Adult Sunday School Going Public Chapter 10

Prayer for Wisdom and Understanding

Let's open our time together in a word of prayer. Father, we are so thankful, Lord, for your mercies, which are in you every morning. Lord, we thank you for the gift of life and breath that you've bestowed on us.

We pray, God, that we would make good use of this gift, even today, as we gather in the Lord's day to receive instruction for our spiritual health and well-being. We ask, Lord, that you'd impart to us this morning a measure of your Spirit to lead us on level ground, to guide and enlighten our minds, so that we may receive your truth as was promised by the Lord Jesus Christ, that the Spirit of God would lead us into all truth.

We pray, God, that as we go about this material today, coming almost to a conclusion, that we wouldn't just internalize this in terms of pure knowledge, which puffs up, but, Lord, that this would stir our hearts to a level of obedience and care and concern for your word, which is truth.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.

All right.

Oh, beloved, we've been going through this book several months now. We're almost at the end of it. We've got about two more chapters left. And so, just kind of, I almost feel like we, like if you don't know the premise, and you haven't come to a pretty firm grasp of the premise, then we've probably done something wrong.

In this study.

But the premise, again, is fairly simple. And it touches on the importance of the two ordinances that the Lord Jesus Christ gave the church, namely, baptism and the Lord's Supper. And the premise is simple.

What makes someone a Christian? And what makes someone a member of a church?

Okay.

Well, we know the first answer is kind of easy. Everyone mostly agrees on the first, which is what makes a Christian a Christian is faith, repentance, and belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, right? So that regenerative work of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in the person, that person is now a Christian, okay?

Well, what makes that Christian now a member of a church? It's, what's the sign? Baptism. You know, again, there's a formality to church membership. And just like there's a formality to marriage. Now, the objections are typical.

I was just talking to, he's kind of a new friend of mine. He's not a believer. His name is Jay. And Jay has a beautiful girlfriend, and they've been dating for like five years. And so I asked him, I said, Jay, when are you gonna get married?

I just had this conversation with him on Friday. I said, Jay, when are you gonna get married? And he says, man, I'm not, I don't wanna get married. Men have no incentive to get married today in today's world.

You know, I love her, I take care of her. As long as that relationship is there, you know, she doesn't have to worry. And it's almost like the argument people make for non -baptism in church membership, right?

It's, man, you know, I don't really need it. It's not really necessary. I don't really need to commit myself to someone or something. You know, it's just all formalities anyways. And that's probably how the guy thinks.

But how do you think, you know, and I can't speak for her, but how do you imagine the woman might feel? You think she feels the same way that he does? Probably not, right? Because what does a woman look for?

Security. That's right. What were you saying, sister?

Yeah.

Commitment, security, right? And that's what women are typically looking for in a relationship. You know what the Lord Jesus wants of his people? Commitment and security, you know? And so when we think about church membership and we say, well, why do we have to be baptized?

Why do we, you know, have to go through this process and all these things? You know, it kind of, from a worldly perspective, how people treat dating and marriage, it may seem as a just cumbersome, maybe legalistic process, but you know, you tell that to your girlfriend you've been dating for five years that you're not interested in marriage, right?

It speaks more to your lack of commitment, your lack of discipline, your lack of foresight than anything else. And so here we come to this conclusion in chapter 10, which is where we're at. In chapter nine, we were answering some of the objections.

In chapter 10, we're gonna turn the tables on some of those objections and look at, you know, essentially objections that the other side who advocate for open membership would have to answer. And so again, in this book, we've been introduced to the concept of like open membership, closed membership.

Can we define those terms real quick? Open membership means, yeah, so like, you know, basically it's like, it's a buffet table, you know? So long as you pay the bare minimum, you get all the benefits of the buffet table.

So it means you can be baptized, not baptized, paedo-baptized, credo-baptized, you can, you know, those things are not important. And essentially, this is kind of the model we had at our previous church at Crossroads in Wisconsin.

And I was not an advocate for it by any stretch of the imagination. As a matter of fact, I think that's what led to kind of the downfall of that ministry and that church is having such a loose view of church membership and not having a well-defined theology and ecclesiology.

So the open church membership is basically, you know, hey, you, there is no defined membership process. You are a member if you wanna be. And there's a very, what's called low barrier of entry, right, so there's not a lot of things that would hinder you from being a member.

Sort of like my first church I went to after I got saved, I was 16 years old when I got saved and then when I was about 17 years old, I started asking questions about membership and baptism. So I got baptized at 17 years old and I wanted, and they didn't have the same view where, okay, you're baptized and then you're a member.

So I was baptized and then I became a member several months afterwards after going through like membership process. But my youth pastor at the time, I told him, hey, I wanna be a member of the church.

And he says, great, you're a member. And I said, that's it. And so, and at the time I thought, well, how cool is that, you know? It's just, you know, it's so open, it's so free, it's almost like very liberal and it's like, you know, it kind of feels nice to a degree where if I just wanna be, I can be.

But again, that presents some challenges and dangers that will be addressed in this coming chapter. Any thoughts or questions so far on chapter 10 if you've gotten a chance to read over it?

Besides the open membership thing was just about, he really believes that infant baptism is where it's at and that's, you know, a thing from God. He's gonna be upset if there are all these children that haven't been baptized.

I mean, he really takes it all the way to the end. But a lot of times, it's just something that happened to them and they can feel kind of awkward about getting re-baptized because they've been following God, so it's not, it's that particular error, you know, they kind of just overlook because it just, you know.

Yeah, there are some challenges theologically, right, that people are gonna run into. Now, I think a question that may come up is can a paedo-baptist join a Baptist church? The answer is yes, if they get baptized and they can hold a personal position that differs from us, you know, and still be in fellowship over the great majority of the faith, they just would not be allowed to obviously, you know, teach publicly that position.

But, you know, you could hold positions that are contrary on the lower end of the spectrum, right? Okay, let's look at some of these objections. Seven arguments against open membership. The first one is that open membership builds on error.

Now, again, this is a pretty direct shot at paedo -baptism in a sense, right? It was kind of the position of this church for a long time, up until recently, actually, as well, where you could, you know, if you were baptized, you know, as an infant and then went through confirmation, all these things, we would permit you into membership.

And, you know, we would just say that the administration of the baptism was wrong. But, you know, we changed that position to adhere more closely to the Bible. And so, open membership builds on a couple errors, not just a theological error, but also a practical error.

Open membership tries to solve a practicality issue, which is, again, high, low entry, barrier of entry, right? And so, in the world today, we've really moved away from high barrier of entries in regard to, let's say, social programs, right?

So if you have a, if you wanna get on welfare, 10, 20 years ago, it was pretty hard to get on welfare, right, you'd have to, like, really, like, go through a lot of hoops, you had to prove, because you're taking taxpayer money and you're using it.

And so, it was not an easy thing to get welfare 10, 20 years ago. What the social, you know, climate has done is that it has shifted that. We're now, man, it's real easy to get welfare. It's really easy.

And because they think that, okay, well, if you are poor, you're less likely to bother with some of the, you know, hoops that you have to jump through in order to qualify for welfare. And so, that would be, you know, so they traded a high barrier for a low barrier entry.

The same is true for voting rights in the United States, right, so you hear the debate politically between voter ID, no voter ID, right? And the argument for no voter ID, like in California, where everyone gets mailed ballots.

I've got people who, I know people who are, don't have a legal status here in California, and they get mail-in ballots. It's crazy. And so, the philosophy behind that thinking is, well, voting is a right, and we have to lower the barrier of entry for every voter.

So that everyone can vote. Well, we know they do that because they want to favor a particular party. And they also think that there's a racial component to it, right, so if you had voter ID laws, they think it would proportionately, you know, favor whites over blacks or Hispanics, because apparently Hispanics and blacks can't get an ID, right, and so it's kind of the bigotry of low expectations.

And so, again, the society is moving towards low barrier of entry in almost every field, okay, in our political realm, in the social realm. If you just look at kind of, you know, there was a controversy with Harvard recently.

I'm not sure if you saw that. Well, you know, the president of Harvard was not willing to condemn anti-Semitism, for instance. And the reasoning, well, and she was a black woman who probably really shouldn't have had that position in the first place.

She doesn't have anything really crazy academically that would have led her to have that job in the first place. So this was likely a diversity hire in the first place. And again, 20, 30, 40 years ago, in order to become the president of Harvard, you probably had to be like among the top 1 of people in academia.

And now, just based upon, you know, your racial makeup, maybe you are part of a minority group, that puts you automatically straight to the top. So again, these are low barrier of entries. Should we, as a church, should we, as a people of God, embrace that low barrier model?

No, because how is that working in the world? It's going great, isn't it? The world is just doing great with all these low barrier entry models in our places of academia, in our places of politics, in our places of social welfare, voting.

It really is damaging society. Again, people think that open liberalism is the answer to our woes, but the more we've liberalized, the more problems we've actually developed. And instead of moving toward a more cohesive society, we are becoming more divisive than ever.

And partly is because of this low barrier of entry to a lot of things. Obviously, when the United States Constitution was first written, only male property owners had the right to vote, and it's because they had the responsibilities.

And they were the ones who were gonna get drafted. They were the ones who had to pay taxes on the properties. They were the ones who were the productive class. And so as we've opened and liberalized, I'm not saying I'm for or against any of these things, but it's just a fact of the matter that as we've opened and liberalized things, things have gotten worse and worse to some degree.

And in some areas, we've gotten better. In other areas, we've digressed greatly. And so when we look at the church, we should not consider a liberal open, and I'm not using the term liberal in the political sense.

I'm using the term liberal in the sense of the meaning of the word being open. We shouldn't embrace a liberal view on church membership, which denigrates the sanctity and the responsibility of the church member, which is, again, why voting rights have changed drastically in America is because we don't see this as a sacred civic duty where you have an investment in it.

Now it's just open for everyone. And so the same, if applied to the church, will be disastrous for the church. And so that error that open membership builds on, it's not just a theological error, it's an ecclesiastical error as well, in that it will bring in more wolves, more individuals who are not truly regenerated.

And the more you muddy the waters of church and of church membership, the more disastrous the result. And so if you wonder why American Christianity seems to be apostatizing more and more, look at some of the high churches, the Anglican Church, for instance, the Methodist Church, even now within theologically conservative churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, you see more and more leaders and churches deviating from the historical faith.

Back in the 1950s, for instance, you had this movement within, really starting in the 30s and 40s, but you had this movement within modern Congregationalism, or not Congregationalism, but Congregationalist, the denomination, and then also Anglican and Methodism.

You had the academia, the professors at the institutions and seminaries of these denominations, they really began to embrace what was called a critical view of scripture. And as they embraced a critical view of scripture, they began to apostatize and move away from the authority of scripture.

And you had people like bishops, anyone ever heard of the name Bishop Sponge? Sponge? Sponge? He was a, I believe, Anglican minister and theologian who became quite popular in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and he died maybe 10 years ago.

And he began to teach things like hell didn't exist, that homosexuality was acceptable, that all these things were really liberalizing away from the orthodox view of Christianity. And his view became mainstream within modern day Anglicanism.

So he also began to embrace a more open view of church membership and communion and baptism and all these things, of course, followed. And so why I bring this up is because the more a church liberalizes, the more that the institutions liberalize, you're headed on a course to apostasy as a church or as a denomination.

So again, a low view of church membership will have disastrous results. And partly it's because, look at Bishop Sponge, for instance, within the Anglican church, when you become a minister, you have to basically take an oath.

And similarly, like if you're an officer of the United States, you have to take an oath to the Constitution. Anglican ministers have to take an oath to the scriptures and to the doctrine of the church.

And part of that confession that an Anglican minister has to verbalize at his confirmation, at his ordination, is that he is to protect the faith. And clearly he did not take that oath seriously because he became a great defector of the faith.

And so covenants matter, church membership matters, these issues matter. So the more we deviate from them, the more disastrous they'll be. The second thing that is brought up here in page 196 is open membership requires churches to accommodate not just error, but willful inconsistency.

In what way is that true from the open membership model? How are they just not embracing error, but how are they inconsistent? How are they inconsistent?

They're actually accepting two different views of baptism, one which we don't even consider baptism, which is paedo -baptism, and then the credo -baptism,.

Which is what we believe.

I mean, if somebody came in and said, I refuse to be baptized, we would not, you know. But if somebody who has what we consider not been baptized because they're paedo-baptist, we allow that, then it's the same thing.

Yeah.

You know, really what it comes down to is like, if paedo -baptism is, there's a line here I wanna read. If paedo -baptism is biblical, then he is commanded by God to have his children baptized. Yet even if he has the boldness to ask, the church will refuse, right?

If you have a, it's always best to go where you will have theological consistency. One of the schools I had considered going to when I was in seminary was a school called SUM, School of Urban Ministries.

This is a seminary in Chicago. And I really liked the school. I loved the people there. But this was a charismatic Pentecostal university. And the kind of the dean of students was vehemently anti-Calvinist.

And I was a Calvinist. I've always, since I've been saved, I've been a Calvinist. And so I, you know, he made it very clear, hey, you know, you're great, you're fine to attend if you're a Calvinist, but just know we're gonna like vehemently teach against it.

And I said, well, you know, that helped me make my decision that this is probably not the school for me because, you know, it'll just be inconsistent with my values. It'll be inconsistent with my theological convictions.

And it's usually best to go where you're gonna have some consistency in your convictions. And so whether right and wrong, it's always better for a person to be consistent than inconsistent. And so again, can a person be a paedo-Baptist and be part of a Baptist church?

Absolutely.

It's gonna be awkward for them though, right? It's gonna be, you know, it's never fun to be in a place where you're at odds with the vast majority of your brethren on an important theological issue. And hopefully in that case, that person can be won to, you know, by the biblical argument for credo -Baptism.

But again, you know, an open membership allows that inconsistency to be even greater because if at least there's a membership standard and process, then that person's gonna make that decision kind of like I did for school, right?

And looking at all the options and saying, okay, well, this probably isn't the best school for me. Even though I really appreciate these guys, I really love what they're doing in the city of Chicago. These are all great things that I'd love to be a part of, but, you know, overall, our values don't align.

And so that made the decision for me not to join that school. And similarly, if there is a membership process in a church, it helps people come to those decision points versus an open church membership where, you know, everything is just kind of appeased and there is no process and you can, you know, and really what happens when there's no standard is there's no, when there's no standard, basically anything goes, right?

So, oh, it doesn't matter if I hold on to this conviction or that conviction. It actually minimizes convictions. It minimizes the importance of having convictions. And so, again, open church requires churches to accommodate not just error, but willful inconsistencies.

And that's a dangerous thing. You don't want to develop a culture of inconsistency in the life of the church. The third thing that's brought up here is open church or open membership privileges the individual conscience over the authority of the local church.

Can anyone parse that one out for me a little bit? What do you think is meant by that statement? That's actually, this is probably like the best argument against open membership. It privileges the individual conscience over the authority of the local church.

Think about that and the implications. How important is the conscience? It's important, right? What is the proper place of the Christian conscience? Is it above authority of scripture or below the authority of scripture?

It's below, right? So in the hierarchy of authority, you have obviously the Lord Jesus Christ, head of his church. He's given us his word, the Bible. That's the authority for the church. And then the church derives authority from the Bible.

So you have Christ's scripture by the church. And then you have the conscience of the believer, right? And so the conscience of the believer is in a sense, can be an authority. We know that because Paul argues such when he says, some of your consciences are troubled by the eating of certain foods.

Some of your consciences are troubled by the observing of certain festivals, by circumcision, all these things, right? And so not that it is the final authority, but Paul says that anything that's not done out of conviction is sin, right?

So if it doesn't sit well with your conscience, you're sinning against your conscience and that's not a good place to be, right? And so the conscience of matters, right? It is important, but in the hierarchy of authority, it is subservient to Christ, scripture and the church, right?

Yes, Emmanuel.

Those are ecumenical councils that are derived from the church, right? And so that's where I would put the creeds.

Is that above our conscience? Yes, yes.

And the reason I would say yes to that, for instance, the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, Athanasius' Creed, those creeds are the standard bearer of Orthodox Christianity that were derived from scripture, but as the church came together in these great ecumenical councils in the first, you know, the first eight centuries of the church, the church had seven ecumenical councils and ecumenical just means that all the churches came together and we hashed some of these issues out, right?

So, and then the Nicene being kind of like recognized among the first of these ecumenical councils and there's a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it because of Constantine and all these things and this is where the Bible was written and stuff and all just nonsense.

But what was the Nicene Creed in response to? The Aryan controversies, there was a bishop called Arius. Actually, he wasn't a bishop, he was actually just a pastor and the pastor and the bishop of that area was of Alexandria and so he was making an argument that Jesus was divine he was like God, but he wasn't of the same substance as the father.

So he was similar in substance, but not same substance. So the debate arose within the church and of all, and so Constantine newly crowned, you know, Christianity as the religion of the state and so he's like, all right, we can't have these theologians, these quarrels, you know, break up the new major religion of the state, so you guys need to hash this out, figure it out and whatever you believe, great.

Constantine himself didn't have a lot of, had no say in the outcome and he was quite ambivalent to it all. He couldn't, he didn't get it. He's like, this is so stupid. He's like, this is so dumb, who cares?

You worship Jesus either way. You know, he really took this attitude. Matter of fact, he was baptized by Arius' disciples and so he didn't take, he didn't really see the value of this whole debate. So he really didn't contribute anything other than telling these people to figure it out and so the authority of the church came into play there because all the leaders of the church, all the bishops came together and they made this, they came to this conclusion that Jesus was of the same substance as the Father, right?

So that has weight and authority, why? Because one, it was based upon scripture and two, it was because the church came together and adopted this view. I would put our confession among those things, right?

So we are a confessional 689 church. We didn't just come up with that in a vacuum. This was done by great deliberation, by great minds coming together and hashing these things out and so creeds and confessions have authority but it is the church, so that's where I would put it.

It is church authority because the church came together and said, we adopt these things and we hold these things to be true, right? Is that gonna help with that? Okay, yeah, long-winded answer, sorry.

I get on tangents.

You get into. What about church discipline? I mean, that's below that because when you join a church, you're being willing to submit to that authority which is always, you know.

Yeah, you know, and again, when it comes to what's at stake here is like baptism, right? So our view of baptism, it comes at play. I think I shared with you guys several weeks or months ago. I have a friend of mine who's just really religiously confused.

He was a Jehovah's Witness, loved the Jehovah's Witnesses and now he just kind of believes in some really weird stuff and he doesn't really hold to a church and so, you know, but he felt the conviction that he needed to be rebaptized, not as a Jehovah Witness and so, but he didn't wanna be baptized by any church or any denomination because he didn't wanna be affiliated with anybody so he literally went on Craigslist and like put a listing saying 50 bucks for anyone who would baptize me and so some random guy who's not even a Christian, you know, said, okay, sure, I'll do it.

This is weird, but 50 bucks is 50 bucks and he baptized him for 50 bucks and in that sense, man, it's just weird but it was fascinating because it just shows such a disdain for the authority of scripture and the authority of the church and so his individual conscience, was it right or wrong?

Wrong, right? So the conscience in itself is not the greatest of metrics for, you know, telling us what is right or wrong. People's consciences are based usually upon their level of understanding. So if you have a low level of understanding of scripture, you're gonna have a low level of accountability in terms of your conscience and so you have to appeal to a greater authority and so open membership privileges the individual conscience because it says basically, yeah, I get this is a command in scripture but it's not that big of a deal to me and I had a guy at our previous church as well, spoken about him often where, you know, he was even a youth pastor at a point and he had been a Christian for 20 years, never been baptized, never been baptized and the answer was, no one ever made a big deal about it.

And so, yeah, that's, and to me, that obviously, there's a responsibility that he had of, you know, ignorance there but it also was an indictment against all the churches he'd been part of and that have held essentially an open membership model and the lack of discipleship that that produces, right?

Yes.

Christ, scripture, and the church.

Correct.

You know, baptism, say something about this.

Yeah, great question. Eschatology and stuff, right? Yeah, so this is because of a discussion of the major and the minors. It also, there's a practicality to it, right? So, when you go through the membership process here at our church, you go through 689 and we teach through it and a person doesn't necessarily have to agree with every jot and tittle in the 689.

You don't need to, right? It's not, it's not, it's not,.

Obviously, you need to agree with the importance, right? It's like, if you deny the trinity, heaven, hell, the resurrection, then, okay, we're talking about major doctrines that you've deviated, not just from our confession, but you've deviated from scripture, right?

So, again, the hierarchy of importance, the Lord Jesus Christ, head of the church, scripture, which is his word, and then the authority of the church, and then, of course, the individual conscience. So, the, you can have a disagreement with something like eschatology, like not agree that the Pope is the Antichrist.

The Pope is the Antichrist, by the way, all right? So, and in our constitution for our church here, I think we have a very, I think we're inconsistent, because we have kind of a loose basis of our theology, where we say that we essentially loosely hold onto, or, you know, I forget what the loose language is.

Dale probably knows. We hold onto, tentatively, to the 689 and to like another confession, and with the caveats of this one being like the Antichrist being the Pope and other things, whereas, you know, again, like, yeah, I think you either wholeheartedly embrace something or you don't, and if you don't, then why even appeal to it?

Why appeal to it? I think that's an inconsistency, and so I think that the 689 should be our standard barrier in terms of doctrine. That doesn't mean that you have to wholeheartedly groove everything that's in there, for instance, like the eschatology part, and the reason why, for instance, when you look at the ecumenical councils of the church, the ecumenical councils of the church usually hold onto big theological issues in common, but then it leaves certain things purposefully ambiguous.

So, for instance, all the creeds agree, Jesus is God, Jesus is truly man, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one, you know, there is heaven and hell, there is a resurrection of the dead, and Jesus is coming back.

All the details in between, though, of how Jesus is coming back and when the judgment is and all those things are left blank, ambiguous.

Why?

Because there's a lot of details there that people may have a different understanding of, and so I would like to look at our confession in a similar manner. Our confession differs from the creeds in that our confession is far more in-depth, right?

So, you know, the ecumenical councils came up with these creeds, which are maybe a paragraph, two paragraphs at most, versus us that we have like, you know, 40 chapters of, you know, teaching. And so that's where, you know, there's a difference, obviously, but I think, again, having a consistency, I would say we should have a standard bearer, and on the issues that truly matter in those doctrinal statements of faith, that's where we need to be in agreement on.

And there is error for people in their individual understanding and consciences to deviate in certain points. But, and how we determine that would be major, minor, and also the overall spirit of that individual in not promoting something that is purposely against the church's position, right?

And so you might have someone who really disagrees with, again, just the easy one, Pope being the Antichrist, and that's fine. Yeah, like, yeah, you can have that view. I mean, you're wrong, but you can have that view.

And, but if you start teaching against it vehemently, that's where a problem would probably come in. And not necessarily with that statement, because again, in our Constitution, we do put that caveat, which I think, you know, hinders us from truly embracing that.

But, but yeah, like baptism being an example. If you had a pato-baptist conviction, you could still join the church, but if you started to teach against the position of the church, then you'd be at odds with the church, and then, you know, that's where, you know, issues would arise.

Correct, correct. Or have been baptized by a, you know, by a true church.

Yeah.

Does that help?

Yeah, that's a great, yeah, great discussion there on that. So the next one is open membership, page 200. Either creates unbiblical distinctions among a church's members, or requires a church to pare down its convictions.

Now, again, the question of conviction comes in. Conviction and conscience are very closely linked together. And so, if you have a conviction that, you know, your conscience, if you go against your convictions, is going to be wounded.

And so, open membership either creates unbiblical distinctions among church members. What does that mean? How does that happen? Because if you have open membership, you inevitably have people who are baptized and not baptized, right?

So in a sense, you are now creating a two-tier membership within this open membership model, right? You have the baptized Christians and the unbaptized Christians. You have the pato-baptist Christians and you have the credo-baptist Christians.

And you create this distinction that just isn't helpful or biblical, right? And so, again, there's an inconsistency that's underlining this open membership model. And again, it requires a church to pare down its convictions.

This is how I felt in my last church, where I had pretty strong convictions about baptism and church membership, but the church leadership just weren't having it. And part of it was, again, an appeal to practicality.

And the first thing that I remember when I had kind of an argument with one of my elders, and I said, why can't we be consistent on this? And he says, well, this family is a leader, are leaders in the church.

The wife does Sunday school and the husband does the worship in the morning. And they're not members and they don't want to become members. And so if we push this, then we'll lose them. Okay, well, that's stuff that churches deal with.

So what do you do there, right? Here's an important influential family and they have a conviction that they're, because they had a bad experience in the previous church and they were members and they don't want to be members anymore.

So what do you do there? How do you bridge that gap?

Yes, Emmanuel.

Yeah.

So what would you do if you were the pastor?

What's that?

You gotta go? Oof, that's not really loving of you. You are so divisive, pastor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's tough.

Yeah.

There you go. That's right. That's right. You teach on it.

Yes.

This is a real situation.

Yeah, yeah.

I had to go through this. This is stuff I had to go through.