Does Andy Stanley Allow LGTB to Serve in Church?

Overall, he's going to talk about an event where he had a couple in his church, a guy he knew that ends up divorcing his wife and getting into a relationship with another man. So two men get into a relationship.

They go to one of these campus churches, these satellite churches, and the partner is not allowed to serve because that partner hasn't fully divorced his wife, and so he's not allowed to serve because of adultery.

So this is going to be a thing. Now, he's going to end, as Drew mentioned, he's going to end on the fact that the wife, who is very hurt, eventually softens and starts to show grace. That's the pitch.

Show Introduction and the Upcoming Andy Stanley Clip

Welcome to the Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of the Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community, of which this podcast is a proud member.

You can check out strivingforeternity .org, and if you want to check out all the podcasts, go to christianpodcastcommunity .org. As some of you know, those who are regular listeners, well, let's welcome the new listeners.

Welcome. But to the regular listeners, you know you've been hearing different co-hosts as we have gone through. In this couple of episodes, you're going to hear the voice, well, half the voice of Matter of Theology.

Drew Vonnita is with me. If you're a regular listener to my other podcast, Paul Jack's Live, you have heard him on multiple times, but I want to give a shout out for Matter of Theology, which is another podcast on the Christian podcast community.

At some time in the future, I'll probably get his co-host on as well, and I'll let him also mention he's got another podcast. It's kind of like the Forgotten Child because it's not part of the Christian podcast community.

He just does it on his own. I don't understand, but anyway, Drew, welcome. Thank you.

I'm glad to be here. Honored to be here. This is my first time on this podcast because like you said, I'm pretty regular on Apologetics Live. That one's just, it's so much fun to do live stuff.

Well, it's fun because you get to just jump in. We never know what's going to happen. Someone asked me how I prepare for debates on Apologetics Live, and I said, well, most of the time I can't because the person who called in is expecting the debate.

I didn't know they were going to call in. And so the person was like, how do you prep for that then? I said, I don't. He's like, well, what do you do? I said, I only look at two areas. I look at the area of hermeneutics and the area of logic, and that's it.

Sometimes you get into church history with the old heresies, but that kind of still falls under hermeneutics. So if you study hermeneutics and logic, that's mostly where all these arguments end up being anyway.

So that's all I study.

That's right. Yeah. And then the key to any debate, right? The first thing that you have to know how to do is listen. If you listen, yeah, exactly. People miss that because they go, well, how did you catch this?

How did you catch this? How did you know about this? Well, I just listened. And if you just let people, because people love to talk, and if you just let people talk and ramble, you give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves.

And you and I had an, we were doing a open Q and A, and we had a guy that came in wanting to talk about the topic of Calvinism, and he told you and myself, and I forget who else was in there. I think it was Anthony, who told us what we believed.

Right. And I actually stopped him at one point and I said, Drew, do you believe that? You were like, no. Anthony, do you believe that? No. I said, I don't believe it either. So we don't know who you're talking to, but you're not listening to us.

So if he comes in, what I got to do is I got to get a little straw man, a little just something I can hold up to be like, here, here's who you're arguing with.

Well, what would be really funny is if you had Justin Pierce's logical fallacy poster, and then every time he does one, just point to it.

Yeah, I should get one of those. That would be really good. So what we're going to do today, folks, is we actually planned, let's give them the behind the scenes. You and I planned on continuing our series on what we believe, which we are going to do.

We will get to that, which might mean that Drew is going to be on for four weeks, but we'll see because we're going to pick up the topic that we had of security when we talk about the doctrine of salvation.

So instead of that, what we're going to do is pick up, because Drew, you had posted a video that you clipped from a sermon from Andy Stanley, and you put this on your Facebook. And now, look, folks, I'm just going to tell you upfront, when you hear what we are going to talk about today, you may be shocked to hear someone that says he's a pastor argue the way he argues.

In fact, I can predict that some of you listening may throw your phone at the wall. This may be a dangerous episode to listen to. It could be frustrating, but it is necessary because this is what's being taught by quote unquote pastors around the world.

So let me start first, Drew, before we jump into that, let me let you introduce yourself to this audience so that they not only get to hear your voice, but know what you're all about.

Drew Vonnita Introduces His Ministry and Background

Yeah, thank you. So my name is Drew. I live in Georgia. I am married to my beautiful wife, Brandy, and we have two little what Vody would call vipers in diapers. We have Lawson. He's our oldest, and he is named after Steve Lawson.

So we have Lawson. He's three years old. And then we have Rhett, who just turned one. So we love our boys. They keep us on our toes. But yeah, I do a podcast with my friend Huff, and it's called Matter of Theology.

We started that back in 2019, and so it's been going. It's gained a lot of traction as the years have gone on, and I'm really, really shocked and really surprised. I didn't think we would even make it out of the first year.

And then we ended up partnering with Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, and it just took off even more. So we're really thankful for that. But one of the things that I also do on the side, another podcast called For Life and Godliness, I started that at the beginning of last year.

And basically what it is, is the goal is to be just kind of short, 15, 20-minute podcast, getting right to the meat of things. And it's basically just anything. If there's a thought that I have during the day that can encourage people, or if there's a scripture I think that people need to know and go over, or if there's an interview that I'm having, I want to bring those things out and basically take whatever I'm talking about and help the listener apply it to their life so that they can grow in godliness.

And that's kind of the whole point, because as we were talking about a couple weeks ago on Apologetics Live, the gentleman that came on had a really tough time distinguishing between sanctification and regeneration.

And everything that I'm trying to push out on that particular podcast is about sanctification. Those who have already been regenerated and now moving and progressing in sanctification. So holiness, living in holiness, living to the glory of God.

That's kind of the point of that. And people don't quite understand what that means to live to the glory of God. And so that's kind of the whole point of that. But I love theology. I've graduated from Liberty University.

I've got my bachelors and masters from there. And so that's what I do. I'm just a guy who's a sinner saved by grace that loves talking theology.

And that's what we love to do. But today, you also like to kind of tweak people or trigger them. And so you did. So we're going to play a clip that we're going to play through and stop and discuss. And you decided you wanted to make sure I got well triggered.

You know, so that's what we're going to do today. We're going to play a clip that you grabbed. And why don't you first give some of the context of this clip, and then I'll give the context, some context of what we're going to hear about the clip and about his church.

Andy Stanley's Sermon Series and the Grace-and-Truth Theme

Okay. So this clip is from a sermon, a sermon series that Andy gave around 2010 or 2011. So this is so when you see all the clips that are coming up now, like this is nothing new. Andy's been on this track for a long time.

And so the sermon series is called Christian. And he's really trying to go through and talk about what a Christian is according to the Bible, which is interesting since his position now is we can't rely on the Bible says.

But anyways, so he's talking about Christian, what it means to be a Christian. And in this particular sermon, it's called what grace metrophy. So the idea is about how Christ was the embodiment of both grace and truth, because what we tend to do when we get into churches or we're looking for churches is we either side on the full truth side and we neglect the grace or we side on grace and we neglect truth.

But his whole point is Jesus was the embodiment of full of the fullness of grace and truth. And so that actually kind of, and when he starts the sermon, it's weird that he starts here, but it's once you see how it ends with the clip that we're, that we're going to go through, you kind of, it's kind of the foretelling of where we're going because he's, he kind of starts the sermon in the introduction by talking about how people in the homosexual community that go to churches that are gay affirming, they were leaving those churches and coming to his church because they, they say that he taught the Bible and he was kind of addressing these things, but yet he wasn't addressing them as though they were sin.

And that's kind of the problem. And so we're going to see that in this clip.

Yeah. And so some things that folks are going to first need to understand about Andy Stanley's church, he's going to mention some things that I just want to explain because not everyone will understand these things.

So what we have is the way his church has done is that they have where Andy Stanley will be the preacher and they have these other campuses, satellite churches. And what they do is the campus churches will have their local band, because that's usually what it is, a local band playing in a worship team up singing.

They may have the local pastor who prays but then they put up a screen when it's time for the preaching and you have Andy Stanley on screen at multiple churches. So he's at one location, but they put project him in other locations.

And so that's that you're going to end up seeing that that becomes necessary just to understand most genuine believers are not familiar with that because they go to good churches. But there's churches that this is what they do.

So they're really, those are churches that are built off of a celebrity status. And so what they're doing is they want to try to build lots of multiple churches to be bigger in different areas. And so they just project the celebrity pastor in multiple areas.

But is he really their pastor? Well, they have local pastors that serve at those churches. So you're going to hear him talk about things like that. Let me give an overview because we're going to chop this up, but I want you to give you a summary of what this clip is and what he's going to say overall before we play this, because you're going to, I want you to see where we're going to go, what this clip is about.

So this is Andy Stanley. He's going to be, well, oh, Drew, I was going to say preaching, but yeah, I guess it's not really preaching. Okay. This is Andy Stanley storytelling.

That'd be more appropriate, you think? I think he's one of those guys that got on board with this whole, I'm not going to preach today, but I want to start a conversation.

Yeah. Yeah. Because he's usually sitting in a chair and he's got a television up there as his means of communication. Yeah. Here's a picture. Because my words are not powerful enough.

And that's the thing about Andy too. That's one of the things that draw people to him is he is a very good communicator in his oratory skills. You can hear that. And that's one of the.

That draw people to Andy. Yeah. And he seems likable in his speech. So I get it, but what he's going to do is he's going to talk about a situation that occurred in his church years ago. And this was a clip, what was the year that you grabbed this from again?

It was around 2010 or 2011. 2010. And he's going to reference three years.

Of time. So it had to have been somewhere before 2007, these events actually happened. But overall, he's going to talk about an event where he had a couple in his church, a guy he knew that ends up divorcing his wife and getting into a relationship with another man.

So two men get into a relationship. They go to one of these campus churches, these satellite churches, and the partner is not allowed to serve because that partner hasn't fully divorced his wife. And so he's not allowed to serve because of adultery.

So this is going to be the thing. Now, he's going to end, as Drew mentioned, he's going to end on the fact that the wife, who is very hurt, eventually softens and starts to show grace. That's the pitch.

So I kind of gave you the spoiler, but I wanted to give you the summary because when we play through this, I want you to, we're going to be clipping it and I want you to get the overall picture first.

So Drew, if you could play this, and I'm just going to tell you folks, we're going to be stopping. This is a seven minute clip. I'll put the links in the show notes. You'll be able to find it on Drew's page on his Facebook page because, well, Drew took the clip and clipped just this part.

So this isn't something you're going to find on YouTube. You're going to find it from Drew. And so I'll put the link to his page and it's public for.

People to see. So you'll be able to get it. It's not private. My page isn't private. It's public.

And so we're going to be, I mean, seven minutes. I think this is going to take us an hour to get through. I will apologize upfront if you hear screaming from your podcast app right now. Yes, it will be me or Drew screaming because even though we've heard this, I just can't believe.

I just still want to scream. If Chris Honholtz was here, you would hear banging of the head.

On the table. Yes. Well, we should request that Chris Honholtz does a video while listening to this episode so that we could see what the host of Voice of Reason Radio looks like when he gets a headache.

He always complains when he gets a headache when listening to Apologetics Live when we have these people come in. And I think you've figured it out. It's not he's pounding his fist on the table. He's pounding his head on the table.

Right. Yeah. That's it. Now I understand. Chris Honholtz and many others, your head will hurt. You will pound it on walls, tables or throw your devices. But please listen anyway. Here we go. We're conflicted like Jesus.

You know, you're trying to figure this out and it's messy. It's messy. And so consequently, the network of church. Did he say Jesus was conflicted? Yes.

In coming to some of these situations, right, Jesus is conflicted. He doesn't know what to do.

Now, here's the thing that's puzzling to me. I don't know any passage of Scripture where I could say Jesus, the Holy Spirit, nor the Father were conflicted over issues of sin. Right. And that's going to be the point.

I mean, I may sound like a broken record throughout this, but Drew, you correct me if you think I'm wrong. The whole thing here is an issue that we're going to address a sin issue, and he's going to ignore sin and focus on, it's just about grace and love.

And making people feel good. Well, the interesting thing about this particular sermon is that in other parts, he talks about the necessity of sin. Right. So he talks about the adultery in John, and he'll interrupt himself and he said, well, did you have to bring up the sin thing?

And he says, yes, because it's necessary to talk about sin. But what we see is we see some things are sin, but some things aren't sin, according to Andy Stanley. And that's going to.

Become essential as we discuss as to what he considers sin. And I think what is going to be interesting is when we look at this, I think he's conflicted with what to do, but he is now projecting that onto Christ and projecting that Jesus is conflicted with situations like this.

And I don't think Jesus will be conflicted with what we're about to hear. I think Jesus will be very clear with what to do in situations like this. And I think we're going to be able to turn to scripture to make that clear.

Right. So keep going. Our desires, and we have, you know, again, a bunch of churches in Atlanta and around the country. We run into these situations all the time. I just want to tell you one story. I was going to tell you three stories, but no time for three stories.

One story that I just... Okay, wait a minute. He doesn't have time for three stories? That's all he does is tell stories. That's right. This must be a really long story. No, folks, it's not. Seven minutes.

Yeah. Years ago, when we first started the church, I met a family in our children's ministry, a husband, wife, and their elementary school age daughter. And we got to be friends and meal together. I did a couple of funerals for parents and just, you know, not super best friends, but knew them, tracked with them, knew what's going on, see them at church.

Okay, hold on. If you're their pastor, you should know them. It's kind of like, how can you shepherd them if you don't know them?

Well, okay, let me give benefit of the doubt. If you have a church of a couple thousand people, you can't effectively shepherd everybody. And that's why you need multiple shepherds. And you you need to have enough shepherds to be able to get to know.

So I'll give, I will defend him to this sense of saying he's not going to know everybody in a church of that church's size.

So the only thing I would, because immediately, what comes to mind is John MacArthur, right? A church, the size of grace community. And so you have John MacArthur, but he's got multiple elders that, that help pastor all the people in the church.

But then one of the things that sticks out in my mind, and I heard this from the MacArthur Center podcast that's put out is whenever someone is going to the hospital or has something going on, John is the first one there.

He beats everyone to the hospital somehow. But he always knows, and he's always involved on an intimate level with the people and what's going on.

Yeah. And I mean, remember, they have 75 elders in that church. I mean, that's larger than most churches. Their elder board would make some churches happy to have that size of people, right? But yeah, there is a case where for a lot of the larger churches, and I'm sure John MacArthur probably doesn't know everybody in his church anymore, just with the size of it.

But when he, you're right, they said when he hears someone in his church is in a hospital, he goes down. It may be the first time he's meeting them. It very well could be, but with the number of people, especially after COVID that started attending that church, I don't know that he could possibly get to know everybody because that church literally grew outside of their doors and put tents outside.

That's right. That's a good point. But we'll continue.

About five, five and a half years ago, she discovers that he's in a relationship with another guy. And it's devastating, of course. And it breaks her heart. And there's just the deceit and all the stuff that goes with those kinds of things.

And of course, confusing for their daughter and embarrassing. It's just a big mess. So she gets an attorney. And to their credit, they asked the attorney to represent their daughter so that however this worked out, it would be best for her.

Did we skip some? No. So did he explain why they got divorced yet? Did I miss that? Or is that still coming?

No, I think he did. I think he explained it. I'll rewind it.

Let's rewind it. I want to make sure because maybe I just missed it. Okay. We missed it. Discovers that he's in a relationship with another guy. Okay. So that's it. So I did miss it. Sorry, folks. So here's what you end up having.

He's in a homosexual relationship. And he's describing the divorce as messy, as any other type of divorce. And I just want you to think about that. Because as we play this part where he describes this divorce, I want you to hear how he describes it.

And think whether he is considering homosexuality a sin. Because if you think homosexuality is a sin, I think every one of you listening that considers what the Bible says is true, you're going to think differently about how to handle this situation.

Do you address it as a divorce situation or as a sin issue over homosexuality? So I want you to just think about that as we play this clip. Play that again.

And you notice what he didn't say about the relationship. He didn't say it was adultery.

Right here. He also didn't say it was homosexual.

That's right. He just said a relationship with another man.

Correct. So you see right there, he avoids the... And this is, again, this is true to what you had said about the communication. He's avoiding the trigger words and just making it sound as if this is a normal thing.

This isn't a big deal in the sense of, I mean, it's a big deal. He's making it a big deal because there's a divorce. But he's basically attributing this as that this is another relationship no different than if this guy left his wife for another girl.

Right. And so you're going to see in the way he describes this divorce that he attributes a homosexual relationship as equal to a heterosexual relationship. So if people are going to defend and say, no, Andy Stanley thinks homosexuality is wrong, the issue is listen to the way he's describing this.

You're not hearing that. Right. That's right. Of course. And it breaks her heart. And there's just the deceit and all the stuff that goes with those kinds of things. And of course, confusing for their daughter and embarrassing.

It's just a big mess. So she gets an attorney. And to their credit, they asked the attorney to represent their daughter so that however this worked out, it would be best for her. So a single attorney worked this out.

And in six months, they're divorced. And there's all the shrapnel and all the wounds and all the betrayal and all the confusion and it's all there. You've been through that. You've seen it. You have family members.

Okay. So I want you to know, is there mess in divorce? Yes. Yes. We've seen it. Drew, I'm sure you've seen this even within church. Divorces are messy. I will admit, I love the description they have. If you ever watched the movie, Fireproof with Kirk Cameron, and there's a scene in there where they're discussing divorce.

And one of the characters takes a salt and pepper shaker and just glues them together and sticks them together. And then hands them to Kirk Cameron's character, who's the chief. And it's like, Kirk Cameron's character was like, why do you do that?

He's like, well, here, break it apart. And Kirk Cameron's like, well, I can't because they're going to break and there's going to be a mess everywhere. And that was the guy's point. You're going to destroy one or both of them.

Yes. You're going to destroy one or both. And that is what divorce does. And so is Andy Stanley accurate in describing what happens in divorce? Yes. I want to be fair, as fair as I can be with this and say, what he's describing is right.

And if this was a point about the divorce, if he wanted to make his point and think about this, remember, his point is about the grace that the wife will show toward the husband. So the homosexuality is not the point of the story, correct?

No, the grace is the point of his story. So you might say, well, then why would he bring the homosexual aspect into it? Well, because he wanted to. You see this story about grace with a divorcee who is hurt by the relationship because her husband divorces her to have a relationship with another person.

And then years later, they can restore that relationship, though they don't get married. See, I just explained the point of his thing without mentioning the homosexuality. So it causes us to wonder if you have a good communicator who thinks through these things, why did he bring up the homosexuality?

Well, I would argue that I think the reason is desensitizing people to it. He wants people to have pity on the husband in this relationship, because as you're divorced, whose husband goes and shacks up with another man, she's not the victim in the story.

She's the victimizer in his story. The victim is the guy who left his family to go be with another guy. And the other victim of the story is the other guy who leaves his family. Let's give credit where credit's due.

Yes, he talks about the mess of divorce. It is messy. But what I want to train you on is to be able to see why people say what they say and what the agenda they have is and how it's revealed. You start to break these things down, you start to see what he's really trying to get at, because the homosexual relationship has no bearing on the point.

Unless, of course, the point is not just grace, but grace towards homosexuals.

Right. That's it. It's softening the blow. Correct. That moves towards accepting and affirming homosexuality. That's what this whole thing is about. Because like I said, at the beginning of the sermon, he's talking about how homosexuals will leave homosexual affirming churches in order to come to his church.

And this is the softening the blow, because yes, we talk about sin, but we're not going to call that a sin. But also what he doesn't talk about, why is divorce so messy? Why is divorce all of these things?

Why is it devastating? Because at the core, what leads to divorce is a sin problem. So even in talking about divorce, you have to get down to the sin problem that led to parties wanting a divorce.

Yeah. And when you have someone telling a story like this, just watch to see who's, in this storytelling, who is the real victim and who's the victimizer. Because it's going to tell you quite a bit about what someone thinks.

So as we go through, I'm setting this up because I want to train you in critical thinking. I want you to be able to hear someone like an Andy Stanley who is a good communicator and very smooth sounding.

And I want you to be able to hear him and go, oh, oh, I see what he's doing. He's projecting his confusion, his struggles onto Christ. He's now trying to soften this and make the one who's the actual victim, the victimizer, to say, oh, but in the end, oh, look how good she is because she showed grace to the guy in sin rather than confronting that sin.

That's what we're about to hear. So let's go. A divorce, it's just all there and it's as painful as it can possibly be. And then some months after the divorce was finalized, he shows up here at our North Point campus with his partner and she's here.

And it was either Easter or Christmas. I can't remember. It was a big Sunday. Okay, let's just stop there because obviously that's the only time people go to church, right? Christmas. Right. Now, why would, you and I were talking before we recorded, right?

His church is going to be bigger on those days because one of the things that might be helpful for you to explain at this point for the audience is how he started this church because they are geared toward unbelievers and making them feel comfortable.

So give the audience a little bit of the background that we had explained before we.

Recorded. Yeah. So, so for the audience, if you want more in depth about this background, you can get, if you want to spend the money and get it, uh, Andy's book called deep and wide. And it's, it's how North Point church was basically planted.

It's kind of the blueprint. Um, and so he goes into that a little more in depth, but, you know, he was, he was with his, his father at a church in Atlanta and his, his father, you know, a lot of people look up to Charles Stanley and for a long time, he, he, people would say that he was a pretty solid Bible teacher up to a point.

There were a lot of things that, you know, he said were off, very off, like where God tells you to get your, your Thanksgiving Turkey. I know Justin has mentioned that, but, and what happened is Andy split from his dad's church because at his dad's church, obviously they, they weren't going to let people like homosexuals or nonbelievers, right.

Serve in the church or be a part of the church because what is the church? It's a body of believers. It's Christ's bride. And so Andy basically split and went off to go plant his own church. And you, if you listen to Andy, you'll hear him say this a lot.

We want to be a church for the unchurched. And so his whole goal was to plant this church so that unbelievers, uh, so that, so that people who are living in sin can come to his church and they can feel welcome.

They can feel accepted. They can feel not judged. They can feel comfortable being at his church. And that's, that was the whole point of planting North Point church. And then the subsequent satellite campuses, um, that they ended up.

Planting as well. And we're going to see that exact mentality in how he describes this story. That's right. Three syllable. Mad. Okay. She is upset. She is. Okay. I had to stop it because.

You and I were talking about this. Uh, he's going to, he's going to say things and it, you're going to hear, you might, you might be able to hear it. The audience laughing when this is not a laughing matter.

This is a serious matter, not just because of the divorce, but also because of the homosexual nature in the divorce. Um, this is not a laughing matter. This is when we look at scripture, these are things that God takes seriously because they are sins that keep people out of the kingdom of heaven.

So this, this is nothing to joke about.

This is nothing to laugh about. Yeah. I mean, this is a thing where he's trying to say how upset she is. And I do hope it came through. You heard the audience laughed and there's going to be a later time where he, you're going to hear them laugh again at a time they should be cringing.

Now this one, okay. He's, he's saying something that's coming off funny, right? They're really mad. They're mad. Okay. I get what he's doing. It's to emphasize it. And it is generating that reaction. And so what Drew's saying is because later there's going to be a point where both Drew and I cringed at the fact that people laughed.

Yeah. And, and so I think though what you're saying, Drew, and this is helpful for folks to understand, you see how he lightens it. He softens it. So don't take this too serious, folks. Don't, don't be focused on the, the homosexual issue.

Let's just, you know, because what is he doing now? He's, she's mad. This is the beginning of turning the victim into the victimizer and the victimizer into the victim. Yep. You're about to hear it right here.

And this is, so how do you do that? Well, one thing to do is lighten the mood, drop those defenses. So people that, because if people are starting at hearing this, if they're starting to get upset in the audience, this little bit of humor just lightens it so that, oh, okay.

They, they, they're, they're not so defensive. Right. Eases the tension. Eases the tension. Look, I teach this with evangelism. One of the ways that we teach at Striving for Eternity, when we teach our ambassador evangelism, one thing we say is disarm the person that you're talking to, disarm their defenses by using humor and being polite.

In other words, when we're discussing and sharing the gospel and you start seeing them get defensive over things, not about sin issues, but when you just see something happening where they're getting tense, because you're, you're starting to discuss things that are spiritual, humor helps to break that down.

So you're, you keep a good conversation. He's using it differently though. He's using it to soften sin and to, to confuse an audience so that they don't recognize what he's doing with the, the role reversal of the victim and victimizer.

That's right. Because there should be a strong tension between adultery and homosexuality and divorce right here. There should be a strong tension where the crowd is kind of sitting on edge because they should be understanding the sin issue.

So like, like, like you're saying, there's that using this as a joke to ease the tension and soften the blow. And it's kind of that point of, you do this in communication, right? When, when you realize things are getting tense, you, you find the, the point of agreement and then kind of make the joke out of it.