Discerning Christians

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am John Harris, and joined today with a special guest,

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Craig, who has designed the DiscerningChristians .com website, which is a website

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I've been talking to you about now for a few months. I've been mentioning it usually in passing as a way to kind of get around some of these institutions to find a solid church, and what we mean by solid is in accordance with the statement of faith that we have on this

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Discerning Christians website. Being against social justice is part of that.

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Being for objective truth and for biblical justice is what we're looking for.

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What we're going to do today is we're going to walk through the website. This is going to be a little bit of a tutorial about how to use

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DiscerningChristians .com, and then I'm going to ask Craig about kind of what plans there are for the future, what other features maybe we can put on this website, and just kind of the intention behind it.

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So Craig, thank you for coming on and being willing to explain some of this to us. Yeah, thanks,

01:23

John. So the website, hopefully it's the idea behind it is self -explanatory, sort of what we're talking about.

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We're just trying to make it so you can find a church easily, and hopefully those that live in an area that cannot find a church, that they can find each other so that if the

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Lord has gifted them in that way, they'll be able to start a church that actually is orthodox and following scripture.

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So this main page is just a landing page. It accomplishes very little, but there is a section for signing up for email updates.

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You probably won't get many email updates right now since I have a day job on top of building this.

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But you can put in your first name, your last name, your email, and then get email updates. This is not a signup.

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This will not allow you to be able to log in when you are done with this.

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And it also won't send you an email for confirmation to make sure that you're not spamming it. It will just put your name in a pot.

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And when we actually get our email updates going, you'll start receiving those.

02:45

Okay. So like when another feature is added to the website and you update everyone, they'll get a little email telling them about it if they put their name and email there.

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Okay. Right. Exactly. So then we also have, this is the home page, so you can click on this or click here and it's the same location.

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It's not going to take you anywhere. But we have log in. Well, if this is your first time coming here, you're not going to have a login.

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So once you click on login, you're actually going to have a couple options here.

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If you've logged in before and you can't remember your password, there's a forgot password section. And then there's a signup section.

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If it's your first attempt, you're going to be doing signup. But every time after that, you don't have to move past that.

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That's why we have login at the top. Perfect. Yeah. Let's walk through a signup maybe so people know how to do it.

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My name on there is Ms. Kuchar. So I'll just put in Ms. Kuchar 3. I don't think

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I have Discerning Christians on here. And this email you're putting here, this is also the email address.

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If people have questions as they're going through this or they get confused or they just want to even thank you or reach out, they can contact you,

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Craig, at discerningchristiansatprotonmail .com. So that's the email address you're putting in there.

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And then you have to agree with both our terms and conditions and Statement of Faith to be able to register.

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It will reject when you click this if you don't have that necessary.

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And the Statement of Faith, I know we don't need to go through all of it right now, but people should probably at least read that before they're going to click the

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Do You Agree? I know sometimes we scan over those things. But we did put some care into this, and it does outline what the website stands for, what kind of churches we're looking for.

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Right. So this is hopefully doing the demo.

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I'll be able to get the email in an expedited manner. Let me just see here.

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Probably not going to show you receiving the email right now. That's fine. You could probably turn that off, share screen off.

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I don't know. Yeah. So this is I mean, it's pretty simple process so far.

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You're just I mean, that took what, you know, 30 seconds to just put in a username, email and a password.

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And it take a little longer when you read the Statement of Faith. The terms and conditions are pretty standard.

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But after you look through all that, that's going to be when you press register, that's going to be it.

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You're in the website at that point. And I know I've had some people who have said they go to the front of the website and they want to find a church and they click on the find a church.

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Really, where you want to start, though, is creating an account first. And that will enable you to take advantage of some of the features on the website and some features that will be updated later as well and added.

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So that's it's not not like a public database that we want everyone having access to.

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I think part of the intention behind that is security, getting doxed and we want to try to minimize that as much as possible.

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I know there's been some mechanisms put into this to try to prevent that. So whenever you're ready,

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I'm just talking because I know you're waiting for that email. Well, I did get the email. I just want to clarify what how the email will come through.

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It says welcome to Discerning Christians. It will say hello and then your username.

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So we're not actually dealing with your actual name. That's one of the mechanisms that we're trying to take to prevent the doxing.

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And it just says thank you for signing up. And then you click confirm sign up and it gives you this link that you're going to go to.

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And I can resume share here. So as soon as I did that, it immediately took me in.

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What it's actually doing behind the scenes is basically doing a bunch of stuff where it's got a very long, secure token that confirms that the email that you're clicking on is actually an email that we've we've confirmed.

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And then it logs you into this page. So on this page, you've got the view my page option.

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So you'll be able to see your page, which is very minimal. You'll also be able to add a profile image.

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Which John already has done. I haven't I haven't done that because I'm trying to be cautious about those things.

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You can also put in where you live. This was originally on purpose, but we're not using

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Google for any of the mapping. And the provider that we're using actually is not consistent.

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So I considered a potential positive to prevent doxing because people can't find where you actually live.

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So if you put in your address, it will actually put a pin on the map and then it will try to re query it and it will give you a completely different location than where you live.

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But it's near near where you live. So if you want to say that you live somewhere so people can find you, you can do that and it will be somewhat obscure for the most part.

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So give me an idea. So if I put, let's say, Nashville, Tennessee, I live in Nashville. Is it going to show on the map that I live somewhere else?

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Oh, you're doing Nashville, OK? Yeah, you can do Nashville, Tennessee. Put it in there.

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You submit. You have the option of doing choose your preferred denominations with the thumbs up and thumbs down.

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But I just sort of thumbs down on the Presbyterians and yeah, we don't want them.

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Yeah, you can say thumbs down Presbyterian, thumbs up Baptist, whatever. And then the other ones are neutral.

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Like, well, we could also put thumbs down for charismatic. I don't know. I know some pretty cool charismatic.

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Yeah. Anyways, this is going to be publicly accessible to people can see,

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OK, that guy is a Baptist when they look at your profile or? Not yet. We're sort of future proofing it, so we'll be able to put that in there.

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And potentially one of the things that I want to implement in the future. So this is forward looking statement is have something on your map so you can filter your the potential churches near you based on, you know, what you put in here.

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OK, so so it'd probably be all the thumbs up, not the thumbs down. Or you could say,

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I want to do it based on those that I agree with or those that I'm neutral to or whatever.

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So. Gotcha. And then you can also put in like Dallas. So looking location, if you wanted to.

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So if you live in Nashville, but you're looking, so you're going to move to Dallas. Is that the intention? So I want to look in Dallas. Yeah.

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Yeah. Or or say you've got to, you know, you you just lost your job or whatever and you've got like potential locations that you're willing to take jobs at because people gave you offers.

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You can put a put a bunch of them out there for scattered locations and then other people might actually be able to ping you in those particular areas.

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So they'll see that you're looking there if they look at your profile or they'll. OK. I can reach out.

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Yeah. I noticed, too, there's a create an organization here on the bottom, bottom right.

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Yeah, this is a very important feature for churches. If you're a pastor or someone who's trying to put your church on the map, this is where you go, right?

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Yep. I mean, just see if I can do that. I don't think it worked. Something happened. So in here, if you already have a church that has entered their information in MapQuest, this search box is using

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MapQuest. So if you. If they already have their location out there, one of the churches that I had attended.

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When I lived in New Hampshire, it was Crossway, they're already on the map, but you can type it in and it fills in pretty much everything that's available.

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It'll move the map over. To where you're actually where the church is actually located.

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And then you can move the move the mark around because sometimes it's not perfectly accurate.

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Yeah, put it on that cross. Yeah, put it right over the cross. And it's still it even says Trinity Lutheran Church, which is out of date.

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But the previous church that was there. And then and then at which point you actually fill in the email and the website.

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So you'll probably have to go to their their website to pull it, pull in this information for the email, for their contact email.

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It's not it's not requiring an email. So in certain cases, people, churches will have like a contact us page instead of an actual email.

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So even though this is email, you can actually put in the contact, the contact website page, the actual page on their website and then the regular just landing page.

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And I do have a requirement to create a position because all these organizations were not requiring people to log in as an organization.

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They're creating it from a position. So the position is basically how are they connected with the the website or the with the actual organization?

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I've been doing a lot of these. So you'll see a lot of nobody's in there because I just put in my title as nobody because I'm just a nobody compared to a lot of these churches.

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But a lot of people were asking for them to be added. And then you have a selection of full time, part time or volunteer.

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When I'm entering it for somebody else, I always do volunteer. And then you can also provide descriptions.

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So if you're a pastor, let's say, and you're putting it on that, you might put in your title pastor and then full time.

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Right. Exactly. And you can even. Now, there you go. Yeah. And then it's got some it's got some editing functionality in here.

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So if you were to say, like, I'm the youth pastor or something full time, full time since.

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Twenty seventeen. Or something along those lines, you can do that.

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One of the other features that is built into this in accordance with all of this

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I do have to put in some type of email address here. Potentially here, that one's already in there.

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And then. Info. Crossway.

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So and you just click submit and that would be it. You'd have that that church would be on the map. If it's not already on the map, it should reject this.

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Well, maybe not. Well, now you add to now you have two of them. I do. I do. You can always delete.

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I could. Yeah, because I own it. I can delete it. So then there's if you are one of the managing members of this, when you come in, you're actually marked as an admin.

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You can actually mark other users as admins as well. You can add positions. So say if there's a an open position.

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You mark it as open. You provide the job type, whether it's full time, part time volunteer, and then you can give a full description.

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You can even I believe you can copy it from word. It's not going to be perfectly formatted, but some of the things will be formatted.

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OK. And then you might want to format it some more. You run it through a text. I don't know, another program or something like your basic text editor.

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Yeah, well, this this will give you a lot of your editing, too. So if you have like a. You know, position requirements and you want to you can bold those, you can also say, hey,

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I want this to be like the H2 title to go with that and I don't want it.

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And then I fill in this, but it might actually be, you know, your bullet points. You can do all that kind of stuff so that it looks pretty nice.

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And it'll actually go in under the position when you click into it. And then you can also say if.

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What? Oh, no, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Is it an organization manager you were talking about? Right.

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So this is this is the admin, essentially. So if you mark a position because I'm an admin or admin for this organization,

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I can say is organization manager, which basically means that this person can also make adjustments to the particular position of.

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The church, they can edit if the church moves an address, they can also. OK, so here's here's the question

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I have when you're adding title. So you could use this to add a let's say you're the senior pastor and you want to put the associate pastor or the secretary or something.

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You could add that here. But it sounds like what you're saying is you can also put a now a hiring ad there.

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Hey, we're, you know, looking for a youth pastor or something.

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You can put that in the title. I don't know what you put, maybe looking youth pastor or youth pastor for hire or something like that.

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Well, I'd probably just put in I'd just put in a pastor and what it should do is

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I wouldn't mark this as organizational manager until you actually have somebody filling it in. But just we got an open position for a pastor here.

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OK, so when you when you let's say it's someone who already works there, you're isn't you're not looking for anyone.

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It's just someone who works that you wouldn't put status open, right? You'd put it filled.

17:55

OK, so I got you now. Well, that's interesting. So this could be this can be used then for a church who's looking for a pastor and then someone who is agrees with our the statement of faith on this website might be poking around looking for churches in their area and finds out, hey,

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I'm qualified for this. This might be a good fit. So that's a good feature. Yep. Yeah, it may be that I didn't push this out of QA because it's acting a little different.

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Yeah. So it should when

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I push this out of QA, this will essentially when you click this, it'll take you back and then you'll have the new the new pastor in here.

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So when you refresh, it'll have pastor and pastor. And when you select.

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That you're that you are a pastor or a pastor candidate and you're searching, it allows you then to search for the view open positions.

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Oh, interesting. OK, so wow. So this is a feature that if you are actually signing up to be on the website, you can put in that you're you're looking on your profile.

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OK. Yeah. And potentially we can make it so the churches will be able to go through the list of people looking as well.

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OK, so you were still you're still building this. This is still but it is usable to find a church and to add a church.

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And. So which we can go ahead, we can show that, too.

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Yeah, let's do that. That's the main thing I think people want right now is how do I find a church? So let's say they're looking in,

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I don't know, Knoxville, Tennessee. They're looking for a church. What would we do? So you would you would move over to the map.

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So it took you to Wichita, where which is which is where I'm located, you'll be able to see that type of stuff.

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And then you'll see churches which are. They look like church buildings unless you're there's too many clumped together, which seems to happen a little bit in the

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Midwest out here. So if you say go to Overland Park area or Kansas City and you're fresh.

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You'll see individual churches and then you'll see grouped in churches and then the grouped in churches are like a light teal with,

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I think, a brown on the outside. And then the group people are a brown with a light teal on the outside.

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So if you click on an individual, you could you could get their info, maybe their email. And then, yeah, they contact them and say, hey,

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I we agree on the same things where Orthodox, we're not woke.

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And maybe if there's enough people, you can start a church if there's not one in the area. Right. Yeah. So this this will allow you to be able to search for the most part.

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For some reason, I think it's because I'm in a private browser. It just doesn't want to behave.

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Well, let me ask you this. Is there a good what's the browser that people should be using, if any, to look for churches and stuff?

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I've been I've been using Brave. I don't have a problem, but I haven't used private browsing in Brave all that much.

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And that's what I'm using right now is Brave. So it just seems to be maybe it's because they're putting additional stuff on there to prevent access to unwanted information when you're doing private browsing.

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So I think it's just because of that. But you can click you can move around, you can zoom out and then you can just click refresh search.

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And depending on how big the search is, it might actually reject if you've got too many records.

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But as you can see, there's quite a bit out there already. Yeah. So this map is populated.

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I know I've added a bunch as well of churches that people have sent me just because I know not everyone understands how to use the website, which is why we're doing this tutorial.

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So we put it out there so that people had churches to look at as soon as they logged in. And, you know, if there's ever a complaint or, you know, hey, this church should be there, this church shouldn't.

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You can always email Craig. But but you should be able to add a church just going through the process that we've already shown you here.

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And that's just a great map. I mean, some I don't know what's going on with Mississippi. I don't see any churches in Mississippi or Alabama, two places you'd expect to see a lot or Louisiana.

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There's a lot a lot in other places. Yeah, they may be just not calling. They're all in Kansas City for some reason.

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Oh, there's a few in Alabama and Decatur area. That's just because I'm near Kansas City. Well, this is a great this is a service of love, really.

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I mean, you have a day job and you've just been doing this kind of part time for now. I don't even know, almost a year just kind of building this out step by step.

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People want to support you. I know there's a support tab where they can go on at the top. And is it just PayPal or Stripe or what?

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How do people contribute if they want to help you do this? So I've got a few on there right now.

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Yeah, so there's I started a subscribe star. I haven't I haven't set it up yet.

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And it also provides in case you forget the email, but it should be pretty easy. It's right up here, discernicritians .com

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and then discernicritians at ProtonMail. If you're not familiar, ProtonMail is a secure mailing service.

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They don't share your data like Gmail. And then if you want to send

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Bitcoin, there's a Bitcoin address. There's a Stripe address. There's a

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Square. And I think is it Stripe is associated with PayPal.

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So Stripe is basically PayPal. Then there's Litecoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash as as potential ways of.

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Yeah, so there's a lot of focus here on security on I mean, even with the cryptocurrencies on kind of trying to prevent cancellation or doxing and these kinds of things, which

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I mean, this has been the story over the last year of so many companies and organizations and individuals getting canceled.

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And so we don't want that to happen to this website, which is why all the security measures, which maybe some people get frustrated with a little bit, but it's necessary in our day and age, unfortunately.

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So, yeah, I would encourage you all to go and contribute, even if it's five bucks.

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You know, this is a labor of love for Craig. He's got a family. He's got a job, but he is doing this as a service to the church.

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And it's a it's a pretty big deal. And it's constantly getting better. I mean, there's some features even,

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Craig, you were telling me about. I didn't know that you could put looking for jobs or, you know, help wanted or anything like that.

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I didn't even realize that feature existed. But so thank you for doing this.

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And and for future looking stuff, one of some of the stuff that I've always wanted to try and help with is assisting people with understanding other viewpoints.

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So that's one of the things that I have a. You know, a concern for when it comes to.

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Within the Christian area, we have a tendency to be overly sectarian, not fully understanding the arguments that certain people are having when it comes to, you know, post -millennial versus all millennial and premillennial.

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Type of understanding of the eschatology. And as I've learned more,

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I felt like I I wish I knew the arguments a little bit better, not because I want to agree with them, but rather because I want to fully understand how they came to their conclusions.

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So that's one of the things that, you know, I'm I'm hoping to implement.

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That's much further down the road map. But there was a suggestion from one of the users trying to that was using the website.

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They wanted an option for doing church planning. Basically churches, locations that don't have a good church.

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Individuals can team together and basically say, hey, we would really like a church plant in this area, be able to mark a certain area instead of having a church, instead of having a planting opportunity.

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So it might look like a I don't know, like a grayed out church version. So you can go, oh, there's not a church there, but there's a lot of people wanting a church.

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There's there's there's definitely a need. So this is kind of I know we've talked about it's a tool that can be used for for church planners in the future to identify an area to go to.

27:19

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And just people being able to say flat out, like, hey, we we we really need some help.

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There's a bunch of individuals here that want to start a church, but we just don't have the resources.

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We don't know the steps that we need to take. And church planners and pastors and individuals like that can actually be helping to establish a strong foundation to fight against what we're seeing happening in our culture.

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So so we're not quite there yet with having a that feature that we're talking about.

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But this is in the works. This is something you want to do. Are there other features, things that you are planning on putting on the website that people can see once they have an account?

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Well, obviously, that that position thing, I thought it was working. So I must have not pushed one of my one of my pushes.

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And please forgive me for not having it working. And I, like I said,

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I like John said, I have a day job, so I'm not necessarily able to stay on top of this the whole time.

28:29

But the open positions that will show is open position. You can adjust the open position from the perspective of on the organization.

28:39

You'll actually be able to fill in a lot of information regarding the church.

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So you might be able to put in like your your doctrinal statement or whatever. And I'm not going to test it because I just proved that some of the stuff that I had pushed isn't working as expected.

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But the idea is that you'll be able to put in verses and the verses will actually hop over to right now.

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I just have it hopping over to Bible Gateway with whatever your preferred translation that you have set up in Bible Gateway is.

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And then you'll actually be able to see the translation of those verses. So people can put in like Genesis one, one for their profile.

29:29

Yeah, yeah. Things like that. And you'll be able to actually navigate back and forth and actually be able to see the verses.

29:36

Now, we were talking, I know, at some point about having like a tab for just for like open jobs or something where it was just kind of like, here's the full list of open positions.

29:46

I mean, is that something as well that we can look forward to in the future? Right. And that's sort of what was already on here.

29:53

I just need to make the job option because when

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I click on here, this is just the position page, which is essentially the open job. I just don't have it. I don't have a link for it.

30:05

Well, the features that are the basic features that we have right now that are working that you can use right now, if you go and sign up at DiscerningChristians .com,

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which I'm encouraging everyone to do, are you can put in your location and you can look on the map for churches.

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And that's the immediate need right now is to find a church. And so those things are working very well.

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And I know that's helped some people already trying to find places to worship.

30:37

So and I noticed we haven't talked about it at all, but there is a blog feature as well on the upper right hand corner where you can go and we put some things there.

30:47

I know there's another blog I've been planning on putting out now for a while. So, you know, here's a this is just helpful information what to look for in a church.

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And I wrote this not too long ago, but I'm going to put up one on how to vet someone.

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If you're looking for a pastor, how do you vet them for the social justice issue? Because they a lot of them will say they're against critical race theory or critical theory or social justice.

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But are they are they really against it? Are they just saying that? So what kind of questions, probing questions can you ask?

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I'm going to put that up probably within the next week. But this is where you can go and and see some of the things helpful tools that we're trying to put there for people.

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So, hey, look, I'm very great, very grateful for the work that you're putting in here. And I just encourage people to go sign up at DiscerningChristians .com

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and go ahead and give a little donation if you can to Craig, just because he is kind of using his extra time.

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Whether you whether Craig, you know that you have extra time or not, you're using time you don't have to put this together and we appreciate it.

31:48

So God bless. Yeah, no problem. God bless you. Yeah, bye now.