman, the current president of nine marks made sure to tell readers in his article that he was not encouraging them to be a culture warrior or to raise up a church of culture warriors on the issue of same -sex marriage.

This was less than a year before Obergefell versus Hodges, which we could have really used some cultural warriors for, to be honest with you.

The same year Russell more practically celebrated the demise of nominal cultural Christianity in the face of secularism in the hope that the church's lost influence would lead to the purification of the church.

Nine marks was sending a message that it was time for the church to work for social change on institutional racism while simultaneously resigning the culture to slide on sexuality.

In 2015, the anti -racist push intensified. And in the aftermath of Obergefell nine marks published, this isn't crazy.

Listen to this for a moment. Okay. Just listen to what I'm about to say. Obergefell is approved by the

Supreme court. The decision is rendered and nine marks publishes 16 consecutive articles on race, racism, and racial diversity while offering only a single article on homosexuality rather than preparing

Christians for the lawsuits that were coming their way. Jonathan Lehman wrote a piece with a question in its title.

Check this out. Should Christians disown gay sons and daughters? Spoiler alert.

No, that's mind blowing to me. I did not expect to find that when I was looking back at their articles at 16 articles in a row on the subject of anti -racism and diversity and these kinds of things after Obergefell and one on homosexuality.

And it's not even what you would expect to find. It's trying to let parents know that if their child comes out of the closet, they need to love their child still.

And you're like, what about the lawsuits coming? What about the church policies that need to be crafted to meet these threats? What about the fact that you weren't anywhere to be found before this, this, uh, travesty and, uh, the, the, the only thing

I could find that was pushing in the right direction on this came much later. Uh, it was almost a year after Obergefell nine marks did publish a sample marriage policy that among other things was intended to help the churches navigate the ongoing pressure for the church to participate in homosexual weddings.

Now it wasn't even advertised that way, but there's a, there's a little offhanded, uh, remark in the article that says, yeah, this would help you with this as well.

It was still more than a little odd though, to me for a ministry. So focused on ecclesiology to fail, to anticipate the threat from Obergefell while pouring so much energy into narratives adjacent to BLM.

And they truly were embracing those narratives long before 2020. So we haven't even gotten to 2020 yet.

Let me see if, uh, I had, so when was this published? 2014. Okay. Pastors, homosexuality and same sex marriage.

Okay. So this, this was before Obergefell and it's

Jonathan Lehman saying that I recently heard Tim Keller say that he is looking forward to getting on the other side of this cultural moment because we'll discover that life goes on and that we should not respond in paranoia.

In the meantime, he says, I'm not encouraging you to be a cultural warrior or to raise up a culture, a church of cultural warriors.

Well, thanks Jonathan Lehman. Like we could have used churches with cultural warriors in 2014.

Um, he's basically throwing cold water on the fire. He's saying, let's wait, let's be patient.

Let's be passive. Let's get past this cultural moment. Life goes on. Don't be paranoid. You should be paranoid about race though.

Apparently like racial inequities and so forth. Um, this is also from 2014

Russell Moore, uh, an article, the title of the article is left behind in America following Christ after the culture wars.

So even the tense of that, trying to get it behind you, right? The idea was that most Americans share the, the common goals of Christianity, at least at the level of morality.

He's talking about cultural Christianity. Like, look, most people have shared cultural, cultural Christianity. We ought to see the ongoing cultural shakeup in America as a liberation though, of sorts from a captivity we never even knew we were in.

So he's saying, look, the true Christians are captive here. There is cultural Christianity stuff is the problem.

We need to get past this. We need the demise of cultural Christianity is a good thing for the church.

He says a rapture indeed is happening, but those who are evaporating in front of us are those structures of nominal cultural

Christianity. Good riddance. Thanks Russell Moore right before Obergefell. Thank you for saying that our cultural standards that derive from Christianity, they need to just go.

Here's one from Brian Davis. How do we respond to the cultural crisis over race? So I'm just showing you, here's some of the articles that you'll see right after Obergefell, race, racial reconciliation, the gospel and the church by Jarvis Williams says the good news of the gospel includes racial reconciliation.

So the Christian gospel tells us that racism fundamentally exists because of sin. We should promote gospel centered racial reconciliation.

We must do a better job living out the gospel of racial, the gospel of racial reconciliation. New title for the gospel just dropped.

Whites must welcome minority voices at the leadership table whenever and wherever discussions about the gospel and race happen.

Here's why churches, why white churches are hard for black people by Isaac Adams. The world readily admits that white supremacy resounds today and that subtle racism skulks and way more is way more difficult to discern.

The majority dismisses the truths of racism and black feelings go invalidated, right?

That's like a big thing that blacks have certain feelings and you should just validate them in these writings. Black churches are the only space where many blacks find it safe to be

Christian and black. So if you want to know why they go to black churches and not yours is because yours isn't safe. As a black individual, it's exhausting to feel as if you're constantly representing all black people.

Acting as if your church has no ethnicity or is ethnically neutral makes blacks feel like your church isn't for them.

Augustine was from Africa. I always get a kick out of this one, right? Augustine was certainly not from Sub -Saharan

Africa and while he may have been on the continent, he would have been more European in his ethnicity, but I digress.

Black sisters are seen as second class. They're rarely asked out on dates, if ever. Brothers have told them,

I'm just not attracted to black women. So you white guys who won't ask a black girl out, why would you expect them to come to your church when you're just not asking them out on dates?

I mean, really? Being Asian American in a white church? This is all not long after Obergefell.

We desire to see congregations of believers identifying so strongly with who they are in Christ that it is the gospel that aggregates us together, not shared cultural experiences, however strong they may be.

We should all be checking preferences at the door to better love and serve our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the gospel culture should be dominant culture of our churches, regardless of ethnic or cultural makeup.

I don't know how that works, by the way. I'm just going to sidebar here. You sing your hymns. Do you do that with Scottish snaps in them?

Is it 12 bar blues? How do you do your hymns? Do you have English? What language do you use?

I mean, there's cultural things everywhere. The architecture of your church, the way that your pastor even preaches is going to have a cultural element to it.

So it's nice to say there's a common culture we should all be in, but practically speaking, you got to figure out what language, what manners, what customs you're going to use as you worship

God. It's just a practical reality. Why the conversation, why the race conversation rather is so hard,

Jonathan Lehman writes. So he had a really long article on why the race conversation is so hard.

In the article, he said, we as whites especially need the race conversation. The white majority needs this conversation more than the minority needs it.

Why is that, Jonathan Lehman? Well, because the minority's eyes have been open for years. We need minority brothers and sisters to help us be conscious of a world outside of our own little sheltered experience.

So there you go. They could have been saying stuff about Obergefell and how your church should react, but instead they opined on these kinds of topics, unfortunately.

So this was going on at the Nine Marks website, and these articles, like I said, they're still on the

Nine Marks website. They're still live there. You can still find them if you want advice. Now, moving forward, there were some articles in between 2015 and 2020 on race, sporadically, just in the mix.

Things like why white churches are hard for Black people, being

Asian American in a white church, and don't be colorblind at church. Christians were taught that if they fail to see race, they are beginning to erase people.

That white Christians need minority brothers and sisters to help them be conscious of a world outside of their own little sheltered experience.

I just read that. That Christians must do a better job living out the gospel of racial reconciliation, and that Black females are seen as second class because white brothers won't date them, according to the author there.

We heard that pastors also should vocally acknowledge racial injustices, such as in the case of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

So the police shooting stuff starts getting into this. The next year, Mark Deber, the founder and then president of Nine Marks, tweeted,

Black Lives Matter seems to be a wonderfully pro -life statement as well. And then the current president, Jonathan Lehman, tweeted,

Black Lives Matter a glorious life affirming and succinctly stated theological truth. This was in 2016. So it wasn't 2020 yet.

This was 2016, but the narrative was the same. Those who try to make a separation,

I think, are doing so incorrectly. The only difference significantly would be that in 2020, the riots were not as localized.

So you already had the Ferguson effect, but the riots after 2020 became more widespread, and it became the largest insurance payout in our country's history, bigger than any hurricane, because of all the damage done.

And that made people want to back off a bit more. But before that, no, it's the same narrative.

The narrative is that, look, the police are shooting people. They're killing people indiscriminately.

I mean, they are discriminating, but there's no justification is what I'm trying to say for it, other than they're

Black. It's racially motivated, racially charged killings. Even though we don't have evidence of these things, we know what happened, but we don't know that it was motivated by necessarily racism.

But that was the narrative that got put out there. And it was because we live in this racist country. We live in a country where there's disparities all over the place, the way that history is taught, the monuments, the street names, you name it.

In our churches, there's such a disparity. And so people are dying as a result.

And so we need to revolutionize everything, including our police departments. Jonathan Lehman was totally down with that.

He was down with that in 2020. But there has been a shying away from some of this, I think, because of the damage that was done and because of the popularity.

And if people change their positions simply because something's more or less popular, you can't trust them.

If people are just riding waves because it's a popular thing right now, so we're going to publish 15 articles on it, even though what's needed is a good, strong article on something like Obergefell and how churches need to navigate that.

You know that these are the kind of people who are more interested in what's popular to a certain demographic.

I don't know. What other paradigm do you use? I mean, it's either ignorance, blindness, or it's some kind of ill intent that whether it's as innocent, if you can call it innocent, as we're going to be popular and gain some kind of a special category, a special exemption in the minds of leftists,

I suppose, in this case, or whether or not it's we actually believe this stuff and really think that this is what the

Bible teaches and what churches should do. This is what it means to be a body of Christ that's diverse, is catered to the social justice narratives.

So, Nine Marks, going pretty hard in on some of this stuff. Here's one of the articles, more

Christian than white or black. I want to suggest, Isaac Adams says that since our

Christian identity matters most, our racial identity and other people's racial identities ought to matter more, not less. So, again,

Demetri Anabuile saying in 2010 in an article, you know, hey, race, right? There's only one human race.

There's different ethnicities, and now we've got Isaac Adams telling us you better care about race. Ethnic minorities have grappled with race in ways that white people in predominantly white congregations, communities, and networks haven't had to.

So, he says also, have you taken time to consider what it means to be white? What does it mean to be in a racial majority?

Have you read books like White Awake, which if you look it up, it's a book that is basically critical race theory adjacent stuff.

It's trying to get you to understand your privilege. Our congregations need to be taught on these matters.

So, now it's the job of churches and pastors to inform their congregations. Okay, and now we get to 2020, and the articles on anti -racism keep coming.

So, I talk about some of that, more of that. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, their deaths at the hands of police were motivated by racism, once again, which if you look them up, not necessarily.

In fact, I think in both cases, the officers were acquitted, but there's no reason to think that it was racially motivated.

I mean, it could have been in their mind, right? That's always the thing. You don't know what's exactly in their mind. You got to have evidence.

In the motive and somewhat confusing article, as many of the pieces on the topics from Nine Marks are, Davis told pastors that they did not need an expert black person to understand the cultural crisis over race, even as he invited them to the

Just Gospel Conference, which he said would be led by men who are theologically precise minorities.

So, that was the same article. Let's see. I don't know if I pulled that one up. Let's see. It's the recent shootings and what it says and what to say this

Sunday. So, yeah, you better say something on Sunday. And in the same article, hey, don't go to the expert black people.

And then at the end of the article, hey, come to our conference where there's expert minorities who know about this. So, leading up to 2020, there was regular reminders that American Christians lived in an unfair country, were often complicit in racist structures, and needed to be active in resisting these forces.

And then came 2020. I mean, I'm still not to 2020. I'm like, I'm ready to go, guys.

I'm ready to go to 2020. It's hard to just summarize all of this because there's so much. So, last paragraph before 2020,

Shilin echoed the conclusions of the Obama administration's report on the Baltimore Police Department alleged racism.

Micah Edmondson somehow connected Martin Luther's opposition to indulgences in support for charity to anti -racism.

I kid you not. I'm going to actually just pull this up so you can see it. This one, I was like, what? It's a Reformation article by Micah Edmondson.

You scroll down. He talks about, first of all, Martin Luther King Jr. And then Martin Luther King.

And he says that, look, if you look at Martin Luther and what he's trying to do in his 95 theses, he says things like he opposes indulgences.

And those indulgences, they hurt the poor. And he thinks charity is good. So, if we're going to learn from them, then we're going to be anti -racist, basically.

He says, this alone suggests that perhaps Wittenberg has more to say to ongoing racial and economic injustice than we might have originally thought.

Yes, Martin Luther had so much more to say to the issues of 2017 than we first realized.

So much more in line with Martin Luther King Jr. And I didn't mention this in the article, but there is a clip of Mark Dever saying,

I don't know if George Washington's a Christian. That guy owns slaves. I can't see how does this happen with a

Christian. And yet, I'll just point out that repeatedly on the website, Martin Luther King Jr.

is just glazed as like, no, hey, he's a good example of what it means to be a Christian despite his infidelities and heresies and so forth.

So, here we get to George Floyd finally. And five days after George Floyd's death,

Nine Marks publishes an article by Michael Lawrence that made things clear. First, silence was not an option.

And second, George Floyd was unjustly killed and the anger minority communities felt was justified. The weakness in Nine Marks approach was beginning to show anything substantive they offered regarding these divides was framed from the left and tended to be theologically shallow or difficult to apply.

So, here's the article. This is their response. And you can see it's pretty short.

I guess I didn't highlight anything on this, but it's responding to a question. Hey, what do we do? And he basically said, look, silence is responding.

If you're silent, then that is a response. And then he says that these things, you know,

Black Lives Matter is complex, but an African -American man who was apparently a Christian, George Floyd, was killed unjustly while under restraint by police.

And, you know, so is he saying it's racism? What is he saying? What is he saying killed him? And he says, you know,

Ahmaud Arbery was killed. There was a birdwatcher in New York City that was harassed or not killed, but harassed.

He was African -American. And he says, look, we can lament the history and the current cultural and political climate that makes this even so fraught, this event so fraught.

Now, look, that's the issue here in all of this. It's connecting immediately to it's racism.

It's kind of some kind of racial thing going on. And that's why these things are happening. And so it's guiding pastors to analyze this in a particular way.

Here's an article. This is also 2020. What does the Bible have to say about our churches to teach our churches about multi -ethnic unity?

So they're still on this and they're using these passages from the Old Testament about unity of Israel, passages about you don't have to become a proselyte to be a

Christian in the New Testament. And they're saying, well, that's the unity. And he says, I confess the elders of my church are still struggling to do it, to know what to do next.

So the elders are struggling with what to do at Jeff Mooney's church.

He's the one giving advice. And this is the thing that Nine March is supposed to be so clear, so good on ecclesiology.

And yet what you find is at best a struggle on these things. It would have been nice if they had highlighted more related passages, right?

It would have been nice if they talked about addressing due process, prohibitions against the kind of looting that had become commonplace in the country on equal weights and measures, but they were not brought into the discussion in any significant way.

Instead, articles calling for charity, restraint, and more general calls for unity without a hard social justice spent started to emerge.

When divisions along racial lines were handled after this point, social justice theories were also blamed for stoking divisions.

That's a shift. This is the current default posture of Nine March on anti -racism with no acknowledgement of how it differs from its posture over the previous decade.

What was once clear and necessary to highlight is now treated as complex and caution is advised.

So, you have these authors at Nine March trying to come up with ways to give advice to pastors and their congregations, and you're getting all kinds of messages.

It's been a duty for now so long, for 10 years, that pastors need to address racism. It's these racial disparities.

It's white people that don't understand. You need to diversify. And then the narrative starts shifting a little bit.

Well, these are complex issues. You know, it's anti -racism or BLM stuff like that.

That could also be contributing to this. So, in other words, what you were promoting very recently, that could be contributing to the racially charged sentiments in our country.

Yeah, but they're not going to say that they were to blame for it. They're just going to start shifting a little bit, but not telling you that's what they're doing.

And I just think it's disingenuous. Let's be honest. You went in hard on this, guys, like really hard.

And you convinced many pastors that that's their duty, that that's what they needed to do.

And now, all of a sudden, that narrative isn't being focused on. All of a sudden, well, it's all complex.

You got to have balance. What shifted? The truth didn't shift.

I know that, right? So, what shifted? What happened? So, this is

Nine Marks on the issue of anti -racism. And they don't publish much on it anymore.

At least, they haven't for a while. Now, that's one issue. Now, here's another issue. Marriage, singleness, and sexuality.

I should note that during the time Nine Marks also veered left by evangelical standards on questions of homosexual orientation and the importance of marriage.

This might surprise some of you. It's true, though. To be clear, they obviously continue to exalt marriage and motherhood.

But therein lies the tension. I do not want to get too far into the weeds here. But since their endorsement of ideas adjacent to critical race theory was more significant, we talked more about that.

But I think it's also important for us to talk about this. It is important that those who consumed their material should be aware of some of their anti -biblical assumptions embedded within these pieces, again, that are still live on the website, guys.

They haven't been taken down. One of the frustrating things about evangelical institutions during this period was that they tended less towards offering guidance for addressing falling marriage rates and the fertility crisis and more toward accommodating these forces by shepherding the outcomes of our sexual crisis.

In other words, instead of trying to at the root address why there's so many single people in Washington, D .C.

and why people aren't getting married and having kids, they're addressing the consequences of that particular issue.

To be sure, there have always been single people. They serve the church through their spiritual gifts. They need shepherding.

But the suggestion that the church or spiritual identity should somehow substitute for marriage by solving problems like loneliness turned a natural order on its head.

In one article from Mary Wilson, she asked these questions. Why does our culture exalt marriage over singleness?

When God says it is not good that man should be alone, does that pertain only to marriage? Does it also pertain to men and women partnering in gospel ministry?

Mary, I can answer that easily. It pertains to men and women in marriage. It's a creation design.

But the fact that these questions were even entertained in any serious way on the website shows a problem, right? They're just questions, but they rest on dysfunctional assumptions rooted in anti -creation posture.

The left has long treated traditional sexual arrangements as merely culturally derived rather than grounded in the divine order.

And here, a theological conservative publication is carrying water for that view. Shonda Mars wanted to normalize singleness by doing things like reminding single church members that they are members of the same spiritual family.

Ed Shaw promoted the idea that churches should see intimacy as more closely associated with friendship.

And in so doing, lessen the power of sexual temptation and provide honesty and accountability for same -sex attracted people like himself as they pursue what they describe as true intimacy and friendship.

So if you're same -sex attracted, look, your church, they can be your friends, the people that go there, and this will help you in the matter of same -sex attraction.

So people are saying the audio cut out. I want to make sure that I'm still live and streaming.

I see one comment saying the audio cut out, and I'm curious when it cut out. I don't want to go back and rerecord this.

So please, if those who are still streaming and listening, give me a comment in the live stream just letting me know that you can hear me.

And if it did cut out, let me know what cut out so I can go back and correct it. I would really appreciate that.

Okay, I'm going to keep going here until those comments come in. Audio is fine, says Stephen Moore. Okay, good. All right, we're good.

We're going to keep going. So Tom Schreiner said he did not want

Christians to assume that everyone should get married or encourage everyone to get married. He concluded we need to reclaim the beauty of singleness as it is taught in the scriptures.

This magnifying glass on the existence of singles and the repeated emphasis on just how normal it is to be single frankly made me feel awkward just reading about it because of how unnormal the overemphasis makes it seem.

I'm sure that pastoring a church in a blue urban area comes with a unique overrepresentation of single people, but how healthy it is to spiritualize these legitimate desires for marriage and family rather than approach the issue by acknowledging it as a legitimate trial and helping to walk someone through it and alleviate it if possible.

So this is what I'm saying. Look, there's going to be people who are lonely that are single. And I was one of those people at one time.

I think all of us, even if we're married, remember what that was like at some point. And of course, you're going to have more time for it and you're going to probably need more friendships and so forth as you live.

But to address the issue that way by spiritualizing it to saying, look, you've got a heavenly family.

You've got a spiritual family here at church, especially for same -sex attracted people, quote unquote, to say, this is who you are, and you're probably not going to get married.

Like Ed Shaw. I think it was Ed, no, it was Ed Shaw did this, but also there was another, there was another guy at the nine marks website.

It's going to come to me in a moment. Sam Albury also did this. It's like, you know, why don't you give people hope

God can repair these things. You can be sanctified. That's the body of Christ is here to help you in that process.

So it's going to help you align with God. That's the whole point here. And the desires he wants you to have rather than I'm just stuck here,

I guess. And well, good thing I have this family. Good thing I can be satisfied in Christ. Well, yeah, you can through trials it's true, but God also made you to have certain desires.

And if you have the desire for marriage and family, and you're lonely, it's okay to not be okay.

It's okay to say, I'm struggling with this and have someone help you out by just saying, like praying with you and encouraging you.

It doesn't have to be a message of it's, you know, you should be okay. You should be okay. Cause you're fulfilled in Christ or something like that.

That's it's awkward. It's weird. And I think it doesn't do any good for people who are single that are having trouble with that.

Cause it makes them, it de -legitimizes and a real struggle. And it's a struggle that honestly churches, the best thing they can do is try to get behind this to say, look, there's a crisis of people.

They're not getting married and they're not having kids. How do we help bring this about? Is there a way we can facilitate godly men and women to come together?

Is there something holding them back? How do we teach them? Right. So they think about this, right. That would be more helpful.

Okay. So it makes me want to cry sometimes when I read things like my true identity is not in how desirable men find me or in whether I am pursued for marriage, but that I have an ultimately pursued and my greatest needs are met in God.

You know, it's, I just feel so bad for someone under this because it's like you're struggling.

You're trying to put this like bandaid on. You're trying to say like these legitimate desires. Like it's like, they're not really that legitimate.

Cause I am truly fulfilled. No, no, you're, you're actually, you might not be a hundred percent and it's okay to acknowledge that.

Like I'm not truly fulfilled. God wants people in general, his general design for most people is his, we'll just say his design period.

And there's these exceptions with the gift of singleness, but his design is people get married. And if you're not married and want to be, you're not totally fulfilled.

If you're married and don't have kids and want to have kids and you're struggling, you're not totally fulfilled and it's okay.

You can still be joyful on a spiritual level and really sad like garden of Gethsemane.

I'm not saying these are the same comparable in this, in the same type of trial, but if Christ can be sweating drops of blood and still not be committing the sin of he's not complaining, he's still having joy.

He's counting it all joy. You can still have that even in the trials we undergo in life. It's, it's part of that is understanding providence and trials and what they do.

And I wish there was more of that. However, when it, where this goes off the rails is regarding same sex attraction.

Sam Albury asked, how can churches do a good job integrating people who experienced strong same sex attraction into the life and body of the church?

The answer centered largely on de -emphasizing sex and marriage while emphasizing celibacy and singleness with the assumption that the person with same sex attraction may feel it is less realistic that they will get married and so be looking at long -term singleness.

Obviously no other sinful proclivity would be treated this way, right? Churches in the reformed evangelical church circles were not being asked how to integrate anti -Jewish ideologues or anything similar, yet they were pressured on this point.

And this is what I'm trying to say is like like all these focuses, all the focus on quote unquote racism, even why not articles on you have these like, and they're trying to, and these, those articles are actually trying to say it's systemic.

So let's just say that they were better articles to say like, Oh, some of you hate others that you shouldn't, you're using unequal weights and balance and measures.

You are lying about people groups you don't like. Cause that would be wrong. We should accommodate them.

We should make them comfortable in our church. We should, they may never transcend this. They may always have these hateful things.

Like you would never say that about it, right? They wouldn't, they would never, but they'll on this issue.

They did on homosexuality. They did. You may always be this way. You may always have same sex attraction.

So the church just needs to kind of like accommodate this. Now I'm marks also recommended Ed Shaw's book, same sex attraction in the church, the surprising plausibility of a celibate life and hosted a positive review of Caleb cattle box or box.

I don't know how you pronounce his name. Messy grace, how a pastor with gay parents learn how to love others without saying sacrificing conviction, both of which legitimize a kind of celibate homosexual orientation as not sinful is very good.

That nine marks held the line on complimentarian against feminism, complimentarianism that is, even if the grounding for distinct roles, sexual roles, general roles was not especially strong rather than entertaining ideas that ground gender roles in the

Trinity or abstract intention of God, it would have been better to argue more directly from creation, emphasizing the differences that inevitably manifest in the world.

God made that was, and still is what the moment calls for because that is what is directly under attack.

It is not even so much expressive individualism, which nine marks published nine articles about, including blaming it for the confusion surrounding gender and sexuality.

Individuals who want to step outside of God's order in these matters inevitably seek social confirmation, legitimacy, and legal recognition, even though they are as individuals relatively free to do as they choose.

An application of Romans one suggests that the feminist and LGBTQ movements pastors are actually encountering are at their root driven by opposition to God and his design.

Nonetheless, this remains an area where all things considered nine marks did better than many other neo -evangelical institutions and did include arguments from creation, even if they could have emphasized this more.

The real test for nine marks though, as an ecclesiology ministry was how they handled COVID. So let me explain a few things and then show you some articles and we'll get into COVID and then politics and we'll end.

So here's what I'm trying to say. Gender differences are rooted in creation.

God designed the place a certain way. Now, the problem is if it's rooted in creation, it might apply to society in general and things like military leadership.

For example, these are long been male roles. And if you start saying that this is exclusively for males, then you might have some people mad at you.

You have to get around Bible verses though, that are very clear in scripture. If you are trying, even if you're trying to accommodate people on the left, you have to acknowledge the

Bible does say women can't be pastors and the Bible does say women cannot be leaders in the home. So what do you do?

Well, there's two options you have that are that soften the blow. You can say, well, the Trinity is like that.

It's rooted in the Trinity. The Trinity has father, son, Holy spirit, they're co -equal, but different roles.

Now there's some problems with that. Go watch the video I did on eternal functional subordination with Russell Fuller.

This gets into some real issues when you try to go that route. But the main issue with it is this. It's not the argument you even find in scripture about these things.

The second thing you can do is to say it's arbitrary. God just, he gave us these commands. We don't really understand it.

It's like mixed fabrics or something. We don't know why, like God, that's God's command. Now that's a true thing.

God, if God commands it, we should do it. The problem is scripture reveals in multiple places that the creation order from Genesis to first Corinthians, uh, even

Romans, it tells us very clearly that the reason that there's a headship is because of the order of creation itself.

So once you get into creation though, and you root it there, then this becomes part of the design of the place.

And these are just, uh, these are very hard things that if you, if you sin against them, uh, you're not going, your society is not long for this world.

You're going to have problems. Uh, it's very against feminism though. It's very directly against feminism.

So, um, that was one of the things that I would say was not as emphasized on the nine marks website.

It was much more just like, these are God's commands, but like, okay, why are they God's commands? Cause the moment called for rooting back into creation on things like sexuality and gender.

That's what the moment called for. But what nine marks ended up doing wasn't as helpful as it could have been.

So this is not like, you know, a total F fail, but it is, it's, it's a D you know, it's a, it's a

D grade or an E grade of like, you could have done so much better. And of course it is an

F on the same sex attraction stuff for sure. So, uh, let me see what articles

I have here. I don't know if I save some of those and the more racism stuff.

This is from 2023. Uh, I think this is the one that talks about social justice narrative.

Here it is proponents of critical race theory or anti -racism can end up proposing a kind of reverse racism. Um, this article says some have criticized the pursuit of racial diversity in the church, um, and that it's connected to a nefarious political philosophical system like critical race or cultural

Marxism. So you see these gentle critiques much later, gentle,

I would say, but you, you wouldn't have seen that. And then before 2020, I don't think here's a single woman's perspective on church membership.

My, this is the one where I quoted my true identity isn't in, uh, is in Christ, not in my singleness.

Uh, that's Chelsea Patterson. And now we're going to get into the politics stuff.

So let's do that. Uh, let's get into COVID and politics. Nine marks tended, uh, toward the idea that the church transcends politics until there is a justice issue of some kind, the church must mobilize for.

So during the lockdowns of 2020, Jonathan Lehman invited others to participate with him. And he protested change the nation's culture, police culture, and even the church's culture that all would affirm a

God given and God, God given imaging, sorry, God imaging. So the image of God, um, is what he's trying to say.

And God given glory of black lives. This was all public. I put the screenshot here and then capital.

So this is while Capitol hill Baptist church is shut down where Jonathan Lehman and Mark never go. And they published on the nine marks website, a justification of this.

And so go March for this BLM adjacent thing. Uh, that's totally the BLM narrative, but so, so gather for that publicly while our church is shut down, right?

This created an awkwardness, as you might imagine, Jonathan Lehman publicly questioned John MacArthur's reopening of grace, community church and sides began to form

Lehman compared COVID lockdowns to measures such as world war two blackouts and zoning restrictions, which of course did not prevent

Christians from gathering, especially over the longterm. And one of the most startling lines in Lehman's article is a question.

He asked the politics of LGBT tells me our churches may have more occasions to defy government requirements in years to come.

Do we want to spend down our capital on pandemics? I think this is the most revealing thing

Jonathan Lehman has ever said, because what he's revealing is, look, there might be some battles downstream from here.

Do we really want to pick a stand now? Like it's never the right time. We could take a stand, but it's never a burger fall.

Wasn't the right time. This isn't the right. It's like never the right time to take a stand. Uh, and if we don't take a stand, we'll have cultural capital built up for the next time.

I guess it's not time to take a stand either. This is a loser mentality, complete loser mentality, right?

You know, and this is the irony, right? John MacArthur can say because of, um, he says because of his eschatological views and his understanding of what's on the, the eschatological calendar ahead of us that look, we,

Hey, he said we lose down here. And that became kind of a, uh, he got in trouble for it and people were criticizing it.

But you look at his actions, look at what John MacArthur actually did. He fought down here. He fought culturally.

He fought politically. He opened his church. He went to, you know, when it was very unpopular, he sued, uh, the, the government of California.

He does all of this. And meanwhile, Jonathan Lehman is literally acting like a loser.

Like this is, these are the kinds of Christians I don't want leading anything if that's their mentality. And I sure hope that's not his mentality anymore, but I have no reason to think it's not,

I don't know the change. I wouldn't know. Uh, we, we need evidence of that. We would need to see very unpopular stands being taken at the right moment to show that I'm a rock in the stream.

I'm not going to be carried down by it, but this is so revealing to me.

So that, that line is still on the website. They haven't taken it down, uh, with over 20

COVID related articles, over 20 guys, nine marks gave instructions and encouragement on things like prayer connection and advice on reopening when legally permissible.

Initially, they adopted the popular application of Romans 13 to encourage churches to take the mandate compliance seriously.

Yet by late November, they opened the door for potential legal challenges to unlawful orders and undermine the intentions and effectiveness of continuing mandates.

So here's what that article said. And I, do I have this? I don't know if I have this. Oh, I got more singleness stuff here.

I might be out of order here. Let me see. Uh, I think it, um,

I don't know if I have it. I wanted to show you from the exact article. Well, here's a quote from it.

So I can show you, I can pull up by just clicking the link, I think. Yeah.

Should your church comply with new COVID -19 orders? Perhaps this memo would help. And in that article, it says

Romans 13 and first Peter two, and other passages make submission to governing officials, the biblical norm and non -compliance exception.

Nevertheless, there are at least two instances in which non -compliance with a law or order is biblically justified.

Number one, when complying with the law or order would be contrary to the will of God as revealed in scripture. And two, when the law or order is itself legally invalid.

So now they're opening the door for challenges to COVID restrictions.

So the decisive moment had once again, pass them by as it had on same sex marriage and the BLM movement when it mattered most nine marks shows a consistent tendency within naturally politically conservative evangelicalism to push the needle towards the left.

So for example, today, nine marks uses harder language towards the LGBT movement than it used to.

Jonathan Lehman says it's neo -paganism called Christians to speak publicly against it, but this strong language is too little too late.

One of the more interesting aspects of all of this is the lack of self -reflection of nine marks that they seem to have regarding what they were doing politically.

So I'm going to get into politics, but let me just close the chapter on COVID here. They, they fumbled the ball on COVID.

That's the bottom line. They fumbled it. They, they started to get it right, but it wasn't until late

September and October that you get that. And now it's past the point of when, you know, when we really needed people taking a stand, they're riding now in the coattails of others who have been the brave ones.

And that this is the tendency of nine marks. This is just what they do on political issues. So often, unfortunately, it's very sad to me.

One of the more interesting aspects of all this is the lack of self -reflection nine marks seems to have regarding what it was doing politically.

They did not appear to recognize they were carrying water for a particular political side. Deborah in particular tried to signal neutrality after Trump won in 2016, he published neither a

Republican nor a democratic church. And in it, he argued that black people experienced racism in ways white people did not understand, and then rather awkwardly priveted to express political neutrality.

And this is what he said. I think it's actually our best gospel strategy to grow as Christians and to reach

Capitol Hill and this district to work hard against identifying our church with opposition to either party.

This article, which was taken from one of nine, one of Mark Devers sermons neatly captures the general posture, frame the situation in terms favorable to Democrats generally, and then claim political neutrality.

Some have pointed to Devers alleged democratic party membership in an attempt to make sense of this. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

I'll show you that just so people know where I'm getting that. Judd Saul is the one that found this out.

So he looked up Mark Devers registration. I don't know if it's still this, but at the time, which was 2021,

Mark Dever apparently was a registered Democrat. So some people say that, but maybe that's why nine marks went this direction.

I remember being at the Supreme court building. So I'm gonna share a story with you real quick. I've shared it before, but I was at the Supreme court building when

Amy Coney Barrett was being affirmed as the judge. And there was protesters there against Amy Coney Barrett.

And it was mostly because she's pro -life. And I talked to a young man who was protesting her.

And he said, he went to Capitol Hill Baptist church. I thought, well, that's interesting. So he was studying for the ministry. So, well, that's really interesting.

And he seemed to be involved on some level there. And so I asked him, what do you think about abortion?

Aren't you against abortion? And his answer to me was, well, racism is a more important issue and he's going to vote for Biden because racism, you know, can't, can't vote for someone who's pro -racist.

So this was part of his issue with Amy Coney Barrett, but he also said that, um, what did he say?

I think I wrote it down. Well, I know what he said. Cause I was there, but I want to get what exactly the language that I used when

I asked him his position on abortion, he told me he was pro -choice. Okay. So this was interesting.

And I'm like, you go now, here's the thing, all kinds of people go to churches. You can't blame the churches, the pastors for this, but in this case, even though his conclusions would be different, hopefully than Mark Devers and John and certainly

Jonathan Lehman's today, the underlying rationale he used is very similar to what

Jonathan Lehman and Mark Dever were saying through Nine Marks. So that's what I want to show you. This man's conclusions are his own, obviously, but I can see how he got there.

There is one article on the website, one article, listen to what I'm saying here.

Like listen very clearly. There is one, that number one article on the website classified as being on abortion.

Okay. You you've heard me talk about all these other articles about other things. There's one on abortion and it was published weeks before my encounter in DC and in the article, which is called what makes a vote moral or immoral, the ethics of voting, which is right here.

This is what it looks like by Jonathan September 29th, 2020. So in that particular article,

Jonathan Lehman clearly condemns Christians who vote for a pro -choice candidate specifically to support abortion. Good. But he hedges on whether it is sinful to vote for a pro -choice candidate, despite a pro -life candidate being in the race.

So here's, I think I highlighted it, the section that I, it's a long article here.

Okay. If you vote for a pro -choice candidate specifically to support abortion, I believe we shift from gear one to gear two Christians. I would want to persuade my church must not support abortion.

They must not sponsor it, advocate or vote for it. Okay, good. Then he says, suppose a Christian wants to vote for a pro -choice candidate, not because of the candidate support for abortion, but in spite of that support.

And then he does all these gymnastics about it. And the conclusion is basically, well,

I'd try to persuade him not to do it, but I mean, I I'm going to go to the Lord's table with him. I can't say it's necessarily sin.

So this was published weeks before my encounter in DC. Also, there was a 2018 nine marks event where Mark Dever, while sitting on a panel with Jonathan Lehman justified voting for a pro -choice candidate on the grounds that black

Christians made superior political calculations compared to white Christians because they accounted for multiple issues while white

Christians primarily focused on abortion. Here's the quote from Mark Dever. He said, I think of the things that most separate white

Christians and black Christians in America is one issue voting. I can vote for a candidate who I disagree with on some very important issues that I don't think they're going to get anything done on, but I agree with them on these other issues that are going to help a lot of people.

I think a lot of our African American brothers and sisters realize like a long time ago, well, there are, well, there are going to be a bunch of different issues that are going to affect us.

I think white Christians think this voting based on pro -life stance is the only way to approach voting.

So just recently, as in this year, I believe Jonathan Lehman retracted this claim, which he didn't even make it was

Mark Dever, but he retracts it on Mark Dever's behalf. And he said in an interview, he says, I don't think you should vote for a pro -choice candidate.

I think that that was wrong. And I think these days, I would say, I think you're sinning by doing that, at least in most circumstances.

The reason he said though, that he and Dever went down this path was because they were trying very hard to appeal to both Republican and Democrats for gospel purposes.

So look, our motives were good. We were just trying to appeal to Democrats. That's not going to help you gain trust.

I'm sorry. So it's like we did something bad that at the time, he even says in the interview, at the time he was even thinking is this.

So you just went for it because you're trying to appeal to Democrats. Is that really as simple as this is?

I mean, that's kind of consistent with what Jonathan Lehman said about building up capital. Don't fight on COVID.

We got to fight on these other issues that we don't fight on. We'll do it later. That's, that's the general posture here.

That's not something you can have leading anything. That's the problem I have. And it's something personal against Lehman. It's just, look, if you're going to fight, fight, you know, just fight.

Don't, what is all these calculation about these things? I understand stewarding a vote. I understand when you have limited options, you go with the best.

Those things make sense to me. I don't understand taking like things that are very clear in scripture, like abortion and homosexuality, muting that we're doing only one article on abortion.

You know, we're, we're not going to do anything to help you navigate Obergefell. We're not going to help, you know,

COVID is something that we don't want to fight on right now because I don't know, gathering your church together seems like pretty primary.

Like if you don't gather, are you a church, right? You got to gather long -term. You can't be shut down. That's pretty basic stuff.

Jesus is Lord of the church. They were letting you march in the street with BLM, like BLM adjacent movements.

Why, why can't you fight on this? Why can't you just obey the Lord on this, right? Why can't you just very clearly say,

I don't care what the culture says. It's a sin. Homosexuality is a sin. Same -sex attraction is a sin because the Bible says this.

It's not because I'm trying to do some kind of calculation in the culture to make them like me. As soon as you start thinking about the approval of man, and I don't care what direction this is in, by the way,

I don't care if this is, you know, what I keep hearing today from people on X about the, the young men want this, that, and the other thing.

Okay. So they want that. What does the Bible say? You know, we're not going to talk.

I literally talked to people. There were pastors that they're, they're going to avoid talking about certain things.

Cause all the, this is where the young men are coming from. That's what Keller did. Let's not do that.

Let's not do that. Let's just be clear. This is what scripture says on controversial matters.

And we'll let the chips fall. That's what a real leader, I think like a good leader does. Um, and when you make a mistake, we all make mistakes.

You just own it. That's what you do. You say, you know, I, I was scared. I shouldn't have done that. Or I was,

I was incorrect thinking I had the wrong position on that. I'm sorry. You know, I'm going to work to build trust with you now.

That's what you do, but that's not what nine marks is doing. And that's what kind of breaks my heart. Okay. Uh, let's, let's keep going here.

We're almost done. So I do not want to question the root motives of nine marks, but I do question their judgment.

They are quick to opine on issues like January 6th, get a whole article on it without suspecting the mainstream news narrative about it, but often slow on getting basic issues of public morality, correct.

When it could subject them to condemnation from the left. So then I just talk about forgiveness versus trust.

I talk about second Timothy two talks about faithful men. Those are the people we want over our churches and our parachurches, faithful men, men, you can count on who will be consistent.

You also want people that you can, you can depend on in just a basic sense.

Proverbs 25 19 says like a bad tooth and an unsteady foot is confidence in a faithless man in time of trouble.

And that's nine marks. I can't depend on them. They've been faithless too many times when trouble came, they've been unsteady, they've been like a bad tooth.

And so that's my, that's my two cents. There is a market right now for brave and confident leaders, especially online.

And, um, many of these leaders will have nothing to show from past experience that would earn current trust.

And this is even more true of those who failed so many cultural tests in such a short period of time. Well, nine marks receives much positive feedback for its ecclesiology resources, including guidance on issues like multi -site churches, membership, eldership, and revitalization.

I can not recommend trusting them on social matters for the foreseeable future. It is good. They are course correcting, but that is only the first step in a longer process that may one day reestablish trust, which is what we all hope for.

So that's the piece. I'll take some questions now. Uh, and conundrums cries of outrage, whatever you have for me.

Uh, thank you for the $10, uh, leading leading says, what do you think will be the fallout in the longterm for these churches and leaders who do not admit they were wrong or repent?

Some of them have institutional stability because they are cushioned by institutions that have functioned in ways that we find necessary, like education, for example.

And, and so they're going to keep their job. They're going to, they're going to be okay in the long run, um, when it comes to the courts of man, but the courts of heaven are what

I'm more concerned about. And I just think we should be aware of people who compromise. So long -term, some of them have discredited themselves, uh, with a certain audience, but they'll still have an audience that will still listen to them, right?

Because they are sitting in the seat of authority and it, there's still some confidence in the institutions.

Um, we need good institutions by the way, the solution is not to get rid of institutions. We need to restore institutional standards and create better institutions.

That's what we need to do. So I think some of them have discredited themselves, but I don't know that that it's not like a death blow to their careers in every conceivable way and every conceivable circumstance for nine marks, they're still going to go on.

They're still going to put out materials. They're probably going to hone in on what they were known for from the beginning and try to stay out of social matters more.

And that may help them continue on, but there's going to be a certain class of people like myself who, uh, have their number on social issues and aren't going to trust them and probably won't recommend them as much.

Um, the, one of the concerns right now is that you have untested people getting into positions of leadership in 2020.

I remember online that, you know, there's no one around me to back me up. And now there's people that want to sort of capitalize on bravery that they didn't exhibit during that time.

And that's, you know, maybe they don't have a record or maybe, you know, they're, they do have some, you know, they're preaching with a mask on and doing the whole nine yards and now they want to be big, brave man on, you know, it's like, uh, there's a lot of branding and trying to cultivate an image and that kind of stuff.

I think a discerning Christian sees past that it looks at track record, looks at what's real building, real building, even 10 years ago, to be a guy online, you had to have some kind of institutional connection.

You had to have a big church, something successful that she said, look, I'm successful in the real world, which gives me the right to be online.

That doesn't exist anymore. You just be, uh, a pastor online without any of that. Um, there's, there's blessings and curses.

I mean, look at this podcast. For example, uh, I have a track record of taking hits and making sacrifices when it matters, which builds trust in the minds of the people.

That's why I think no matter how I'm attacked, there's a certain core audience that they they've seen me for now six years at least.

And they know, okay. John's doesn't care if it's popular or not. He's just going to say it. And he, it just doesn't popular.

It doesn't factor. It might frustrate him, but it's not going to motivate what comes out of his mouth. I can depend on that. Uh, there are some good guys like that out there.

Like Russell Fuller is totally like that. Does not care what people think. He's just going to tell you what he thinks is good for you.

Uh, which I really, really appreciate. I was just talking to him the other day. So I'm thinking about him. Um, I, and by the way, speaking of Russell Fuller, I should probably mention because, uh, there is a conference coming up.

I'm losing my train of thought a little bit here, but it's, it's for a worthy cause. Um, I'm trying to remember my own websites, pull it up.

JohnHarrisPodcast .com. I think that's how you pull it up. So I'm going to show you a conference that I'm going to be speaking at.

And Russell Fuller is going to be speaking out and some other courageous pastors who've been consistent in this, right? Which is really the only thing, what else do you have?

You can't look at image that, that can be adjusted in the temporary. Anyone can put on a sports jacket, right?

You can't look at even some of the traditional metrics.

You might've made yourself made a way into an institution and these institutions were kind of slanted left.

Um, what matters? Watch the person over the long haul. Are they consistent? Do they consistently work off the same principles?

Uh, or, or are they, do they change? Now we should all change. We should be corrected when we do something wrong, but that for someone who's stable, that shouldn't be often that you're getting things at least core things wrong.

And you should, and your primary, your, your convictions, you know, your primary principles should not be blowing with the wind at all.

You should have some solid convictions. And if they're blowing with the wind, you have really no business trying to be a pastor, influencing people, get that figured out.

Um, anyway, so, uh, I don't know if that even answered the question. I don't know.

It's the, it's the vein I got on though. So here's,

I'm pulling up right now the, uh, schedule for where I'm going to be.

So you can see where I'm speaking and where you can see Russell Fuller and myself, the truth conference in Tampa, Florida, May 1st through 3rd.

So check that out. The truth conference, uh, the truth fellowship .org is where you can find it, or you can go to johnharrismedia .com

and go to speaking engagements. I'm also going to be in Portland, Oregon, June 12th through 13th. So just letting you know about that.

Uh, so what's, yeah, what's the long -term, uh, it was a question. I don't know. I don't know for all of these people, but I think there has been a crisis of leadership and we can't accept cheap substitutes.

We have to do the hard work and there's only one way to do it. It took Jesus three years working with guys and, and even then it, you know, they had to go out on their own and demonstrate and, and, and it, it's a process.

There's qualifications were given in scripture. It takes time to realize whether someone's a Titus elder, um, a

Titus one elder. So that's, that's all I can say. There's no shortcuts in this other questions.

Uh, John, repentance should be the chief Mark of the, of the nine. Here is the demarcation. Christ remarks is in the power of the spirit or academic hegemony.

Other questions. I have an acquaintance who went to Southern seminary who I am deeply imbibed that, that junk.

And I asked him, okay, so he, this guy at Southern seminary saw this CRT junk.

Okay. And I asked him, do I think there are more, say people in Vermont or Mississippi?

Oh, okay. I guess. Okay. So some of these people like they hate the South. I get it. Yeah. They go to, that's, that's one of the hilarious things to me.

Um, especially coming from the North and going down South is like how much the people in the

South who are being raised in the leadership structure seem to hate the South. And it's like, you know, the people in your churches are conserving orthodoxy way better than the people up North, but you know, or, or in Europe, uh, other question were these people closet

CRT folks, or did something happen along the way? I think some people got pulled aside and asked, you don't want to be one of those

Baptists do you? I think you're right. Yeah. I think some of these people got poisoned in academia. Some of these people, they, they, they caught something somewhere that gave them a ideology.

And then that ideology got synchronized with their Christianity, but some of them there's opportunism and there's like, I don't want to be thought of as one of the bad

Christians. And I think that's for sure. Some of what's going on, what would it look like for nine marks to repent?

Would each contributing author have to change views or would mark ever put out a statement, distancing himself? Look, here's what you do.

Number one, you go through your website and you take down the articles that are live there that are going to give bad advice to pastors.

You're endorsing the messages on your website. These are all currently on the website. So it's not like they were up there and they're taken down.

They're still there. So that's number one. Number two. Yeah. You make some statements. It doesn't have to be every single author, but I think you pull down the stuff that's incorrect.

And you, as you know, Jonathan Lehman is now the head, you make a fine -tuned repentance statement.

Here's where we're at and here's the damage we did. And this is what we're, this is what you can expect for us moving forward. And we hope to, to win your trust again.

I don't think it's many, much more complicated than that. I mean, some of these guys, I don't, I, I tend to think like you failed so many times, maybe think about doing a different job.

Maybe ministry is just not your thing, but there are so few leaders out there.

I don't know how realistic that is for everyone. Some, some people, certainly to be, to be quite honest, Jonathan Lehman has got stuff bad so many times.

I am tempted to think, why don't you just do something else guy, go do something else. But if you're not going to do that at the very least, make sure that you're lining up with the qualities of a leader now, and you're being very intentional in working on the areas of weakness.

So that, those are, that's my two cents in all this. I hope this was helpful for all of y 'all and more coming later in the week.

Tomorrow, we got Rod Martin on the podcast, Juan Riesco later in the week. We're going to do an update on him.

If you know Juan Riesco, paint the wall black, go watch the documentary. If you haven't seen it, he's going to be with us and we're going to talk some abortion and how we can stop it and that kind of stuff.