August 31, 2023 Show with Rev. Evan McClanahan on “A Manifesto Towards the Church’s Best Mission”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 31st day of August, 2023.

I'm thrilled to have back as a returning guest, Reverend Evan McClanahan, moderator and occasional participant in one of the only continuously operating debate series in the country.

That's why I have such a kinship with him, being a lover of debates and having established and arranged many of them, including one that's coming up on September 16th with Dr.

James R. White here in Pennsylvania. He has called this debate series the

First Word Debate Series at First Lutheran. He's a writer for The Everyman and The Federalist and pastor of the

First Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas. Today, we are going to be addressing a manifesto towards the church's best mission.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Reverend Evan McClanahan.

So glad to be here. And thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to it. My pleasure, brother. And let our listeners know, for the sake of those especially who have not yet heard you on this program, let them know about First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas.

Yeah, First Lutheran Church, oldest Lutheran church. I guess the name indicates that in Houston.

And we were a German immigrant church way back in the day. And now we're about a mile south of downtown and trying to do ministry.

We are across the street from a college. So we do a college outreach. We do the First Word Debate Series. And actually,

I'll be talking a little bit about, you know, what some of the various things our church has kind of embarked on really in the last decade to survive, if I might say that.

You know, it's just shocking to me that my preaching has just not brought in hundreds and hundreds of people to hear my sermons.

But it hasn't happened. And I suspect it hasn't happened for a lot of other of the life, you know, shattering, earth changing pastors out there, given this post -Christian age that we're in.

So we're a small church. Nothing wrong with being a small church. I think 90 percent of all churches have less than 100 people in them or so on a

Sunday. That's pretty normal. But we're a small church, once a big church, but now a small church with a big property.

So very traditional, you know, liturgical, you know, I would say a conservative church across the board.

Still wear vestments, play a pipe, you know, play the pipe organ, sing hymns. But I think in many other ways, very robust and alive.

Great. And why don't you tell our listeners about some of the upcoming debates that you're having with Dr.

James R. White next year? Yeah, looking forward to those two with Trent Horne on Back to Back Nights, February 16th and 17th.

He's the current president of Catholic Answers. Oh, I didn't know he was the president. I know he maybe he's maybe he's maybe he's not.

I'm sorry. I just thought he was. Well, no, he no, he may be. He's very active with them. He has a podcast that I think is growing quite quickly called the

Council of Trent. His name is Trent Horne, Council C -O -U -N -S -E -L.

There could not be a better name for a Catholic apologist than Trent Horne.

It's like calling a Calvinist when you have a child.

If you have if you are Calvinist, it's like calling your child a

Calvin trumpet or yeah, or if your child is a Lutheran, Luther trumpet or Concordia trumpet.

How about I'm going to name my child a Wittenberg loudspeaker. But yeah,

Trent, Trent Horne. Yeah, he's he's he's yeah, he's a nice guy.

In fact, I'm going to hopefully do a review of a debate he did on the whatever podcast on abortion where I think he did

OK. But, you know, some of the limitations of Catholic theology is, you know, are apparent in some of the compromises that are made on that issue.

Believe it or not, Catholics do, I think, compromise on that issue quite a bit. But that said, they're going to be doing solo scriptura and then purgatory on back to back nights.

So there are some new arguments that he's trying to develop for solo scriptura. So Dr.

White responded to that on his radio program. And basically there was a

Twitter exchange and ended up I kind of fell in my lap in some ways that kind of already said we want to debate each other.

So Dr. White was like, hey, I know this this strange guy in Houston who likes to host debate.

So there's that. And then a couple of weeks later, we're doing a debate with a Unitarian Dale Tuggy on is

Jesus Yahweh? So not necessarily a Unitarian Trinitarian debate, but this is part of the question, which is, is

Jesus the same being as the father in essence? So is Jesus assuming that Yahweh, the proper name that God gives of himself, is descriptive of the being of God, which

I believe that it is not just say the name given to the father. But anyway, that being said, so is

Jesus Yahweh will be that debate? Looking forward to it. And I am trying to put together a another one on other topics that I won't disclose.

Well, maybe I should disclose it. Maybe your audience will know somebody. But I'll just say

I'd like to do a debate on on the death penalty. It's not a debate held very often.

The Catholics have changed their view of this. And given kind of some of the direction that we're going in terms of crime,

I thought that it would be a good vehicle to look at some of the general equity or theonomic issues or Old Testament, New Testament law issues.

Right. Like, does does Jesus abolish the death penalty when the woman is not stoned, for example? You know, there are some

Christians who argue that Christians absolutely should be opposed to the death penalty or that that is inconsistent for a life position.

And there are some Christians like James White who doesn't believe that story belongs in the canon. Right. Yeah, exactly.

It's not probably not a good story to base, you know, doctrine on. Although, although, although even those even though there are scholars who don't believe it belongs in the canon,

I don't believe any of them are certain it didn't happen. They just don't believe it was a canonical story, a

God breathed story or something, something that should be in the pages of Scripture. Yeah, it definitely has the ring of a strong oral tradition, which maybe is why it bounces around in different gospels and finds its place in, you know,

John seven and eight. But now are you looking at like you look or you're still looking for the debater to defend the death penalty?

No, I've got that. OK, yeah, I'm looking for a Christian to oppose the death penalty.

OK, yeah. So that's kind of that's kind of anyway, that's a debate

I've had in mind for a long time because I just not necessarily to make it all about the death penalty, but like really, why would you oppose the death penalty or why would you favor the death penalty as a

Christian? Then that gets you into the questions of, well, can we look to Old Testament law? You know, can we look to Old Testament law on on the death penalty or or should like say you have a pietist question, like should our hearts be so changed by the love of God that we would think we would find the death penalty unthinkable?

Or does the justice of God for the victim demand the death penalty? You know,

I mean, it really opens up, I think, some very interesting cans of worms that have wide applicability. And there's not been a lot of debates on that.

So that's something I'd like to do. But it's probably very dangerous telling you that because you might steal my idea.

You know, you might you might you might know somebody. No, I thought together without me.

Now, if I find a an opponent who is opposing the death penalty in the

Christian era, I will let you know about it. So cool.

So who is I just want to I just want to find her speed. That's all. If you get together, who is the individual?

If you can disclose this, who is defending the death penalty? Well, it's something

I've talked to Dr. White about very, very, very off the record, so please don't hold him to anything.

And he's you know, he said, I think he would be interested in it. But we we have not been able to put anything together or find the right person.

So don't don't hold him to that by any means, because for him, you know,

I don't think he's you know, when he does debates, as you know, he studies a lot and he would want to read the opponents material or books or something like that.

And he's got so many other debates. He might end up saying I'm pro death penalty.

I think it's defensible. But that's not something I want to debate because I can't do it justice, you know, because he's got so many other irons in the fire.

So I want to be careful not to commit him to anything. But he and I talked about it.

But there you know, there are other folks. I happen to have a friend, you know, I happen to have a friend who has been on this program,

Dr. Ron Gleason. He's a Presbyterian, and he wrote the book The Death Penalty on Trial, Taking a

Life for a Life Taken. So if James, if James can't do it, I would offer him to you,

Dr. Dr. Ron Gleason as a runner up. I can't be certain he's available, but I think he would probably do it.

Yeah. There's a very well -known progressive, quote unquote, Christian, Shane Claiborne, who has written a book against the death penalty.

And I did reach out to him, but he didn't ever get back to me. He might be too big time for a little of me.

So that's what I found. That's what you probably find when you try to put debates together as well. It's like you have the right people, but they won't do it.

So. Oh, yeah, it's fine. You know, in fact, you get a lot of no's before you get a yes. Oh, yeah. In fact,

I was really fearing that this upcoming debate in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when

Dr. James White is debating Dr. Gregory Coles on the theme, is gay

Christian a biblically acceptable identity identity for a member of Christ Church?

I really thought that I was not going to find anybody because every single person I approached either immediately rejected me or after a couple of days of contemplation, rejected my invitation.

And they were all kinds of people, because not only did I approach people who were claiming to be

Christian, who supported full blown, physically active homosexuality, but also those like Dr.

Gregory Coles, who believes that the physical act of homosexuality is sin, and therefore he must remain chased for life or.

Oh, interesting. If he's if he so chooses, marry a woman because he doesn't believe in the same sex marriage or anything like that.

So there's all different kinds of folks in that realm of side

A, side B, gay Christianity, as they call it now. And they were all rejecting me.

Even these people who have a lot of bravado on YouTube who malign those that believe that homosexuality is a sin and they can have a very cocky attitude about it.

Even a Mormon who is still teaching at Brigham Young University is pro homosexual, which shows you how far they have declined.

I mean, they were always and still are a cult. But as far as endorsing homosexuality, that's amazing that they are now doing that.

They're not all doing it, but many are. But I'm very grateful to Dr.

Gregory Coles for accepting my invitation, and I'm looking forward to that debate, by the way, folks. Yeah, those of you who are listening, it's

September 16th, 330 p .m. to 630 p .m. at Spooky Nook Sports and Events in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, which is in Lancaster County.

And if you want to find out more about that debate, which is actually a part of a three day Bible conference, go to future of Christendom dot org, future of Christendom dot org.

And can you repeat the dates that Dr. White will be speaking or debating at First Lutheran in Fort Worth, Texas?

Houston and I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I said Fort Worth. I apologize.

Fort Worth is as long as you don't confuse me with Dallas, we're fine. But Fort Worth is a nice place. February 16th and 17th and March 9th and hoping for something for March 8th.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull that off or not. I'm using a ticket tailor to sell tickets and I will live stream them.

I'll have links on the front page of our church website, FL Houston, when the time comes. I might have to disable comments, though.

Last time we had comments going on YouTube, people were pretty nasty. So let's keep it classy, folks.

You know what I'm saying? All righty. Well, you have an intriguing subject that you want to tackle today, as I've already announced in the beginning of in the beginning of the program.

This is a manifesto towards the church's best mission.

And if you could, there are those that may be unfamiliar with the term manifesto.

They may remember the communist manifesto and they may have even heard some manifestos that are in agreement with conservative

Christianity. But perhaps they even though they've heard the term are not exactly certain what the definition is.

If you could let us know. Yeah, all

I'm trying to say is that this is a path forward at this time and place.

I do want to you know, I thought you might object to the use of the word mission, which would be fine because one of the things that I don't think individual churches have are unique missions.

In fact, when congregations have mission statements that they have to like recite together during the worship service or it's printed on the bulletin every week or on their website,

I don't really understand that we have a mission. It's the Great Commission, right, to go into all the nations and baptize in the name of the

Father, Son and Spirit. You know, we proclaim Christ to the world. That that is our mission.

But we do find ourselves in unique times and places and circumstances. And so the question is, you know, how do we as churches and pastors sort of take that mission and adapt it to our circumstance?

And so I'm writing as an American in the year 2023 and I'm looking ahead.

I'm trying to do my best to sort of analyze the culture in which I live. I want churches to survive.

I want us to be doing gospel ministry in 2050. So let me give you kind of a thesis statement that we'll kind of build from, which is something like this.

Churches that are still around in 2050 will look more like the missions of the 1850s more than the

American churches of the 1950s. And what I'm saying by that is that we are operating essentially on the model of postwar

America, right, where during the 1950s, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, for example, tripled in size, tripled.

So the 1950s was in some way a kind of unique golden era for church planting, for growth of church.

You had the postwar optimism. You had the baby boomers. You had suburban sprawl.

You had new development spawning all over the place. Just incredible optimism, manufacturing strength, economic strength.

America was the was the, you know, you know, the standard, you know, worldwide in so many respects.

So I think if I asked your audience if that's where we are today, the obvious answer is no.

But we are living off that capital. And so that capital is now dwindling. You know, the number of churches out there that are closing, the number of churches that are aging.

Right. So they were built in the 60s or 50s or 60s or something like that. But now they're like due for major maintenance.

And, you know, churches don't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to do that. And also there's so that's kind of the physical plant side of it, you know, kind of the logistical side of it.

But there's also a a spiritual side of it, which is that churches have become, you know, and really

Christianity, you might say, has become a private affair in many respects. You know, churches where we go to privately have a spiritual life, time with God, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think churches, if we're going to survive into 2050, as my example, we need to go back to being an integral part of the community.

Now, I don't want that to sound like a, I don't know, kind of left wing, you know, communitarian.

Right. Social gospel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but I think the question is, how can we integrate ourselves?

How can we make ourselves be indispensable? How can we make ourselves be useful? And is that part of our mission?

You know, I'm in a I'm in a church body that talks about discipleship all the time. And that's a good thing.

Discipleship as opposed to membership. Right. We are disciples for Christ going out into the world, trying to make people, you know, you know, follow

Jesus just as we follow Jesus and all of that, whereas membership is kind of an entitlement mentality.

And, you know, people are members of it, you know, you know, the Jelly of the Month Club, and they're also members of a church.

And those two things really aren't very different, except you get, I don't know, jelly every month or something in the other one.

But so so that that's a good thing. But I also think our understanding of discipleship is kind of limited, where it ends up being about,

I don't know, you know, Bible study or things that are, you know, churchy things that are done and done well. I'm saying, you know, what what are the ways that we can look more be a more community integrated institution that is more holistic in the way that we bring the gospel to the world?

So that's that's the vague generalities of it. And I'll try to give some very specific things of things that we've done.

Yeah, in fact, why don't you do that when we come back from the first commercial break? Sounds good. And just out of curiosity, why did you think

I would object to the word mission? As I said,

I don't think churches have or congregations have unique missions. We all have the same mission. So what

I'm not trying to do is say the church in 2023 has a different mission than the church in the year, you know, 83.

We have the exact same mission, which is to proclaim the gospel and make disciples. So that's all

I'm saying. All I'm saying, though, is that in America, in the year 2023 and perhaps in other places around the world as well, what that is going to look like and how we make disciples, it might be a little different or it might need to change a little bit if we're going to survive to 2050.

By the way, Felix and Brentwood, Long Island, corrected me. You were right. Pastor Evan, Trent Horn is not the president of Catholic Answers.

Christopher Check is. And Trent Horn is an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers.

So thank you, Felix and Brentwood, Long Island, New York. We're going to our first commercial break.

If you have a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail dot com.

Give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter like something that we are discussing today is at odds with the church where you are a member, something like that.

We understand that you would remain anonymous in cases like that. But if it's a general question, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

We'll be right back with Pastor Evan McClanahan right after these messages. The Mid -Atlantic

Reformation Society presents the future of Christendom. Twenty twenty three. The gospel at war.

September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference. Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating

Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian, a personal journey of faith and sexual identity.

The debate topic is gay Christian, a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's church.

So come join us for the sixth future of Christendom conference. The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day

Saturday with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reform Bible Church. This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching, with a theme of the gospel at war in many areas of our culture, including government schools, the

Supreme Court, missions, feminism and even the church pulpits at the future of Christendom dot org.

James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here. I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the

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And we are now back with our guest, Pastor Evan McClanahan of First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas.

We are discussing a manifesto towards the church's best mission. And our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail dot com.

I understand that we would be foolish if we did not observe something that was successfully taking place, even when it is being accomplished at the hands of people with whom we have very strong disagreement, like the

Roman Catholic Church, for instance. I don't think you have to agree with a person or a group or a church theologically, or especially when it comes to the gospel, if they are doing something that is not offensive to God and is not a sin in and of itself.

And there are many things that the Roman Catholic Church does that are idolatrous and so on. But I understand that you have taken as a model missions,

Catholic missions from San Antonio, Texas, that were the that spawned you on to take a deeper look at this topic that we are addressing now.

And I have no problem with that as long as we are not doing something that's offensive to God.

So why don't you explain that in more detail? In Texas, it's pretty much a rite of passage that you got to go to San Antonio, which is a lovely city, walk the river, walk.

But it was some years before we actually visited the missions. In fact, it was some years before I even heard of the missions.

But the missions are these, I think there are seven of them, but some of them are quite small.

But they are basically chapels that you visit, but they really are set on these entire communities.

And so the city of San Antonio really grew up around these missions and they're kind of right on water.

They're right on the whatever the river is there. I should know that. But I'm in Houston. So what the heck.

But when we visited these missions, I learned that these were like really whole kind of communes, you know, or whole places, you know, the understanding of ministry was holistic.

I'll put it that way. So they were growing food there. Right. They had access to water. They obviously built chapels.

That's what most people want to visit when they visit the mission or the chapels and churches that are still standing. You know, they had housing there.

They would have had all of civic life that you can imagine, you know, music making or some education, you know, basket weaving, like literally basket weaving.

I don't know if they did it underwater or not, but if they did, they would have had underwater basket weaving. So but some people get that that old joke.

But anyway, but it was kind of the whole of life was going on. And who are the people who lived on the mission? You know, homeless people.

No, not really. It was Native Americans primarily who were sort of coming off the prairie, coming off the range and, you know, converting to Christianity.

That was a prerequisite for living on this mission and giving their life to Jesus Christ and therefore participating in this mission.

And so the priest would have overseen all of that. And it would all would have been done in sort of the shadow of the chapel.

And but this was a kind of holistic understanding of what Christian life looked like. Now, yes, we have our issues with Roman Catholic theology and with communes and with communes, for sure.

But, you know, at the same time, you know, I don't know that in some parts of the world at this time, a commune or something like it wasn't necessary for safety or survival.

You know, so it doesn't necessarily reflect the tenets of communism where you have some authoritarian, tyrannical dictatorship, you know, binding upon you a limit to your income and all kinds of things that a communist dictatorship does to destroy the lives of its subjects.

But they're not necessarily synonymous. Well, exactly. And these were

Christians going, you know, into pagan, you know, hinterlands.

This was not Christian territory. This was hostile territory. I mean, really, these these missions go back to the 1700s.

So so that's kind of what spurred me to think, OK, well, are our

Christians today finding themselves in sort of these pagan hinterlands in a similar way?

And being in, you know, downtown Houston, I can tell you anecdotally, it feels like that a lot. You know, people think of Texas as this great, you know,

I don't know, conservative state or something, but the cities are often not that at all. And even in smaller towns, you're going to find a healthier and healthier percentage of people, even even young conservatives who find the church to be antiquated, uninteresting, offering nothing.

And so they're not supporting the church because the church hasn't made, you know, some of this, you know,

I have to watch my language, but the church hasn't. I'm just going to say it bluntly, even though I don't mean every word of this. The church hasn't made themselves relevant to them.

And part of that's, again, the privatization of religion, which we'll come to in a little bit. But, you know, if you if you're going to spread the gospel in a in hostile territory, you probably do need to do it in this way until enough people are converted and it becomes a

Christian area and it's sort of safe to open up the walls. But there was a time where these sorts of communes were what was needed to survive.

People had to work together to to make the food and to harvest the food and to grow children together and all these sorts of things.

So. So, yeah, so I would say these missions are kind of, you know, interesting to think about.

I obviously don't think that it's a one to one correlation, so I don't think that what we might end up needing to do would be exactly the same.

But I think we need to think about ways that we can become, again, integral to the community.

Another example I give, which is just kind of reflective of how much things have changed, is during the year 2020.

I don't know if that year means anything to you, Chris, but a lot of interesting things happened that year. You know,

Covid, all these riots all over the place. He had a hotly contested election. But in that year, and I'm going to read a little bit from my essay here to get it right.

But the mission of San Juan Capistrano in California was vandalized and they had a statue of a guy named

St. Junipero. And that church decided to remove the patron saint of gin,

I believe. It's made out of gin. No, I'm only kidding. Gin is made from juniper berries.

That's where my. Oh, OK. Well, I mean, you never know. I mean, maybe maybe that's what this mission was making.

I don't know. But in 2020, that that old church that had been in California for hundreds of years, you know, and they basically were getting vandalized and defaced.

And so they took the statue of San Junipero down to before it got torn down by these angry mobs.

And I thought, oh, that's interesting, because that's the same exact kind of mission that we have in San Antonio or in other parts of Texas.

Very same idea. And now places like that, which were once revered for bringing civilization to the hinterlands, right, bringing

Christianity to the hinterlands. Now they're under attack because we're dealing with this alternate worldview of Marxism or whatever you want to call it.

And so now these missions. And so basically my question was, well, how long before the missions of San Antonio need to get torn down?

You know, it's hard for us to imagine something like that, they're revered. I mean, the Alamo is, of course, one of the missions.

So that's, you know, icon in the state of Texas, rightfully so. You know, obviously, though, more for the battle that was fought there, it was used basically as a military base for a short amount of time.

But the Alamo itself was one of these, you know, what we call the Alamo is one of these one of these seven missions.

So so it's just interesting to kind of note how much things have changed.

This was the exact same kind of mission where people were converting to Christianity. They were not receiving the benefits of the mission.

Right. So the mission, let's say the mission was cultivating food. Well, you couldn't get the food unless you converted to Christianity.

Now that would be considered horrible. Now, that might be an overstatement. My guess is these missions were were charitable, but they had to protect what they had or else they'd be raided and pillaged.

So I thought that was an interesting news story from a few years ago that that made me realize kind of to a degree how much, you know, the world we're living in has changed.

These missions were once celebrated and in some parts of the country they still are. But eventually the world could very well turn on on on these missions and kind of rethinking them.

So so the question for us then is, OK, well, how do how is the church seen in the modern age?

And as I've kind of hinted at already, it's largely, I think, you know, Christianity and what we do in church is largely seen as a private affair.

Almost everything about modern Christianity really has turned inward. And I think a lot of Christians feel like they have more to apologize for than really feel comfortable promoting their faith.

Part of that, you know, is the woke agenda once again telling us how terrible we are are all are is

I don't know, white Christians or something. And we're the root of all these problems. Or, you know, you've got

Christians out there who do something silly like, I don't know, pick it in front of an abortion clinic. Well, that's embarrassing.

Or, you know, Christians don't support the LGBT agenda. So that's embarrassing. So so we've kind of but we've kind of made

Christianity a private affair. And my argument is that, no, Christianity needs to be a public affair.

So we need to be taking dominion rather than just retreating into our churches.

But if that's what we've done, if we sort of retreated into our churches, then we're going to find ourselves pretty useless.

And I think you can see the evidence of this retreat pretty clearly. I saw you bring your mic up, so I don't know if you want to say something.

Oh, no, no. You can continue. I just had a question come in, but you can continue. Well, just to kind of round that thought off, you know, look at a lot of churches in a lot of cities today.

I've talked to so many, you know, Lutherans like in our denomination and in others who have these beautiful Gothic buildings, you know, in like town, not not huge cities, maybe towns of, you know, 10 or 20 thousand people.

And there are these huge churches. They used to have hundreds of members and now they have like 50 people trying to maintain this enormous

Gothic, beautiful building. Or you think about all of these churches that I mentioned earlier built in the 50s and 60s, a lot of which were born to kind of stock architectural plans, you know, almost repeated over and over.

They kind of look the same. As I said in my essay, you know, trapped in time somewhere between classicism and, you know, postmodernism.

But, you know, think of all those churches in America right now that are there in communities, people drive by them.

But the only thing that really goes on there is Sunday worship. They're financially strapped.

They are not sure what their mission is. They know they're supposed to be discipling the nations. They have no idea how to do it.

And so, you know, what I'm trying to do is give a way of thinking about ministry that answers a lot of those questions and not in a uniform way for everybody.

But I do want to get into some examples of what we're doing. But maybe let's hear that question.

It might be a good time for me to break. OK, we have Perry in Oneonta, New York.

And Perry says, it sounds like you're speaking about doing something like replicating what the

Amish do, but perhaps without the thwarting of taking advantage of modern technology.

Am I anywhere in the right area of thought? Yeah, actually, you know,

I'm I'm I'm coming to respect the Amish these days, you know, they're not getting, you know, every medicine pushed their way, they're coming under attack.

Actually, there was a story of a Amish, a farmer at his cattle seized or something recently.

But the Amish are growing. I heard this the other day and I was sort of shocked. I was like, well, nobody wants to be

Amish. Well, au contraire. They're marrying. They're having children. They're building. There's like three hundred and seventy thousand

Amish in America. You know, if somebody had asked me how many Amish there are in America, I'd be like,

I don't know, 15 or 20 thousand or something. Three hundred and seventy thousand. And that number has doubled from,

I think, maybe, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago or something like that. So I wouldn't I mean, obviously,

I wouldn't go that far. I think the way we think about it would be quite different. It's not it's kind of a withdrawal in place is kind of how

I'm thinking about it. So if you look at the major institutions that we've taken for granted, you know, that Christians have in many ways built up but now are turned against us,

I think a lot of Christians are in a posture of withdrawing from those institutions. So how do we build side by side institutions?

How do we become more self -sustaining? Not full on prepping, perhaps, but definitely something in that vein that these sorts of things end up kind of going together.

Yes, and by the way, as much as the

Amish life may have admirable aspects, they do have a false gospel.

And I wanted to point out a wonderful, fascinating interview I had with former a former

Amish individual, Ephraim Stoltzfus, along with a pastor, an evangelical

Reformed Baptist pastor who led Ephraim to Christ or Ephraim. I don't know how he pronounces that.

I can't remember right now. Understanding and reaching out to the Amish people with the gospel of grace.

If anybody wants to listen to that interview, I conducted way back in 2017.

If you type in Amish into the search engine at IronTrapandZionRadio .com,

that will be the only interview that comes up. So I think that you might find it interesting and fascinating, as I did, because Ephraim or Ephraim Stoltzfus also cleared up some, what's the word

I'm looking for, falsehoods or things that are said about the Amish that aren't true and also revealed some very dark things about the

Amish that I didn't know before I did the interview, like the high rate of child molestation and child rape and so on because of the fact that they're so isolated.

And in fact, I saw a documentary since conducting that interview where an

Amish father was actually tried and convicted right here in this town,

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for raping his own daughter. And I'm not even talking about one instance, multiple instances, but it was a fascinating interview with this brother who left the

Amish and became a Christian. In fact, you can see a documentary called Trouble in Amish Paradise that has featured

Ephraim or Ephraim Stoltzfus and another Amish gentleman who became a born -again believer.

And it's quite fascinating. One of the things that they cleared up as far as a false notion, which it's understandable to come to a conclusion like this, but the

Amish are not opposed to electricity. They're not opposed to invention and progress and things like that.

What they do not want is reliance on the government or anyone else but themselves.

So whatever an Amish person invents that is self -sustained within the community, that is permissible.

And Amish use generators. In fact, there is an Amish -run chain of stores called

BBs that I go to nearly every week, at least once, that sells at discount prices items where the boxes they came in were damaged.

The items themselves might not be damaged, but the boxes were. And that could be anything from furniture to canopies.

You know, it's the whole gambit of what you would find in a Walmart, for instance, but at a cheaper price.

And I just thought I'd throw that out there just to make sure that nobody is thinking that I am advocating the

Amish religion because they do have a false gospel of work, righteousness, and so on.

Gotcha. And, well, I would like you, when we come back from the break, to begin specifically addressing things that you and the

First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas are doing in regard to making this vision of yours in some way manifest.

And if anybody has a question for Pastor Evan, our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We'll be right back. The Mid -Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023.

The Gospel at War. September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Featuring Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian, A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity.

The debate topic. Is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's church?

So come join us for the sixth Future of Christendom conference. The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day

Saturday with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reform Bible Church. This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching with a theme of the

Gospel at War in many areas of our culture, including government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.

Head to futureofchristendom .org. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here.

I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the

G3 National Conference. That's Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd on a theme that I've been preaching, teaching, writing about and defending in live public debates for most of my life.

The sovereignty of God. I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott Anuel, and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries.

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Thanks for helping to keep Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio on the air. Oh, hail the power of Jesus' name.

This is Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio financially.

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

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Becoming a Parent My name is A .M. Brewster. I'm the president of Truth Love Parent and host of its award -winning podcast.

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God called and created them to be. We produce free parenting resources, train church leaders, and offer biblical counseling so that the next generation of dads and moms can use the scriptures to parent their children for life and godliness.

Please visit us at truthloveparent .com. As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey, pastored by Alan Dunn.

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First of all, I want to just praise God right now, because I just heard word from a nurse, my brother's primary nurse at the nursing home where he resides, that he no longer has any evidence of sepsis in his bloodstream, which is a life -threatening, very deadly situation.

And they are no longer giving him the intravenous antibiotics. They have peace of mind that he is doing very well.

So I just want to praise the Lord and I want to thank all of you, the hundreds of you who have been letting me know that you've been praying for my brother

Andy in the nursing home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and I can never thank you enough for offering your words of prayer and lifting up my brother

Andy to our sovereign Lord's throne of grace. Thank you so much. Also, folks,

I want to remind you that Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is in urgent need of your financial support.

We are really facing a scary month that is vastly approaching.

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We have never bounced back from the plummeting giving to IronSharpensIronRadio ever since the insane and tyrannical mandates of the federal and local governments began over the

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Shoals in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It's absolutely free of charge. Everything is free, the admission, the food, and everybody leaves with a heavy sack, maybe even two heavy sacks, of free brand new books personally selected by me, donated by Christian publishers all over the

United States and United Kingdom. So if you would like to attend this, just send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put pastor's luncheon in the subject line. Last but not least, if you are not a member of a

Christ -honoring, biblically faithful, theologically sound, doctrinally solid church like First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas, I'm asking you to send me an email and say,

I need a church in the subject line because I may be able to help you find a church no matter where in the world you live.

I have extensive lists spanning the globe and have helped many people all over the planet earth in my audience find churches, sometimes even within just a couple of minutes from where they live, and that may be you too.

If you are in that situation of not having a biblically solid church home, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com

and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to our guest today,

Pastor Evan McClanahan, a pastor of First Lutheran Church Houston, Texas, and our theme is a manifesto towards the church's best mission, and that's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence, and if you could, Pastor Evan, pick up where you were giving specific examples of how your church is involved in some way and in some fashion making this vision or manifesto a reality in the

Houston community. Yeah, well let me say, look, I wish that, you know,

I had the luxury of sitting in my office and thinking deep thoughts and reading great tomes of theology and writing masterpiece sermons, but I don't, and I think a lot of pastors are in my situation.

For pastors in, you know, larger congregations, this all might seem strange to them, but I would say you need to start thinking about these sorts of things now before it's too late.

This is one way I have to say it, which is it would be better for your congregation to start its own brewery rather than to become one.

So, you know, I don't know if you know there's a kind of trend in taking abandoned churches, you know, churches that couldn't survive it, and then what do you do with a property like that?

It's commercial property, it's, you know, but it's often in a good location, and they're being turned into breweries, you know, or other nightclubs or discos or something like that.

So my thought is, hey, why don't you beat the competition to the punch, and now

I'm kind of half joking, but let me tell you some things that we've done. This has been about a project that's been in the works, you know, really over a decade when

I wasn't sitting in my office reading large tomes and writing masterpiece sermons. We started a preschool.

A lot of churches have preschool. I don't think that would be anything too kind of unusual, but if you can do some kind of a

Mother's Day out or a preschool, you know, use your church building, you know, during the week, because, you know, it's kind of a waste of a building to sit there, you know, five days a week and not get any use.

It's obviously a way to get to know parents, although I will say fewer parents today will be interested in the gospel than they would have been 20 or 30 years ago.

They'll gladly use your religious service, but they don't always necessarily want to hear what you have to say, but it's going to be very hard for people to attend your church and come to know the

Lord if they don't know that your congregation exists. So we need to think of ways to let people know that we exist.

So I don't think that's a revolutionary by any means. Probably, you know, beyond that, our biggest project was turning our kitchens into commercial kitchens.

So we basically had two kitchens that once were commercial kitchens, but they were really in terrible shape and they were really out of code.

And so long story short, I learned that there was a kind of dearth of commercial kitchen space for rent in Houston.

But vendors like food truck operators, food manufacturers, caterers, etc.,

etc., etc., candy makers, salsa makers, ice cream makers, juicers, all kinds of people, they need to sell their food.

They need to be in a permitted kitchen. So we set about getting architectural plans, getting a general contractor to do the work, and it was a lot of money and it took several years to get it all done.

In fact, I'm still have a couple of loose ends I'm tying up. But we have kitchens that operate as commercial kitchens and people pay us to use that space.

So instead of sitting there, you know, day in and day out collecting dust, we now use that as like a profit center.

Now, that's not exactly the same thing as the missions in San Antonio where they're growing, you know, maize and grinding it or something.

But I have space. People need space. They pay me for the space. I can use that money for mission.

So that's kind of a modern take in a sense of that integral mission that I'm trying to talk about.

We have a parsonage that we now have an outside business that leases that from us.

But I want to talk about a ministry that we started some years ago because it might maybe spur someone to and I, you know, do something in this vein.

So our parsonage, it's a beautiful two -story house built in 1926. Absolutely lovely home.

But when I moved here, the church was or the parsonage was really not livable. We had a fire in 2011 that basically, long story short, gave us some cash to put into the parsonage to make it livable.

And around that time, I was advocating that this house be used as a kind of house of studies for seminarians.

We did use it for about four years as a kind of community where young men and women lived separately.

It was not co -ed, but they did. I have a garage apartment as well. Anyway, so young men and women lived here.

They did ministry together. They prayed together. And I was waiting during that time for a kind of denominational approval to be a house of studies or kind of a local seminary

Bonhoeffer style, Finkenwalde style, life together style. That approval never came.

So I sort of had to abandon it because I couldn't keep, you know, kind of encouraging people to participate in this if there wasn't a seminary connection.

But it was an interesting use of the house. It was very community oriented.

The church loved the idea of having these people living on our campus, learning about ministry, doing ministry, doing evangelism, you know, praying regularly.

So that was a use of a property. And they paid to participate in the ministry, a modest amount. But it was, you know, again, any amount was more than we were making on that property before.

We ended up with a nonprofit using that property for a time. And then now we have another group using that property.

I do want it to be, by the way, a parsonage again in the long run. I think that churches should, you know, if they can have a pastor living on campus, that's kind of the best deal for everybody.

But I've got a lot of work to do in the house between now and then. But I'm working towards that. That's part of the master plan. I've got a number of groups that use space as well.

Like we've got a local dance group that needs a place with wooden floors so that they can shuffle as they dance.

I mean that in a respectful way. They kind of shuffle when they dance. Anyway, they needed a place with the right flooring for their dance group.

So we have a dance group that's there. We have an HOA that's there. We have a number of kind of ethnic groups that have come and gone, like Swedish clubs,

German clubs, things of that nature. Under certain circumstances, we will host, you know, weddings or funerals as well.

So, you know, not that we, you know, do that like for money, but as a way again of, you know, doing outreach.

We host a lot of music groups because we have wonderful acoustics. We have a lovely organ. So we host a lot of music groups.

So all of that is just kind of a comprehensive vision or picture of, you know, there's a mission aspect to some of it.

There's a financial aspect to some of it. There's kind of a combination of the two with some of those things. But I think between the groups that meet there, the businesses that operate out of there, and some of the ministry that we've done there, it has, you know, you put all that together and it's a little bit more of that holistic vision

I'm talking about. It's not quite the same thing as a San Antonio mission, but it's using the space which has value, you know, it's finding a way to use that space that has value so that we can stay there as a church, right?

Because either I would have to become a bivocational pastor or the facility itself is going to have to raise money so that we can do ministry there.

And this goes back to the importance of dominion. If you think it's important that you have a church on a church, you know, at the corner of, you know,

Elm and Main or whatever, and I think that is important, then you got to find a way to stay there. People aren't going to knock on the door and bust down the door to get there, so you have to figure it out.

Well, in some ways, just to briefly interrupt you. Yeah. In some ways, what you are doing seems to be the antithesis of what some might think of as a commune or a modern

Amish complex because they are typically withdrawing.

Yes. And you seem to be a lot more open to the involvement of outsiders into your, even your facilities and so on.

So it seems to be Yeah, that's true. Like the Amish, for instance, every week they are involved, and it's not exclusively

Amish, but just with less than a five -minute walk from where I'm sitting, there is an open -air farm and produce stand where a number of people, including the

Amish, bring what they want to sell and they sell it. But, you know, it's not like you're going into the barn of an

Amish person. They're coming into the community. Right. So it seems like, in some ways, the reverse.

True. I have a kind of Amish mentality, broadly speaking, on some of the other issues, like education, for example.

Or if I could, but yes, generally, I agree with everything that was just said. But let me say in the future, because,

I mean, I don't think I'm done yet. What I'd like to do is could, you know, could we use our property?

And I don't know that we have enough property to do this, but maybe some churches, in fact, I know a lot of churches do. Can I start to use the property

I've got to start modeling some self -sustenance, not necessarily prepping wholesale, but, you know, self -sustaining, you know, food growing?

You know, could you have a chicken coop on your property? Let me give an example. Let's say there's a church that has, you know, five acres of land, and all they ever do with that land is mow it.

You know, it's just grass that has to get mowed. Sure, they have a church in a parking lot on maybe one or two of those acres, but otherwise they don't really know what to do with the land.

And that church maybe has 40 or 50 or 60 people on a Sunday morning, and they're all of a certain age.

And I think, you know, you can kind of read the writing on the wall, which is, you know, are we going to survive?

Well, now would be the time to take whatever money you've got and maybe use that land for something, because what is the need right now?

I do think there's a kind of withdrawal to some degree, because Christians don't trust a lot of institutions.

They don't trust the university. They don't trust the food supply. They don't trust the water supply in many cases. They, you know, they don't trust education, which, by the way, is kind of the biggest point that I think churches need to be using their buildings for, if at all possible, which is education.

For example, I mentioned a preschool, but what about homeschooling? You know, can you start a homeschool co -op?

That's something my wife and I started literally this week, where we are now expanding our preschool to include a homeschool kind of co -op or a homeschool environment where parents can bring their kids so that they can, you know, they kind of end up doing their work, you know, privately or quietly, but, you know, they would have time to play, do board games, you know, some cooperative learning with other people, maybe get a little bit of tutoring or help with their schoolwork if needed, and then the parents could have time to do what they need to do or offer lessons in how to degree hack.

You know, there's a lot of ways you can get a college degree for literally pennies on the dollar online and be done with it by the time you're 17 or 18 years old.

A lot of people don't know that. Churches can become valuable resources for that. Churches could have, for example, homeschooling libraries.

Do you know how much it costs to buy homeschool curriculum? I mean, a lot of times if you have multiple kids, you're talking about $500 or $600, you know, per semester.

Could churches develop homeschool libraries of material that, you know, could then get shared? So I definitely think churches need to be leaping, you know, jumping into that space, speaking to the

Christians who are wary of institutions, who want to learn how to be prepared for, you know, food shortages or inflation or a lack of water or, you know, withdrawing from education.

We're going to be having a debate with a group I have, I'm working with, and it's kind of an informal debate.

It's not actually part of my debate series, but it's with another group where we're going to be looking at vaccines. You know, should

Christians be anti -vax? That's excellent. I definitely want to hear that.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, of course, I'm, you know, I vaccinated my kids, you know, I never, I thought anti -vax people were absolutely nuts, you know, all this autism business.

I mean, these people were crazy. They've been debunked. And then COVID comes around and they start talking about this, you know, mRNA vaccine.

And I'm, you know, I'm thinking, in fact, it was Dr. White who explained the mRNA technology.

I had no idea it was this new kind of technology. I thought it was basically the smallpox vaccine all over again, you know.

And when I listened to Dr. White explain it, I think it was in December of 2020 before it had been rolled out.

I said to myself, nope, not doing that. Anyway, that's just, I'm just speaking for myself.

I'm not speaking for the congregation or denomination or anybody else. That was my own theory. But it has led me to start going, well, let's start looking at other vaccines.

Let's look at the polio vaccine. Let's look at all the ways, all the vaccines that they're giving people, even in the last 15 years.

And so I'm listening to people that I never thought I would listen to before. Christians need to be talking about these issues.

I think churches would do well to talk about these sorts of issues. So you can host events, you know, where you have dialogues on these issues.

Hey, should Christians stop taking vaccines or should we take vaccines? What kind of vaccine schedule should we do?

You know, what are we doing for seminaries? The seminary model is barely sustainable. Seminaries are very expensive.

They're moving to online, but that means they're losing community. So there's a lot of ways that we can kind of start to get off the grid while we're staying in place.

Meanwhile, congregations, what I'm saying is, what can you be doing in your community to make yourself valuable?

If you're just sitting there five days a week doing nothing, here are all these sorts of things you can do. And a lot of things I'm sure I've never thought of.

But going back to that example of the church with five acres, I know this is going to sound crazy, but just roll with me.

What if you planted, like I said, while you have a little money in the bank and you got a few people to help with it, what if you planted, you know,

I don't know, pear trees or peach trees or something or pecan tree, something that has some value. People are not people are looking to to eat non

GMO food, right? You know, they call it organic, but even what they sell in stores is necessarily organic. Can you can you buy some trees today that you could plant that five years from now while your church is still alive?

You could sell those at farmers markets. You could teach people how to can, you know, and grow their own food.

Gleaning laws from the Old Testament like Ruth, right? They might come back into vogue where you're literally giving, you know, poor people in your community the food, you know, the fruit that has fallen on the ground.

So could you could you use your land for something like that? Because right as people are losing trust in institutions, you're providing a solution to that.

Could you have chickens? Could you show people how they could have chickens, you know, collect the eggs again, sell them at a farmer's market or sell them off, you know, sell them at the church, put a sign in front of the yard, you know, dozen eggs for sale for two dollars.

You know, one of the things people are going to really think I'm crazy now, but one of the things

I've done in the last month is I realized how much water we we give away. So every every day our air conditioning runs, it produces water and condensation.

So I figured out a way to catch most of the water that we have produced through condensation.

And it's about 70 gallons a day when our air conditioners running 70 gallons goes pretty fast.

And, you know, our water only costs two cents a gallon. I'm sorry for being not very theological here,

Chris, but I'm just trying to give examples. It's not a lot of money savings, but hey, every little bit helps.

So we use we're not recycling our own water to to water plants. So imagine if we, you know, did want to, say, plant some fruit trees or something like that, or if we had chickens, we're now producing water where we're not having to pay for it because water is going to get more expensive.

Anyway, I'm just trying to throw things. This is like the throwing things against the wall and see what sticks mentality where what

I'm what I'm saying is that there are a lot of things we we can be doing. We need to be making ourselves invaluable. And so here's my question to the audience is, is that discipleship right?

If churches are showing people how to can food, how to grow food, how to preserve water, how to if we have a school, right, if we're helping people degree hack and get college degrees for, you know, five thousand dollars instead of one hundred thousand dollars, is that discipleship?

Is that value? If we're letting people lease our space so they can start a business that we can be an incubator for them, is that discipleship?

You know, if we're using our property for all of these kinds of is that discipleship? And my answer to that is yes, that's discipleship.

It's relationship forming. It's, you know, and again, going back to the mission, it's similar to the mission in that, you know, we're using the space, you know, to to reach people.

And that might be the way that we reach people. There might be a lot of former hippies out there who are with us on like, you know, eating,

I don't know, non GMO food or something like that. And all of a sudden now we're speaking their language. Now, if we can bring the gospel to somebody that, you know, wears

Birkenstocks and I don't know, has scented candles in their house or something, because we actually now agree with them that we ought not to be fighting foreign wars.

That was political. Sorry. We agree with them, though, that we need to start questioning some of these institutions.

Maybe that's a way we reach them with the gospel. I don't know. Yeah, I just had a guest on recently who was speaking about health and nutrition, a

Christian. And I was telling him and he agreed with me that it's interesting how when it comes to holistic medicine and organic food and, you know, we could go on and on with the things that are in that genre, people who own health food stores and all that, there seems to be a uniting of people on the far right and the far left when it comes to that, where they have that one area in common, even though they're opposed to each other in nearly every other sphere of life.

Because, well, I remember. Yeah. No, go ahead. No, no, you go. Well, I remember, you know, when big pharma would come under attack, you know, it was the, you know, conservatives,

Republicans, whatever, conservatives who would defend big pharma. Oh, look at all the lifesaving drugs they're giving us. And a lot of us have changed our mind on that.

You know, well, maybe we've been too cozy to big corporations for way too long. And I think 2020 opened our eyes to, you know, the profit motives of these sorts of things, the way governments and pharma companies kind of change hands in terms of their leadership a lot.

Yeah. So there's a lot of things where, a lot of things where I do think we're kind of coalescing and we're kind of seeing things.

And what it is, is we're losing trust in institutions. I mean, if you kind of have to boil it down,

I think what is happening with a lot of Christians and a lot of Christians are, by the way, way ahead of me.

We've homeschooled our kids for two years. Obviously, there have been people who have homeschooled their kids for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.

I used to think those people were kind of strange. And I used to say the same stupid stuff that other people say now to me, like, well, how are you going to socialize your kids?

Right. And the answer is, well, have you seen the way the public schools are socializing kids these days?

By the way, can you pick up right where you left off? Because we have to go to our final commercial break. Don't go away, folks.

We'll be right back with Evan McClanahan right after these messages. The Mid -Atlantic

Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at War, September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, featuring

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.

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The debate topic is gay Christian, a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's church.

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James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here. I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the

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That's liyfc .org. Welcome back. Pastor Evan McClenahan, if you could pick up where you left off and also summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

Well, I just think there's a lot of pastors who, you know, they sincerely desire to spend their time in the

Word of God, which is good. They want to be preachers and teachers, which is also good.

I'm just saying that in this particular context, that looking at the trends, that short of revival, which

I think is actually quite possible given the dearth of, given the life that modernism has given us,

I think a lot of people are maybe reconsidering things, but I just want pastors to think, you know, you're really, what you actually are is you're someone in the community and you want your church to be as integrated and as useful to that community as possible.

It's obviously useful in the administration of the sacraments and the preaching of the Word, but are there other things that you can be doing to keep your space there, to keep your dominion there?

I will tell you it's a lot of hard work. You know, I mean, I spent over two hours today negotiating leases with kitchen tenants.

I'm going to be going up there tonight to work on something. So, it's not like I always want to do these sorts of things.

Some are more joyful than others. You know, my wife runs our preschool and does a great job with that, and she does a lot of the homeschooling, so it's definitely a tag team effort, and I rely on other volunteers to help with things, but what

I'm saying is try to embrace this more holistic, communally integrated understanding of what your congregation is and where you're going to end up.

I think it'll be good for you. I think it's part of our discipleship, and I think the 1950s model of having so many people that, you know, we don't have to worry about having the people and resources to do ministry.

I just don't think that's our model, so that's why, again, my two catchphrases of the day are ministry in 2050 is going to look more like it did in 1850 than 1950, and then the other thing is start a brewery before you become one.

Now, actually, starting a brewery is extremely complicated, and I'm only half -joking.

I'm more than half -joking with that. Hopefully, people get the idea. Well, if any church is going to start a brewery,

I can't think of any other church other than a Lutheran church that would be most fitting. 100 percent.

If you were a Presbyterian church, it would be a whiskey manufacturer or bourbon or something.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Or scotch, actually. That would make more sense. But hey, if you've got five acres, build a steel building and get after it, you know?

Probably wouldn't be that hard. Anyway, I kid, but yeah. We have Theo in Rutherford, New Jersey, who said,

I think you should probably clarify that there is some kind of a way to judge what these people who use your facilities are doing where they're not going to bring shame upon your congregation.

Yeah, that's a good point, and we do think about who uses our building.

For example, I said we'll do weddings and funerals, but not any wedding or funeral. You know, that could be quite problematic.

You have to be discerning in who does things. In terms of businesses or other nonprofit groups,

I do think about that. And, you know, the groups that we have, I think, this might drive our presuppositional folks crazy, but relatively neutral.

I mean, I don't think they're doing anything explicitly for God's kingdom, but they're not doing anything against it.

You know, so, you know, that's something every church has to figure out what their comfort level is.

I mean, obviously, I don't want, I mean, if somebody's making ice cream, I think that's fine. If somebody is selling lingerie and using our church as a warehouse, that's not fine, right?

So if somebody is doing, you know, we also have another church, by the way, we have an Ethiopian church that uses our space as well.

So that's another kind of ministry we do. Yeah, you just have to discern, you know, and whatever, you know, it might be that what, you know, it might be that what we do, you would think is wrong.

Obviously, some people would think having a brewery is wrong. Oh, yeah. That's why I'm kind of saying, yeah.

So I'm not necessarily advocating that at all. What I'm saying, though, is that your building is going to turn into a brewery one day.

So what can you do now to avoid that? Because I don't actually think it's a good thing for Second Presbyterian Church at Elman, Maine, in small town

America, disappearing, right? Well, it depends on which Presbyterian church it is.

I'm assuming all of your listeners are good Orthodox folks, and I want their churches to do quite well.

Right. Well, I want to make sure that our listeners have all of the contact information that they need.

First of all, if you live in Houston or are traveling through that area, or if you have family, friends, and loved ones in that area, go to FLHouston .org.

FL for First Lutheran Houston dot org. And I do want to remind you folks that Iron Trip and Zion Radio is in urgent need of your financial help like never before.

And so I'm hoping that some of you who have never donated will donate for the first time. I'm hoping that some of you who have donated will donate again and perhaps even donate more.

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And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater