News Roundup: Gig Eva, Reading While Black, Platforming, Same Sex Marriage, Gen Z

Opening Reflections on “Conversations That Matter” and the Week’s News

Stations that matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris. I already I'm getting mocked in the comments. Kimberly Murphy never heard of Yankee time and I am one New Yorker because Humpy Toast is Mr. Harris is running on Yankee time apparently bless his heart.

Yeah, I'm four minutes after 350. So there you go. That's Yankee time for you. I don't know if that's Yankee time that might be I've heard it referred to as homeschool time and I've heard it referred to as some other things that I won't mention on the podcast as well.

I call it fashionably late, but I was reading some important things right? I was about to get on and then I realized I hadn't opened up signal and I was going to post and I did post the link to this particular live stream in the patreon.

By the way, thank you patrons really appreciate your support, but I was posting it in the signal group for patreon and lo and behold I had all these messages so I was trying to get to them, but we got a big show for you today.

Lots of news roundup stuff because there's lots of stuff stuff doesn't slow down stuff just keeps going. You have to whittle through what stuff you want to talk about, especially if you do a weekly or a bi-weekly news roundup.

I mean you could do one every day and just get into the nitty-gritty of this and that I'm reminded just because maybe I went to FDR's home the other day. The National Park Service has shut down obviously the tours and all of that, but you can walk on the property and so I went there as soon as I got home.

I've been away for a few days and took my little daughter and she likes to walk around right and especially in the leaves and stuff. She collects leaves that are different colors puts them in her stroller and now we don't even take the stroller sometimes she's walking so well, but FDR's home was a great place to go and one of the things it's attributed to his wife Eleanor.

I don't know if she actually said it. I think it's one of those famous quotes that probably came from someone else, but it's something to the effect of small minds talk about people and big minds talk about ideas and I thought of that that's resonated with me as someone who does talk about people on this podcast, but always hopefully in connection to the bigger picture the ideas because if you just talk about people if it's just this person said this and this person did this and it's just drama and you don't actually gain from it.

You're not learning anything. You're not progressing in even pulling out lessons from the stories that take place on a weekly basis. What's the point? It's just a reality TV show at that point and that's not why we do what we do here.

This is conversations that matter and it's the ideas. It's obviously people embody ideas and you need to know what to do about and react to certain people. I mean if there's an election coming up who are you going to vote for right?

You got to talk about people, but what do they represent? What kind of person are you going to be as a man as a woman with all the responsibilities you have? I think it's important if you're going to invest your time, especially in a podcast make sure it's a podcast that isn't just going through gossip and giving you the juicy details about this and that.

Make sure it's a podcast that has some some meat to it. That's what we do here on conversations that matter. So it's about 4 p .m. Eastern Standard Time now and I'm going to get started with stuff. I need to just mention one thing to you and that is this.

I'm going to be at the truth is forever conference coming up November 7th through 9th November 7th through 9th at Gray's Community Church at Palm Harbor. You can go to truth is forever .org. I'm speaking on discernment and I have three sessions including Sunday morning.

So that's quite a bit of speaking. Actually, I'm trying to remember the last time I did three sessions at a conference. I think at the beginning of the social justice days when I had just written Christianity and social justice, which you'll see behind me.

Sadly, I had to give up my last copy of against the waves. I'm waiting for more books to come in, but that's why you don't see it there. You see my older one there Christianity and social justice. I think I did a few conferences like that, but it's been a while and it's going to be the the fire hose on discernment.

So looking forward to seeing you all there right now though. We have some stories to go over some lessons to pull some lessons to learn and some questions to get to. So if you are streaming, please feel free to put a question, a comment, a cry of outrage in the comment section.

You can do so on Facebook on YouTube and on X not on rumble, but on those other three you can and we'll be sure I will be sure to get to it. If I can, I can't get to all of them of course, but I will try to get to the ones that seem pertinent.

So where are we going to start is the question I have so many things lined up. I got videos, nine marks ministries, a JD rear video that I think we may watch. It's pretty short just on the third way stuff.

Well, we'll talk a little bit about third way. That still seems to be somewhat of a topic. We're going to talk a little bit about a boys college and what's going on there. It's still there. What's still going on?

Um, you have to do actually is go into their library and look at the books that are in on display. I don't know what category they have it at. Someone just contacted me recently and said they had gone there and seen all these woke books and even complained.

I think one of them was taken down, but that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'm gonna talk about some really concrete stuff that played out online showing that they're still using Issa Macaulay's book, reading the Bible while black.

I did a whole show on it about an hour long where I get into the standpoint theory and the false gospel that that book promotes. Not a good book, but being promoted in a positive way, not to critique it, but to endorse it and find good ideas from it.

We're talking about that. We're gonna talk about a Jen hat maker wrote an article on ditching the evangelical script. She's very she's a deconstructionist, I think, at this point. I mean, how else would you categorize her?

But we'll get into it a little just because I think there's a lot of people who have made this journey, who have gone through this arc. And what should we think about it? We probably have friends that have gone through the kind of thing Jen hat makers talking about.

Carl Truman talks about Big Eva and Gig Eva. I think. Am I Gig Eva? I don't know. Maybe. And we'll get into some domestic issues as well. Allie Beth Stuckey giving some advice at a conference and a lot of pushback online for the advice that she gave.

Kevin Roberts also going out there. He is the president of the Heritage Foundation and essentially saying, I have concerns about Nick Fuentes. I think some of the stuff he says is terrible, but I'm not going to just distance ourselves from Tucker Carlson.

And of course, that made some people somewhat happy that made other people very upset. And maybe this is a good opportunity to apply some of the things that I've been talking about in the last two podcasts.

And if you haven't watched those, it's kind of like required reading right before you get to the stage we're at in examining some of these things. But I did do a podcast on friends, enemies in a political sense.

I also did a podcast on politics and morality. I dropped that yesterday. Go check those out. If you haven't listened to those, I think those are really important. Those are evergreen episodes. And I'm really trying to convey what my thinking has been for years.

I think I've always just about thought this way about politics. And I think, I think it does come from a, a mindset that wants to preserve biblical fidelity, but also recognizes the nature of the political fight.

I won't say anything more. Just go check those out. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about Gen Z a little bit. Maybe the dip, supposedly there's a dip. I'm going to give you the long and short of it.

What's really going on on the support for same sex marriage and more. So we're going to get to all of that. We already have someone giving $5. Wow. $5. Thank you. The Lincoln rail split for the super sticker of $5.

I don't know what a super sticker is, but I'm really, I'm happy that I have it. Thank you. Thank you for the super sticker. All right. Well, let's start, I guess with evangelical stuff and then we'll get to more political stuff as we go.

Women, Shepherding, and Authority in the Church

I had a, a pastor pastors, I should say in the PCA, send this to me. This isn't anything new. And I think that's why they sent it to me to say, look, this has been in the PCA for a long time. It's a book called alongside care, alongside carry vision for churches to care for women in crises.

And the description of it is in every church, every Sunday, if we were to be honest with each other, there are men and women weighed down by life that lived in this fallen world. So is the command to bear one another's burden and to fill the law of Christ only for the ordained.

How does the male leadership minister to women who are hurting, suffering and in crisis? What if there is a church discipline issue? So this book attempts to provide reasons for and guidelines to start a ministry for the hurting women in your church, for men and women to walk with them in crisis.

It's been intentionally written by a variety of authors who represent the church. Okay. And this, why am I even mentioning this? Well, this is a book that is at the PCA bookstore. That's the Presbyterian church in America.

It was, uh, it's alongside, let's see, I'm not seeing it referenced here. It was, it's actually formed though internally. Uh, it's a PCA internal book. I don't know why I can't get to that, um, website.

So I got some screenshots, which I don't have displayed. I'm gonna actually see if I can pull them up real quick here. Cause I do want to mention them going back to the text thread that I saw this all in right now.

Um, can I get back to, we're professional here in the conversations that matter podcast. We got big media teams ready to go and I can't pull up the screenshot. I don't think, Oh, maybe this is it. Let's see here.

Let me make sure if this is, this is it. Okay. Um, so within this book, apparently the pastor, this is a section append in the appendix of the book, appendix six, the pastor may ask the caregiver to affirm these are similar vows.

Do you believe, and it goes through some biblical fidelity and that kind of thing. But I think the wiggle room here, what people are concerned about is, uh, the, there's this role that's created the caregiver, and this can be a female who's in the role of a caregiver, basically doing the things that pastors do, but without the title of pastor, do you promise by enabling grace of God to help the elders provide pastoral care?

That's literally in this book. And this is a, an official book of the PCA, or I mean, it's endorsed by the PCA more or less. And this was, when was this written? This was years ago, I think, but it's still being sold.

It's still out there and 2024. So not that many years ago, like one. Okay. So maybe this is more recent than I thought. Anyway, whole point is we're seeing this in the SBC. We're seeing this in the PCA, and this is going to be part of a larger discussion later when I get to the Allie Beth Stuckey stuff, but I think people are trying to figure out what does it mean to be a pastor and have that exclusively a male office?

Where are the lines on that? And in the SBC, of course, we've seen something similar to the PCA where you can just change the term from pastor to minister or from pastor to shepherd. And there are churches who think now they're covered.

They are not in violation of the Baptist faith and message. They're not in violation of the bylaws of the PCA. They are fine. And all that's happened is a term has changed. The question is who's actually doing the shepherding?

And how does the shepherding being administered? Now, here's, I think, food for thought here, right? Is it permissible for a woman to disciple another woman? Well, we have precedent in scripture for older women teaching younger women, do we not?

Is it permissible for someone to call that shepherding? That's a good question. You are guiding someone, but you're technically not the shepherd. The shepherd or the pastor, same role, is reserved for a male, a male leader.

And the male leader in the church who has attained to this position through virtue, the recognition of others, and most of all, the gifting by the Holy Spirit, is watching over the souls of the flock.

There's an aggressiveness to him. He actually goes after threats. There are certain things that the shepherd does that are not fitting for a female to do. I think this is one of the reasons Paul says in the book of 1 Timothy 2, that he does not permit a man to have authority over a woman.

And then what's the very next thing he says? He references creation. The example that he gives when he says this is Adam, who was first created and then Eve. Now, he is talking about the ecclesiastical office.

He is talking about leadership, I think at least, I mean, in the context. Now, some people broaden this to include other things, but you're certainly talking about, at the very least, the office that the husband occupies in the home, and then extended from that, the office of the pastor.

And we see that backed up in many other passages. There's leadership in the home. There's leadership in the church. I think there's also a principle here, if this is from creation, leadership in the political arena ought to be a man.

I don't, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself because we're going to get to the Allie Beth Stuckey stuff here in a few minutes. But I don't think that is quite the same in the sense that I think there is a universal moral principle that is laid down in scripture, and you're in violation of it when you start ordaining pastors.

I don't think it is a sin in and of itself for a woman to be in elected office. It can be, it certainly can be, but there are circumstances where if men aren't stepping up, you have a Deborah and Brock kind of situation.

I don't think it's necessarily a sinful thing for that to happen. It's certainly not ideal. It's certainly not the design. It's not what a woman ought to be doing or pursuing according to a biblical framework and really according to what Western societies have interpreted as the natural law given by God within the nature of a thing.

I'm not saying just observation. I'm saying within the nature of what it means to be a man and a woman, they've looked at this and men have been the leaders, even in the political arena. But what are the limits on this?

This is a good question. The progressives, unfortunately, in these denominations, you give them an inch, they take a mile. You tell them, well, you can occupy this office we've created under the pastor and do the shepherding.

Well, I'm sorry, you're not a shepherd though. Shepherds do shepherding. You can be, you can disciple someone, you can help someone, and many of those things might parallel what a shepherd does, but it's not the full spectrum of what a shepherd does.

It can't be. The office and the function go together. So that's the PCA. Someone sent that to me. I thought it was worth highlighting. Let's move on as we're going through evangelical stuff and let's talk a little bit about what's going on at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Reading the Bible While Black and the Problem of Standpoint Theory

Patrick Schreiner, excited to lead our Advanced Hermeneutics Seminar this week as we trace the history of interpretation. There are so many great books. I keep swapping them out. We read both primary and secondary literature in each major arena or era, rather.

It begs the question, are you endorsing these things? Is this a survey? What is this? We have early church stuff because there's origin there, but then we're going all the way to the last one in the sequence is Reading the Bible While Black by Esau McCulley.

Now, like I said, I did a whole podcast on this. I pointed out he mixes activism or works with grace. You don't have a full gospel unless you are somehow doing a social justice thing or you're keeping yourself within the parameters of a social justice construct.

You don't understand the Bible really fully, at least, unless you read it from a minority or oppressed perspective. It's standpoint theory, and he turns books like Philemon on their head doing this. Now, Nate Schloman, Pastor Nate Schloman, pulled up a tweet, and there were multiple tweets, by the way, from Patrick Schreiner regarding this, he pulled up a tweet from 2020 where Patrick Schreiner says, there's a good review of Esau McCulley's new book on the gospel coalition.

In that review, it says, McCulley's work is stimulating and edifying a book in which believers, black believers particularly, will find fresh confidence in the scriptures power to speak to both the body and soul of our lived experience.

A very positive review. Now, someone sent me a syllabus that I posted from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and it is from a course called History of the Bible. In that particular course, the Boyce College, remember, is linked, it's the undergrad at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and lo and behold, reading the Bible while black is also in this course.

In the discussion forum where people, students, or pastors, soon to be pastors, are discussing this, it says, how might the perspective expressed in reading while black provide a critique that helps you to not distort scripture to fit a majority culture point of view?

How does this reading equip you to minister more effectively in diverse contexts? Name one potential danger that you see in the perspective expressed in this reading. Post your reflections in the forum.

It is a positive reading of the book. It's not a critical understanding in the sense of, here's a book that's in error, let's critique it. That's not what's happening here. What's training of future pastors, mostly, and missionaries, giving these, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, young skulls full of mush, a bunch of poison.

Now, they're giving them good things too, but they're also giving them poison. You can't really understand this book, the Bible, unless you understand some kind of a modern oppressed perspective. You can't just go back to the authorial intent.

You can't just understand what it said to the original audience. You need more than that, and you need to understand that the gospel is not simply justification through faith in the finished work of Christ.

It is something that must be in tandem, must be connected to, found with some degree of social justice activism. The slave masters in Antebellum South did not have the gospel. They could have been orthodox in their beliefs.

They could have taught. I mean, that's where the Christianity primarily came from. That's the influence in the Black community, but they can't be Christians because, look, they're involved in this labor arrangement.

Well, that's certainly not Christian, and that undercuts the Bible. You see, you have to understand the Bible from our perspective. That's what's going on in a book like that. It's poison. It's not good.

This is still being taught at the place that Al Mohler is in charge of. I know some of you think Al Mohler, he's all pivoted on it. Yeah, I know he changed his view on same-sex attraction and on the abuse issue, the Me Too issue.

He's changed, it seems like, his view on even critical race theory to some extent, at least what he's saying now is not what he used to be saying about this. He still has this under his nose at his institution, though.

It's still happening. That being said, let's move on to the next topic as we survey some of these stories. A PCA pastor, going back to the PCA, I should have put this first, but a PCA pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma has been caught for soliciting prostitution.

Jeremy Fair was in the progressive wing of the denomination. Now, that's the wrong church. It's not Covenant Presbyterian. I got this wrong, and I corrected it later. Oh, I don't see the comment correcting.

I think it's, what was the name of it? I can't remember now. It wasn't Covenant, though. It was a Presbyterian church, though, in Tulsa. Anyway, Jeremy Fair was in the progressive wing of the denomination.

He tried to shield opposition to revoice, which normalized homosexual orientation, and I asked people to pray. There's a picture of him, and there's a picture of the sting operation, where it was a tactic by the police to try to attract those who are interested in prostitution.

Some of it was underage. I don't know. I don't think that was the case for Jeremy Fair. I'm not sure. I don't know how strong of a connection I want to draw. I will say this. If you are soft peddling sexual immorality, LGBT type stuff, then I'm not surprised.

I'll put it that way, because it's consistent to an extent. It would be more surprising, I suppose, if it was someone who is really against that stuff, although there's exceptions. There are people who sometimes want to make up for the deficiencies in their own life, and by doing so, they're very vocal about opposition to certain sins that they're involved with.

I'm saying it's consistent to be a part of an effort to normalize sexual deviancy and then to be found to be sexually deviant on some level later on. Very sad. My hope is that as people see this, they'll wake up to it.

They'll realize, yeah, that is a problem. That should be suspect. I think for the members of this church, hopefully, this is a big wake-up call. I understand from PCA pastors, this is one of the more progressive pastors in the PCA.

If this is true, and I know there's certainly backing for him supporting the revoice, then maybe this should offer an opportunity for some self-reflection. Jen Hatmaker, on ditching evangelical scripts, the system robbed us, originally published at Religion News Service.

Jen Hatmaker, Deconstruction, and the Failure of a Performance-Based Faith

Jen Hatmaker married at 19 and for 26 years lived with an enviable evangelical life. She had kids, pastor. She was a thriving author, had a women's ministry. It all fell apart. Her new memoir, Awake, Hatmaker begins with the end of her marriage, devastating middle-of-the-night discovery of betrayal, and then returns to the beginning, to the Bible, college, meet, cute.

She chronicles the ways purity culture, complementarianism, and ministry zeal both choked and fueled her fledgling marriage. She finds there in the evangelical origin of that love story, the seeds of what she now calls bad fruit.

Awake, which was published September 23rd, is a divorce memoir, but it's also an exvangelical testimony. Whether or not she would claim that label for herself, Hatmaker's divorce is one of the part of a deconstruction journey that has her reckoning with purity culture, homophobia, racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism.

These beats may sound familiar to many of you. This is the book and the article goes on. I guess there's some quotes from her. It's actually an interview style. I'm trying to determine which questions I actually want to read on the podcast.

Let's see. You talk a fair amount in your book about learning to listen to and trust your body and your intuitions and your gut. How did you learn to trust yourself? Oh, so brave. Well, that is one of the most diabolical results of not just purity culture, but evangelicalism.

This is just some fleshly container. Our citizenship is in heaven. We are a soul people, not a body people. These bodies are untrustworthy and suspect. It was really interesting over the course of my divorce and recovery that my body was actually my best leader.

My body led me through all the most important phases. It was my body where I first appropriately grieved. My brain was trying to talk me out of it like we don't have time for this, but my body allowed me to breathe.

Ultimately, my body is where I found healing. I'm working on a new story for myself. I promised my dear body, this container of mine, that I'll never, ever, ever abandon my own wisdom again. I would be curious where that wisdom comes from.

Is that wisdom from God? Someone made the body. Even if true, where does that wisdom come from? Obviously, there are intuitions, or if you want to call them instincts, that God gives that even people who aren't Christians sometimes operate by, loving your own, that kind of thing.

There's also the desire of the flesh. If you're following that, then you are going to wind up in a heap of trouble. Let's see if there's any other interesting responses before I analyze this further. Women are considered emotional hysterical leaders in the church, I guess.

Now we have this whole argument about toxic empathy, that women are the problem, the church has become too feminized. Okay. She goes after Allie Beth Stuckey, it looks like. Stuckey is the author of Toxic Empathy.

She says, it's so depressing to see all these women in the sunken place. I'm so devastated at the lengths of which we will go to vote against the act and against our best interests, but this isn't new.

There's always been this huge contingency of women who are complicit in every work of injustice. We know we need to maintain our proximity to the men in power for our own protection. If I'm being altruistic, which I don't care to be, but I guess here we are, I can understand how someone in that system might feel like it delivers a sense of security.

All right. She goes on. She hasn't quite given up on Jesus, I guess. This is so typical. I feel like I've read this story so many times or I've seen it actually more often in real life. I'm very drawn to Jesus, she says.

I'm very drawn to his story. I'm incredibly drawn to the way he lived through the years on his earth and what he found important and what he found valuable. So she says, I was afraid of God before. And so right now my deal with Jesus is that we're pretty relaxed.

All right. The guy coming back with a double-edged sword to put his enemies under his feet. Now let's talk about this just a little bit. And I don't know Jen Hatmaker, so I gotta be careful reading too much into what we heard.

So I'm going to be careful in how I phrase it. I have heard very similar things, if not identical things, from people that I've even known who have rejected the church, even if they've grown up in the church.

The most, I would say, aggressive anti-Christian people I've ever met are those who generally grew up in the church. And I can't say this is universal, but very often they grew up with an understanding that if they did certain things, it would produce a certain outcome.

If they were the dutiful wife, if they did their devotions every day, they didn't have sex before marriage. If they went to church faithfully on Sunday, then they were going to be assured of having a good life and reaping the rewards of that life.

And then, as Jen Hatmaker describes in her own story, they wake up, and one day their husband has been cheating on them. Their pastor has a scandal. One of their children dies. Something happens to shake them, and they just throw the whole thing out.

They say, well, this never worked. I thought this was the key to the good life, and this formula doesn't work. And oftentimes, I think what's really going on is they've been playing pretend the whole time.

They know the lingo. They understand the rules. They operate by them, but there's no heart. Jen Hatmaker, I'm sure, would disagree and say that she had heart. She was legitimate and all of that, but they're following Christ for the good they think it will produce in their lives, and there's a fear that if they don't, they're going to reap evil.

Now, can we admit as Christians that there's some truth to this, right? We understand that if you do good things, if you follow God's law, if you obey the principles that are found in the good rewards that follow, and if not on this earth, we know and we have assurance that in the life to come, we will certainly gain a reward.

Now, these good works, though, must be motivated by a response to the love of Christ. It's not just doing good works to do good works. Even our righteous deeds do not attain to the level of goodness that God represents.

Our righteous deeds are filthy rags before him. So, the good works that we do after being a Christian are good works that please God because they are generated by God, and yes, this is a yes, we do have a volition in this, but also God is motivating these actions.

James talks about the fact that there are rewards for those who actually follow God's law, but it's out of a love for Christ. Jesus said, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. So, some of these people, I don't think, they never knew Christ, but they're just using the thinking it's going to produce good.

Now, there are some, even if you're not a Christian and you do things like you save your money and you operate by biblical financial principles, yes, most likely you will reap something better than had you not done that, but even for those who are Christians and later really struggle in this area because a tragedy happened, there's a legalism that comes in of some kind.

There's a performative kind of way of living the Christian life where you fear God because you have not come to the place where you are, let's say, if you have come to the place, you are not operating as someone who has come to the place, as truly repenting and receiving the love and forgiveness of Christ, and I think if you grace, if you separate those things, if religion just becomes this stale thing, and that's what you think it is, and the only reason for it to exist is to benefit you in some way, and then you don't think it's benefiting you, of course, you're going to turn on it.

Of course, you're going to say this is terrible. I think Ray Comfort gives the analogy of the parachute. You throw the parachute away because you think that it's just uncomfortable. It's making the plane ride worse, but there's a jump coming, and if you knew there's a jump coming, you would keep the parachute on.

So anyway, that's kind of my initial understanding when I hear of a deconstruction story. I'm thinking of that template in my head. I'm thinking, okay, was this about a love for Christ where they were motivated?

Were they willing to go to the cross to bear their cross daily like Christ if it meant receiving him? Was that the reward, or was the reward a cookie cutter family and book deals and financial prosperity?

Let's admit it. Let's just face the facts here. I think many of us who do love Christ, we are pursuing that. That thinking can invade. If we're not careful, that thinking can invade, and we have to be vigilant against it, and we start blaming purity culture for the reason that we're in the spot we're in or something else.

It was something that the church told us to do. We did it, and we didn't get what we wanted out of it, and so now I'm going to trust myself. Now I'm just going to do what I feel is good, and you know what?

Initially, especially when you start just doing what you feel is good, indulging the flesh, there is a sin that is pleasurable for a season, especially if you're someone who's not convicted because maybe you're not a Christian.

Truly, you know, it's like you can breathe a sigh of relief. You're not pretending or acting anymore. You just be yourself, and we know where that leads eventually. We know that there's a consequence.

There's a price you're going to pay, both on this earth and certainly in the life to come, but it's sad. Pray for Jen Hatmaker. Just pray for her. She's in a spot I would not like to be in on judgment day.

Big Eva, Gig Eva, and the Rise of Online Influence

All right, one more story before I get to the political stuff, and I'll take questions, take a break, and then we'll get to the political stuff. First things, put an article out there, and it is—oh, sorry.

Okay, two things. I forgot about the nine-mark stuff, so anyway. First things, second-to-last thing in the evangelical space. I don't like using that word. The evangelical news. Carl Truman writes this article, Goodbye Big Eva, Hello Gig Eva, and he talks about how this term was coined.

Actually, Phil Johnson coined it, and it's about celebrity pastors in his mind. He says, By celebrity pastor, I don't mean those church leaders who happen to be well-known. I mean those who consciously leverage their public platforms to exert influence beyond their church, thereby weakening it.

They're not simply podcasters or bloggers or op-ed writers. They were key players in large parachurch organizations. That's Big Eva. He says, The era of Big Eva seems to have run its course. The conservative Protestant scene in the U .S. is no longer dominated by a few big-name celebrities or by a handful of large conferences.

Those large conferences still exist and are often well-attended, but they do not grip the popular evangelical imagination. Yeah, we've all sensed this. We all can see we are entering a new era for sure.

He says, The problems at the heart of Big Eva have not disappeared. They have migrated into new forums. The broader business dynamics in the U .S. are now sometimes referred to as a gig economy, a term that describes a shift from the traditional business model institutions as sources of income to more disparate and informal network of opportunities offered by new media.

That would be me. You got Ubers that have squeezed licensed taxi drivers. Airbnb has opened. Of course, my family's involved in that as well. That's the reason we can make it effectively financially, at least right now, is a couple different streams of income.

We have to have a couple. I can't just, the podcast alone really won't even do it. So it's, we're in the gig economy. My wife and I are part of this. Anyway, he says that Big Eva is being challenged by what we might call a gig Eva.

There are some obvious differences between big and gig. Even in the world of Big Eva, the headline acts were generally men and women who had first established their reputations through service of local churches or talented writing for established publishers.

They had a certain authority that predated their rise to Big Eva influence in gig Eva. Everyone with the time to spend online can become a celebrity without having to prove himself beforehand in any real service to any church.

But there are also similarities such as in the matter of accountability, they gave a gurus were accountable only to each other. Their heirs in the gig Eva are accountable to nobody to put it another way.

Both tend to marginalize the actual church by making their own platforms and declarations, the source of all wisdom, but gig Eva has only intensified the problem that led to the, to the coin, the term Big Eva.