IF:Gathering | Should Women's Ministry be About Changing the World?

IF:Gathering's Goal of Discipleship and World-Changing

Would be the purpose of a women's conference. Like what should a women's conference try to accomplish? And I think that we all need to think about that.

What is IF? IF gathering began with three words, disciple a generation. And discipleship is what we are still about. We believe it is the way that Jesus said the world would change. As I travel and meet so many of you from all different types of places, coming from all different types of backgrounds, I find us though in the same types of conversations.

Basically, you are wanting to live a big faith in God, but we get stuck in the everyday challenges and the messes that are right in front of us. If God is real, then what? The reason that we gather is because we actually want to live out what we say we believe.

There's a pressure as women to do everything, to be a mom, to take care of the home,.

To be a perfect wife, to be a perfect manager at work,.

To cook, to clean, to be a perfect daughter,.

A perfect sister, a perfect friend.

We don't wanna just say, yes, God is real. We want to, as a generation, come together and live out what he's called us to do. IF gathering is about this dream that we can make the very most of the time that we have to build the kingdom of God.

Biblical Women's Ministry According to Titus 2

The number one thing that a women's conference should be accomplishing is very simply Titus 2. Titus 2 literally tells women what to teach other women. It tells us to teach other women to be kind, pure, sensible workers at home, to love our children, to love our husbands, to not be addicted to much wine.

It should build us up in those things. And that doesn't mean we can only teach Titus 2 and no other scripture. I'm not saying that. But we should be built up very specifically in what the Bible tells us.

I believe that it's possible for us to come together. I believe it's possible for us to make changes that could change the world. I have naively believed that from the beginning and yet it's not naive because I've seen it happen.

I've seen it happen through you. I've seen communities change. I've seen neighborhoods change. I've seen college campuses change because of you and your places. And this is what I still believe can change the world.

And friends, I just wanna come here and encourage you that the job that God has called you to do, it's gonna be hard. It's gonna require you to go outside of your comfort zone. It's gonna have its own set of pain.

It's gonna require faith. But the desire to be with your dad and do the job that he's called you to do is going to fill you with the confidence. And guess what? You don't even just have to have self-confidence.

You'll be filled with the spirit of God to do what you never thought you were capable of doing.

A woman should be a mature Christian. A woman needs just as much theology as a man. A woman grows in Christ just like a man through knowledge of the word of God, through prayer, through the grace of God.

And that's very important to understand.

There is a God that has a plan for you in the midst of this chaos.

Friends, this is what IfGathering is all about, changing the world through discipleship.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of you gathering together with one purpose, to come before God and to ask the question, how do you want us to live? Guys, this is the story of IfGathering. Women from all different backgrounds, women from all different countries, women from all different races and ages.

And guys, we need this more than ever. We want you to bring your people together in your places, wherever you feel safe, however that looks for you this March. We want you to bring your people together on mission, praying and asking God, how do we lead out of this?

Do not miss this. Join us live, gather your people, tell everybody you know, and let's go and imagine a world that is unified again and on mission for the glory of God.

Women should leave a women's conference encouraged in going back home and doing what the Lord has called her to do. We should be encouraged to go back home and be better wives and moms and be sensible and kind.

And so I think a lot of these conferences, not A, they come home being falsely taught. That's just how it is, being falsely taught by a lot of women that are in roles that God has not called them to, like pastor.

There's several women pastors on that list that we will talk about. And I think that they leave women coming home wanting to be rockstar Christian women like the women on stage.

If God is real, then we want more than anything to live like it. We wanna be a part of this epic story, even if it is in the smallest of ways. Every one of our souls aches to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

We just have to remember that we already are. Something about the power of women in every city, in countries around the world, all standing up and saying, you know what? I want God like this. I want to matter with women.

Take all the women in the world. And I think every child under 15, it makes up for 75 of the population. Women can do a lot of work. The thing is that really bothers me. I'm so tired of women getting together.

Men get together, have a conference on the Trinity or justification. Women get together and the only thing they teach them is if the world gives you lemons, learn how to turn it into lemonade. Women don't need that.

They need theology.

Women in their churches, in their neighborhoods, in their homes are already having an impact. We just want to resource them. We want to give them what they need to come around tables and to eat together and dream together and hope together and to lift each other's heads and to remember the story that we're a part of.

Why Christians Should Speak Against IF:Gathering

Why should Christians speak out against this movement?

I think out of love for God and love for neighbor. What sums up all of the commandments is love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself, which implies we already love ourselves. It's not a command to love yourself.

You do love yourself by nature. But I think because we love God, like you said, we have fear of God and we don't fear man. And we are to pursue that. Of course, some of us do have fear of man, but we are to constantly be putting that fear to death and dying to self.

And so I think because we love God and his word and fidelity to it, we speak out as a primary motivation. And then the second one is because we love our neighbor and we love people and we don't want them to see, you know, we don't want to see them get caught up or swept away by any of these potentially false teachers or teachings that are being shared from either the if stage or from the teachers who are platformed at if.

And then those people get introduced to them and, you know, kind of drawn away into some sort of crazy movement, like be the bridge, you know, and now are burdened and saddled with all kinds of anxieties and weights and burdens that they were not meant to bear.

That is not Christ's burden for them, which is easy and light. And, you know, he's done the work. And I just think if you really love people, you don't want to see them go down that road. And so, you know, I think that it's obviously tough because there are people who have a real soft spot in their heart for this event and for Jenny Allen.

And I think she's a super likable person. So I don't fault them for that. And I think it's, I've heard that the event is very well done. It's beautiful. It's just like every detail is thought of, the gift bags, the table decor, everything is just so thoughtful.

And women are suckers for that. I'm sorry, like women like love that stuff and they eat it up and I'm not against beautiful table settings, but at the expense of being exposed to false doctrines and to false teachers, it's not worth it to me.

So, yeah, I think love of God and love of neighbor.

Welcome to the Thirdly Quick Podcast, where we compare the teachings from popular women's ministry, books, conferences, Bible studies, et cetera, to scripture. Our focus is 2 Timothy 3, 16 to 17, that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so the man or woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I'm your host, Melba Toast. May this episode bless you and bring glory to God. Please welcome to another episode of Thoroughly Equipped. If you are new, well, welcome. I want to say thank you to all the subscribers of Thoroughly Equipped.

Thank you for watching these videos, sharing, liking, commenting on the videos. It is a blessing to my heart to see that you guys are watching them and getting something out of them, or even if you disagree, you're commenting and we're having discussions.

I've had a couple of discussions through YouTube with people and I get all excited to have discussions and go deeper, especially when I'm discussing things with people who are really looking for the truth and is like myself, wanting to stand firm on God's word.

Overview of IF:Gathering as a Parachurch Ministry

So let's talk about Jenny Allen's, if gathering, very, very, very popular ministry that I am sure if you attend a seeker-sensitive or a Calvary Chapel, non-denominational, or even just a simple common Baptist church, you have probably heard of Jenny Allen's.

If Gathering, a discipleship ministry, which launched its first conference back in 2014. Now this conference is done in a more modern format as held online and reaches those across the world in individual homes, college dorms, church buildings, et cetera.

So it's not the typical conference that you'd see like Beth Moore has her conferences where she goes around the United States or even around the world and gives a conference. This one is pretty much a conference held one time in beginning, or yeah, the beginning of spring, either the end of February, the beginning of March, held in Dallas, Texas, streamed online to which people can purchase the rights to watch the stream and then host what they call and if local, like I said, either the churches or the college dorms or anything like that, okay?

So this is how it's grown through the use of technology and it's a brilliant idea in getting women together under one parachurch ministry because you get them into the conference, they get excited, they go all out for those women who are attending the actual in-person conference in Dallas, Texas, and then I'm sure churches, individual churches will go all out themselves to host a local and then advertise on Facebook to women in their community.

So this has just been a fantastic way to reach women and I give them kudos for that in using technology in a very smart way, grassroots almost, put the resources into individual woman's hands so they themselves can access resources to disciple other women.

So right off the bat, that's, I think, one of the good things about AFGathering but also because of that, it is problematic and we're going to look into all the things that I find problematic with this ministry in the next coming series and I hope to have it all complete because next year, March 1st, they are expanding the ministry from specific for women to broaden it, it looks like, to become more egalitarian with what is coming in March 1st of 2025 with Gather 25, which is taking that same technology and that same idea with the locals by granting it to churches all over the world to which they are advertising it as a gathering of the global church for a full 25 hours from the evening time of that Friday to all the way to the end of Saturday for a full 25 hours.

Okay, so one of the things about this ministry because of its exponential growth, they host some of the most popular evangelical female speakers such as Beth Moore, Christine Cain, Bianca Olthoff, Ann Voskamp, Liza Turkers, Jackie Hill Perry, et cetera, et cetera, right?

So this is one of the things why we need to talk about the IfGathering. Now, a side note here. I'm gonna ask all of you who are new and who are coming on here who are IfGathering followers, who are Jenny Allen followers, who are gung-ho about the IfGathering and if you come across this video to just bear with me, right, don't shut me off.

I know you're probably gonna come to this going, she's a heresy hunter, she's just wanting to put down God's work of this ministry and things like that. And I get it, I understand that for probably a lot of you, it was in my life.

A lot of you are not, or whoever, a lot of you have felt that this ministry has blessed you or benefited you in some way. And ministries like this too, other women, teachers and speakers, we tend to be all gung-ho for those female teachers that we like and feel have blessed us in some way.

And like I said, I've felt this way too. I came out of the purpose-driven, seeker-sensitive evangelical sphere, but I came out of it because I saw my failures and I began to also see that what was being taught within this became a heavy burden for me.

And then after feeling the heavy burden and diving deeper into scripture, I then began to see why it was a burden or why what I was being taught, especially the purpose-driven gospel, became a burden for me.

It was because one, it's kind of a false gospel that adds to Christ and his work. And three, I began to see the way that they mishandled scripture. And the way, because of that, how it became a different God, a different Christ.

And because of that, I therefore had a different purpose for living. And I hope throughout this series to kind of draw that out. For those of you who have been involved in the IF gathering or even have gone deeper and gone into the IF ministry and used their resources, I'm going to show you and expose to you how the main teachings within and coming out of this ministry are more of a burden than a joy and place more on our works and importance on what we do for God than what Christ has done for ourselves or for us.

And so that's what I want to free you women up to just know the gospel and the freeness that comes from the gospel and to just, because of that, love God more and live your life in faith to him and trust in his word.

And so long introduction, all that to say that that's my heart for these next couple of episodes to show you the concerns I have for this ministry and conference. And then to call you to look at the scriptures to see if what is being taught will actually produce women after Christ's own heart or women after the IF gathering's heart.

The Goal of IF:Gathering and Three Key Questions

So let's start with that. Let's start with the heart or goal of the IF gathering. The ministry's goal is to quote, put tools and resources in the hands of women within the church to empower women to reclaim discipleship as God's means to change the world.

In eight years through technology, our events and our tools, we have reached more than 1 million women in 179 countries. And we have a grand desire to see an entire generation discipled and unleashed to then go and make more disciples of Jesus.

We believe with God, it's possible, end quote. That's from the ifgathering .com, our story. So right off the bat, I'm going with some questions here. And these questions that I'm going to ask and then hopefully answer it will be, one, does discipleship need to be reclaimed as God's means to change the world?

Two, what does biblical discipleship empower women to do? And three, what is the tool that women need to be empowered in discipleship? So let's address these one at a time so that then we can ultimately come to understand and discern if the if ministry will disciple women, as Christ has called discipleship to be for his women.

Does Discipleship Need to be Reclaimed as God's Means to Change the World?

All right, first question was, does discipleship need to be reclaimed as God's means to change the world? Jenny believes by the statement that discipleship needs to be reclaimed. And to reclaim something means to recover or retrieve something that was previously lost, given or paid.

So in this case, Miss Allen is making the claim that discipleship needs to be recovered. And more specifically, that it needs to be reclaimed as God's means to change the world. That somehow discipleship now is no longer about changing the world, but was what Christ intended discipleship to be.

Is this true? Is discipleship God's means by which he changes the world? Well, we need to have a right understanding of what discipleship is before we ask if Jenny Allen is correct about it being the means to change the world.

So let's look to God's very words to learn about what discipleship is. Matthew 28, 18 to 20 is what Christians call the Great Commission Passage. This is a passage that calls all Christians to discipleship.

When I read this, look at what Jesus instructs the apostles to do. And let's see if changing the world is an end goal. And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.

Now let's make a note of some of the things that Jesus tells us here. One, that all authority in heaven and on earth are given to him. He has all authority on this earth. He is in authority over all governments and all peoples.

And because he has all authority, he now instructs his apostles, because that's who he's speaking to, to go and make disciples, to make followers, learners, those that want to learn and obey all that Christ commands.

He taught the apostles and the apostles teach us to this day by the written word of God. But let's go deeper. What does discipleship look like? What are we to learn? What is the goal of discipleship and is it to change the world?

What does discipleship start with? Well, it starts with the gospel. The good news that the apostles proclaimed to the nearby nations, that God sent his son to die for our sins and was raised on the third day, revealing that he has the power over sin, death and the devil to set free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

Hebrews 2, 14 to 15. And with him being the one with all power and all authority, we are called to repent of our sin and trust in the finished work of Christ, justified by his blood so that we may be saved from the wrath to come.

Romans 5, 9. Discipleship starts with the good news. And therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ God, making his appeal through us.

We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 2 Corinthians 5, 17 to 20. This is our message. And by this good news, we are made new to follow our master, our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship starts with the gospel and the proclamation of the reconciliation between God and his people.

And from there, it's about training those who have been reconciled to observe and obey all that Christ has commanded. We see this all over the epistles. The prayers of Paul and Peter are centered on the formation of Christ and his people so that they may be filled with all the fullness of God.

So is the goal of discipleship to change the world? No. Now, the effects of large groups of people being discipled will change the world. We cannot disregard that. But that is not the purpose of discipleship.

The purpose of discipleship is to teach his people to observe all that Christ commanded the apostles. We can find out more on the purpose of discipleship in Ephesians 4, 11 to 16. He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to measure the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way unto him who is the head, unto Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

All of ministry is done with the heart of making disciples. And Christ has given his people, apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers to train the disciples up to serve and disciple others, so that we attain to the knowledge of the Son of God, which this knowledge is deep theology, to bring people up to the maturity.

And in Hebrews, we see that maturity comes from discernment and discerning, good theology versus bad theology, and to grow to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so we are no longer carried to and fro by every wind of doctrine, but instead, by truth spoken to us in love, we grow up in every way unto him who is the head.

We are to grow up into Christ. For us women, discipleship is about training God's women to be like Christ. And that is the purpose of women's ministry. It's not to equip you with tools to train you up to change the world.

In fact, Christ came to give life to his sheep to lay down his life, so we might have life abundant, John 10, 10. In this abundant life, yes, we will love our neighbor, and in that love, we'll do many, many good works in the world, but our goal is not to change it, but to proclaim the one who saves it from the wrath of God.

We make disciples because individuals need to be saved. This world, the people in it need to be saved and set free from sin. We make disciples because those who have been saved also need to be trained to observe and obey Christ and all that he commands.

When we abide in Christ's word and obey his commands, we love our neighbor and our savior and bring glory to God. The goal of discipleship is not to change the world. It's not even about making you a better version of yourself nor to accomplish a calling by God to do something great for him.

It is about putting on a whole new man, the man Jesus Christ, denying ourselves and becoming like him. It is to call another individual to obey Christ as Lord. For this to happen, we must be proclaiming the gospel, knowing nothing but Christ and him crucified, hearing about him, seeing him in the works of ourselves and others and growing into the mature statue of him.

Was discipleship the means by which God changed the world? And some people might say, yes, I'm sure Jenny Allen would, but I believe there are things that are missing from this statement or twisted in this statement, sort of the misunderstandings.

See, the gospel is the means by which God saves his people and discipleship is a means by which he sanctifies his people. People who are more like Christ love and serve others and by obvious deduction, then we could say that the more sanctified people there are, the more the world will change.

Yes, absolutely. And yet you cannot find anywhere in scripture that God calls his people to work on changing the world because from the very beginning, from the moment sin entered this world, it wasn't changed that God said we needed, but salvation from death, Genesis 2, 17, and the wrath of God that is to come against all those who do evil, Romans 2, 6 to 11.

It is the salvation and sanctification of his people that all Christian ministry should be about, to minister is to provide a service and for the Christian, our service is always done with the heart to edify and grow the church.

What Biblical Discipleship Empowers Women to Do

Now onto the next question. What does biblical discipleship empower women to do? So now that we know what discipleship is and what it is for, we can look a bit at what women's ministry is and what discipleship according to scripture should empower women to do.

Evangelism is the spreading of the gospel to bring people into the kingdom of God, the message that is the power of God unto salvation. Discipleship is bringing people to obey Jesus' commands through the edification of God's word.

This is the job of the church and the ministers within it. A ministry that should come out of the church is a ministry for women by older women. Now there are broad commands that Christ instructs the whole of the church body in and there are more narrow commands that he gives to his women.

In Titus 2, we have a more narrow or a specific set of commands on what the older women are to train the younger women up into. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanders or slaves to much wine.

They are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled, Titus 2, three to five.

Women's ministry is women serving and training other women to obey Christ's commands within their roles as wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend. These are the good works and acts of love that Christ by the Holy Spirit through the apostle, Paul instructs women to disciple the younger women into.

So the ministry of the older women in the church is to take the good doctrine taught by the faithful elders and pastors in the church and use those good doctrines to empower women to thrive in their homes as modest, kind, self-controlled wives and mothers who work hard at providing for the family and submitting to their husbands.

This is where womanhood and femininity shines. Now it saddens me how the popular church culture today thinks so very little of the family. I mean, oh yes, you can receive many, many teachings on parenting, on marriage, on what marriage is and even on women roles in submission and husband's roles as heads of the family.

You get teachings on how to get your children to behave or how to even train your kids to become world changers. But it is very, very lost on these type of churches for the most part that the family should be the clearest display of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church.

That is theology, that is deep theology and that is often missing from most of these teachings in the seeker-sensitive churches. Should God grant one marriage and children discipleship starts with the family.

This is not to say that one cannot disciple others. Should God not grant them a husband and children? But it is the common means by which God instituted discipleship. He calls all his people to train up their children.

That his words be on our heart, teaching them diligently to our children, talking of them when we sit down in our house, when we walk by the way and when we lie down and when we rise, Deuteronomy 6, 6 to 7.

We are to bring up children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, Ephesians 6, 4. This is discipleship and that as a whole is vastly different than the popular teaching that we hear about discipleship outside of the home.

It's an honor to disciple our children and God has called women to have one of the most important influences on our children as well as our husbands. In fact, God states that our submission to our husbands has a great effect on them, almost even a form of submissive discipleship.

In a way, a meek and quiet spirit that is willing to submit to our husband can disciple our husbands and win them without a word, verse Peter 3, 1 to 6. That is how powerful a meek and quiet spirit is to a man.

And the same type of qualities in a woman can also be a light and example to our children as our godly submissive conduct is a display of how the church submits to Christ our Lord and Savior, Ephesians 5, 31 to 32.

It's a failure within popular evangelical Christianity today to equip women to be world changers and leaders who ignore what God's word says on discipleship within the home as God's first and foremost calling to women.

What's even worse is that the training in discipleship that comes from the typical women's ministry is filled with just vapid theology. And I wonder if this is a result of thinking that world changing doesn't necessarily involve theology.

We don't actually need theology to go out there and change the world, but to change the world, what we need is more sociology, psychology. These are the things we need because these are the teachings that the world is steeped in and understands, and therefore we can become more relevant, incorporating these into our ministry work.

See, that's just not true. Theology and doctrine are at the center of what it means to love and serve our neighbor. We see this especially applied to women in the Titus 2 verse, that teaching what is good, God's word, will encourage women to love our neighbor.

And again, like I said, that is what true biblical women's ministry will look like. Older women taking the good doctrine and theology of scripture and encouraging the younger to trust and believe in it, applying it to their roles as wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend.

So much of the American evangelical women's ministry today wants to pull you away from what God has instructed in Titus 2. But a lot of it, there's no mention of it whatsoever. They give lip service to women who want to be homemakers or homeschool and say, yes, that's your calling, but that's not necessarily a calling for every woman.

So of course, we're all called to live on mission. Stay-at-home mom, homeschooling 10 kids, global Grammy award-winning singer, you know, massive media, media ministry, whatever we call it. Dance, dance dance.

And that's a, I think that's a big failure in understanding the beauty of biblical womanhood and the beauty of the godly wife displayed in Proverbs 31 and her role there. We like to kind of remove the wife from Proverbs 31.

I've often heard her described as a wife of noble character. And again, I think that's beautiful, but there's also this sense that she is a woman of valor. And I think if we only assign her value to a role, like she's a wife of noble character, then we're missing the reality that she's also a woman of valor and her worth is found in the valor, the woman of valor that God established her to be.

And make it more about, this is the godly woman so that you can say, well, this is, every woman can be godly in this way at certain time periods. I think that does a disservice to the beauty that is described in being a wife there because you want to remove that idea and it cheapens the role and the ministry work that a wife does in her home and a mother does.

And yes, I can reach all sorts of spheres, even spheres within the neighborhood and be works like she does in selling clothing. And I'm getting to think of the word, belts, sashes. And things like that.

So she goes out into the world to sell what her hands have created and she is resourceful and entrepreneurial in that way, but it's all focused on the home and for her closest neighbor, her full-time ministry work for her husband and her children and those that reside in the home.

Gotta keep going back to the first couple of verses of that proverb. It is about a wife and that is the foundation where they're answering the question, who can find a godly wife? And that is the teachings that are coming forth from Solomon's mother in explaining the importance of finding a good woman, marrying that good woman and that woman doing all those good works in her home and the beauty and being compared even to rubies and fine jewels.

That's how precious she is, more precious than those. When you broaden it, you just kind of cheapen it a little and make women think, oh, if I just, you know, I'm still Proverbs 31 woman by going outside in the world and becoming a big girl boss, I could still be that Proverbs 31 woman by, you know, becoming like someone like Jenny Allen or someone like Beth Moore who have produced mass ministries and the IF ministry is a perfect example of this.

The Purpose and Problems of Women's Conferences

So what about women's conferences though? Now, I think women's conferences have their purpose. I think they're a very useful tool to promote ideas and this is where the tool can go wrong. Depending on the ideas and teachings being conveyed, it can be a very successful tool at spreading false teaching.

The excitement, the feelings brought through music and lighting, the large crowds, all of this can entice us away from truth. So as Christians, we should have a different use for conferences, not the spreading of the world's ideas, but the spread and exaltation of God's word.

What should be the purpose of any Christian woman's conference? To glorify God. In whatever endeavor, we are called to do them all to the glory of God, 1 Corinthians 10 31. Nearly eight verses before this very popular verse, Paul informs the Corinthian church that all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful.

All things are lawful, but not all builds up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor, 1 Corinthians 10 23 to 24. Now in the context, Paul is talking about meat sacrifice to idols. He's trying to teach the Corinthians that while we have liberty to eat what we want with a clear conscience, should we be confronted with certain pagan idolatry practices, we are to build up our neighbor to seek his good.