Is the Bible Eternal – What We Believe, Part 1

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This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, joined by my trusty sidekick, Bud the Wiser.

Bud, how are you? I am great, sir. How are you?

I am doing better than I deserve. So, it's nice to see you went to get your hat on, and it's nice to see your hat matches your shirt. No comments on your T-shirt, just a regular blue T-shirt. That's good.

You're color-coordinated. Your wife dresses you in the morning?

No, no. I just have an innate sense of style, you can tell.

Hey, listen, we got an email, and folks, if you want to write a review for us, you could. We always like the reviews because we do these podcasts, and we don't hear from you unless you reach out to us.

And so, we appreciate when you do, and we've got no new reviews this week, but if you want to send us a review, we would appreciate it. There is a link in the show notes to give us a review, and so if you wanted to do that, that would be wonderful.

But we did get an email, and so we should let folks know how they could email us as well. First, let me let folks know how to give us a review. Just go to lovethepodcast .com. Lovethepodcast .com slash rap report.

That's rap with two Ps. So, lovethepodcast .com slash rap report. If you're listening and you're not following the podcast, just go to followthepodcast .com slash rap report, and you will make sure that that way you get all of the episodes.

So, that's followthepodcast .com slash rap report, and again, rap report is with two Ps. But you can email us at info at strivingforeternity .org. Info at strivingforeternity .org gets us a review or an email, and we check those out, and we're going to have two of them we're going to talk about because we got one from Bud.

But I got this in the mail, Bud, from the episode we did on the local church with Steve Hamm. So, this was really touching. I sent this to Steve, and I asked him, I said, are you as touched and encouraged by this as I am?

And he said, yes, I am. So, we got this from Michelle. It says, Andrew, I met you at Cruciform 2020 and loved your presentation on Leviticus. Okay, let me just stop. Yes. I went to a conference and preached from Leviticus, like the entire book of Leviticus.

And before you think that is nuts, everybody enjoyed it. It was actually the most commented of the different talks. That was the one that people remembered, probably because no one actually reads Leviticus, doesn't have a good handle on Leviticus.

The topic of that year's conference was on holiness. So, everyone was mentioning holiness from the New Testament, referring back to Leviticus, but no one dealt with Leviticus. Well, I dealt with Leviticus.

Went through the entire book of Leviticus in one hour. It was fun. I do that in some churches in a Sunday school time. And every time I've done that talk, people have loved it because what Leviticus does, when you look at it in a broad spectrum, you do an overview and you start looking for key words that are repeated throughout the book, you see the gospel presented very, very clearly.

I will argue that the gospel is presented most clear in the book of Leviticus than any other Old Testament book. That's a bold statement. That's a bold statement, I know. But when you look at the gospel, and then you look at that book, it's all about purity, keeping pure, the idea that we can't save ourselves, we can't atone for ourselves, but God has to do that for us.

It's all laid out, and he does it because he's God, he's holy. So, that's throughout the book. That's a real high level. Maybe one episode will do that. I think I might have dropped that as an episode here.

So, she says, I met you at Chris Forum 2020 and loved your presentation in Leviticus. I will never read it the same again, exclamation point. And that has been the comment most people have said with that.

I admit, I didn't start listening to your podcast right away. My loss, exclamation point. And so, folks, if you enjoyed this podcast, share it with others so that they don't miss out either. Let them know if you've gained a lot.

But here's the key of what she's saying. Check this out. This morning I was listening to your interview with Steve Hamm about the local church and feeling very convicted of the needs to thank my pastor for his labor of love for our church body.

When I stopped at my favorite local coffee shop to grab my pickup order, there was my pastor. I went inside and thanked him for his love of our local church and then proceeded to cry the rest of the way to work.

I hate crying. I like that she put that in there. I am so blessed by a Bible teaching pastor, a group of elders who support him and love the body right next to him, and their wives who are always encouraging the women of the church in godliness.

Thank you for reminding me that while I have radio personalities and preachers I like to listen to, Jeremy is the one who cries with my family and celebrates with us and prays for us and thinks of us when preparing his sermons.

I'm almost teared up again just reading that. That was probably one of the more touching emails that we've gotten in a while. That's wonderful.

It emphasizes the importance of your local church. There's all kinds of things that can supplement, but nothing can replace that. She's speaking exactly to the things that we understand Christ has built his church and is building his church for.

We do this show, folks, for you guys, and we really don't know the impact. Unless we hear from you, we don't know. We get messages like that. I actually have a folder in my email that I keep just for things like that.

When I'm at points where I'm like, this is so much work, I don't feel like doing it, I don't think it's impacting anybody. I can look at the number of downloads, but I don't know if it's actually impacting people.

Then I get something like that. Those are the things when I'm kind of sad or whatnot, I go back to and I look at that. I read through those, and it's so encouraging. I'm just so glad for this Pastor Jeremy that he has someone in his congregation who values the labor of love that he does.

If you haven't listened to that episode with Steve Hamm on the local church, I encourage you to do that. It was really good to talk with him. You got an email, because you have a podcast as well that just dropped.

The first three episodes dropped of The Bud Zone.

You're even getting email. I was shocked this morning I got an email. It was not argumentative or anything. It was very nice. It says, Bud, would you like to cover the topic of Bible translation in your podcast?

Yeah. 7 ,000 languages are spoken, and less than 700 have a complete Bible. Today, the Bible translation efforts are through partnership with local churches in Africa and Asia, countries that are almost closed to Christianity.

Let me know if you'd like one of our team to talk about it, Don, with Wycliffe Associates. Yeah. I've replied to Don. That'll be interesting. I would love to have a conversation about the work and ministry that they're doing to get the Word of God, a topic which I think we're discussing today, to the nations.

Wycliffe, actually, if I remember correctly, I think that it started at America's Keswick, which is an addiction counseling place I used to counsel at. They also have a conference retreat center. It actually started when a couple of people were just up all night praying because they were so discouraged that there weren't the Bible and languages of different people around the world.

They stayed and prayed. In the morning, they canceled the conference that they were supposed to have and just prayed about that. That's how, I believe, that started. Let's get to the in-the-news section of our podcast before we get started on the main topic.

I got something in the news that I think—. Oh, wow. No, no, no. You're going to enjoy this. Oh, okay. This is really good. The title is, Government Must Pay $800 ,000 in Legal Fees to Church for COVID -19 Overreach.

This is from the Epoch News. I'll put this in the show notes. If you don't subscribe to Epoch News, you should if you want to get some good conservative news. By the way, this isn't American news. This was started in, I believe, Hong Kong with their fighting of China's communism.

You'll see that in the Epoch News, a very hard line against China. They always refer to it as the CCP virus. But it is really interesting here. Here's the details. One of the things that they focused in on is when a state or county or even federal government sue you or do, in this case, the restrictions, and you sue them as Grace Community Church did, typically the result is the courts will say, you've overreached, and that's the end of it.

You still have to pay your $800 ,000 in legal fees. Now, I don't know if the $800 ,000, it says it's in legal fees. I don't know if there were damages. I don't know if Grace Community Church said there were any damages.

I mean, they really just continued moving on. One thing I would argue would be a damage is for folks that don't know Grace Community Church where John MacArthur is the pastor, refused to close down once they realized that the protests were allowed, that they were writing laws to close churches but open bars and restaurants and strip clubs and protesting Black Lives Matter was allowed en masse without masks and no social distancing.

And they were trying everything to work with the government. They were trying to have church outside. But under the same rules as were allowed for the protesters, but they kept getting shut down. And it was a thing.

I do know people over there. So it was an interesting thing. Every Monday they would send out an email to their church saying this is what we're going to try to do. And then by like Thursday or Friday the government would shut it down and pass a bill or do something.

So it was clear that they were being targeted. And so at that point they just said that's it. This is discrimination. This is against our freedom of speech. They did this different than many others are fighting the case.

And in doing so, what they ended up doing was fighting on the issue of freedom of speech. Now, granted, they do have at least two judges that I know personally in the church. They have several lawyers.

I think they have at least one judge that is on the board of elders. But they have a within the church they have a legal team that I think consists of two judges and four lawyers. So they got some legal minds within their own church.

Not every church has that. But they handled it very well, so well that the Epoch News is focusing on something that happened with this, is the fact that the state and the county each had to pay $400 ,000 in legal fees.

That's not typical. Now, that is typical, bud, for people that may not know some of the law. In business law, if you and I made a contract, obviously in this scenario we'd be unbelievers that we're going to go to court.

So two unbelievers, two people have a contract of agreement. If one breaches the contract, in other words, you have an agreement, one breaks it, the person who did not break the contract can then sue for the breach of contract.

But part of breach of contract, because the person who breached it, an agreement, they breached it, then they're allowed to go not only after the person, but after the person for legal fees. Now, the only way that's really allowed in law is when you have an agreement and someone breaks it.

Other than that, you usually pay your own legal fees. Now, the article points out that places like the United Kingdom and Canada allow for, if someone is unsuccessful in a lawsuit, then you can go, you get the legal fees covered.

Now, that is biblical, and that's where that comes from. And I actually believe that should be the law of the land in the United States as well, because you have so much frivolous lawsuits. If someone was to sue somebody, then what ends up happening is it's frivolous.

If they fail, then they're going to have to pay the legal fees. I think that would stop these cases where the woman got paid, what, three and a half, three or three million, three and a half million dollars, because she put a coffee cup of McDonald's in her lap at the drive-through and then stopped short.

And because she stopped short, her legs pushed together, and it poured on, and it was hot. And she won from McDonald's because they got money. Was it $800 ,000 to a woman who was driving a Winnebago? And she put it in, well, we would call this, you know, cruise control.

She thought it was autopilot. So she went in the back to make a sandwich and went off the road. And the jury actually said they awarded her just because, you know, Winnebago had the money. Well, I don't think those two women would have sued had there been the fear that if they lost, they would have to pay the legal fees of these companies.

I actually think that's a good policy. Now, the reason we don't do it is there's some people who don't have the money to pay the legal fees, go up against a big company with a big lawyer. They may lose, and then, you know, they get victimized twice.

So there is a balance there. But in this case, they got paid the legal fees, which is why Epoch News saw it as interesting because it's unusual. But here's the key, and this is why I want to bring this up in our In the News section.

So many churches, so many big evangelicals were critical of John MacArthur when he would not close. When he opened up and he made a case for others to do the same, to say, look, this is against the we do live in America, we do have freedom of speech, we do have a freedom to assemble that's in the Constitution.

And being in the Constitution, we have the right to do this. And so that was the basis of their argument. Now, this is different than the way a lot of churches were arguing over COVID restrictions. And that's why many churches were losing court cases.

The way Grace Community Church did it was over the First Amendment. They made it a constitutional issue. And one of the things that's interesting that came out of this lawsuit that occurred is not only, from looking at this, did they have to pay back $800 ,000, which, by the way, Grace Community Church was being fined $1 ,000 a week.

So when this started, they had to put $1 ,000 a week in escrow. So they kind of just now get, you know, where the church has been paying out all this legal fees, they now get $850 ,000 that suddenly comes in.

I mean, it's not just free money, it's money that is paying the fees. Now, I don't know, one of the things that the reason that they ended up having the state and the county had to pay was because it was proven that this was, you know, that they were targeting them.

This was retaliation. And I didn't see anything in the article referring to the parking lot situation. I do want to ask some folks out there if they got the parking lot back. Because they had leased the parking lot for like 30 years.

And over this issue, suddenly their parking lot was taken away. As soon as they said that they were going to open, as soon as they challenged the county, the county just decided you know, the county actually tried to get the police to arrest them.

And the church has such a good working relationship with the local police that the sheriff said, you could pass the bill, but we're not enforcing it. Like, no one's going to Grace Community Church and arresting Pastor John MacArthur.

So it was like the county and the governor tried passing laws against them and that didn't work so well. But the thing that's interesting with this is not only did they have to pay the sum of money, but also in this is an injunction that the state and the county sorry, state and the federal can never do this again.

They cannot shut down churches or actually houses of worship, not just churches. And that's actually one of the reasons when you look at what happened with the parking lot being taken away. It was really interesting because when that was taken away, there's a right by them is a synagogue.

And they tried to work with in the past, but it didn't work out. Well, the interesting thing with this is that once John MacArthur's church, Grace Community Church, stood up and took a stand, that and they lost their parking lot.

The synagogue contacted the church and said, hey, would you want to use our now, granted, they went from 250 parking spaces to 75. But the synagogue said, hey, do you want to use our building on Sunday even?

So now they have extra classroom space, which they had they were actually praying about it. They needed more classroom space. So it really has been a good working relationship there. But this what happened actually helps that synagogue as well, because now they can't have these kind of targeted responses where they shut down houses of worship anymore because of this case.

So this case had a broader thing on the entire state of California and the federal government. That doesn't mean individual states can't. But what it does mean is that they can't do this again to some other church, at least in California or the federal government.

So this is a big win for more than just Grace Community Church. And so this is something we should be rejoicing in for those who are Christians. So that's our In the News section. I don't know if you have anything you want to add to that.

I don't know if you've read the article.

No, I think it's just very providential the way the Lord orchestrated all this with the faithful folks out there like John MacArthur and the elders at Grace. Because, you know, I don't know of a more liberal place in America.

Maybe your former state, but California is just extreme extremely liberal, socially, politically liberal. But what was interesting and I don't have a link right now that I can provide to you. I read an article about this that was surprising to me, that the California state constitution has actually a more robust protection for speech and religion than even the U .S. constitution.

So that's kind of an unknown thing. So this comes out with all that MacArthur and those guys did in a place that has really strong support for churches, houses of worship, like you said, and the freedom of speech.

Kind of ironic that it happened there, but certainly a wonderful precedent, and that was great. And I was going to say about the parking lot thing, and I think it was Phil Johnson. I saw a comment from somewhere that they did get the parking lot back, too.

Oh, did they? Okay. So that was I guess it rescinded it along with all the other fees that were in escrow and nonsense. So praise the Lord for that. That was great news.

Yeah. Now this is a little bit longer of an in-the-news segment that we usually do, but I thought that took some I think this is an important enough of a thing. Because one of the things is that this permanent injunction barring government officials from ever again imposing discriminatory restrictions on houses of worship.

This is something if your local church is being discriminated against by your state or county, you need to go get a hold of the folks here. The Thomas More Society is, I guess, who is the special counsel.

And so get a hold of these people. Get how Grace Community Church fought this and do the same. Because now there's precedent. And that's the thing with courts. They do it based on precedent. Now there's precedent.

So hopefully states and counties and federal government will be less likely. Although with our current president, I mean, he admits he doesn't have legal authority and then just goes ahead and does it anyway.

Well, he's the current resident.

Well, no, he is technically president, okay, because in our system, the electors have selected him. Now here's the thing. There's a lot of people who want to say that Biden's not president. We know he didn't win the election.

That we know, right? I mean, mathematically, it's impossible. If this was flipped, the news would be all over it. How do you stop all the voting in the middle of the night and suddenly 138 ballots, 100 percent for Biden?

And you're seeing it. Arizona has shown fraud. But here's the thing. There were people who are arguing that the electors should ignore the vote because of the fact that there was fraud and vote for Trump.

Now, had they done that, would you hear anyone saying that on the conservative side that Trump is taking that position? No, they would say he's president. Why? Because the electors voted and the Democrats would be the ones saying he's not legitimate.

So he is legitimately the president. It's just we disagree on how on the on the reason that the electors chose. Oh, I don't doubt.

I don't deny that he is the office holder. And the question is actually in charge. The question is legitimacy.

I understand. So what we want to do, not just today. I'm going to admit, but I have no grandiose ideas that we're going to get through the first and smallest section of this today. But we want to start a series.

And so we're going to go through this series. What we're going to do, I'll put a link to this in the show notes, but we're going to go through a systematic theology, just an overview. What we're going to do is go through the doctrinal statement of striving for eternity.

And so if you go to striving for eternity under the about section, it says what we believe. That's what we're going through. We're going to go section by section explaining these things. And we're going to start today with Holy Scriptures.

That's the first section. It's actually the shortest section. Now, these sections that we have there, I've tried to be as concise as possible. It is kind of funny, bud. When I was in seminary, I took my theology classes and I decided to, now is the best time for me to write a doctrinal statement.

Because you're going to need one eventually in ministry. Let me try to be as concise but give enough detail as I possibly can. And so my wife was, you know, I was working, trying to make sure I have a detailed doctrinal statement that I was working on that I wanted as detailed as possible.

And my wife was asking me, so this was when I was in my class on soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation. So I still had the doctrine of the church and doctrine of end times or eschatology to go.

And I was working on it. And it was really funny because my wife said, how many pages is your doctrinal statement right now? I'm like, oh, about 75 to 90. And she's like, she goes, that's your statement?

I said, yeah. She goes, you try to write a statement and it's a book. She goes, you try to write a book, it's going to be, you know, a series. So she's like, you try to write a series, it'll be the, you know, the encyclopedia.

Yeah, well, you did write that book, by the way.

I did. And it turned out that I did write that book, What Do We Believe? It really, actually, what do we believe for the most part is my doctrinal statement, for the most part. You know, there's actually some things I didn't include in the book because my detailed doctrinal statement, I get into the doctrine of man and reasons against abortion and things like that, of how some of the really detailed views affect, you know, was, you know, and really when you think about when man is created, we'll get to that when we talk about the doctrine of man.

It affects, you know, the view you're going to have for abortion. I have more in, like, just in notes. But yeah, you're right. It did become a book, which is about 200 pages.

So let me, I have a question. Have you had to pull like a, has this been litanized like an Ed Litton where you can delete something because you had it wrong? No, not because I had it wrong.

Hey, you wrote it. It's not copy and pasted. No, there are some sections, especially under eschatology, which is probably my weakest area. The area I study the least in systematic theology, that I grabbed a lot of it from Grace to You, because I am very much in line with them and there's some things I couldn't write better.

For my own church doctrinal statement, we actually use the, I think we use pretty much Grace Community Church's doctrinal statement, except for one edition that I put in, which I need to add to Striving Fraternities is a section on marriage, divorce, you know, dealing with homosexual marriage, same-sex marriage, I should say, transgenderism, things like that.

You know, I need to beef up the section of man to explain some of that, because now that's an issue nowadays we have to do. So there are sections, there's a couple sections under soteriology, if I remember correctly, that I could not get it as concise as they did at Grace Community Church.

And so the goal was not to be like, oh, this is me. But there are some points where I could not get it more concise, and that was the goal of it. I mean, as is, you print this out, it's I think 10 to 12 pages.

Yeah, I think 12 I printed this morning.

Yeah, so it's kind of funny when I used to candidate at churches and they'd ask for a doctrinal statement, and they'd be like, ah, yeah, you gave us a doctrinal statement. Like one person said, you know, we usually get one page, maybe two.

That's what I wanted to point out. I don't know where you're going with all this, and I don't want to interrupt your theme here, your logic. But I think believers need to understand the importance of researching this kind of thing if they're looking at another church, if they're looking to support a ministry, it is imperative that you understand what their doctrinal statement is and whether it not only aligns with Scripture, but whether you can support it.

And there may be secondary, tertiary issues that you may have some disagreement on, but fundamentals need to be precise. And I think that's what you've done here. But yeah, I think far too, I mean, you've got the president of the Southern Baptist Convention that I joked about earlier who had no clue that he had heresy on his church's doctrinal statement.

Seriously? Hello, hello. It's not important to you. Doctrine is that unimportant. Terrible. It's very important. And so these things are useful tools, and they're useful sources to ask questions and inquire and also learn from.

So don't disregard doctrinal statements from churches or ministries that you may support or rely on.

Well, and this is the thing that I find is you go to most church websites, and they give you a, I mean, some it's just one paragraph doctrinal statement. We believe in the Bible. We believe in God. No description there.

No definition. You're not dealing with, okay, what differentiates your church from other churches? How do I know when I come there what you actually believe? And this was the thing I didn't want to do with Striving for Eternity.

I wanted it to be detailed. I wanted it to be something that people can go and say, I know what they, even if you disagree with us, this is what they hold to. What they believe.

Yeah, but you're right. I've seen some of these doctrinal, like the way you're talking about we believe in the Bible. I mean, some of these things are so broad that Satan could drive a semi through it.

Come on. You need to be precise. There's more to it, and that's what you've done here, even though it's 12 pages.

Well, and I've tried to be concise. I mean, that's the thing. But you need to be detailed enough to explain these differences. So, folks, if you're going to a church, you're going to go visit a church, the first thing you should do is look at their doctrinal statement.

And this is the first thing, when people ask me about a church, oh, hey, I'm thinking of going to this church, you know, what do you think about it? First thing I do, look at their doctrinal statement.

If they don't have a doctrinal statement on their website, that's a concern. Now, I'll give a caution with this, though. You have churches that have a perfectly fine doctrinal statement, but that's not what they believe or practice.

One of the arguments, we'll deal with this on Apologetics Live, Justin Peters and I are going to address Sam Storms, who is critical of people like Justin, who say you shouldn't be listening or playing Bethel music, Hillsong music, Jesus culture in your church.

One of the arguments is, but Bethel's doctrinal statement is fine. Well, it's so generic that it doesn't really give the details of the errors. So what people do is go, well, look, they believe in the Trinity, so that must be fine.

Okay, they also believe Jesus was born again in hell. So what they do is they put a statement that everyone can believe. Why? Because some people want to deceive. So they don't want to define what they mean.

You'll see this with cultic groups. The Mormons will say they believe in the Trinity. Totally different definition of the Trinity than we would have as believers. Totally different, but they would say we believe in the Trinity.

Yes, they just believe that God the Father was a separate being who was physical, had flesh, became God. So, you know, it's so off. So you have to realize that you need to be precise. You need to dig in deep.

You need to get definitions. And that's why we have such a detailed doctrinal statement and why we want to spend the time to go through this. Because one, we want to educate you guys on what should we be looking at theologically.

Now, I'm going to say at the outcast of the start of the series, some of you may disagree with the positions that we at Striving for Eternity take. Okay. Some of these are going to be there. There's going to be some, as you'll see when we get toward the end, where Bud and I have differences.

Okay. Some of those differences are just this is where we take a stand. That doesn't mean this is what all Christianity takes a stand. So what am I saying there? There are some areas that are non-negotiable.

You deny them, you are not converted to Christ. You're not a Christian. Right. Those are primary issues, issues we should be willing to die for. But then there's secondary issues, convictions. We feel very, very strongly about them.

Not going to die over them, but there are going to be things that we could differ but still have fellowship. We don't need to split over, but we may not go to the same church. I mean, there's going to be people who go to Presbyterian churches versus me going to a Baptist church.

I wouldn't have a hard time being a member of a Presbyterian church because of our differences. But they're still brothers in Christ, and I'm still going to be able to work alongside them in a lot of different ministries.

Okay. And so those are secondary issues. Then we have church-area issues, third-level issues I call preferences. And these you shouldn't even fight over. Okay. So first one, you die for. Those are your beliefs.

Your convictions you fight over, but you don't separate. The quarter ones you're going to separate. These you're not going to separate. And then your preferences, let's not even fight over. Okay.

If you're not using the NASB, you're probably in trouble.

You say that now, but I bet that once the legacy standard comes out, you're going to change, my friend.

I've switched to that for my New Testament stuff.

Because you're not using the NASB 2020, I'm sure. No, no. But you see, these are the things where some of these things, some people take it stronger than others, and that becomes a thing that I just want to encourage you to think about because when we do this, when we have these discussions, especially online folks, you go online, man, there are people who are fighting over stuff that just they shouldn't be.

And so much fighting that's going on, that really it's over secondary or tertiary issues, not primary issues. And I just wish that people would stop fighting so much, stop trying to prove they're right, and try to understand what someone else's position is.

What do they believe? Understand what they believe in context. Understand what their position is without misrepresenting it. And so I'll recommend to you guys to, if you go to look up Do Theology, it's part of the Christian Podcast Community.

If you go to the Christian Podcast Community, go to Shows, you'll see Do Theology. Their entire podcast is based off this idea of what we're talking about. They have a chart that they refer to, a theological chart that they have in their episodes, and what they're doing is working through that chart.

What is a primary, secondary, tertiary issue? And that's what they're doing. And so this is something you need to know. Where do we look with that? How do we examine these things? But the reason I wanted to do this is so that if you do start to look for a church or maybe you're at your church, a lot of times I get questions.

We get a lot of emails at Striving Fraternity with people who are struggling with the church they're in. Something's going on. Something's happening. I've had just this past week someone calling because they're like, I'm trying to understand if this is actually biblical.

This is the situation going on in our church. Is this something to leave the church over? Now, in that particular case, it probably is. That church, from their side of the story, now notice how I said that.

There's always two sides of the story. From their side of the story, it sounds like the church is becoming very controlling in a bad way, very patriarchal, where wives can't even speak. Women can't speak in the church supposedly at all, not even to sing.