Fundamentalism, Deconstructionism, and KJV onlyism (Interview wit Nathan Cravatt) pt 1

All right, thank you all for tuning in tonight. We have a great episode lined up for you, excited to be talking fundamentalism, deconstructionism, and KJV -only -ism.

I hope we can get it all in on this episode. Here we go, the Here I Stand Theology Podcast.

Here I stand, I can do no other. Will you recant or will you not?

Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer.

Unless I am convinced by scripture and by plain reason, and not by popes and councils who have so often contradicted themselves.

My conscience is captive to the word of God. To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

I cannot, and I will not, here

I stand. I can do no other.

God help me, God help me.

All right, welcome to the Here I Stand Theology Podcast. We are a podcast devoted to a pointed and spirited debate of biblical doctrine.

As well, I would like to mention the Here I Stand Theology Podcast is a ministry of Rev. Ramada Baptist Church, meaning this, that as pastor and an elder there at the church,

I am under accountability to the other elders. I serve the congregation, and so everything that we do and say here ought to be a good representation of biblical conduct.

Our conversation ought to reflect that which glorifies Christ. So, in that event, if there are any issues, any concerns, if we get out of line in any way, if we are in any way unbiblical in the doctrine and the truth that we are speaking, talk to us, shoot us a text, shoot us a message, let us know if we are straying from the truth, if we are not above reproof, rebuke, and correction in the faith.

So, that being said, today we have an exciting episode. It's going to be a concentrated episode.

We are not going to get to everything that we want to get to today, but we are going to get some good stuff today.

So, that being said, let's bring in our guest tonight.

Our guest is Nathan Cravat. Nathan Cravat was born into an

IFB home. He quickly became a pastor's kid and a missionary's kid and did his best to prove all the stereotypes true.

He grew up in an IFB boys home and attended IFB schools until he was kicked out during his senior year.

Now, this is on their webpage. This is not in any way a degrading comment. This is simply something

I'm sure that Nathan has approved himself. But his life was radically changed by the gospel when he was 25, and he immediately felt the call to preach.

He served as a youth pastor for 16 years until God led his family to plant a church in 2016.

Nathan is the director of Young America Ministries and currently serves as an elder teaching pastor of Hope Church in Trenton, Georgia.

So, that being said, let's bring Nathan in here. All right, Nathan, welcome to the

Here I Stand Theology Podcast. Thank you, Claude. Man, I am blown away by your intro.

So, I've listened to, I sampled some of your episodes when you asked me to come on, but I have not heard the intro yet.

I don't know if that's newer or if you just do that on YouTube, but that was awesome.

The video, the audio, everything. I'm just like, I'm proud to be on here, man. Thank you very much.

Well, praise the Lord. You'll hear that a lot, so all glory goes to God on that.

So, Nathan, here, again, we're just going to jump right in, go right into this. We got a lot to get to in a short time to get there.

So, if you have sampled us, you probably are aware when we have guests on that we ask a foundational question, okay?

This question kind of sets the standard and the tone for the whole podcast. So, we'll go ahead and get this question out.

Actually, for you, I have two questions. Normally, it's just one. Let's go. But for you, we've got one.

So, the question to you is this. If you had to arm wrestle

J .C. Groves or Brian Edwards, who would win? Wow.

I think J .C. could beat me. I mean, I feel pretty sure that I could put up a fight.

I would be very happy if I could beat him, but I think

J .C. could beat me. Brian's been a little sickly the last few weeks, so I think I could probably take

Brian right now in arm wrestling. I wouldn't want to fight with Brian, but arm wrestling, yeah, I think I would try to take him.

But J .C. would slam me. I just have no doubt whatsoever. Would you kick him in the shin underneath the table to get an advantage?

Whatever I would have to do, I would probably throw something at him or distract him or, yeah.

Ask him a theology question and then, yeah, definitely. All is fair in love and war.

That's exactly right. So, the next question, okay, you probably get this all the time, but I'm going to ask this anyway.

I haven't heard anybody ask you, but I think you should get this if you're not already getting this. So, watch your screen.

Here's the question. Have these two guys ever been seen in the same room at the same time?

The answer to that question is no. And you can interpret that.

You can do your hermeneutical methods. You can interpret that any way you feel fit. Thank you.

That was a great answer. That was a great answer because I'd already planned to guide you into that anyway.

So, do you get that a lot? I do not. Actually, almost everybody that I meet and talk to for the first time tell me

I look like somebody. And I think that's because there's so many – how do you say this in 2022?

I have so many roots and nationalities.

I'm a Hans 57, if you want to know my pedigree. I have a little bit of everything.

I would tell you what my grandmother said we are, but that's not suitable for the air. Basically, a cleaned -up version.

We're a little bit of everything. And Italian, Spanish, Irish, Native American, all sorts of things.

So, yeah, I think there's a little bit of everything in me, and that's why I probably look like somebody to everyone.

So, it was Shia LaBeouf to me from the time I saw you on that debate. It was like, is that Shia LaBeouf?

Well, thank you. I think I could definitely beat him in an arm wrestling match if we could ever manage to get the two of us into a room, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So, well, obviously. So, here's just a sample of some of your work then.

Since you are not taking credit for being him, this is a word of encouragement.

Do it! Just do it! I love that.

I like that, man. Motivation for a new year. Come on, 2022. All right.

So, let's just start here then.

Share with us. I know I read a little bit of your bio there from your webpage. Just share with us a little bit about you, how you came to Saving Faith in Christ.

Yeah, gladly. Thank you for the opportunity to do that. I do want to back up just a little bit and tell you that I need to update my bio because I've been in Anderson, South Carolina, as the associate pastor and youth pastor of Gospel Light Church, and I've been here since April.

So, I've had over nine months to update that, and I actually thought

I did. So, I kind of want to blame it on somebody else, but I need to take credit for it. So, I need to update that bio, but everything else is true up to that point.

And after four and a half years, the Lord led us away from the church that we planted. We were able to transition it over to the elder team that was there, three other elders, and they just brought another one on, and the church 100 % voted in one of the elders as the lead teaching elder.

So, God's hand was just all over that, man. I'm so proud of that church, so proud of them.

God created me as a pioneer, and I'm not scared to start something.

I'm not scared to move out, but God has not equipped me yet. I'm working on it, but so far,

God has not blessed me naturally with a whole lot of administrative skills and organizational skills.

A pioneer just gets out and gets the job done and makes something happen, and that's my strength.

Now, here in Anderson, I am trying to become a little bit better and get some of those rough edges knocked off, and my lead pastor here,

Chad Gamble, is working with me, and y 'all pray for him because I'm growing. But, yeah, we're glad to be here in Anderson.

My family loves it. My oldest son, I have four children, and my oldest son is an adult.

He's 25 years old, 26 years old almost, and he has moved out. He graduated with his master's degree and is living in Nashville, Tennessee, and I guess that's pretty close to you, right?

You're in Tennessee somewhere, aren't you? Yeah, I'm in Knoxville. I'm in East Tennessee. Okay, well, he loves your football team, so there you go.

Go Vols for my son, Austin. I'm an Alabama fan, so I may have to bleep that out.

Man, I'm sorry. I'm a Florida State fan, so we're just going to be all mixed up today. They let you guys live in Knoxville?

Yes. I would have thought you'd had to do a survey or something to purchase property there.

Yeah, yeah. It's especially hard on the church because during football season, right after prayer, we say amen, and then we need to say roll tide.

Oh, absolutely, yeah. You're compelled to do that. So, anyway, my son is living there, and my three daughters moved here with us to Anderson, and I've been married to Carrie, my beautiful wife, for coming up on 26 years.

And, man, God has been so good to us. We were two kids that knew almost nothing when we got married.

We both thought we were Christians, and we were really just playing games. We've been raised in the church, and we knew a lot about God and about church and theology, but didn't really know

God personally. I'll start my testimony there and try to keep it brief.

We were married right out of high school, and I was raised as a preacher's kid, came up in independent fundamental

Baptist circles, camp meeting circles, King James only circles, and my wife, bless her little heart, was raised in the

Nazarene church. She had just never heard of anything like what she was about to encounter when

I took her to church with me for the very first time. Man, she literally looked at me at church and said, why is he screaming?

And I was like, I guess that's just how we do it with the

Baptists and kind of made a joke about it. And then about halfway through, he started using inappropriate language and she was just like, is this a joke?

And I was like, you know, yeah, I think maybe, but no, it's not.

And I don't want to repeat what he said, but he was very comfortable in talking about other people groups and things like that and just kind of a backwoods comedy, as you would say, about people of different nationalities.

And it just wasn't really funny, but I was raised in that type of environment, the camp meeting environment.

You can just about get away with saying anything. And the worse it is, the more shock jock value, the louder the amens are going to be in the camp meeting circles.

That's what it's all about, how many amens you can get, as you probably saw from the debate. I mean, come on.

Have you ever seen an amen section? Just be honest with me. Did a little bit of the inside of you wish that you could get a little bit of that in your church on Sunday morning?

Oh, always, always. But I'll reflect the honesty. When you were talking about the colorful language used, it made me think of when

I was a teenager, Bobby Thompson, the eagle preacher. Oh, yeah. He would use the

N -word. Yeah. Yeah. There was one story he told about sitting on the front porch and trying to hug up on his girlfriend and what she said to him about after that.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And let me just say, I don't approve of that.

I'm not okay with that. But he was not out of the ordinary. Right. That didn't even turn heads.

I mean, I didn't even notice it because that was just commonplace. Yeah. But I do want to say, because I always try to point out the positives in my upbringing and some things

I'm very, very thankful for. And, man, I do remember Bobby Thompson, right?

Yeah, the eagle preacher. Yeah, yeah. I was getting his name mixed up with another guy.

But, anyway, I remember him multiple times. I heard him like my whole childhood all the way up through being a teenager.

And I remember those sermons on the eagles, man. I loved them. I thought they were awesome. And he was the guy that was preaching when

I found my favorite Bible verse and my life verse. And I will never forget the church

I was sitting in. It was Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle. And he was preaching. It was a big old -timey rock church in Ringgold, Georgia.

And he was preaching, and he referenced Isaiah 55, 8 and 9, where he says,

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, says the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts and my ways than your ways.

Amen. And that's King James Version, and I probably misquoted a little bit of it. But, man,

I absolutely didn't know it at that point. But that was, I think, when I became

Reformed, because something about that verse captured me as an 8-, 9-, 10 -year -old boy.

I don't remember how old I was, but I was definitely under 10 years old. And something about that verse just captured me in the bigness of God, like how great he was.

And if his thoughts were so much higher than mine, I could trust him with my life. And if his ways were so much greater than my ways, why would

I try to write my own story? And that was just a huge point in my life. And for the past almost 40 years, that's been my life verse.

And I have him to thank for that. So definitely some good memories there, even though I try not to learn a whole lot from some of his tactics.

So my wife and I got married, and, yeah, she was baptized by fire into that world.

And she just was immediately like, we're not raising our kids in this kind of church. And I was like, amen, sister, we're not.

But then I had to break her heart and basically tell her, but I'm not taking them to a Nazarene church either.

We're going to have to find a middle ground. So we ended up finding a healthy Southern Baptist church that had actually just transitioned from being an independent

Baptist church, and they still use the King James. So it was a pretty easy transition for me, because I still had a lot of the legalism and fundamentalism in me that, you know, some of it was good and some of it was not very good.

I would argue at the drop of a hat and in the middle of me arguing, like the person I was arguing with was just like, it's not that big of a deal.

Why are you so upset about it? And then he would be like, and why do you feel that way?

And I would just pause and look at him like, oh, wait, I'm supposed to argue this, but I don't know why. And I can't back it up with scripture.

I just had those talking points, and it had always, that's what I had always believed and it had always been right.

So moving into that church, God used that church to really introduce me to the concept of grace, and yet still have some solid

Bible teaching and preaching. And I don't know if you're familiar with the name Tom Hayes. Tom Hayes came through and preached at that church and multiple other, mostly independent

Baptist pastors. Dana Williams was one of the independent Baptist evangelists that came through.

And I was actually saved the night or the next morning after he finished preaching our revival,

God wouldn't let me sleep that night. I got up and went to work the next morning and I was just living a double life.

I was living a lie and wanted to believe and thought I believed and thought I was a Christian, but my life just was not matching up.

There had never been any true repentance in my life and through a course of bad decisions and looking at possibly losing my family and just struggling with some horrible decisions in my life and having a difficult marriage just because we were both kids and we truly didn't know the

Lord. I came to a breaking point that next morning after that revival service ended on a

Wednesday night and God just met me in the garage on a construction site and I couldn't work.

Nobody else showed up that day. I was on this construction site all by myself. And I tried to work for about 10 minutes and I just was crying.

And I took my tool belt off, went and got my Bible out of my truck, sat down in the garage and said, God, I'm not leaving until you do something in my life.

I need you. And that was where I finally repented of my sins and said,

God, here's my life. It's a blank slate. Please, you do something for me. It wasn't, okay, I'm going to do this.

It was, God, you save me. I need help. I'm calling out on you. I've made a mess of my life.

I'm ready to do it your way. And that was where everything changed. And like you said, immediately felt the call to preach.

And it happened in the middle of a prayer. I don't really believe philosophically or theologically in prophetic praying, but something happened while I was praying.

And I know I'm making you uncomfortable. I'm doing it on purpose. All your listeners are out there like, whoa, what's happening?

You're not making me uncomfortable at all, brother. Believe me, we're on the same wavelength. Yeah. So I was praying and just like trying to be like,

Lord, you know, I need this. Lord, please do this. Please do this. And then out of my mouth, I hear these words. Lord, I want to do what my dad did.

And my dad worked with youth in children's homes. And when I said that, I like stopped because it shocked me.

And I was like, well, what was that? Like it was it was almost like it wasn't my voice speaking.

And it was it was strange. Probably six months before that, a visiting pastor who was very influential in my life had stopped in the middle of his sermon or at the beginning of his sermon after he read his text.

And he just stopped and just looked out at the audience for maybe 30 seconds. And everybody was like,

OK, what's happening? He was an older, very much 70 plus year old gentleman and loved this guy.

John Paul Parker was his name, pastored for over 50 years all around Somerville, Georgia, Lafayette, Georgia, that area.

And yes, that is how they pronounce it, Lafayette, Georgia. And for everybody listening out there.

And he was preaching and he just paused. And after it felt like 20, 30 seconds, he just looked at me.

I was on the second or third row and he said, Nathan, come up here. And he called me, boy. He said, Nathan, come up here, boy.

And I was like, OK. So I walked up and he just stopped and he just started crying, put his hands on my shoulders.

I'm not even saved yet at this point, looking back and just puts his hands on my shoulders and just starts shaking and weeping.

And he said, God has a call on your life. He's going to use you to preach the gospel.

And he just call it what you want to. It felt like he was prophesying over me in the power of the

Holy Spirit. And it absolutely shook me up and rocked my world. And I wrote it in my I have a whole page in the back of my

Bible. Still have that Bible where God just shook, shook me in that moment and then eventually came to faith.

And then God just put me in this whirlwind where it almost feels like, you know, he made me run through a gauntlet.

The first 15 years of ministry and marriage and and it was tough. And it seems like all of hell and Satan tried to do everything to get me out of the ministry and destroy my marriage.

And God was faithful, man. He was so, so faithful. And through all that time,

I had to had that whole pendulum swing from legalism to liberalism to, you know,

I was I was flirting with the whole emergent movement because it looked cool to a young 21 year old guy.

And praise the Lord for Kevin DeYoung and his buddy, I forget his name, that wrote the book, While We're Not Emergent.

That was one of the things that brought me back from the brink. And and thank God that pendulum stopped right around reformed theology.

And God rocked my world with with reformed theology and the doctrines of grace.

And and not what I had always heard character, caricaturized as being, but what true reformed theology teaches.

And I don't I don't go around waving a banner, waving a flag. People ask me all the time, are you Calvinist?

And I'm like, no, I'm not what you mean when you ask me if I'm Calvinist. But I say

I'm reformed because I can I think I can explain that a little bit better. And then I have a ton of friends that are just all out

Calvinist. They have the tattoo, they have the Luther beer, and they're they're wide open.

And I'm fine with that, too. But God has put me in a unique position where I've been able to influence people on both sides.

But the influence in my life from reformed theology, from guys like John MacArthur, before I even knew he was reformed and Calvinistic, to discovering

John Piper through his biography series, to starting to read

R .C. Sproul and all that. Man, God just just rocked my world, this little fundamentalist

Baptist heart of mine. He rocked it with the gospel. And I'm just I'm in love with Jesus and give him total 100 percent credit for every good thing that I've done, all the bad stuff

I have to take credit for. But Jesus is is everything to me. And I'm honored to be serving him in the ministry.

Praise the Lord, Nathan. That is wonderful, sir. Thank you for sharing that. So in our communications back and forth, you had to correct me.

Actually, you had to correct me, actually, because I kept wanting to say and top reforming fundamentalist.

And so let me ask you this question. So you you are co -host of the

Recovering Fundamentalist podcast. So tell us a talk.

Let's talk a little bit, as I mentioned in the notes, we'll talk specifically and candidly about the issues within the

IFB movement that they've had throughout the years, obviously. And again, we're not pigeonholing the

IFB. Every church has its problems because human beings are involved.

Particularly, you know, where you're all's podcast is coming from. What does it mean to be recovering?

And let's define fundamentalist. Actually, let's let's do that. Let's start with fundamentalist in the

IFB sense versus the general sense. Yeah, I would just say the historic sense of what it means to be a fundamentalist is that the fundamentalist movement was started to unite

Christians and I'll I'll admit that it was used to unite Christians against something negative, against false doctrine.

And that was theological liberalism. But it was a uniting effort that was trying to bring people together across denominations.

And it was completely an interdenominational movement.

And there were different Bible versions that were used. It was just to unite people around the five fundamentals, the inerrancy of the word.

And I could normally list them out. My mind's going blank right now. But there are five historic fundamentals that people had to affirm to be a solid

Christian and or to be an actual Christian. So those are the inspiration of the

Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the belief that Christ's death was an atonement for sin.

So that's penal substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection of Christ and the historical reality of Christ's miracles.

Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to. Thank you for doing that, because I can usually just say them and my mind just went blank after that first one.

And I didn't want to get them wrong. It's funny. There was another podcast recently that ended up saying there were six fundamentals.

And it's funny because they were kind of speaking out against us and they didn't even realize how many fundamentals there were in the fundamentalist movement.

But that's typical. And hey, we all make mistakes. I just reduced it to one.

So I can't really say anything about them. But so a historic fundamentalist would have been someone who held to that.

But the fundamentalist movement was quickly split and hijacked.

It quickly moved to a separatist movement that I think is what we saw reflected in the 50s and 60s and the independent fundamental

Baptist movement. And then in the 70s and 80s with Howles and other guys like that.

And so originally it was a uniting movement around five fundamentals of the faith that were honestly a lowest common denominator of what it means to be a

Christian. Like if you don't believe these things, then just don't call yourself a Christian. If you don't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture because you don't have any solid ground to stand on.

If you don't believe in the virgin birth of Christ, then you can't claim that he's deity. So there's claims the

Bible's lying about who he is. So all of those things one by one, it's like a stack of dominoes.

One of them goes, they all go. And I love Al Mohler's a little bit refined way to put it, the theological triage where he talks about there's first level, second level and third level things.

The first level things are things that you have to believe to be a Christian, like the Trinity and different things like that.

And then, you know, you move to second and third level things that you can disagree about. But ultimately, that's what fundamentalism was.

And what was your what was the other part of your question? Well, basically, recovering, what does it mean that you're recovering fundamentalist?

Obviously, that's in context of the IFB, correct? Yes. Yes, sir. So we Brian Edwards, J .C.

Groves and myself, we're all we're all the three three hosts of the

Recovering Fundamentalist podcast. In the very beginning, J .C. Groves and myself met in a restaurant in Chattanooga.

I believe it was Mission Barbecue. Praise the Lord for barbecue. And we met there.

What better place to talk about starting a podcast than a barbecue restaurant? So we were we were sitting there and bouncing names off each other like X Fundy and all this other stuff.

And we wanted it to kind of get people's attention. And and somewhere in the recesses of my mind,

I said, what about Recovering Fundamentalist? And I wasn't sure about it. But J .C. Groves was like, whoa, that's it.

That's the name. Let's go with that. And we didn't invent that name because I mean, if you look up on YouTube, Mark Lowry did a skit on recovering fundamentalism.

There are one or two other books out there that, you know, people wrote and self -published that are confessions of a recovering fundamentalist and different things like that.

So those words have been bannered around together, but never like anything really substantial.

So we did what all good Baptist preachers do, and we stole the name and took it for our own.

And there was not a podcast out there named that. So we so we ran with that and the name as we discussed it and wrote out our mission statement and developed that.

Basically, the name recovering means two different things. First of all, we believe there are a whole lot of people out there that were influenced by legalism, whatever denomination they were a part of, because fundamentalism runs across runs the gamut across, you know,

Presbyterian, Church of God, just Baptist, whatever. There's a lot of fundamentalists out there and there's a lot of legalists out there.

And so we do believe there are a lot of people that need to recover. And we admitted that we are still recovering after all these years.

I hadn't been in a, you know, a true, solid, legalistic, independent Baptist church in 15 years at this point.

And yeah, I still had things in me that I know I still need to to work through.

And we know there are a lot of people out there. And the people that God really put on our heart to start this podcast for were the people that were out of church that had walked away from God or they walked away from a misrepresentation of God.

And we wanted to tell them, hey, you don't you don't have to leave church. You don't have to become an atheist.

You don't have to even become a theological liberal. You can be a Bible believer.

You can be a true Christian and not associate with angry, independent, fundamental

Baptist, the legalistic type. And then that's the first part of the name, which is obvious.

Everybody gets that, oh, you know, they need to recover. Those poor guys, they're recovering from fundamentalism.

It really messed their life up. If you listen to our intro, there's there's some really good words in there about love.

I love your intro. It is so it is killer. Thank you. And then and then the second aspect that we really felt most challenged about with the name recovering was that we want to recover the name fundamentalist from those people who have hijacked it.

We we believe true fundamentalism is united around a core set of beliefs that can have a lot of unity across denominations, across different Bible versions, across different dress codes.

And that's what true fundamentalism started as. I call it 1910 fundamentalism, because that was when they started writing the fundamentals of the faith.

That's the doctrine to the truth. The doctrinal deliverance. Right. Of 19. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I think they continue writing it and finished it around 1950 or 1915, something like that.

So five five years, maybe more that they were writing those those books and the four volumes, 12 different essays.

And so that that is really where we where we started out with the name recovering fundamentalist.

That is awesome. So how did how did you you get connect?

Obviously, you just told us about you and J .C., how you all got connected. How did you how did you three get connected with Brian Edwards?

So J .C. and I have been friends for, you know, 15, 20 years at that point and just just were brothers.

And wherever we moved to different churches and different ministries, we worked together a few times. And as God took us different places, we just always stayed in touch.

We just from the second I met J .C. Groves, we were brothers and there was just never any like just never any doubt about it.

We I don't know if we've ever had a fight. We've had some deep discussions, but we just we're just brothers and love that guy.

And Brian Edwards is another man that just is a was an immediate brother of mine. And Brian Edwards and J .C.

Groves had crossed paths multiple times and sang and preached in the same place, but had never met one another.

But then when I finally introduced them on a phone call, they immediately knew all the same people, had preached in all the same revivals and sung in all the same churches and concerts.

And, you know, they had both been Southern gospel singers. And so they they had run in the same circles.

And man, they they immediately had more in common than J .C. and I did just because all the people they knew.

So after that conversation, J .C. called me back. He goes, yep, he's in he's he's the one.

You're right. Let's get him. But Brian Edwards had helped me plant Hope Church in Trenton, Georgia. And he just we actually met on Facebook.

There's a lot of nightmare stories out there about Facebook. But Brian Edwards and I met because some people were attacking his dad about King James only issue.

And his dad was so gracious as he always is. And so was. And I just stumbled across this.

I wasn't friends with him. It was a friend of a friend and I stumbled across these people attacking him. And I just made a comment.

I said, hey, Brother Craig, I heard you preaching growing up and I'm proud of you for your stand.

Just keep preaching the word. Don't worry about these people that just want to throw rocks. You just keep doing what God's calling you to do.

And within two days, Brian Edwards had private messaged me and said, thank you so much for standing up for my daddy.

I appreciate that. And then we started tracking down how we knew each other. And all the different places we had been around each other, but had never actually met.

And, you know, strange, strange set of circumstances. A few months later, he out of the blue invited me to preach at one of his pastor's conferences on youth ministry.

Just from the phone conversations that we had had. And I showed up and preached and he didn't kick me out.

He let me stay. And I ended up going back for a few years after that. A few years later, ended up planning

Hope Church. And the church I'm at now, I actually met Chad Gamble, the pastor, the founding and planning pastor of this church at one of Brian Edwards' uplift conferences.

I think it was the very first one that I spoke at. So the Lord moves in mysterious ways. And, you know,

Brian Edwards, J .C. Groves and Nathan Cravat, we have caused quite a stir and people either love us or hate us.

Very few are in the middle of that. But hey, whichever end of the spectrum they fall on, we're having the time of our lives.

And we're really enjoying what God has called us to do. That is wonderful.

So let's do this. I mean, dude, we got a whole lot that we could talk about.

Craig, again, let's just, you know, talk candid more a little bit here.

So I think just to share a little bit with you.

So I will say this and I'll tell anybody this. You know, I got saved in a

Southern Baptist Church, March 1987 at a youth conference. I wasn't in the actual Southern Baptist Church, but I was in Nashville, Tennessee.

Got saved way up in the balcony. I got born again without a doubt. But so many folks and I'll say, looking back now,

I've been reformed since I got saved. Right. The Lord called me to preach at age 17. You and I are close, close in age.

I'm 48, 49 this year. But the

Lord called me to preach at age 17. I know looking back, I didn't know

I was reformed then, but I know I've been reformed as far as doctrine goes all the way through.

I just never knew how to articulate it. And I think there is a there is as there is in the

IFB movement, in all the other movements, even in the reform movement. There is that there's that that challenge of just being able to say that it's not my way.

That's always the right way. It's not my ideas that are always the right ideas. Like, you know, you've read it a few minutes ago.

You thought, oh, you know, you're you're maybe getting you asked me if I was getting uncomfortable.

No, because that unlike most, I mean, the reformed have the same problem that the

IFBs do. They go, they go over into the ditch of legalism or they go off into the other ditch of hyper

Calvinism or hyper reform. Right. Yeah. So so there's no you know, there's really as we're talking, dude,

I am identifying 110 percent. You know, I just want you to know that.

So, Nathan, what have what have you learned just over the past couple of years as far as working with the

Recovering Fundamentals podcast and your view and your communication of the faith in the gospel to others?

Yeah, that's that's a really good question, because when

I started this out, you know, I. I don't think I wouldn't have worded it this way, but I kind of thought

I had this thing figured out and I thought if there's any topic I can talk at length on, it's this one. But man,

God has taught me so much in the last two years about some of the legalism and the fundamentalism, the negative side of fundamentalism still in me that, you know,

I just was was not gracious enough to a lot of the people. And man, I have met so many good, solid, independent, fundamental

Baptists that have sent me private messages that have emailed me and that have said, hey, man, we agree on more than we disagree on.

And I'm thankful for what you're doing. And most of them tell me I would get in trouble if anybody knew

I was sending you this message. We've had I've had lunch, breakfast, dinner, exchanged emails, long phone calls.

I'm talking hundreds of pastors over the past two years that understand where I'm coming from, but they're still in the

IFB world. And one of the best experiences I had with that, which was really a turning point for me, was

I woke up one morning and someone sent me this happens almost every day. Someone sent me an email or a link to a guy who wrote an article on Twitter that said, why

I'm not a recovering fundamentalist. And I was like, oh, boy, here we go. So I opened it up and started reading it.

And, you know, I'm just got my guns cocked. I'm ready to go start firing back. And as I started reading that,

I was like, man, this guy is very gracious. He makes a lot of really good points. And I can talk to a guy like this.

So I just commented on it. And his name was Dave Young. And I said, Dave, thank you for your very kind and truthful article that you wrote.

And we would love to have you on the podcast to discuss why you're not a recovering fundamentalist. And he graciously agreed to come on.

And it was one of my favorite to this day, one of my favorite episodes. And I do say that about multiple episodes.

And everybody makes fun of me for that. But everything's my favorite, whatever I'm doing right now, my favorite meal.

So this is my favorite podcast at the moment. After your intro, it really is up close to the top of the list.

That was awesome. But, yeah, he did a great job. And he challenged us on, you know, broad brushing people and stuff like that.

And I think that was a turning point in our ministry where we started being like, yeah, there are a lot of legalistic independent fundamental

Baptist churches. But there are a lot of them that are balanced, that are healthy, that are trying to be healthy.

And, you know, I don't know. We know there are no perfect churches.

There are no perfect pastors. So we may have different things that, you know, our strengths and different weaknesses.

But God has shown me that there are a lot of faithful brothers in the independent Baptist church. And, man, I'm thankful for a thousand and one things that God blessed my life with growing up in independent fundamental

Baptist churches. Now, there are a lot of things that I'm not afraid to back down on and I'm willing to take a stand against.

Out of context preaching. Nonsense conspiracy theories about Bible versions.

I'm willing to stand against that. Man -made standards that can't be backed up by Scripture.

I'm willing to stand against that. I'm willing to stand against, you know, just twisting the

Scripture to make it mean anything you want to and playing fast and loose with Scripture and interpreting it wrongly.

I'll stand against those things and I'll speak against those things. But I think the accusation that in the beginning days we broad brushed all the independent fundamental

Baptist churches. I think there's some truth to that. I don't think we ever said every single independent fundamental

Baptist church is legalistic. But, you know, from our experience as three pastors growing up in it and being preacher's kids and riding the camp meeting trail and circuit, like from our very large sampling, the majority of our experience was in legalistic churches.

And, you know, I'm also very, very thankful for my parents. My parents are the real deal.

They love Jesus and they have been faithfully in ministry over 40 years.

God saved them when they were long -haired hippies partying on the beach of Pensacola, Florida. And God saved them out of that mess.

My dad got saved two days after his brother -in -law was killed in a drug deal that he was supposed to be at.

My dad was in church. You know, that was Friday night, Sunday morning. My dad was in church and he got saved not too long after that.

So God has been good to me. He's been good to my family. I have people within my family that, you know, this podcast is not their favorite thing, if I can just put it nicely.

But we have reached a place where they love me and they support me.

And it's amazing that the debate was what brought us together. The debate was really the catalyst where they looked, you know, multiple people in my family called me and said,

Hey, I don't agree with you on everything, but your heart and how gracious you were in that debate really, really let me see where you're coming from with this podcast.

And God is just, that was a specific answer to prayer in my life because I don't want to fight with my family.

I love them too much and life's too short to focus on the things that we disagree on. Now, I do think it's important to stand up for truth.

And this podcast that we started was started to reach those people who had been negatively affected through legalism in fundamentalist churches.

And God has allowed us to help thousands of people in that situation. And I'm thankful for that.

But, man, we're still learning and we're still growing. And if God's taught me anything, it's been that I'm still a work in progress and I need to be careful about pointing my fingers.

I can point it back to scripture. I'm always going to do that. But I need to be careful when

I pointed at other pastors and churches because I'm going to be held accountable for me and my ministry, not them and their ministry.