What’s Causing the Issues at McLean Bible Church

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. I've been asked many times to comment on the

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McLean Bible Church situation. That's where David Platt pastors. He's the author of the best -selling book

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Radical. If you don't know who David Platt is or McLean is, you probably have heard of Radical, or at least you did 10 or so years ago when it was a big thing.

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I've been a little hesitant about this. I've even said it on the podcast. I've said, you know, there's so many moving parts to this.

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It's very complicated, it's like an iceberg. There's so much under the surface. I've been aware of problems there for over a year,

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I think, now. And I just haven't wanted to say much because it could even be the historian side of me.

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I just, I wanna wait till the dust settles and more comes out, because I know more is gonna come out. And it's just, it's so much bigger than just quote -unquote critical race theory or even social justice.

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There's more going on here. Now, that is part of it. But that, I think, is also serving as an occasion for conflict, not just it.

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In other words, there's several problems, and I don't think it's just that. And I'm gonna show you,

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I'm gonna point to some other things internally at McLean that are publicly available online if you wanna go look them up.

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But there's a lot here. So I'm gonna try to hit the ground running. I'm gonna go through a lot of material as quickly as possible.

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And the goal here is really just to, it's become so big. I've landed on this kind of conclusion.

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That's why I'm doing this. It's become so big, I can't really ignore it. I've had so many people reach out to me, people who think it would be helpful if I say something.

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So I'm gonna try to say something. But my goal here is to explain what's happening to the best of my ability, knowing that this is not exhaustive, okay?

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Just know that up front. This is, there could be probably a lot more added to this. And then secondly,

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I want to frame it. I want to, and maybe we'll do that at the end, just try to think through what lessons can we draw from this?

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What does this say about where evangelicalism may be going in general? I think the reason

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I can say that this is bigger than McLean, that there's something going on, something in the water, is because of everything what we've been observing for the last few years.

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And right now, you have a denomination, you have actually multiple denominations, but the Southern Baptist Convention is a big one.

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I just learned that the Assemblies of God is fighting over the social justice stuff, kind of, or at least there's,

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I'll talk about that in a future episode. There's tension though. What's happening at John Piper's church,

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Bethlehem Baptist, is, I mean, it's kind of like all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put evangelicalism back together again.

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It's, some have said, you know, R .C. Sproul died and it all fell apart. I don't think, I don't think that's necessarily the cause of it, but it does seem that there are not, you don't have leaders, it's leaderless.

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You don't have the kind of leadership that used to exist that maybe could have patched things up and could have provided some clear direction.

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A lot of the people you're probably even thinking of now that are very clear on this are maybe not in the United States and as present in this fight as you might like, or they're aging, they're old, they're about to retire, they are retired.

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There's just not a lot of leadership. There's a lot of chaos going on. And so McLean Bible Church is the flavor this week or this month or this couple months, but it'll probably be another church or another organization or, we're gonna be going through this,

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I think, for a while. I'm just trying to prepare you. This is not going to be a unique situation and it is not a unique situation even right now, but it is illustrative.

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It is one of many situations. So let's do it. Let's go get into this. I'm gonna just share with you some of the things that I've observed from David Platt over the years, and then we're gonna get into McLean specifically.

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So what's causing the issues at McLean Bible Church? Well, this was August 1st, 2021.

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So this past Sunday, David Platt just said this from the pulpit at McLean.

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And here we've set up a page at mcleanbible .org slash elderupdates. We gladly invite members to sit down with leaders of the church to discuss any questions you ever have about the church as we move forward together, undistracted and undeterred as a supernatural church family.

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So he said this as just an announcement. And if you go to the website, it's basically they're trying to defend themselves.

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They're hedging against all the issues that are happening, the accusations that are being made, the internal strife in their church.

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And he feels the need to say this. He said the same kind of thing last week. He took longer, but this is, they have to acknowledge it.

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He has to acknowledge it even in a sermon. And I just, I really get the sense it kills him to do this.

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It really, I mean, there's been strife there for so long. And you probably, if you are a regular church, in fact,

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I talked to someone who's a regular attendee, had no clue. And that's, I think, how they want it.

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They can't ignore it anymore. When national media is talking about them, and of course, they're right there in the

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DC metro area or the Beltway area, they're also keyed into the media.

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That's kind of, I get that impression too. They can't ignore it anymore. It's popping up in the papers they read.

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So they're acknowledging there's an issue, and they've been doing that for a few weeks now. Now, I wanna start back in 2010.

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I'm gonna go all the way back to Radical, and I wanna read for you some posts, some quotes here from David Platt.

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This is on page 64 of Radical. How many of us are embracing the comforts of suburban

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America while we turn a deaf ear to inner cities in need of the gospel? How many of us are so settled in the

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United States that we have never once given serious thought to the possibility that God may call us to live in another country?

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How often are we willing to give a check to someone else as long as we don't have to go to the tough places in the world ourselves?

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How many of us parents are praying that God will raise up our children to leave our homes and go overseas, even if that means they may never come back?

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How many of us are devoting our lives to taking the gospel to people in hostile regions around the world where Christians are not welcomed?

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Certainly few of us would be so bold as to say that we would just assume God annihilate all those people and send them to hell.

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But if we do not take the gospel to them, isn't that where they will go? Meanwhile, Jesus commands us to go.

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He has created each of us to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. And I propose that anything less than radical devotion to this purpose is unbiblical

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Christianity. Okay, so that's a lofty charge. It's unbiblical Christianity, anything less than going to the ends of the earth with the gospel and a radical devotion.

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And so if you've read the book, I had to read the book. Southeastern required me to read the book. And so I did,

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I think in 2014. And I remember afterward, I liked it.

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I remember I even, I looked back at something I wrote and I even had said, basically, I agreed with it, most of it, but there was something unsettling about it.

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I had written a blog that just, and this was the quote that I had used in my blog. I'll read it to you. It's from the Christian Post in 2014,

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I believe. But David Platt said this, I believe that the gospel and the American dream have fundamentally different starting points.

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The American dream begins with the self. Exalt self, says you are inherently good, and you have in you what it takes to be successful.

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So do all you can, work with everything you have to make much of yourself. This, I don't know if it was that quote, or it was probably a combination of reading radical and that quote.

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Something was just not right in my head. I felt like I agreed, but at the same time, there was something that just,

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I couldn't figure it out quite. And I think what it was, was

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David Platt, it was actually the followers of radical. Well, and I'm not talking about people who were radically actually doing what

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David Platt said. I mean, his fan base, the people who read the book and wanted to condemn others for not doing what

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David Platt said. They tended, they disturbed me a little bit, because I saw them in seminary.

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And they, the sense

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I got, was that conservatism, political conservatism was bad. Loving your country was bad.

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Those were all part of the American dream and associated with it. God's blessings were bad.

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It was sort of the demonizing of their parents and all the stuff their parents had and all the blessings their parents had.

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And this was one of the things that I think bothered me, was if you understand how a market economy works, and I'll blow this up, by the way, so you can see what

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I just read. I should have blown it up before. If you know how a market economy works, you know that if someone's buying an expensive car or a house or whatever, there are people that are feeding their families based off of, you're creating jobs.

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They're based off of what you did. And it's not evil. Wealth isn't evil. Those things aren't bad. And I don't think

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David Platt, I don't think he ever said wealth is bad. I think, though, this teaching, though, sort of led people to that conclusion or they assumed it somehow.

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And you would assume, reading something like this, just even the page I just read, that David Platt must live like a monk.

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I mean, he must be in the inner city or in a foreign country and living in some box with his family.

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Or at the very least, like George Mueller, just kind of every day, okay, what's gonna happen?

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Is the milk truck gonna break down and feed all of us? That kind of thing. And so the reality is, though,

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David Platt, now, I don't know everything about his life. I don't wanna assume that I do. But it doesn't seem like he does live that way.

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And I wanna start with something personal. This is a personal story. So you can take it with a grain of salt.

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You're free to do that. But I know it's true, because I remember it happening.

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This was 2011, I think. And I was at Master's Seminary.

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And I remember there was a student there who came directly from David Platt's church, which was in Georgia at the time,

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I believe. And this student did not like David Platt at all, like really had an ax to grind with David Platt.

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And one of the big things he kept saying, and he said this publicly, he told it to me, was that David Platt was, well, publicly in the sense of seminary classmates, that David Platt was a hypocrite, that he did not live the way that he wrote about a radical at all, like that it didn't describe him, he didn't, that he was fake, that he was,

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I mean, these were heavy charges. And I was, I did not buy it at the time.

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I just remember thinking, this guy must have an ax to grind. It must be, maybe he's the one with the problem. I'm not just gonna assume that David Platt's this way.

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Time has gone by, though. Time has gone by. And I just wanna let you know,

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I think back to what this person told me, who knew David Platt on a personal level. And what he said is now resonating with me.

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And I'm wondering if I should have listened more at the time, because I wasn't like a huge follower, but I definitely,

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I would have thought that David Platt was a positive force, a positive leader in Christianity.

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And I mean, this was kind of that young reform dish thing. And I never, I don't know that I was, would describe myself as completely in that, but I just thought that, hey, there's guys who wanna get the gospel out there, they believe

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God's sovereign and big, and I mean, that seems like a good thing, right? So this is

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David Platt's house. This is his house, apparently, according to, this was an article on Capstone Report, but I know that other people have sent me this over the years.

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It's worth $935 ,000 in Vienna, Virginia.

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And it's a very nice house. Now, look, I don't think there's anything wrong with this, having a house like this.

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I don't think, especially, I don't know how many kids he has, but if you have a family, I don't think there's anything innately wrong with having a house like this at all.

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But again, I didn't write the book radical. And that's, I think, the thing that's made me wonder a little bit, is if you're gonna have a house like this, is it really necessary?

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And is it in keeping with the radical kind of agenda that you wanna present to people?

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That's what doesn't make quite sense to me. There seems to be, it seems to be consistent, if what my friend in seminary said was true about David Platt, this would be the kind of thing

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I'd expect. I might expect even more than this, I don't know. But again, my view is very limited on this.

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But this is public matter of public record right here. So I'll let you do with that what you will. But if McLean has hired a pastor who is some of the things that seem to be true about him, hypocrisy, some lying, in fact,

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I'm not even gonna go through it all. Capstone Report, I think did a whole like the five lies or six lies of David Platt or something, where I guess

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Alan Atkinson says he's like verifiably, traced through and caught David Platt in these lies.

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There's definitely some lying going on though. I just can't see a way around it. I've tried in my head to like figure out how could it not be, and it just, it doesn't work.

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You have someone who seems dishonest, who is accused by multiple people of being power hungry, who doesn't seem capable of taking personal responsibility.

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If you watch his statements on the whole issue with McLean right now, for what's going on, just doesn't seem like he's capable of it or desires to do it.

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And again, I mean, look, maybe he doesn't think he's wrong, but he is the pastor there. There's gotta be somewhere along the line he can say there's a leadership failure or something.

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Something's off, I'm just telling you that. Something's off. And little things like this seem to give you a little hint of it.

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Now, this was something in the research for the book, and by the way, I should plug it.

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You can go to socialjusticegoestochurch .com and order a copy, the history of the social justice movement,

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Eden Evangelicalism. And this is one of the things that I included in it. I included a link to this picture of Russell Moore and Ron Sider and David Platt.

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And this is from 2016. And this is early 2016.

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And what Russell Moore says is, my colleague David Platt and I enjoyed being with Dr. and Mrs. Ron Sider.

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Dr. Sider's writings on hunger influenced both of us. This did not surprise me when I was looking into it, because I knew,

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I thought there must be a connection between David Platt and Ron Sider. Ron Sider's a guy that basically pioneered within evangelicalism, even though he's kind of Anabaptist, but he pioneered in evangelicalism.

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It's sort of like, it was like radical, his book, but in his teaching, but it was even more radical than radical, put it that way.

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There were clearly some Marxist kind of influences shaping Ron Sider's work.

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So anyway, that was an interesting connection.

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And that just showed me that, if Russell Moore is saying that David Platt has been influenced by Ron Sider, specifically

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Ron Sider's writings on hunger, then David Platt has been influenced by someone who is, in my opinion, one of the best and nicest, his public persona at least, person who's mixed

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Marxism with Christianity, syncretist. So that's a red flag, big red flag.

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Now, 2018 revealed that something was up, that it wasn't just David Platt's a hypocrite for having, and by the way, that house

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I showed you, I think he got in when he moved to McLean, but before that, I know people have sent me pictures of another house he had,

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I think it might've even been bigger, I'm not sure, but anyways, that issue was a present issue.

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Now, you have the Ron Sider thing, then in 2018, this happens. As pastors of churches, of worshiping communities who gather together with our congregations every week to sing our songs and give our offerings to God above us, have we been or are we now slow to speak and work against racial injustice around us?

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And I am convinced the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

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In fact, I'm about to make a broad statement which I know is dangerous because 12 ,000 of you have lived 12 ,000 different lives with 12 ,000 different experiences, but on a whole, pastors in America and the churches we lead, instead of bridging the racial divide in our country, have historically widened and are currently widening the racial divide in our country, have the racial divide admittedly broad strokes.

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I'm not talking about any specific city or community here, but the reality is the facts are, some of these facts come from a helpful book called

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Divided by Faith, which is in the bookstore, but the facts are, black Americans are much more likely to be unemployed than white

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Americans. The current ratio of two unemployed black people for every one unemployed white person has held pretty constant since 1950.

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Income inequality between white and black people is close to 50 % worse, wider today than it was.

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I'm gonna stop it right there because it goes on and on and on and on. David Platt talks about criminal justice and just these disparities.

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The sermon, as you can see from the title, Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters, Racism and Our Need for Repentance was delivered at T4G 2018, and of course, he's working off the passage in Amos, and what he's doing is he's taking that and then he launches into all the disparities that are existing, and he blames it essentially on the church, or at least partially to blame on the church, and he just lets this social justice influenced understanding of justice, that justice is about eliminating disparities and promoting equality, not equality before the law, but egalitarian equality, he lets that be the defining thing in this sermon, and so this was a defining moment.

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This sermon, I think when history books are written about how evangelicalism fell or whatever, this is one of the things they may look at, the

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T4G conference and David Platt's sermon in particular, because it was massive scripture twisting, and it was a terrible sermon, but this was a wake -up call for a lot of people.

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They thought, wait a minute, how in the world did David Platt just preach this sermon? And I'm wondering if this is kind of who he had been for a while, and just maybe he developed more in it, but he hadn't said all these things.

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He kind of disparaged the American dream. He kind of showed, hey, I like Ron Sider's work.

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I think in the book, I couldn't remember it earlier, but Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was Ron Sider's book, 1977, but now he's coming out, and it's a woke sermon, there's no doubt about it.

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So then, let's see here, we have other issues going on.

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We have internal issues at McLean Bible Church. So when David Platt got there, which now I'm trying to remember what,

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I had it in the forefront. There's so many moving facts, I'm trying to remember. So I guess it was 2019, that's what

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I wrote down here, coming to McLean Bible Church, although I feel like he was there before that.

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Maybe it was 2019, though. When he got there, Capstone Reports reported that there were issues that David Platt did not want oversight as much over himself.

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Under the previous pastor, Lon Solomon, the senior pastor's report would last about an hour, covering a range of issues.

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Platt's reports were five or 10 minutes, and didn't really cover anything of substance. Platt and Dave Young presented a

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PowerPoint to the elders when he got there, I guess, and the focus was taking the church in a new direction.

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The new direction focused on increasing Platt's autonomy. One glaring example was in the area of church discipline.

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Platt sought to totally remove the elders from the process and replace it with a far more autocratic system. So Capstone Report, getting information from those concerned within the church, but there were some documents, or some

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PowerPoint, I guess, sent, and you can see some of the screenshots if you go to Capstone Report. David Platt's letter from June 2019 after praying for President Trump.

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If you remember, President Trump came to McLean, and poor guy, in a way, David Platt, I feel bad for him.

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He got a five -minute warning, and he did, I thought, a pretty good job. He prayed for President Trump when President Trump got there. Here's the thing, though.

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The day after, he posted this. I wanted to share with all of you, let's see, because I don't,

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I'm gonna skip ahead here. Some people, he acknowledges, are hurt that he made the decision to pray for Trump.

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This weighs heavy on my heart. I love every member of this church, and I only want to lead us with God's word in a way that transcends political party and position, heals the hurts of racial division and injustice, and honors every man and woman made in the image of God.

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And so this was, this caused a lot of anger among some political conservatives.

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They're saying, wait a minute. You prayed for the president. I mean, look, if Obama would have come, I mean, like, it's the president.

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You prayed for him. Why does this merit a statement of acknowledging the hurt that it caused, and then you have to insert hurts of racial division and injustice that, so there's an implication here that racial division and injustice, in part, stemmed possibly from him praying for Donald Trump, possibly.

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It's vague. You don't really know, but it's oddly worded, and there shouldn't really, really, this is an opportunity to disciple the people in your church and say, you know, and probably go to them individually, but if it's so widespread, you maybe say it the next

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Sunday at church, I'm making a statement. I mean, this seems like it's, I don't know. Is it for the media? I don't know, but I can't know all the motives, but what

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I do know is they need to grow up. If it's a problem that your pastor prayed over the president, you need to kind of grow up, and gave a very biblical prayer, but David Platt showed that there was something there that he was uncomfortable with, and it seemed like, from the way it was worded, that it was people who were upset about what

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Donald Trump supposedly represented, and specifically racial stuff, and then we have, so the question was, is

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David Platt accepting the narrative about Donald Trump? Is he just accepting this narrative that he's this horrible person, and that he's not even worthy of being prayed over at church?

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So then you have a number of sermons that David Platt's preached. Here's just a clip from one of them. Can I just share this?

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This is May 27th, 2020. David Platt. I want to sacrifice more of my preferences as a white pastor.

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I need to grow in my laying aside of preferences for members of this body, because I want

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Christ to be exalted through increasing diversity in our leadership and our membership. On a related note,

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I do not want to speak from the Bible on issues that are popular among white followers of Christ while staying silent in the

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Bible on issues that are important to non -white followers of Christ. That's not faithful pastoring.

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I actually read this week how studies have shown that white church leaders are less likely to speak and act prophetically on race issues because white church leaders have more to lose when they do.

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Basically, if you want to draw a crowd in general, stay away from racial issues. And if you want to draw a crowd of white people or black people or this type of person or that type of person, then stay away from saying any one of those types of people is part of the problem on racial issues.

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Because the reality is many people mainly want to be comforted when they come to church. And as people, we're naturally drawn.

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All right, I'm just going to stop it. All right. There's so much more here.

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Woke Preacher clips did a whole thing on this one, this sermon. But David Platt is starting off in the complete wrong place.

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You preach what the Bible says, right? You preach what your people need. You, as a shepherd, you're leading sheep.

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And he's saying, basically he's saying the whole seeker -sensitive thing isn't right when you're trying to just give people what they want.

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But he's dividing the church up ethnically. And only two ways, by the way. People are so much more complicated than that.

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But he's just dividing between black and white. And somehow, they have, I guess, different needs, different things that they need to focus on.

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And he needs to just kind of focus on the things that they need. I mean, this is so stressful to have to live this way.

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When it's better just to preach what the Word of God says, go through it verse by verse, and then try to assess where your congregation is at for application.

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And there's going to be a number of factors that are going to lead you to preach on certain things or say certain things.

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In fact, even real -time reactions might cause you to say certain things or not say certain things.

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But to make it this hyper -racialized thing, and then to, I mean, look at his source.

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So I read an article that said that white pastors do this. And it's almost like he's feeling guilty for it. This is the kind of thing, and I could have inserted more and I didn't, but you see from David Platt over the last few years, this kind of stuff.

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And it's this kind of this desperate, I used to think it kind of seems sincerish.

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Now it kind of, I don't know how you feel about it, but for me, it's just, I don't like it. It doesn't, it actually seems the opposite.

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This very desperate tone of just,

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I don't know, thinking that they got so far to go and they're just, they're such a mess because they're not racially this or that.

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And he participates in the Gospel Coalition's Night of Lament, which is that year.

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I did a whole video on that. He, and I'll show you in a minute, the book he writes the same year on voting.

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And I don't know, there's other stuff too, but there's a Sunday school that's super woke that, and in fact, they actually,

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I think were pretty, they had a Sunday, was it a Sunday school or small group? It was some kind of like a woke study they did.

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They didn't call it that. It was like a social justice study. And they were trying to keep it under wraps. I remember hearing about that last year.

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But there's just like so many of these little examples. I can't even keep track of all of them, especially from last year. And here's the book,

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Before You Vote. I'm not going through all these right now. I did a whole podcast on it.

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So you can go check that out if you want. But here are some of the slides and I'll make these slides available. Link is in the info section for patrons if you wanna go check out these slides.

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But I took some quotes out of them. It's morally repugnant though, this whole thing.

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I mean, here's, I'll just read you this one quote. What about the scores of Christians, including overwhelming percentage of African -American Christians who consistently vote for Democrats because of the party's record on other issues that they also deem biblically important?

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Can you really conclude that they lack faith in Jesus and are on a road that leads to everlasting suffering because of how they weigh those other issues?

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Will you really exclude them from the church because they voted for a Democrat? How about this, David Platt? How about we get our ethics from scripture?

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And when a party's platform is committed to murdering people, and they're being murdered in large quantities every single year, every single day in this country, and there's a party dedicated to keeping that going, how about we check the moral compass of that person to make sure that they know what they're voting for?

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Maybe they're super ignorant. And if they're not, then we start the process of confronting them for the evil that they are.

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I mean, if they justify this, that this is a good thing, that we confront them for it. Now, if it's a situation,

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I think this is what David Platt's trying to provoke people to think about, well, what if the other issues outweigh that issue?

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So in other words, yeah, they're for murder, but at the same time, they're also for free healthcare and for,

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I don't know, all the other stuff the Democratic Party's for. My challenge, and this is what

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I said, I think, in the review I did, it was like, you show me the good part of the Democratic Party platform. Show me one good thing that's biblical, that would be in conformity, at least, to a biblical ethic.

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And it's not. It is consistently against all the things that the

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Bible stands for. So David Platt's judgment is the warped judgment in this situation. And the whole purpose of the book seems to be justifying that, what

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I just read to you, justifying that, hey, you can vote for a Democrat and still be a Christian, and there's no reason.

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It's this fake unity. So we shall be unified and not be worried about these things.

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So let's see. There's so many problematic quotes in this, but I'm just going to, oh, man, see,

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I'm tempted now to go into it, but I already did a podcast on it, so you can go check out the podcast that I did on that. Now, Friends of McLean, there's a group on Facebook.

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Is it on Facebook? I can't keep track. There's one on Facebook, and then there's an email. This is the email,

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I guess, Friends of McLean letter, December 8th, 2020. They said this about what's going on at McLean.

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Currently, McLean has established attendance requirements that far exceed the restrictions enumerated by the governor of Virginia.

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The governor's instructions allow for exceptions regarding face coverings. McLean policy does not. The governor's instructions do not require that temperatures be taken, yet McLean policy does.

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Our church has actually become more controlling and tyrannical in that control than our current governor. This was on December 8th, 2020.

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This is the real thing that kills me. David Platt and Mike Kelsey, so he's one of the other pastors or elders,

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I guess, they attended a Black Lives Matter march, and this, well, it's technically not the

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Black Lives Matter organization. It was kind of a Christianized version. I think this was the one that Fabitti Annabuile was on, and Mitt Romney, I think, joined it.

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Anyway, so this happened, and this is the paragraph from, it's on the

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McLean Bible Church website right now, and they confirmed it. In June of 2020, David and Mike joined many church leaders and members from all around the metro

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DC in an explicitly Christian march to pray for unity and healing in the midst of escalating racial tensions.

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Mike's son held a poster saying Black Lives Matter to God as Mike and his dad, a longtime pastor at Washington, DC, led in prayer on the lawn in the front of the

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Capitol. The gospel was proclaimed to the surrounding crowds, and people were invited to trust in Jesus. Now, here's the thing. I've seen the clips of this.

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It's a Christianized Black Lives Matter march. That's all it is. This happened at a time, and so it's sponsored by David Platt, too, in a way.

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I mean, or at least he's posting it on his Twitter, encouraging people to go, when the church was closed.

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You heard that right. McLean Bible Church was closed at the time. You couldn't go to worship on a

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Sunday service in person there because of COVID restrictions, et cetera.

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But he encouraged people to go to this march. If that doesn't bother you, I just don't know what will.

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As far as the hypocrisy and all that kind of stuff, I mean, this seems to flow into that whole narrative that David Platt has a hypocrisy issue.

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I'm just telling you straight up, that really bothers me. That really bothers me, the priority that someone would place on going to this

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Black Lives Matter, soft Black Lives Matter -ish Christianized march to protest, and this is right after.

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There was all this mayhem done in D .C. the last couple days before this, and they're going to show their solidarity because of the

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George Floyd thing, situation where George Floyd had died and now all these cities are up in flames, et cetera, and they go to,

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I guess, show their disapproval of systemic racism, but you can't go to their church.

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Which is more necessary? Which does God command? Which is actually the job of a pastor?

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So this is the problem here. And then in December 8th, December 2020, it's shown that McLean Bible Church apparently has restrictions that even exceed the governors.

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Now, I don't know all the reasons for that, but there's a double standard, seems like it's going on, and this is another thing that is causing people issues.

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So if you wanna understand what's going on, that's another slice of the pie. Now, some articles,

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Capstone Report, February 3rd, 2021. Leading up to today, McLean Bible Church leaders and members confronted

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David Platt for bad management, including affirmative action promotions. This is a long thing, you can go read it. I just put a few quotes.

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This is the beginning, I guess, the letter that starts it off, this itemized list of issues.

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To the elders of McLean Bible Church, greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I'm gonna skip ahead.

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We thank you for your service. As you know, several months ago, we provided the elder board with paper discussing our grave concerns regarding the gospel, the church justice and racism class.

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This is a class I was talking about earlier. We write again to share our deeper underlying concerns on the following issues, elder oversight, lack of transparency, biblical preaching and teaching, staffing and outside influence.

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We believe that these issues are the root of NBC's current predicament, and we gotta believe that they call into question the fidelity of the church to scripture.

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In approaching these issues, we are inspired by Paul, where he rebuked Peter. Let's see here,

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I'm gonna skip ahead here. We wish to assure you that we raise these concerns at a deep affection and concern for the church.

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So this is coming from a place of affection, of love for the church. Even though David Platt is going after the people who, probably some of the people who fashioned this letter, but people who have problems right now, this was a friendly letter written to itemize, here are the issues that are happening, and social justice is definitely part of it.

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Washington Post then gets involved. This is July 20th, 2021. Critics say the church's leadership has become woke and has substituted critical race theory and social justice for biblical teaching.

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Platt and other leaders, they say, have abused their power by violating the church's constitution. In response,

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Platt has claimed that the church is trying to fight off a hostile takeover, and that Satan is trying to divide the church. And the article goes on to talk about some church constitution violations allegedly, illegally preventing some leaders from voting.

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So this apparently happened. Some leaders, I guess, were stripped of their membership without,

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I guess, proper due process is the concern, allegedly, enforcing provision, a provision that after eight weeks in a row of non -attendance constitutes inactive members during the

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COVID scenario. So essentially, I guess that must have been a pretext that was used.

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I'm not exactly clear on it, but the elders, or the leaders of the church, were trying to strip people of their membership for not attending for eight weeks.

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But this is also during a time when many people are streaming the services, et cetera. And then denial, this is one of the big ones, and this one,

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I believe, has gone to court now, denial of secret ballots. So you have ballots with people's names on them, so now you know how everyone voted.

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And they're saying this is a mess, because this is, that's not, you could enact revenge or whatever, you could identify who the issues, people that are issues in the church for leadership are, and voted a certain way, et cetera.

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Then the Washington Post, July 22nd, posts another article, five members of the church have filed a lawsuit claiming that the

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Sunday election, they just had an election of three elders, violated the church's constitution because the church did not allow a secret ballot.

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There's also concern that local Muslim leaders are looking for the church buildings to buy and could have sites set on McLean's property, and McLean's affiliation with the

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Southern Baptist Convention. This is a big one, this is a big one right here, right now, currently.

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McLean Bible Church, according to Capstone Report, June 17th, 2021, and by the way, the primary sources are there.

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A .D. Robles actually did a great video on this. McLean Bible Church is listed as a member of the Southern Baptist Convention.

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McLean Bible Church is also a member of the SBC of Virginia State Convention. Such memberships are prohibited by the church's constitution, according to the current church members, staff, and former staff of the church.

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The church experienced significant turmoil when David Platt became lead pastor. The church forced its leadership to accept social justice and woke thinking.

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Also, the church leadership quietly affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. According to Article I, Section 2 of the

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McLean Church Constitution, affiliation, that's the word used, this church shall not and cannot be affiliated with any denomination, but shall remain independent for the promotion of the gospel of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. Emails with the executive committee of the SBC confirm that McLean has all three levels of affiliation with the

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SBC. In one email between the SBC and a McLean member, it was stated that, yes,

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McLean Church is affiliated with the SBC, et cetera, it's in the databases, in the records. Also, the

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SBC confirms that McLean has affirmed the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as a basis for cooperation. Church member asked

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David Platt, and this is publicly recorded now. Okay, so just let me ask you a question just one last minute.

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Is McLean Bible Church affiliated with the SBC, yes or no? David Platt, I'm not sure. I'm honestly not sure how to answer this question.

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Like, if what you mean by affiliation is, or if what I mean, if what anyone means by affiliation is working together with other churches to plant 43 churches in the

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Metro DC to send missionaries, including some from our church, family overseas to support disaster relief in response to hurricanes, to support

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Yemeni refugees, then the answer is yes. If you or anyone else or I, by affiliation, in thinking we are submissive to a denominational structure that we are helping direct and guide, the answer is no.

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Church member, okay, so you are making a distinction between affiliation and partnership, correct, David Platt? I'm giving anyone the freedom to make that distinction.

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I'm saying we partner together in all these ways that I've just mentioned. So, this is, depending on your meaning of is, right, depending on your meaning of affiliation, and this is, and David Platt has, there's been multiple cases of this, apparently, where he denies that they've ever been affiliated with the

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SBC, he's done this publicly. The fact is, though, this one,

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I just can't find any way around it. This, it's just a lie, it's just a lie. I don't know how in the world he can say that.

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It totally is affiliated, or has been affiliated, and still is on the Southern Baptist website.

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Now, this was June 18th. Now, some of you might have seen this already, so I'm not gonna play the whole thing.

40:52

They tried to have a business meeting during a church service. Very, very just weird move, but it seems to probably have a political bent to it, because if you do it during a worship service, you're gonna be a rude guy if you do a point of order or anything like that.

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Well, someone did point of order. Hold on, this isn't secret ballot, this isn't right, and, well, here's just a clip of it.

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When they're complete, we'll ask you to pass them to the right. Larry, point of order.

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This is a difficult meeting. Just a minute, sir, just a minute.

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I have a point of order. Well, I'm not accepting your point of order. We're conducting this meeting, sir.

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So, that's how it started, and how it ended is you have a security guy, security guys come forward and basically escort this guy out, even though.

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I've got a motion on the floor. Vote on it. Yes, sir. I want, second is there. I second.

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Two thirds vote to move it, to stop the discussion. This is our meeting.

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Who is you? Who do you get out? Are you trespassing? Yeah, I'm trespassing. That's an awful lot of trespassing. Jim, you are not being priceless.

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Trespassing, yeah. Here's the hard part in all this. The people are so confused, and this guy is trying to, he's trying to operate with Robert's rules,

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I guess, to conduct the meeting in the way a meeting should be conducted of this nature, and the people just don't even know what to do.

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They're not equipped with that. They just don't know how to react to it, a lot of them, and they're looking for direction from the front, and the people in the front, in the security, they're not acknowledging this.

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They're doing the opposite. They're escorting the guy out, and this shows that there's a real problem.

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I mean, this could've, I don't know all the specifics, but you'd think this is something that could be avoided. This guy isn't hopping mad, jumping around, shouting, and being crazy.

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He seems very rational, but he's acting in a way that someone would act at a business meeting, and these people are confused because it's supposed to be a church service, and what is it?

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This is a mess, and the way they're dealing with it is this seems like one of the most incompetent things, and I don't have to know all the details to say this is incompetent.

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However, whoever had the bright idea of we're just gonna tack a church business meeting on with the service, and then,

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I don't know, but that happened on July 18th, and then you have this,

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July 23rd, July 25th, this is the announcement that's made, and this is,

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I don't know which one this is. This is, I think, one of the satellites of McLean. If any person disrupts or shouts out at any point during the meeting, whoever is speaking on stage at that point will immediately back away from the microphone, while our security team immediately comes to escort that person out of the meeting.

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If you are sitting near the person who has disrupted or shouted out during the meeting, please feel free to move away from that area appropriately and expediently.

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This will help both you and our security team or our FRT team. If anyone disrupts or shouts out during the meeting or refuses to leave with our first response team, then security and possibly law enforcement will be asked to intervene.

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If anyone here is representing any sort of media, official or unofficial, including online platforms, bloggers, social media channels, et cetera, we would ask that you identify yourself.

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This is a private meeting of the McLean Bible Church family and it's not open to media, so we kindly ask that you would leave the meeting at this point.

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Please know, please know that we care and we love each and every single one of you.

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This is for your cooperation and we pray for a peaceful and productive gathering that brings honor to the

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Lord. You know the people at McLean are looking at the angle of this cell phone video trying to figure out who was that, who took that video.

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Yeah, this is a threat. This is, they don't want the transparency.

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And this makes matters worse in my mind. But this is their way of trying to control the situation.

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Control is the word here. Other issues. 40 % drop in attendance over,

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I guess that would have been since David Platt got there. That's pretty significant. The relationship that the church has with the radical organization,

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David Platt's organization, I guess they have some office space there. In a video, one of the pastors,

45:53

Mike Kelsey says, and this is a quote, totally honest, being angry about the situation, but it is difficult for me sometimes not to just torch all white people because particularly white evangelicals and Christians talking about the

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BLM stuff last year. This is a leader there, this is a pastor there.

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Hard for him, he just struggles, difficult sometimes. And he says this publicly, not just to torch all white people.

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This is crazy. So there's an apologist there at McLean Bible Church who's made several videos, very long ones.

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I haven't watched all of them, but I did watch this particular one because it was only 12 minutes long.

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And I was just like, this is crazy. This guy's a leader there at the church. So what are the takeaways from all this?

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Why share this? This is what's going on. Now, not in this exact, it's not the exact scenario at every church, but this is what's going on across evangelicalism right now.

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Churches are being torn apart. I've been saying this for two years at least, more than that, I think, that I've seen on a micro level because people send me the emails, churches being blown up over social justice.

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And it does that by design. That's what I think people need to realize. It's by design. You start dividing people up and assigning oppressor and oppressed designations to them that are very firm, firm designations.

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And you start shaming people for things they haven't done. And you start trying to conform the church to these ideology, really.

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And you get away from the teaching of the word of God. And the word of God becomes just, it becomes a book that you use to illustrate your ideological pre -commitments instead of the other way around, or not even the other way around, just the

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Bible being the, the church is, I'll put it this way. The church is a ministry of grace.

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And it is, it's a representation of the eternal realm as well.

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Not just, not just the temporal realm. It is, it is kind of like, it's been viewed that this way for 2000 years.

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It is the gateway. It is the place you go to commune with God. Now, yes, we priesthood of all believers, we believe that, but the church is the place you go to be with the other believers and to commune with God, to worship him, to prepare yourself for the life to come, to remind yourself of eternal things.

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And once you start doing the social justice thing, you start really getting hyper -focused on the affairs of the earth and conforming them to some kind of ideological, almost utopian scheme that can never really happen.

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It's just a hamster wheel you keep running on. You can't ever quite get there. And there's no forgiveness in it. It's, it really does contradict the gospel in many ways.

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But, and Christian teaching and objective truth and all kinds of things that Christians have held for a long time.

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But it, on a social level, it just disrupts the communion that Christians have with each other.

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And that's what I think you have going on at McLean Bible Church, among other things. It's not just that.

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With that though, that's the second point I wanted to make. This is very typical in my mind, because it's usually not just social justice.

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The people that want to push it generally have other issues. Corruption issues, dishonesty.

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I mean, I've just run into this constantly. The politics are insane, especially in the SBC, insane.

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And David Platt was leader of the IMB. He knows about the politics of the SBC. He said he didn't like them, but he wouldn't name names.

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So he, but he comes from that world in a certain sense. He knows about it. And I think with Joe Carter, I think is there.

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I mean, you have, you have left -wingers there. And, and McLean is supposed to be a place that is influential in DC because of how close it is.

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It influences politicians. That's the big thing

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McLean's supposed to be about other than, you know, the general things that church is about. On a, in a temporal level, in a temporal realm, and their specific mission field in the eternal realm is these people that are influential in politics, ministering to them.

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And of course there's, that is strategic. You can influence other people when you influence leaders.

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This has been the goal of evangelicals for a long time. Try to influence the leaders of culture or build artificially kind of construct leaders of culture, identify who they are as early as youth group, and then, and then try to make them the next cool thing.

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It doesn't work out that way. It really doesn't. But that's been one of the things that they've tried to do.

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And anyway, that was not a tangent I needed to go down, but that's the reason that McLean is so strategic,

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I think. I think, this is my gut. This isn't evidence I'm pointing to directly. This might come out at some point, maybe it's already out there and I don't know about it, but I have a suspicion

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McLean is a strategic church that it's a big church, it's an influential church, and that's the reason social justice folks wanted it.

51:12

I have a suspicion. Who are those folks? I'm, David Platt would've been part of it, right? Joe Carter, probably somewhere in the mix somewhere.

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I don't know, most of them we probably wouldn't know. And I'm not saying it's a big conspiracy theory thing.

51:25

This is a theory, but it's a theory based off of previous experiences.

51:33

I look at the Naples, FBC Naples thing, and the dust has pretty much settled on that.

51:38

So we can go back and look at that. I see similarities here. It seemed like higher ups at the

51:43

SBC really wanted FBC Naples. They're gonna get

51:49

Oxano involved. The Oxano is the group that was there telling them what they needed to do.

51:56

They all of a sudden, from the leaders I talked to there, they're going to the SBC convention and they have these leaders from like Kevin Eazell and J .D.

52:07

Greer making statements to support this pastor who wasn't even qualified according to their own constitution.

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And why is it that the SBCs all of a sudden, the big leaders want this big influential church in Naples, Florida?

52:20

Well, it's one of the most conservative places in Florida. One of the biggest churches there. If you can flip that church, you can do a political move.

52:28

And maybe they're not even thinking of that. Maybe it's just the power and influence of being able to control that church.

52:33

I don't know. But there was clearly, in my mind, from what I've heard from the people that are on the ground there, there was an agenda at FBC Naples.

52:42

I see something similar at play here. The difference is I haven't talked to all the people on the ground in detail and I don't know all the names or anything, but I'm just saying,

52:51

I'm seeing the same kind of pattern. And I'm just wondering if that's going on, if there's more to this, that this was a strategic church and someone higher up wanted this church to be a certain way.

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And David Platt was the celebrity pastor who could go there and maybe do it. But again, that's just an observation based off of the

53:18

Naples stuff. It's just a correlation. I'm not saying I have 100 % evidence. I'm not saying there's a smoke -filled room somewhere.

53:25

I'm just saying there seems to be some people that wanted to take this church in a more left -leaning direction.

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And a lot of the members don't want it, don't want that. And the same thing happened at FBC Naples, very similar.

53:40

So let's see, we've gone about over almost an hour. I hope that was helpful in thinking this through and maybe give you some information, things that you didn't know about.

53:51

Ultimately, our hope's gotta be in God. Our hope's gotta be God, not in celebrity pastors. It's one of the things we gotta get away from.

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It can't be, it can never be in man. Our hope can never ultimately be in man. We do need heroes, though.

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We do need leaders. I would just be careful about picking those leaders. Don't do it according to just celebrity.

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I think that our best leaders should be the people we know and experience in our daily lives.

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Local church leaders, people that, you know, coaches, your dad, your mom, relatives, friends, neighbors.

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These should be the people, the people that you can watch their daily life. There's a reason that in scripture, the qualifications for an elder are things like hospitality.

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Like, you need to be, you need to see this man. You need to see what he's doing in his daily life. Be in his house.

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You need to know kind of what the reputation that he has among his neighbors, et cetera. That's important, very important, because you wanna make sure that this person is actually who they say they are, who they portray, because it's easy to portray.

54:59

It's harder for some than others, but for some people, it is easy to portray something that they are not, from the pulpit.

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And I would just caution you, just because someone wrote a book. I would say that even with myself, by the way. I'm hoping,

55:14

I'm giving you good information that's getting you to think and answering questions and that kind of thing, but don't be careful of even putting someone like myself on such a big pedestal in your mind.

55:25

And look, I'm not trying to say don't have respect. I'm not trying to say, for people,

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I'm not saying don't follow some of the things they do. I'm just saying be very careful of how much you elevate someone in your mind who you don't really know, and just a general principle there.

55:44

So it is late where I am. I need to probably end this. More coming later this week.

55:50

I should probably mention, I thought I had, I do have it somewhere, but link is in the info section.

55:57

I'm still offering AD Robles, Social Justice Pharisees. You can get the book yourself. It is $20,

56:04

I think, with shipping. So it's $15 and five bucks for shipping if you are not a patron.

56:10

If you're a patron, you just pay five bucks for shipping. The $15 is waived. You just enter a code, and I'll put the link in the info section if you're interested in that.

56:19

It's a great book. I'm almost done with mine, by the way. Give you an update. I'm still writing, but I'm in the homestretch right now for Christianity and Social Justice, Religions in Conflict, and it's gonna be a good book, guys.

56:30

I'm really excited about it. So anyways, appreciate all your support, all your prayers. God bless, and until next time.