From Layman to Church Planter in 2020

Welcome to another edition of the Conversations That Matter Podcast. We have a guest with us today, Mr. Dirk Wahlstedt, who has been kind enough to join us to relay an experience I want everyone to hear about.

Many of you have heard me say over the past few months, perhaps even more than that, I think it's been maybe a year or more that I've been saying a lot of people in situations that are very similar to Mr. Wahlstedt here cannot find a church or they're in an area where the options just are not good options.

It seems like a daunting thing to plant a church yourself, especially if you didn't have seminary training. There's a lot of things that, a lot of hurdles that we're supposed to go through before doing that or so we're told or so many of us think.

Here's the unique thing. Here's the story that we're going to be going over today. Dirk Wahlstedt has been in this situation very similar to many of you. He has decided to take this step of faith and plant a church.

I think it's an inspiring story. You can find more about it in print form by going to the link in the info section at discerningchristians .com slash blog. I'm going to let Mr. Wahlstedt tell the story in his own words.

Thank you for joining me, Dirk. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. I want to hear from you a little bit. Start from the beginning because I know a lot of people are in your position.

You didn't start out with the intention of just planting a church. You were in a church and then something happened. What happened?

Concerns About Tim Keller, Hell, and Storytelling in Preaching

Yeah. I'll just say background-wise to the church I was in, in many ways, I liked it. I liked a lot of the people. It was an evangelical, non-denominational, reformed-ish church. There were just things that were concerning.

There were things that made me question the direction the church was going in, question the commitment to some of the things that I thought were important. Just some of the resources that were being pushed.

One thing that was this huge alarm bells for me was just the amount of people like Tim Keller, for instance. I read some of his stuff and alarm bells are going off in my head. That was kind of, but didn't seem to be going off for the rest of the church, certainly not for the church leadership.

In fact, that was the book that was, his book, Reason for God, was the book that was being pushed a year ago when we were doing.

An apologetics class. You put a quote in your blog here. Tim Keller, I guess, had one of the ideas, and I'm assuming there's a lot more than just this. He said, hell is therefore a prison in which the doors are first locked from the inside by us and therefore are locked from the outside by God.

This was something that you kind of had issues with and talked to your pastor about. The response that you got, and I'm assuming this applies to a lot of other scenarios as well, just was not satisfactory.

Am I getting that right?

Yeah. Yeah. I know I'd actually read previously because I had spent a bit of time looking into Keller and had concerns about him several years ago, probably four years ago, I think now. He actually openly talks about how you can't talk about hell with postmoderns the way you would talk about hell with more conservative traditional people.

I mean, with those, you talk about it as a punishment, but with other people who are more into their sort of autonomy, you have to talk about the fact that it's sort of you doing it. In some way, he's following C .S. Lewis in some of this.

He actually talks about Lewis in this chapter in that book. I have real problems about that because once you start saying, well, it's basically you're the one who sends yourself to hell. I mean, there's a sense that you can talk about that, but you might send yourself to prison, but the authorities put you in there and lock you up.

When I voiced that to our pastor after, and this was in a class on apologetics. I said, the problem with that whole sort of thing, particularly getting it from Lewis, C .S. Lewis, who I admire, but I said, he's not an exegete.

There's no scripture here. It's just storytelling. The response was, well, Jesus told stories. I mean, that's just completely unsatisfactory to me. I'm sorry, I'm not Jesus. We're supposed to be teaching the Bible, not telling stories.

Right, right. Stories teach a lesson and you can tell stories to, as Jesus did with parables, to lay aside something that's understandable in the temporal realm that makes sense of things in the eternal realm.

But that's sort of a categorical error there that if someone's telling a story and it's just false, it doesn't relay the truth. I mean, we'd never say that a criminal sent himself to jail. It's the judge, it's the police, it's the justice, criminal justice system.

But somehow we switch, and I've heard this same line before, and we start softening hell for unbelievers. We're playing around with doctrine. I think you were right to have a red flag go up. I want people to understand something here as we go through kind of your story too.

You did not just kind of willy-nilly, I don't like something I heard and I'm going to just leave the church. There's a lot of people that do that. But it sounds to me like from your experience though, you tried.

You tried to go through the proper channels to make your concerns known. And it was just over and over, you were getting kind of failures of leadership and unsatisfactory answers. And it just became a place you didn't want to have your family.

Under that authority. Is that correct? Yeah. I'm sure the leadership there would want to say, well, you didn't come and have some big sit down meeting. But I think most people acknowledge how this goes.

You go to your pastor after an event or after Sunday service or special class or whatever, and you start interacting with them and you get very rebuffed. And that happens over and over where you're sort of like, you just sort of start losing trust in the leadership.

You start losing trust in the direction that they're going. You bring something up and it's sort of like, oh, well, that's just... At one point I was told, well, that's just because you're a Baptist fundamentalist and can't get out of your own echo chamber.

And I think even in the context, I was simply saying, I just was sort of thought that two of the pastors, they're reading lists. It just seems some stuff that I was kind of, I don't know. I was like, well, I'm not definitely reading different books than you.

And that's the kind of answer I got. So it's like, well, almost seems threatened to have somebody who reads and thinks different,.

If you will. Why don't you tell us a little bit about their reaction? And this isn't to bash anyone. It's just to relate to so many people out there going through similar scenarios, COVID lockdowns, and then the social justice movement this past year.

Were those issues.

Brought up? Did those kind of push you over the edge? Yeah. So, I mean, the concerns that I had were concerns very much in the back of my mind. There was some concerns about liberalism and whatnot, but those were very much in the back of my mind.

I mean, I wasn't planning on leaving or whatever. And then 2020 happened. And we were told specifically, the church was like, okay, we're not really sure what's going on here, but we're going to close down every other program of Sunday, but we're not closing Sunday down.

And I was like, oh, good. Okay. Because they said, hey, if this is sacred, we're going to continue to meet. And then three days later, they were like, oh, church is just closed. And they didn't give any answer.

They didn't say why or what the thought process was, which, I mean, just on that, it's very unsatisfactory. Not only that, and in a way, I mean, Sunday worship is a unique thing for Christians, but in a way, one of the things that was more upsetting to me is they actually said that all small groups were not allowed to either.

They had to be online. And at some point, that's where I, as a man, as the head of my family, that becomes very inappropriate because now you're telling me, you're treating me like a child. I don't get to make that decision of whether I meet with other Christians.

There was two different Christian men who expressed to me that they were concerned they could actually be even disciplined if they met, you know, because it's like, well, you know, the elders explicitly said you're not to meet.

We're to do everything online. And yet several men I knew, like my small group leader, was very upset by a lot of this and several times voiced the concern that he felt like we should meet, but he wasn't sure if that would, you know, be a violation of what they had said.

And those sort of things just seemed to be more, in my opinion, at that point, about not wanting to get sued or something or get in trouble with the government than it is about protecting people. Because, I mean, you should be able to let grown adults make their own decisions.

That's not even in the church building. That would be in their own homes.

Yeah. It's outside the purview of what an elder would be responsible for necessarily if some group of Christians want to get together. And, you know, that's funny that you bring that up because that exact scenario, I've gotten so many messages about that exact thing.

Like, what do I do, John, when an elder specifically says I can't come into church unless I have a mask on or I cannot, in the scenario you just said, I cannot meet with my own friends who are Christians to worship God because it's a violation of their imposing their authority and saying, you know, whether they're justifying it by Romans 13 or you're going to be a bad witness supposedly, or it's not loving your neighbor, all bogus reasons, but in my opinion, but that kind of heavy-handed approach, I think you spelled it out the way, well, that's the way that I've heard a lot of people describe it.

They feel like they're not adults, like they can't make their own risk assessment choices and for something good to worship the Lord. So, this kind of, this bothered you. What about social justice was after the George Floyd thing?

COVID Lockdowns, Government Pressure, and the George Floyd Sermon

Yeah. So, and I think it's.

Important to point out as well because of the events that were going on that I live in Washington State, south of Seattle. So, after the death of George Floyd, you know, we had massive riots in Seattle and there was a section of Seattle that was actually taken over by, I don't know how many in other parts of the country were following this, but what was known both by conservatives and liberals were referring to him as a warlord who had taken over a part of, they claimed it as an autonomous new nation.

Yeah. So, we had that event happening and the church we were attending is actually not in the town we live in, it's about 40 minutes away, but it's most of the population of the church worked for the Navy, there's a Navy shipyard there.

And so, most of the people, blue collar people, they work for the shipyard or the naval base. And so, when we have all this going on, people are concerned, our governor won't do anything, he won't send in any sort of help.

I mean, there's literally a part of our biggest city taken over and apparently is no longer part of the US and people were being assaulted there and all the rest. And my church decided to address, they didn't ever address, they never like gave a sermon talking about how Christians should view death or disease or sickness or anything like that.

They didn't address any of the stuff going on in Seattle, but what they did do is do a sermon on racism. And I'll say it was a, you know, whatever you think about George Floyd, we have a major racism problem in America.

And that was a direct quote, which I think right there, you're begging the question, because that's the very question that's up for grabs, I think. And the worst part of that sermon too, was the church was going through Genesis, and that was Genesis 41, the Joseph story when Joseph comes out of prison and speaks to Pharaoh.

And that became, well, this tells us that non-Christians are given insight by God, because see, Pharaoh got insight by God. So we need to listen to non-Christians and we need to work together for the good of our city.

And, you know, at one point the phrase was made, we need to shut up and listen to black and brown voices. And I'm going, well, first of all, this has nothing to do with the text, like nothing to do with the text.

And second of all, like there was no gospel, it was long years of hard work to fix racism. And I mean, so we have all of the stuff going on with lockdowns and all the rest, we have, you know, all the stuff that's going on in Seattle, and here to a bunch of, again, middle-class blue collar working families, you're telling them that we have such a racism problem, and almost indicting them in the racism problem.

It's just frankly absurd.

Well, one of the things Jesus said about the Pharisees, right, was that they strained at a and swallowed a camel. So he went after their sense of proportion and priority. And that's one of the problems it seems with that kind of preaching is they're going after something that doesn't, it's not even really in the purview of most of your lives.

And if it is, it would be certainly, it would be a minor issue at best. I'm not even going to maybe concede that, but then to ignore the actual questions Christians have. What's happening in their own backyard?

You know, that's the something that's, I think, happened all over this country. People, there's a separation. They don't relate to the leaders in their church. And in the same way, they don't relate to the media elites or really the elites in any other institution.

It's like they're just out of touch with the lives that people are living. So you felt that way. I mean, I'm assuming that there were ongoing conversations. When was the time, though, that you just said, you know what, that's it.

I need to get out of here and either find a church.

Or plant a church? Well, yeah, I had been asked when the church was still shut down. I had been asked by my small group leader, an older gentleman that I'm good friends with. He didn't feel like he could articulate what was going on.

And, you know, his wife was really concerned that she thought this is so serious. Everybody's going to die because, I mean, look at all the people she trusts, the way they're acting. So she was afraid her family or whatever, her kids or grandkids are going to die.

And my friend was more concerned that he couldn't believe this was happening. So he pushed me several times to write a letter and he said, I can't explain it, but you could explain it to the elders that just what's going on and that this is wrong.

And I tried to tell him, I mean, I don't think you quite know what you're asking. Um, but I did eventually end up writing a letter and, you know, and I talked about a bunch of stuff in that letter, um, uh, issues that I had, but ultimately my biggest issue was I said, you know, like, uh, my concern, the thing that keeps me up at night is that my children and grandchildren will not be able to worship freely.

Um, you know, I'm no prophet. I'm not a son of a prophet, but I saw back in March where this was going. And, and I said, specifically when I heard places like Grace Community Church and others, I said, the church must not close because this will never end if it does.

And I got rebuffed by people who, who heard that they didn't, you know, Oh, you know, that's just ridiculous. And so my biggest question was, you know, is this even a concern for you? Are you, are you guys concerned enough to lay your lives down for the sheep?

Because, um, I mean, honestly, like if you go to jail, but you can protect your children's right to worship. I mean, I think we take these, these things really for granted in America. Um, and, and I'll just say too, I mean, it was that, and also, and again, you know, the head pastor was told, you know, expressed his fury at me.

He was very mad. The letter really pissed him off. He said, um, that I had just attacked them. But the other thing I'll say, the other thing that was sort of, and so my, when I finally did talk to him on the phone, that, that was sort of the final straw.

Um, he kind of made it plain that, you know, the opportunities that I'd had, I'd had some teaching opportunities in the church and whatnot was I think respected there. Um, he made it plain that those were in the past tense.

Um, and the other thing is that they took, while they had shut down, they took federal money, which again, seems to me to be a massive hook for the government to control the church. And they didn't tell anybody.

You can see the giving stuff. If you remember, giving was not down at all. And there was a Q and a, I submitted questions to the Q and and asked, and honestly, the reason was, well, it's free money. Of course we take it.

Um, and so that wasn't brought. So I was like, well, wait a minute, you're locking their church down. And yet at the same time, you're, you're, you're, you're holding out your hand to the same federal government that is, I mean, basically the government is telling you, you can't meet.

I mean, that is a very concerning thing. That seems like protecting the shepherds,.

Protecting the sheep. Yeah. I remember that. Um, and, uh, unfortunately a lot of people took that money when it, and it's yeah. Anyway, borrowers slave to the lender, but, um, so it reached the breaking point and then you did something.

Some people would consider crazy. You decided to start a church plant or church. I'm not sure exactly what you're calling it. Um, yeah. Tell me kind of went through your mind and a little bit about your background.

Cause you haven't been to seminary. I mean, what, what kinds of hurdles and questions did you have as you were considering.

This? Yeah. Well, I'll just say for myself, you know, yeah, I haven't been to seminary. Um, I, I have had a desire to be a pastor for a number of years and I've tried to do, um, you know, I, I mean, I have a family, uh, I, you know, I can't, uh, I can't go, go to seminary now at this point in my life.

I mean, maybe somebody would say I could, but so I have, um, you know, tried to get as much theological education as I can. Um, there are great resources out there. So, so it's not like, it's not like I'm somebody who's just, you know, I don't want to say pew sitter in a pejorative, but as though I have no clue about these things, but, um, you've been a faithful layman.

Yeah, exactly. Trying to be a faithful layman, trying to read, trying to study, trying to learn all that I can. Um, what was, what's so interesting about my story is, is that it isn't just the story of one individual who said, I have this vision, I'm going to go start a church.

Um, there were actually two other, um, faithful men who, who started to take steps. And this is what's so great because I think sometimes people think, well, I need to do all this. And if I don't have a vision, if I don't have all these kinds of things, um, then I, then I just can't do it.

And so the way it worked out in my situation was my younger brother, um, who'd been attending the same church and it pretty much made the same decision I had, but this was not a place that he would be bringing his family to anymore.

He actually made a YouTube video about how the ultimate question comes down to whether the worship and the love of God is the, is the most important thing in our lives. And, you know, I watched the video, I told him, um, we'd obviously been talking about all of this and then something really kind of out of the blue happened, a friend of mine who, you know, lives a ways away here in the state.

I don't see him very often and I've never really had like deep theological conversations with him, but he's a committed Christian man. He saw my brother's video and he called me and said, I feel so convicted about this, that I'm going to hold a worship service outside.

And he bought an old farm, old rundown farm. They're not living there yet, but he, uh, he said, you know, would you come? And, you know, I'm going to ask your brother to preach. And I said, yeah, absolutely.

Um, we'll, we'll be there. Um, and then, and then he said, my brother was like, wow, you know, I'm just not sure. I've never done something like that before. So, and I've, and I've saw every, I personally have saw every opportunity I have, I can get to preach or to teach or whatever.

So, I mean, it's something I've done a little bit of. And so he said, I, but I told, I told the mutual friend, I told him that you should preach. And I just, honestly, at that point was like, I don't, I don't even want to, I just kind of want to go hide somewhere.

I mean, I don't know what this is going to be like, I don't know, like, but I thought, you know what, if my brother was faithful enough to, to, to say, hey, we need to take a stand and, and, and worship God above all else, which is what, what my heart had been.

And if my friend was like, you know, I'm going to just take a steps and, and, and call people to worship, um, then, uh, then I should be faithful to bring the word. And so I said, yeah, okay, we'll be there.

And, and, and I'll teach. And we'd been going through as a family on Sunday mornings, uh, Daniel. So we were in Daniel chapter six and I said, you know, I'll do it, but it has to be in Daniel because that's where we are.

And he said, okay. So, which I mean, honestly, is the perfect path. I was going to.

Say that he couldn't have picked a better. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was absolutely perfect. And,.

You know, there's people from different churches and whatnot. And I mean, I didn't know any of his friends and stuff from his town. And, um, and then, you know, people were like, what are we doing next week?

Um, I don't know. I don't know. And somebody opened up their home and, you know, and there was some of my family and other people. And, um, and so since the middle of June, um, people have been meeting every week.

They said, well, you know, what are you preaching on next week? And I said, well, I guess Daniel chapter seven. And honestly, that was part of it for me. I was just sort of like going, I'm not trying to start a church here.

My wife was asking me, well, what do you, you know, what do you, what is, what is this going to do? What do, what are we starting here? And I said, I don't know, but I just want to be faithful. I mean, there are people, there are families, there are families who drive and have been driving since June an hour drive or more to come every Sunday, um, to meet in a house, to hear the word preached.

And I don't know how to do any, I have to honor that. Like, I can't, I can't just go, well, you should find some, some, I don't know, church planner guy somewhere. And I'm honoring enough. I said, okay, fine, but I'm going to keep doing Daniel.

And I knew that the second half of Daniel is not in section to do. And I kind of thought in the back of my mind, probably nobody's going to want to hear this. I mean, I'm not going to want to preach this.

This is hard sledding. Right. And that second week there was a family, another family that was invited. She told me later, she said, I, when you said turn to Daniel, I was like, Oh no, like I just, what did I do?

I brought my kids here. And, and then she said, but you know, you just taught the Bible. Like it was great. Yeah. So, and it's just slowly been growing. I think there's about 45 to 50 people that come.

Wow. Well, that's a church. That's a church. Yeah. Yeah. And most of the people, you know, I, I didn't know them before, um, you know, I didn't know them that before the, all this, this last year before June.

So,.

And it's just slowly kind of grown. And so you've sent the Lord's leading in this with, through circumstance and, and I mean, it's so organic the way that this all happened, where you weren't really planning it, but it just kind of the pieces fit together and, and all at the same time when they needed to.

Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, it's been my heart to, to be involved in pastoral ministry. Not, you know, I've some of the full time Bible. I don't really care. I just, I have a passion to teach the word of God.

And, and so at this point, like I said, I can't turn my back on people. I.

Can't, um, you know, what's your week look like. If you don't mind me asking just for people who might be considering,. Hey, maybe I should do what, what Dirk is doing. You work full time, you have a family, right?

So where, how do you run a church or how, how do you.

Preach and do these kinds of things? Yeah. So, um, yeah, I, I have seven children, so my week is very busy. Um, and we have a small, um, we have some acreage, we have a small farm. One of my passions, I love growing my own food and doing that.

So yeah, no life is crazy, but, um, my week looks like, um, I try to get into the text fairly early in the week. Um, in the evening, you know, I, I've got, um, we do devotionals and stuff a couple of different nights a week.

We do some study stuff as a family. So after the kids go to bed, I get, I can get two or three hours and a couple nights a week, um, just to get some initial work done. I, uh, well, we finished Daniel and then we went through the book of Philippians.

We just finished that actually. So it was, you know, first by verse section by section through Philippians. So at least in that case, you know exactly where you're going to be next week. Um, but, um, I've also tried to, uh, provide some other, other ways to give a little theological, um, help.

There's people coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. So I made a commitment to try to write an article every month that can kind of tackle a different subject or whatever. And so trying to work on that.

So if I can get, you know, two, three nights a week, I can get a couple hours in, um, I'm kind of a night owl, so I can get some time in. And then Saturday is my main prep day. And, um, so, you know, I'm probably putting in a good 12 hours.

Um, wow. The wonderful thing about doing it Saturday is that it has to be done by Sunday. So, um, uh, you had a hard deadline. Yeah. Yeah. So you're, you know, you're climbing the mountain and then Sunday morning, you preach and I feel, um, kind of exhausted, try to get something done as do something with my family or whatever on Sunday afternoon.

And I, I honestly, you know, it's like, I'll, I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead, but, um, I, I love it. And, um, I, I am so glad that all of this happened. Um, I think that when people talk about burnout, I think a huge part of it is because they're not sure what they're doing matters.

It feels like I'm just treading water, but I am seeing the people who are coming. And, you know, it's so funny. So many Christian leaders want to deal with all these big questions that are being asked, you know, whatever in the news, social media, whatever the questions that Christian families, Christian individuals are asking are about how to be a better parent.

How do I understand how the new Testament fits to the old Testament? You know, how do I talk to my friend who wants to become part of BLM and Christianize it? Like, those are the questions I got last Sunday.

Yeah. They're practical and they're basic theology. And I think that's the thing, like sometimes we, um, it's funny earlier, you mentioned, um, the whole, the whole thing about, um, I can be bigger, you know, the picking out Nats, you just talked about picking it out now.

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever read CS has an essay called fernseed and elephants, which he talks about that there. It's about theological criticism. And one of the things he says in there is that he says that, that, that for shepherds, he's given to an address of, um, English, uh, church of England, churchman.

And he says in 1959, and he says that he says that the, the study of for shepherds is supposed to be the study of sheep, but, and only incidentally other shepherds. But he's making the point that the problem is that shepherds spend all their time studying other shepherds.

Right. Instead of studying the sheep. Right. And obviously as Christians, it's a little different because we're supposed to be following the good shepherd. But I think that there's way too much of that.

How am I going to look in the eyes of all the people that matter? But honestly, all the people that matter are the people who I'm preaching to. Amen. And those are moms and dads and kids, and they have just regular world problems.

They are not honestly all worked up about, I don't know, whatever. Uh, what a couple of the men came to me several weeks ago and they weren't doing this as a rebuke. It was just kind of afterward conversation.

But, but one of them said, you know, I don't come to church to hear about the latest news headline. Another one, I'm so tired of hearing the five letter word, you know, Corona like, or COVID or COVID, I guess.

I mean, it was just like, I just, I do not want to come to church and hear about that. I want to come and hear the timeless truths of the word of God. And it like, like I said, we went through Philippians.

Um, it's so intensely practical and it deals with honestly, a lot of things that people are dealing with right now, but it does it in a timeless way instead of the headlines kind of grabbing way that a lot of people want to, I think we're motivated too much by what the world's doing instead of what, you know,.

The Church Is for the Sheep, Not for Shepherds Studying Shepherds

Let me, you know, a few observations from, from what you just said. And by the way, amen. And I, I love to hear this. Uh, I think it's very inspiring for everyone who's listening. Um, number one, one of the reasons, I mean, the main reason to be in a church, right.

Is to use your spiritual gifts, to be ministered to, uh, that's the analogy of the body in first Corinthians 12. And, um, it sounds like you were kind of hindered in that at the church you were going to before you had reached a point where you weren't going to be able to become an elder, which was your desire and exercise the spiritual gifts you have.

And so that that's one of the barometers, I think, and it's a really major one that people should be looking at when they're evaluating whether they should stay at a church or, um, start a church, go to another church, where, where can you invest the gifts that the Holy spirit has given you, uh, to build up the body.

And that, that was just one of the things I noticed that you were talking about. Um, the other thing is, is how this kind of all came together. It wasn't you necessarily, um, just going out on your own as a lone Ranger and in a huff because you were angry.

It was more out of necessity. And there was a confirmation that took place with people around you being blessed by it, uh, show, you know, showing that you actually do have these gifts because, because it's, it's ministering to them.

Um, and you, you, I mean, you were telling me before we started recording, you don't have an official name yet. Uh, I mean, there's probably a lot of things you don't have that most churches, you know, I mean, I've been through like NAM church planning classes and stuff.

And I mean, it's all, it's so strategic. I mean, don't ever go to one of those things, by the way, if you ever have an offer to go to like a NAM church planning seminar, please don't do it. Um, it'll probably just mess up whatever you have going on, but there's like a whole formula for kind of what you're supposed to do first.

And you don't have like a hip, cool website. I can send people to, um, but a lot of, a lot of the things probably that you, you, you do need will in time, you know, God will provide those things and you'll, you'll be able to kind of put them in place, but, but you have the simple things, the necessary things, the, the things that actually, you know, make a church a church.

It sounds like the fundamentals I'm saying are there, and you're getting back to kind of like the basics of just worshiping Christ and, and, and final observation here with everything you just said, and I like to get your reaction to this.

So it seems to me that the deck is being reshuffled because of all this, that it's not so much whether or not someone is maybe even a Presbyterian or a Baptist or a Methodist it's people are coming together.

True Christians are being kind of like separated from either false Christians or compromised churches, et cetera. And, and there's a hunger for just simple things like worshiping God together, like we're supposed to as Christians, um, not going down the path of the social justice religion, uh, and sticking with orthodoxy.

Like these things are so basic and fundamental, uh, you know, what does the Bible say about justice? What does the Bible say about salvation? You know, what does the Bible say about guilt and forgiveness?

And like, it's, it's transcending denominations. It seems like, so I want to ask you, you know, what do you think about that? Do you have people coming from, you said you have people driving for hours or are they coming from all sorts of backgrounds?

Cause they just hunger for that pure milk. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, that's the thing. Yeah. There's, um, there's people from all sorts of different backgrounds. It's something I, I wanted to be, um, sensitive to.

Cause I think sometimes, you know, you get in a particular context, you know, I'm very much would identify as reform, um, reform Baptist, probably be the best descriptor. Um, but, uh, but I think sometimes we're almost like you can get into this little echo chamber and, and you start arguing about things no one else cares about,.