Are Discernment Ministries a Good Thing? (Interview with David Morrill of Protestia.Com)

The Origin of Protestia and Its Discernment Mission

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. I recently began Church Soup, a satirical news show in the style reminiscent of Talk Soup and the SNL Weekend Update.

I noticed in my time collecting stories for Church Soup that I kept coming across protestia .com as a source. So I decided to reach out to the brothers there and ask if they were okay with me citing their material.

This led to a conversation which gave way to today's interview. On the about page of their site, it says, protestia is a polemical news site that dedicates itself to providing Christian news and discernment in an age of widespread censorship.

We document the downgrade of the church while being a resource for those wanting to know more about the figures and folks abusing the bride of Christ and taking us further and further away from sound biblical orthodoxy.

So my guest today is David Morrill, one of the contributors for protestia. David, welcome to the show. And if you could tell our audience.

A little bit about yourself. Hey Keith, thanks for having me. Yeah, my name is David Morrill and I publish a, they call it now the Rolex of polemics watch blogs, but a little website called protestia .com that is focused on polemics and discernment news and commentary and opinion and some fun stuff and satire and sort of we dabble in it all, but the purpose is to keep the body of Christ, the larger visible body of Christ informed and apprised on the theological mischief makers is what we call them, but false teachers, false doctrine, false movements out there just so folks can be equipped, but also take it home to their churches and make sure that their churches are equipped for what's going on in the broader conversation.

Awesome. And I was watching another video with you and I think I heard it said that you're also in the military, is that correct? Are you still in the military or is that, am I wrong?

I am, I would say, since you brought that up, I will offer the disclaimer, nothing I say on this podcast is the DOD's view or the army's view or anything like that. That's what we all have to do now. So just to be clear, this is not a DOD endorsed program.

Absolutely, I just wanna say my son is in the air force and he's currently serving in Spangdellum, Germany and I'm thankful for your service, thankful for his service and I always like to point that out if I have someone.

Thank him for his service. For me, for sure. That's awesome.

Amen, amen. Well, you mentioned Protestia and I talked about this in my introduction that Protestia is a polemical news site and basically that means you guys start arguments. I'm just kidding. Right, totally, no we do.

But can you tell us a little bit more of the history of how you guys got started? Because this is something that I think people know exists but I think sometimes people wonder, well, what got this going?

What got this motivated? What was the reason why a group of guys got together and started pointing out errors? What got you going?

Well, it pretty much, I mean, it takes its inspiration from, because Protestia and the website that came before Pulpit and Pen, which by the way is still a website, still has some great content. Not as regular as Protestia, not as news focused, more opinion focused.

But Protestia and Pulpit and Pen sort of followed in the footsteps of websites that had come before and online ministers who had come before. And I can speak for me specifically, ministries like Apprising, kensilvasapprising .org, Chris Rosebrough's Fighting for the Faith, Pirate Christian Radio, even like Todd Friel and Wretched Radio, some of these guys that introduced guys like me to polemics and discernment ministry.

And I can say for me, it really, those kind of ministries helped, really helped me see the light in the church that my wife and I were attending being far too seeker sensitive, far too market driven, really following in that Rick Warren, that Rick Warren purpose driven mold helped sort of take the blinders off and helped us see, hey, this isn't actually how Christianity is supposed to be practiced or expressed or how our worship is supposed to go.

That's kind of how I got started. And I've always been sort of an argumentative guy and somebody who likes to debate the issues and debate the particulars, especially as a Christian, the particulars of theology and doctrine, but I never was involved in it specifically until a few years ago.

And I sort of had volunteered to help, I had volunteered to help JD Hall fix the audio quality and some of the issues on his podcast, the polemics report, I said, hey, I can help you with this. I can help make the sound look better.

And he's like, okay, you help make it sound look better and be the co-host, serve up the questions, be somebody to knock the tennis ball back and forth with on the program. And so that's how I really got involved.

And because I volunteered to do that, he let me write some articles and that was a few years ago now and sort of the rest is history. And after he stepped down, the ball, I guess, landed in my lap. And so now myself and then a handful of other faithful gentlemen run the site and write all this stuff and take the heat when people don't like it, which if we're doing it right is fairly often.

That's where we are now, but yeah, I'm kind of the visible face of it at this point. And it's an honor and a privilege and I guess something that I like to do. I like to argue.

Discernment Ministry, Accountability, and the Danger of Pride

Yeah, it's interesting because I honestly didn't know about the relationship that you had with JD or the relationship with Pulpit and Pen until I reached out to you guys asking about using some of your material for Church Soup, which is my satirical, funny news program.

And I wanna thank you again for allowing me to piggyback onto some of you guys' stuff. And it's certainly Oh, we love it. All I'm trying to do is, yeah, just trying to make people laugh. But when I reached out and it was mentioned that you guys were connected at least genetically connected to Pulpit and Pen because you guys were sort of birthed out of that.

I was interested in that because I don't know a lot about what happened and I'm not the kind of guy who looks into those things. It's sort of a not my circus, not my monkey's thing when it came to JD.

I read and saw things that happened or I'm sorry, I read and saw videos that he had made over the years. But I didn't, so much negative comes out and people saying things that are untrue and things. So I just sort of was like, I don't really wanna get into all that.

But I'm thankful that what you're doing is continuing and that it's not based on him. It's based on the fact that there are issues that need to be pointed out. There are things that need to be done. And even if one man steps away, you can step in and continue.

And you're continuing Pertestia as a discernment ministry. And I wanna ask you a question. What do you think about that term discernment ministry? Do you think that that is, I mean, you've used it a few times.

I'm assuming that's okay. But do you think that that is the right way to describe it? And what do you mean by that? When if somebody says, well, I'm starting a discernment ministry or I'm looking into a discernment ministry, what is, how do you define that?

Well, it exists alongside other ministries that would be birthed out of gifts of the spirit. So as we know, the gift of the spirit to discern between spirits, to tell things what is true versus what is false is something that should be practiced by the church.

And it should be practiced by all believers. Yeah, and I believe personally there's a supernatural, I mean, a spirit, a gift upon conversion, upon regeneration, that is a gift of discernment, a gift of discerning and being able to distinguish between spirits.

But it's also just a general practice that should be engaged in and practiced by all believers. You know, we're to train the powers of our discernment with constant practice and be skilled in the word of righteousness.

Because, I mean, as we know, Jesus said that, I mean, wide gate, narrow gate, wide is the gate that leads to destruction. And then narrow is, like the truth is exclusive of Christianity. And so every believer has to be on the lookout because there's a lot of false Christs out there, a lot of false religious belief masquerading as Christianity.

So that's what we try to practice at Protestia. And it's always funny because you'll find people that say, hey, that's not supposed to be a ministry. Why do you make a ministry out of attacking people?

Or why do you make a ministry out of refuting this or calling people false teachers? And it's like, nobody ever says that about mercy ministry or helps ministry or any other specific para-church ministry emphasis, except for discernment.

Discernment is like the black sheep of all of the different para-church ministries. And what we've tried to do is basically say, and especially now that Protestia isn't officially a ministry of a church specifically, we understand that that can potentially be an issue.

Like, where's your accountability? Who do we go to if we have a real issue with what you're doing? And so because of that, we try to make it very clear, this is not a, this is a para-church ministry that exists to serve the church.

It's not something that people should focus on above or instead of their church. It's something that they should take advantage of or be blessed by or be ministered to in order to turn around and serve their church, serve their family, serve their local Christian community and say, hey, have you noticed this?

Oh, you're about to do that. You're about to do that Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer Bible study. Do you know about this? Have you seen this? And we want to provide the information so that they're equipped to be able to, you know, I suppose, protect their church.

And that goes for pastors as well. Like, none of us are pastors at this point as far as the people that run the site, but we are brothers in Christ and we are doing our best to be ministers where God has placed us.

And God willing, support local pastors, support local churches. Give them the resources that they need to be able to answer the questions that get brought in by their congregation. You're at church on Sunday and you're preaching from the pulpit and it's a wonderful time of fellowship and praise and worship to God.

But those other six days, people are living on the internet. I mean, half the time, they're spending their time on social media. They're spending their time listening to all sorts of stuff purporting to be in the name of Christ, purporting to be the truth.

And fortunately, a good amount of it is, but there's a whole bunch of falsehood out there as well. So that's what we're focused on. And it's not the only thing that Christians should be paying attention to.

I try to say that on our programs, like, hey, you know, yeah, do your polemics, do your discernment, but there are a lot of other areas of doctrine and theology that need to be focused on. This is just one of them.

When Discernment Becomes Harmful in the Local Church

Sure, sure. Now, do you think that there is potential for harm? And this is the reason for my question is, I would imagine that there are times where church members will see something, maybe on Protestia, or maybe even see something that I put out, and then maybe immediately try to bring division in their church as a result of, I think about specifically, you mentioned Priscilla Shire, so I'll tell a story.

And my friend knows who I'm talking about, she's a dear friend of mine, who she was in a church, they were doing a Priscilla Shire webcast, and she simply posted something online or something saying that she didn't think it was a good idea, and ended up getting a lot of pushback from people in her church.

And ultimately, she was, in one sense, sort of ousted, and she had, I don't wanna get too much in her story, but the point is, she found herself introducing a discernment, and it was not received very well by the church.

So do you hear stories about that? And what do you think about that?

I think that it seems to me, and maybe this is just my view of things, is that the existence of discernment and polemics ministries are becoming more, I don't wanna even say mainstream, because the truth is never gonna be mainstream.

And being biblically faithful to the point of being willing to divide if we have to, and God knows we don't wanna do that, but it's becoming more accepted as a part of the ecosystem, I guess. And before, when discernment and polemics ministries and watch blogs, as we call them, and things like that were first started, they'd never been seen before.

So it's like, now you have these guys from the pews that nobody's ever heard of, necessarily, basically building audiences of believers with an emphasis on refuting a lot of the industrial evangelical output.

So it was like, it didn't have to come from Zondervan or Thomas Nelson or something anymore, what Christians thought about things, now it's coming off the internet. And now we're, it basically democratized, to use, for lack of a better way to say it, the theological discussion and debate and working through these issues.

It kind of brought it back to the pews a little bit, versus, and not even versus the pulpit, but versus the industry, versus the church industry. Now all of a sudden it was, in the same way that social media sort of opened up a lot of content creation, like this podcast, that people can spend their time on, versus watching regular TV or going to a movie or something, in the same way that technology has caused that to happen, it's also caused the theology and the debate and Christian discussion to come down to the level of regular people like me.

And I think generally that's a good thing, as long as we're humble and careful to stay true to the word.

Yeah, and I think, I'll add, I think the word that you just used, that word humble, is important, because there is a sense in which, and I've seen it, and I've seen it, I know my own failures of this.

Sometimes, you know, the Bible says knowledge puffs up, and sometimes when we feel like we're right, or we feel like we know something, there can be a sense in which that can create pride, and pride, of course, creating a problem, which can lead to a lot of other problems.

And that's my fear for some people, is that they would take their, what they learned from a discernment ministry, and charge like a bull into their church, and try to start fights where maybe a softer or more gracious hand might be, and maybe that's where I, maybe some people would say I'm too nice, but I do think sometimes we are, a chainsaw to a blade of grass is the expression my fellow elder uses that term a lot.

He says, you know, not everything requires a fist. You know, sometimes you can be a chainsaw to a blade of grass, and that's not always how we should do it. And so, when I was talking about how sometimes these things can be harmful, that's my biggest concern, is just when people come to me, and they say, hey, my church is doing this, I say, you know, have you talked to your pastor?

Have you gone to him, and genuinely shared your concerns, rather than trying to start a coalition, or something within the body, or bring division within the body? Have you really tried to do that? And so, that's my point in bringing that up.

So, go ahead, I'm sorry.

Well, I was gonna say that it's something, I've kind of been in the middle of myself, as you might imagine, because as a pew sitter, as I like to call myself, as a pew sitter who's still, you know, very interested in theology and doctrine, and studies it regularly, and it's very important, you're bound to come across things where you have an issue, you have a theological issue at your church, or something that you're concerned about, and the way that you approach that, especially with your pastors, because it's a difficult job, and it is hard on the spirit, it really is, and the last thing that they need is to think, I got guys in the pews reading Protestia all the time, and they're ready to whack me over the head the first time that I don't get something exactly right.

So, I mean, like I've told the pastors of my church, I said, if I have an issue, or a question, or something I'm concerned about, you will hear it from me in private, first and foremost, you will never find yourself on the front page of Protestia, unless we're talking about heresy, in which case, we're still gonna work it through Matthew 18 first, you know, that would be the very last thing, and because they're worried about it, and rightfully so, they should be, it's not, like you said, it's a weapon, it can be wielded, you know, wrongly, and so, as much as we can put our pastor's minds at ease, like this is, you know, as God is my witness, this is going to be something that benefits the church, but you gotta hold me accountable, and I gotta, you know, we gotta hold each other accountable here, and if you see that I'm getting prideful, or I'm doing something that you have a concern with, you gotta bring it to me, don't just let me, don't just let me be out there thinking that everything's okay, you know, we have to be willing to do that for each other.

Amen, and I'm really very glad to hear you say that, because being accountable in our local church is what we should be, and even though you said Protestia is not a ministry of the church, it's a parachurch ministry, you yourself are still accountable, and you have men that you're accountable to, and that's good, I think it's good.

They know exactly what we're doing,.

And they don't wanna do it, I mean, it's not, the Spirit didn't put it on their hearts to do this work specifically, but I told them, like, I want you to be fully aware of what we're doing, I don't wanna ever feel like, and we say this, by the way, on our programs, we say that the information provided is not so that somebody can go be a lone wolf Christian, and hit their pastor over the head every time they don't like something, it is for the edification of the church, and if you're not willing to use the information for that purpose, humbly bring it to the church as iron sharpening iron, turn the program off, this isn't for you, you know?

We try, if you're not a loving, we say it this way, if you're not a loving, giving, serving, faithful member of your local New Testament congregation, this is not your program, this is not your website, you know, go listen to the Christianity Today, you know, Mark Driscoll podcast, or something like that, you're in the wrong place.

Amen, that's very encouraging. So, with all that being said, some of my favorite stuff that I've seen on Protesty, especially recently, you guys posted the Barbie sermon series that the lady's doing, the past, I meant.

She had a Barbie doll, I couldn't believe it, she's like playing with dolls,.

While trying to preach a sermon. She said, wear pink, men wear pink, and I make fun of Methodists, I wear my pink polo, so I was right up my alley. But that's, you know, it is interesting that that's, you know, that's how I found you guys, again, seeing these things on Twitter, seeing these things on Protesty, that there was the Star Wars church, there was, you know, the different crazy things.

And we know that those are problems, we know that that's indicative of a larger health problem in the church. The church, like so many, you know, so many nutrition-wise are addicted to fast food and candy, well, the church is providing, rather than nourishing spiritual food, it's providing spiritual fast food, spiritual junk food, spiritual popcorn and candy, as to connect with the movie theme.

But what do you think, do you think that's the greatest danger? Now, I wanna get more into your mindset as you're putting these things together. Do you think those things are the greatest danger in evangelicalism right now?

Or is there something more that's behind this that's driving it? What do you think is the greatest dangers that are in evangelicalism right now? And I know that could be probably an hour of conversation.

Postmodernism, Man-Pleasing, and the Loss of Biblical Fidelity

Yeah, there's a lot of potential places to fall into.

Yeah, but, and let me ask you one other, are you reformed yourself?

Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I guess I'm a, you know, I'm not purely 1689, but I'm certainly a Calvinist in terms of my adherence to, and people, I mean, even people argue about that, right? Like when you were talking with Doug Wilson, I listened to that, you know, did you call yourself a Harbor Freight Doug Wilson?

Yeah, that's me, I'm the Great Value Harbor Freight knockoff.

Rarely do I laugh out loud listening to a podcast, but that was pretty good. So I mean, I'm probably closer to a John MacArthur where a premillennial Calvinist, dispensational, but not like, I don't have charts on my walls and I'm not trying to predict the second coming next week or something like that.

But in terms of there being a future for the ethnic Israel, I'm partial to that. I'm still working through that, you know, for sure. Let's put it this way, like John MacArthur makes an incredibly convincing case for a guy like me.

That sounds good.

Well, the reason why I asked about reformed is I know that reformed Christians often are charged with being more rigid, more negative, more concerned with error, more, you know, more picky. And so when I ask you, what are the greatest dangers?

You know, somebody might say, Arminianism, you know, is the greatest danger. No, not particularly. Yeah, I would say, you know, to find a classic Arminian anymore is hard to do. You know, most of the guys I run into are provisionists, not Arminians.

You know, they're Leighton Flower guys, you know. It's not a tulip, they got a different flower.

And it's Leighton's. Yeah, Leighton doesn't like us very much. Oh, does he, does he not?

Well, he and I did some shows together, so we have a good working relationship, but obviously He seems like a nice guy. Yeah. I don't think he likes us. Yeah, well, we disagree on a lot, of course.

But that being said, getting back to the question of the greatest dangers. So you certainly wouldn't say the greatest dangers are a Calvinism, Arminianism thing. You would say maybe it's more something deeper.

There's been such a postmodern infiltration into the evangelical church that it's corrupted the thinking of Christians, you know, to the point where we can't even say there's an immovable truth about, name your issue, there's an immovable scriptural truth about this that is timeless, that we can hold to, and is true and effective and applicable in every generation.

You know, instead, everything is contextualized, and not contextualized by necessarily, you know, like external cultural factors, but contextualized by my feelings about it. So my feelings and my subjective view of something become not only the arbiter of truth, but also the goal for Christian ministry.

And I mean, that's why we see crazy Mario sermons and Barbie sermons and Jurassic Park and all of this man-pleasing going on, because that's become the definition of success in Christian ministry. It's not fidelity to the word.

You know, pastors have, in larger evangelicalism, long ago gave up this idea of being brokers of truth, which is what they have been historically. The pastor is in a special seat of being a truth teller, a truth teacher, right, a preacher of the word of God, somebody with a solemn duty.

Long ago, we've given that up, and now pastors are, they're CEOs, they're managers of large organizations. You know, half of the seminary degree is in leadership classes, rather than theology and doctrine.

And that's been a result of the postmodern, really poisoning of thinking itself, infiltrating the church. So I mean, I think that's the largest, just if we were to talk about something that's all-encompassing, in terms of its danger to the church, that's, the first thing I go to is, man, Christians can't think anymore.

Christians can't, they're not holding true to scripture like it never changes, and it's always solid and always reliable. They're using themselves and their own emotions as a measuring stick for what they're going to accept and what they're going to practice.

Regulative Discernment and Testing Novel Teaching by Scripture

So if a Christian is, let's say, in their local church, and they're seeing these things, they're seeing the Barbie sermons, they're seeing the Jurassic Park, and it's not just movie stuff, it's other stuff too, that's an obvious, you know, this is something that's, man, I know that's not cool.

But what would you say are the things that are often overlooked? And maybe that might be a hard question, but I'm kind of going, in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, how do we warn people when it's not such a big, you know, to me, a Barbie sermon is a glowing, blinking sign that says, this is not good.

But they're Right, I mean, we generally would call those, that church a synagogue of Satan. Yeah. But by the time you're doing a Barbie sermon, you've long ago let go of what the Bible teaches church is supposed to be, and you've decided to basically reinvent it in your own image.

And in the image of what the flesh desires, and like, that's, we would say, if you're a church that's preaching Barbie, you need to leave. Go find yourself a solid church, as an Orthodox Christian. That should immediately set off about eight different red flags.

Yeah. But you're right, there are churches in kind of a middling gray zone, where it's like, you're not very clearly apostate, and you're not as, perhaps, as solid as you should be, but you're sort of in the middle, and usually the sign that we see of that, and I mean, I hesitate to broad brush, because, I mean, we really try to name names.

I think the Bible teaches us to mark teachers, not just teaching, or not groups of people, but actually say, hey, this guy has taught this falsely at this church. You know, we try to get specific. People don't like that, but I think that's the right thing to do, in terms of the way Christians are supposed to approach one another, but if I was to generalize, there are a fair number of churches who, they sort of go along to get along, and they practice what I like to call normative discernment.

You know, we know, like, in worship theology, we talk about normative worship versus regulative worship, right? If we're Reformed, we're usually much more on the regulative side. Go to Scripture, see what it says to practice, and then emulate that, versus the normative, you know, sort of the Lutheran idea of, if the Bible doesn't specifically forbid it, we're good to go, you know?

Do whatever you want, as long as the Bible doesn't have a specific verse that says, thou shalt not fly into the service on a zip line, or whatever, right? But there's a lot of Christians that practice normative discernment, as well, where it's like, you see teachers out there, basically, coming up with novel concepts, novel terms, and really, when you get underneath them, they're not novel.

They're the same old false teachings they've always been, but they hide them under new terminology, and hide them under new framework, you know, new ideas, and to the normative discerner, they would say, hey, I don't see a verse in the Bible that specifically says critical race theory is a sinful philosophy.

I don't see it directly in there. Therefore, do as much as you can until you come to a verse that says, thou shalt not do, yada, yada, yada, yada. Normative discernment. But the problem is that if you practice it that way, false teachers, they shift their terminology.

They shift their framework. They come up with new combinations of false teaching, hide them in Christianese, and they sort of look like they might be legit, and rather than the normative side, we would say, no, you should be practicing regulative discernment, where you go to scripture, you know what it teaches, you form a solid worldview, and a solid biblical and systematic theology for what you believe about all of these things so you can more easily recognize error no matter how it's phrased or no matter what words they use or no matter how many Christianese-sounding terms they sort of try to hide it in, you'll still know.

You'll still see that it isn't right. And of course, avail yourself of websites like Protestia, where we're doing that work on a regular basis.

That always helps, I think. Yeah, and again, I think that's an important thing to say is what's going on in the world is hard for one person to know about. It's so funny because we're so connected, compared to where we were 50 years ago, the world is an absolutely different place, and we know things faster than we've ever known them, we hear things faster, but we still, it's almost impossible to know everything about what's going on.

And I bring this up because even with our interaction tonight, we didn't know each other before we began this interview, and so how did I learn about you? I went and looked up some of your videos, and I learned that, and I even talked to my friend Jason Whitaker, who is a fellow podcaster, and he spoke highly of you, which was nice.

Dear old Christian. Yes, yeah, yeah. Love Jason. Yeah, and so, but he and I have been friends now for a while, and I respect his opinion, and so I got a chance to talk to him, and the fact that he spoke highly of you was encouraging to me.

But when it comes to, people will ask me all the time, they'll say, well, pastor, what do you think about John Doe, this Bible teacher? And I'm like, I don't know, I've never read anything by them, I don't know who they are.

So I can't tell you whether or not their books are good. I can't tell you, because I can't read everything. I can't study everything. So there is a value to you guys, and I don't know if you know Steadfast Women, which is a ministry, I had them on the show, and they do this on behalf of women, and trying to help them discern good and bad, and things like that.

And so, yeah, I think there's value in it, but I think it's like anything, it has its place and its value, and like you said, as long as people put it in its right place, then it's good.

It's just one of the things that any faithful Christian should be focused on. I mean, for all the time that you could be reading a discernment website or something like that, there's also time you could be studying Christology, studying soteriology, just doing helps work in the local churches, lots of things Christians can spend their time on.

And what we try to do is hopefully, because we have a specific focus here, take a little bit of that load off of the regular, and even like with pastors. I mean, like I said, pastors can't, they can't know about everything.

And so to provide a resource that's, and not just a resource, but also real people behind it that want to be held accountable, that want to, you know, like me, I want to learn more. I want to know more.

I want to really solidify what I believe and what the Bible teaches about all these different things. And I mean, there have been times, I mean, like guys at my church have called me and talked to me for an hour about, dude, are you sure you should have said it that way?

And that's a valuable conversation. You know, probably 20 years younger me would have been like, you don't know what you're talking about. You know, you're just being judgmental or something. But like me in my 40s, I'm like, did he have a point?

You might have had a point. Maybe I shouldn't have said it that way. You know, that's all we try to do. And it's, you know, we don't always get it right. We're still human beings.

No, absolutely. And I think those, having those voices in your life are important. You know, what's funny is I'm at a point now where the voices of those people often comes in while I'm doing something, like while I'm writing an article or while I'm fixing to video something, I'll hear one of my elders or I'll hear my, I'll hear one of my good friends, you know, Richard or Matthew or Jake, one of the guys I have on the program a lot of times, they're, we call them the CWAC crew.

CWAC is Conversation With a Calvinist. So that's our little thing. And my group of guys that I trust, I'll hear their voice in my head. And I'll like, ah, maybe I shouldn't do that.

And so. If there's something that I'm concerned about, like maybe I shouldn't say it this way, I'll send it to the, like the private chat group that I have with, you know, some of the pulp and pen guys and all that.

I'm like, what do you guys think about this? I'm like, dude, no. Or just rephrase it. Like, I get your point. I know what you're trying to say, but it would be more effective and less controversial and people wouldn't get distracted if you said it this way instead.

And so, I mean, we rely on each other for that, like any brothers would, but it is weird to do it like online over the internet. I mean, you know, some of these guys, like guys I've never met in person.

Yeah. And that's something people have to realize about something like Protestia is, you know, like we got guys, I mean, I'm in Colorado, but we got guys in Canada. We got guys in the East Coast. We got guys all over the country doing this work together.

And the only reason that that's possible, I mean, aside from the gift of technology that we take, that we of course take full advantage of, is because we have a common faith. You know, we have a brotherhood that extends beyond any technological limitations in Christ.

And because we have that unity, it's able to work, you know, somehow, which I still find amazing. You know, it is very much a blessing.

Christian Nationalism, Tribalism, and the Need for Careful Judgment

Yeah, absolutely. And so within that group, how many are actually active contributors to Protestia? How many people do you have that actually write for you guys?

It's, we got a couple that are heavily active, myself, of course, being one of them. Then we have kind of a stable of contributors as well that will post things on there. They'll usually send that stuff through an editor to make sure that it's kind of worded the way, and we double check it.

Although we have a bad, we have a bad habit of publishing stuff with like misspellings, which drives me up a wall. So I'm like chasing down, you know, spelling errors on articles that are already up there.

And it's very much a labor of love. It's very much a, you know, citizen or pew level journalism for sure. And we like it to be that way because there are gonna be those times when it's somebody that we really like and we really respect, and still we need to say something.

It's rare, fortunately, it's rare. But every once in a while I have to publish an article, you know, take an issue with, you know, something Doug Wilson said or whatever, whatever it is, somebody who I respect and I'm, you know, I think I'm blessed by and I consider a brother in Christ, but there's an issue.

And so we gotta take issue with it and not being connected to, you know, like a larger parachurch ministry or even a church specifically, it helps in that we don't get tribal with it. We're gonna publish this or not publish that based off of the tribe that we wanna see advancing here.

You know, like with the debate on Christian nationalism, that's a big deal. I got buddies of mine and people I respect and I'm blessed by and I really like what they do on both sides of the debate. You know, I mean, I got guys who are very much anti-Christian nationalism and guys that are very much pro-Christian nationalism.