Targeted Ministries

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Deere and Kretzky. We are happy to read another question that we've had sent in recently dealing with the local church and ministries, specifically ministries for different subsets that you might find in the church.

The question reads, should church ministries or communities within the church be provided to certain subsets within the body, i .e.

singles, married with kids, minorities, etc., as though they are services offered?

Could you speak to the attitudes that demand such from churches as a requirement for either joining or for leaving your church?

Michael, you Sure. This, I think, is fairly common amongst a lot of churches.

If you were to visit maybe a family -integrated church or go to a house church or a smaller church, this would probably be absent.

There are many churches who, they gather together as one group and very often, you know, they'll have

Lord's Supper every week, they'll have a meal, fellowship meal together every week, they'll spend time together afterwards.

In Bible study, they probably don't have a nursery, they probably don't have a cry room. That's great. I think that's awesome.

I think that there's a lot to be said good about that model.

I would say that the model that goes to the other side, the other pendulum, and says we need to have a hypersensitivity to all these various little groups that they all need their own little space, is the product of probably a couple of things.

One of those would be the influence of the market -driven church, the church growth movement, the obvious salesmanship that you have to have in order to attract a lot of people.

The most large churches, the ones that have the biggest following, will have a lot of focused ministries for these various groups.

And in a sense, you're trying to find a way with so many people in one church to help each person that comes there feel like they're being cared for, loved, helped, discipled, and so on.

And hey, I'm not going to argue against that. But I think we need to think about whether this is a good, healthy, biblical model.

Now, I mean, our church, we have inherited some traditional Sunday school logistics models and so on that slowly over time have begun to soften.

And so, I'm personally, I'm fine taking a very slow roll at this particular challenge, but I don't think it's necessary at all for there to be age -graded

Sunday school classes and then divide up the men and the women have their own Sunday school classes and all those things.

I understand that there are some good things that have been done through that structure and that folks who have been ministered to through that structure and have invested their lives in the church, serving by teaching in that structure, have a connection to it and that they would feel probably fairly disoriented if it all went away.

And again, I am a big proponent of small or smaller churches that have a long history of establishment.

There's so much good that the Lord does as he builds his church. And he washes his bride with the water of his word.

And that's a whole different metaphor than he busts it up and melts it down in fire and makes something out the next day.

These things take time. So, over the years, we've been softening the structure that we have here to where we have fewer

Sunday school classes, more integrated Sunday school classes. Age groups become less of an issue.

Gender -specific classes have become far less numerous. I think we only have one left now. There used to be a mandatory children's church.

All the children had to, you know, they were all kicked out of the... Yeah. I mean, in the bulletin, it said, all children aged whatever to 12 are dismissed from the church service.

And this was like, you know, like halfway, you know, sing a couple of songs and you are now dismissed.

The previous pastor here, who was here for 30 years, kicked all the babies out of the auditorium, you know.

No distractions, you know. I don't find a lot of biblical merit for any of that.

I think that... And so, what we've been doing here is kind of trying to emphasize to parents, look, if you want to be a part of your child's

Sunday school or anything that we're doing with your children, anything, like the Wednesday night children's program.

And of course, that's like four years old to fourth grade. They're all in there, like, together. So, I mean, that's not hyper age.

I experienced that Wednesday night. You did. It was something. Yeah. And one year,

I was in charge of that program one whole year. And it was me and the youth and all the kids, you know.

And it was fun. But parents are always encouraged to be wherever their kids are, no matter what it is.

You know, moms, you want to be in the nursery with your kids? Go. You want to be in the Sunday school? Go. I mean, we're not telling you that you have to be separate from your kids in anything.

You want to keep your kids with you? Please do. That's awesome. We're just trying to be helpful here.

We're not trying to insist on hard and fast divisions. Now, that being said, we still have those specifics.

We do have some age -graded, you know, nursery to elementary, you know, on to the youth.

I think some good can be done through that. But I don't think it's necessary for a healthy church.

I think you can have a healthy church without it. I think you can have a healthy church with it. But I don't think it's healthy if you insist upon it and go deep into those divisions, if you understand my approach there.

So, that being said, you know, the question says, should, right? So, the question is, should church ministries slash communities within the church be provided?

You don't have to. That's my answer to the should. Is this mandatory?

I take the should to be, is this mandatory? And I'm saying it's not. And I think that there needs to be...whenever

you have any kind of structures within the church that are not necessarily mandated by the

Bible, and you just have them there because you're trying to, you know, organize yourselves to do something good, but it's not necessarily, you know, the biblical model, those should be held very loosely, those structures.

That should not become sacred in at any level. And we should be ready to change if we need to.

Yeah. Given enough time so we're not, you know,

I thought of Titus. So, when we're talking about, like, Sunday school class, typically you think of a teacher with kids, you know, in the class or an adult teaching a group of people.

If you've done gender segregated, you've got a man teaching other men and women teach other women. In Titus, where it talks about older men teaching younger men.

Yes. And it's plural there. Older men, plural, teaching the younger men.

Older women, plural, teaching younger women. And when you talked about the structures, there's, you know, some churches not have that structure set up in their church, but there are some structures that that God has set up, so like the family.

That's a natural structure that's already there. And the commands there to women, when it says older women teach younger women, it tells them to teach them certain things that are kind of homebound, where you already have a structure for that.

And if you're having women over, or young ladies over, that seems to be more of a,

I'm teaching them through the life that we're living. I'm doing these things, come join me,

I'll teach you how to, how I do these types of things. Rather than, let's sit down in a classroom and talk about,

I don't know, baking, or talk, like, this is how I discipline. Because my kids are all around me, you're gonna see it modeled because it's just through the process of life that, that I'm teaching you these things.

Yeah, most of the, most of that we see, it looks more organic than contrived.

And like, so I'm thinking of like the singles one in my mind. How organic is it for the singles to, like, group up together and then move themselves off as a separate ministry in the church instead of, like, like Titus says, older women teach the younger women.

Well, if you've got a majority of younger women all together, a majority of younger men all together, we need some older men around.

So it's gonna organically not just be filled with singles, right? Like, if it's done right, it's not gonna organically be filled with that one specific group in my mind.

Yeah, and you're right to identify, to recognize the, the relational structure of the family.

Obviously, what would a father be teaching his son? But, you know, how to be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, and love and patience.

You know, what else would a mother be teaching her daughter, except, you know, being reverent in behavior, not slanderous, not giving too much wine, to also, you know, need to love your husband and love the children that God gives you.

And, but given Titus's context, right? Paul is encouraging him in the church planting mission on Crete, and the

Cretans were Cretans, and so they needed a lot of help. And so there needed to be some ongoing teaching and training in how to be human, how to live in the image of God.

This is how, this is what it looks like to live in the image of God. You need to be instructed in this. Here's how a man should be a man, here's how a woman should be a woman.

You're lacking in this, and you need this in your life. How does that happen?

Well, in the current American church context, we're gonna have a miniseries.

We're gonna have a conference. We're gonna have a Sunday school class.

We're gonna have a small group on this, rather than it being something more organic.

This is where what Titus is describing is vine growing. He's not really describing the trellis on which the vine grows.

Now, you can teach this by using a class. There was a

Saturday every quarter at the church I went to when I was in college. One Saturday morning every quarter, they brought in somebody to teach all the men about being a man.

And they fed us breakfast, so that worked. And I learned a lot. I was greatly helped in thinking about what is it gonna be like to be a husband?

What is it gonna be like to be a father? And I learned lessons in those settings that have helped me to this day.

So I'm not against the structure, so long as we recognize what is needed is this relationship.

And then again, the focus. The women are teaching what?

Something that particularly pertains to their primary domain.

Right. That would make sense. What happens if they don't teach that to people who haven't never learned it?

What happens? Well, what happens is the

Word of God gets blasphemed. Verse 5 says, the older women are to be teaching the younger women to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands.

Why? That the Word of God may not be blasphemed. In Titus 2. Yeah. So we do see, in Titus 2, there is specific focus on the younger men.

There's some specific focus on the younger women. But this is more about developing those discipling relationships.

Again, you could use some structure for that. But this is about developing those discipling relationships about their particular discipleship needs.

And so you can have some focus on that. That's fine. And that would be a good thing. But like you were saying, if you were just gonna isolate people away from folks that are not like them.

Mm -hmm. I mean, but that goes back to the purpose -driven church, the church growth movement from Rick Warren, Donald McGavern.

That was Donald McGavern's initial strategy. Being a missionary kid from India, he did a study on the different mission stations in India that grew and the ones that did not.

The ones that did not grow and have great numbers were those that said to the Indians in their caste system, you ought to, you know, basically deny this caste system and treat one another in a different way and be able to come to church together and learn to love one another in Christ.

Okay. So that, you know, so in in this city or in this village or wherever, the caste system was in place and the mission stations that went against the caste system did not grow.

But the ones that said, our mission station is only for this particular level of the caste people, you know, so whatever it is.

We're gonna be going, we're gonna reach out to the high priestly Brahman class. Oh no, we're gonna go for the military class.

Oh no, no, we're gonna go for the merchant class. And they would just keep it all within that and they would have a specific groups for them.

Those missions grew. And so Donald McGovern got the idea like, oh, well, whatever works is blessed of God.

So what we need to do is we need to remove any kind of barriers for anyone to come to Christ.

And one of those barriers is like showing up to some place where people are different than you and you don't like that. So we're gonna remove that.

And so he brought those philosophies over to the States, Pacific Northwest, and California and so on.

And through kind of a networking with a variety of folks, including some within some very influential people that have had a big impact on the fast food industry and so on and so forth.

I mean, we're talking about economics, we're talking about marketing. They figured out the best way to do church is this.

Make it easy. Remove all barriers. Whatever you feel comfortable with, that's what we're gonna give you so that there's no barriers for you to come to Jesus.

And it seems like the metaphor that comes to mind from Titus for me is in the beginning, the thing that he's warning

Titus about is those who will upset whole households. And when you have them bring this methodology to the

States after it having worked in India, that seems like it would upset the entire household of faith. Or it would at least, if you're going to like kind of group people off as though they're separate churches within a church, that body's not gonna grow as a family together.

Like you may see numbers come in, but you're not gonna see people unite as a family and a body.

I think some of it is because it's very myopic. So each one is segregated.

So when you're in the youth, the youth are youth and they like these things, so we'll do those things.

But it's not preparing them for the next stage of life necessarily. It's just talking about the things that pertain to youth.

Then they age out and move into the next thing, but they weren't prepared for it. So then these are things that this age group, oh, you're single now, we're gonna talk about single things now.

Versus a more holistic, you're in church or you're in Sunday school with multiple generations in different walks of life.

The questions that come up, you're going through the Bible, just going through it, sometimes topically, usually expositionally, and you're just dealing with what's there.

And conversation will arise out of that, but you're with people that are in different places.

So if you're thinking, if you're forward -thinking and you're like, I'm a youth or I'm single, but I'd like to be married, you've got married people around you to talk to about that instead of consulting single people about being married.

It just seems very segregated and doesn't necessarily prepare you for...

And it's an inorganic segregation, right? Like everywhere else that you go during the week with your family, your kids are going on a hike with you, they're going to the park with you, and then all of a sudden they're in church, but they're not in church with you.

That seems strange to me. You go shopping with them for groceries, right?

And that's like... Dude, Ron, when you rise up, when you go, but when you go to church to pray...

It doesn't make sense. Well, in some sense, part of that was that families were uncomfortable together.

So for the family whose children are away from their parents for the majority of their time, okay, they're off in school or they're off doing their sports or their activities and so on, and the whole experience might be, you know, the basic family time that they get is probably just whenever mom and dad are driving them somewhere in the car.

That's about all the family time they're gonna get. And one of the things is they're uncomfortable being together.

So when they would come, when you come to church and they're all together in doing something, that is foreign.

It's easier for mom and dad to do what they've done all week long, drop the kids off to the experts who do the kid things that they like, and then we're gonna go do our thing.

And that model was attractive.

I don't want to bring my kids to a church they don't want to be at. If my kids are grumping about being here, I don't want to bring them here.

That's a real issue for a lot of people when they're trying to figure out what church to go to. I don't want to bring my kids to someplace where they're gonna feel uncomfortable or out of sorts or not around other people that make them feel comfortable, and if they're gonna be griping and grousing about it, then we're not going to do it.

And that's a big deal. That's one of the main deciding factors for what church you go to.

And the other one is music. In The Purpose -Driven Church, Rick Warren wrote, said, the scale of how many people that you can reach is gonna be based on what kind of music you have.

So that was the main thing. But when you read the Scriptures, so when you think about Paul writing letters to the church at Colossae, we wrote a letter to the church of Colossae, we wrote a letter to the church at Ephesus, and we think about how these letters were circulated amongst the churches.

Jesus, through the Apostle John, sent seven letters to the churches in Asia Minor along a very common postal route, and all of their mail got read by everybody else.

To the churches of Asia Minor, write, hey, Laodicea, hey, Ephesus, hey,

Thyatira, but everybody else got to hear what Jesus said to the other churches.

And so this is a very basic observation in which we see that not only were the

Old Testament prophets reading former prophets to the current people, but also in the

New Testament, everyone's reading each other's mail. And the Gospels are getting circulated, and you know, what

Luke wrote for Theophilus was also read throughout all the churches. Paul mentions in Colossae and in Corinthians a brother who was with him whose gospel was received amongst all the churches.

That's probably Luke's gospel that he wrote, it's being spread throughout all the churches. So all of these Scriptures are being read.

Why is that important? Because as it's being read to the people there who are being addressed, wives, husbands, fathers, by extension we mean, you know, obviously parents, children, slaves, slaves, slave owners.

So all of them were being, and this was what made up the classic oikonomos, the household, where you got a word economy from.

And all of them were there. Now in other places in their culture they would not all be in the same place.

That would be odd to have father -mother with their children and their slaves that they own, all out together doing something.

That was not something that was done. But it was expected that they were all there in the church.

And so all of them were addressed. The men and the women, the husbands and the wives, the parents and the children, the masters and the slaves, all being specifically dealt with, exhorted, instructed.

And what you read about in Colossians 3 and in Ephesians 5 and 6, before we get to the specificities of how the doctrine of God and the gospel of Christ apply to them and how they should be thinking about their lives, before we get to the specific applications, they've already heard these massive ideas about Christ, his cross, his resurrection, the meaning of the

Spirit. All of them need that. And then there's specific application to them.

What a privilege. What a change, like you said. It's expected, meaning that the people writing the

Gospels knew that things had changed. They said, when I write this, all of these people are going to be around listening.

What a privilege that unlike class systems or other places where things are segregated,

Christ brings everyone together. And then in our wisdom, we're trying to segregate things out again, versus everyone comes together and hears this and is unified in Christ.

Yeah, there's a lot of these things within the Scripture and within life that reflect the wisdom of the triune

God, who was one and yet plural in his Godhead.

One God, three persons, one God. And so there's not some sort of dichotomy between the one and the many.

Not in Christian theology. There was for the Greek philosophers, and there still is in philosophy to this day.

But what we see in the Scriptures is that God is able to bring a unity, but also still dealing with specificity.

So for example, at Pentecost, you have all of these tribes, tongues, and nations represented.

Notice how the miracle works. The miracle is not that God makes all of these folks listening to the

Apostles suddenly understand Aramaic. Okay, that wasn't the miracle.

The miracle is that all these disciples who spoke really good

Aramaic and had some facility with some Greek and Hebrew too, but that everybody there at Pentecost heard the gospel preached to them in their own heart language and the dialects that they learned back home.

That's the direction the miracle went. What is that saying to us? God loves the tribes. God loves the tongues.

God loves all these different types of people, and he's showing his love to them by sending the gospel to them in their dialect, in their language.

So you don't have to learn the King's English in order to be saved, as some 1611 onlyists have been known to claim.

We must teach them the King's English, otherwise they won't know the gospel. That sounds Islamic to me.

You've got to read it in the original language. It's a sure way to make sure that your specific flavor of religion dies, because eventually that language dies, and you're gonna die with it.

And so what we see also is a contrast between the synagogue and the church.

In the synagogue, the men would gather in one room, and the women would gather in another room, and they would listen from the open door.

Or sometimes they built it two -story, and there was kind of a circle balcony around, and the women would be upstairs, and the men would be downstairs.

If you were a certain age, you couldn't be in the room with the men. And if you were a Gentile, you weren't circumcised.

If you were God -fearing, you could be around, listening in from the door, so on and so forth. But for some synagogues, you couldn't even be in there if you weren't circumcised.

But they didn't say you couldn't listen. You could listen in. But everybody was segregated. It was very

Old Covenant. How very synagogue -ish some of our churches look. That's not the expectation in the

New Testament about how they gathered, what they did when they came together, how they ate together, fellowship together, heard the

Word together, prayed together, and so forth. And they did that. The Cretans learned to do that on Crete.

Macedonians learned to do that in Philippi and Thessalonica and in Athens and Corinth.

They learned to do that where they were at. And they came together and said, let's worship together.

They learned to do that in Troas. They were a little crowded. Eutychius fed off the window, but what were they doing?

They were gathering in an apartment. It was the only place they had to be. But everybody was there.

It was kind of stuffy, but everybody was there. And that's why when the question is should, should, no.

And anyone contending that that has to be the case is perhaps seeing, like, in order to have an effective ministry to these people whom

I have a particular interest in, and I think that really we ought to be very especially kind to this group of people, we need to have special things only for them so they will feel comfortable and not threatened.

We'll give them a safe space, bring them in, and show that we truly do love them, whereas other people may not.

And again, I'm not questioning the sincerity, however, I'm questioning whether there's wisdom there.

Because the way in which the love of God is on display through Christians is one in which

Jesus specifically states in Matthew chapter 5, there ain't no big deal if you love people just like you.

So he says in Matthew 5, like, oh, you love others that are just like you? Big deal. The kind of love that we're called to is loving people who aren't exactly matched up to us, okay?

Now it's like, by this all men will know that you're my disciples, but the love that you have for one another. We got a lot to learn about that.

So yeah, am I, what am I doing trying to love people who are 40 years older than I am?

Trying to love people that are, you know, 40 years younger than I am. I have a three -year -old in my house.

He's very strange sometimes. You know, to love people in a different economic status than I am, a different station, somebody with a different rank, to love somebody who is of a different, way different level of experience, and so on, education, so on.

How do I love these people? There's no end to this list, you know. They list subsets within the body, singles, married with kids, minorities, and so on.

I think the attitudes that would demand, they say, could you speak to the part, yeah, could you speak to the attitudes that demand such from churches as a requirement for either joining or leaving a church?

Well, I would say that sometimes those attitudes are simply expectations, because that's what they have met everywhere else.

And if they come to a church where that's absent, it is such a shock that they sense that something must be wrong.

And people are concerned that they show up to visit churches, or they try to participate in church, and they try to see if anything feels off.

Why? Because they don't want to be part of a bad church. And so what they recognize as good and healthy may not be good and healthy, but that's what they think is good and healthy.

So if it's missing, if it jars them, they're like, oh, you know, there's something wrong with that church.

And then they're out. You know, again, I think they're trying to make a good decision in the main.

Some people will get a taste of other churches, oh, they have special stuff for this, this, this, and this.

My church doesn't do that for me. Yeah, like an expectation to be served rather than to serve.

Yeah. And I think that there can be a selfishness, there can be a, like you were saying, shortsightedness, a focus upon the self that leads to, well, if you're not gonna have, you know, this, then we're out.

You know, when we stopped doing vacation Bible school around here, it ruffled some feathers. We don't take kids to church camp, right?

We stopped doing some traditional things because, one, we can't do them well.

And not because people aren't talented around here, they are, but what it costs in terms of energy and ability and time and so on, simply to do the thing that we've always done makes no sense whatsoever.

Right, not worth it. Not worth it. Well, I think some of that is like, like you said, depending on certain assumptions that go into it.

So if you grow up and you send your children away to the experts, and that's what you know, they're doing the kids thing, they're working with them.

You walk into a church, okay, I need to find a church that knows how to do those things to properly care for my child.

In their minds, that's their role, is I'm gonna best help my child by finding a church that can cater to them or that can teach them in ways that will reach them.

So I think with some people that can be, I don't want to deal with it. And with others, it's, I don't know how to deal with it.

I have not done that. I've not been fulfilling that role. It's been fulfilled by other people.

So I need to find a place that can continue to do that. And so that's what they're looking for in order to keep that going.

Even though in Titus, it says the work in that situation should be done on you and not on your child necessarily.

Right, yeah. Yeah, well, and even what you're saying with the camps and things like that, depending on the structure of your family, if it's

I've sent my children away to school, I'll send them away to this camp. But if you have a family that has been keeping the children home, and in the church says, we're gonna do this separate thing, that's not a structure of the family, it's not necessarily a structure of the church, it's an extra thing added on to your already, your family routines of things that you're already doing, it seems foreign.

And it puts a burden on those families to do those things, which they wouldn't naturally be doing anyways.

Yeah, I think there's something to be said for the way that a church is structured and what it encourages in terms of how families expect to grow and function.

There is some sort of interaction there. And I would say that, like you were saying, it could go both ways.

Whereas here's a family that does everything together, when they come to a church that says, all of you have to be separate, that's disorienting and so also on the other side.

I'm not questioning the desire or the motives of parents who feel like,

I'm not connecting with my kids very well, I really want them to know and appreciate biblical truth, and I think it would be a good thing to bring them to somebody who could do that well, who

I would be able to trust and have at least a basically good relationship with.

And so I'm not against that, but you have to begin to think, what is, as Paul Washer said, there is such a thing as youth leaders and God calls them parents.

And that's very true. I mean, God gave the parents to the children, the children to the parents, so that they would raise them up in the fear and ambition of the

Lord. That's primarily the parents' job. So anything that we do as a church, Sunday school, the

Wednesday night Truth and Grace program, TAG, anything we do here regarding some sort of special focus on children or whatever, it's only in terms of, hey, we're just here to be a supplement, we're here to be a little bit of help, we want to do whatever we can to reinforce what you're doing at home.

If you're interested in learning how to do more at home and bring a more robust focus in family worship, family discipleship, we want to encourage you in that, equip you for that, support you in that, because this is no replacement for the good that can happen in family life.

And now we're talking about the age -graded stuff and kids and so on, because that's what is most close to home.

Yeah, that's our context. Yeah, to our context, that's what... Now, speaking more broadly, a lot of folks may look at a church and say, well, unless you have spaces, which is, you know, an awful word

I wish we would stop using, but unless you have spaces for these various groups of people whom we have all been informed that they're not being loved well, and unless the church has spaces for all these oppressed peoples, then the church isn't being very loving, and we're just nowhere close to what

Jesus said in terms of gospel. Okay, so someone's been discipled that way, they've been given that framework to work in, and so I remember we had someone visit from the

East Coast, from the Deep Left, you know, and they came and they visited and they looked around and one of their comments that they made in Sunday school was, you know, this church isn't very diverse, right, because she'd been trained to look for skin color.

How dare you? We have every type and form of 60 -year -old man in this church.

And I was like, as a pastor, you know, I'm thinking about how different everybody is and how, you know, without the grace of God and the bailing wire of Christian grace, you know, we never are going to love each other.

I'm thinking how different all these families are in their backgrounds, their economic statuses, the kinds of work they do, the kinds of convictions that they have, and I'm thinking, oh my goodness, you have no idea, you know, because she had been trained to look at skin color.

That's all, you know, like that has so little to do with what we're dealing with.

You can't possibly even see how it is that people are loving one another. And to your point, though,

I mean, I think there is, we see the differences between all of us, but if we go out into different contexts of different people, groups, and cultures,

I mean, you do feel that the major differences between one group of people and another.

And there is, like even though we're in different lines of work, we have different, we're at different phases of life, there's still loads of similarity in our church that I see, even though, you know, there's differing convictions here and there.

So, like, I think the real issue is, for them, it's that it needs to be flattened and from people group to people group, rather than just an accepting of that people groups are different, right?

Like, so they can't accept at all that people groups are different, which is strange, given that most people who have those positions are

Darwinian evolutionists. It's really weird. Well, how do you get there? I don't know. But it's really just not being able to accept that and, you know, like I've said before, the only places they show up and do that at are white churches, you know?

Well, that, yeah, and because the other places have been, other types of groups have been identified as the oppressed, so them having their own safe spaces is what would be loving, right, and just to do.

We were renting a place in a Midwest city, and one of the guys came by and was helping us with our appliances, and he was a black guy, and he was a

Christian guy. We got along, we had a lot in common. We started talking about churches, and we didn't have a church yet.

We had just moved back up to the city. So they asked him where he went, and then he got uncomfortable real fast, because he knew

I was gonna ask about visiting, coming out, and so then he was just real on. He's like, I don't,

I don't think you would like it there. It's like, it's church. Why wouldn't I like it?

And, well, because then he just went on to say, you would be the only white person there, and it would be a very different experience from what

I think you would be comfortable with. I appreciated his honesty and him just telling me, and I, like I said, we had a lot in common.

We talked about Jesus and God's grace, and His forgiveness, all those types of things, and then he was just honest with me, like, yeah, you, you probably...

But there's not, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, right. But we're always, what I was saying about the skin color thing, is like, that was the way that, that's the only way she had been trained to see whether or not people love one another well enough, was if you had this flattening out of the kaleidoscope of melanin.

That was it. It's a very shallow, shallow approach to it. What happens in your local church, as Dylan has noted, it's like, you know, it's not that we are drastically different in culture around here, and in terms of, like, just being, being far apart from one another.

We have a lot of similarities. But given all the similarities, that doesn't mean that there are no differences at all, right?

And learning to love one another in that way also teaches us how to love others who are not, not primarily of our culture.

And that's fine that they're not in our culture, and it's fine that they have their own. It's fine that we're different.

I'm not saying all cultures are equally good, equally holy before God, equally on the same level in, in terms of conformity to the image of God.

I don't think that cultures are equal. But at the same time, I don't, you know, to say that, just to suggest that unless you have this wide distribution, it's only been, that suggestion is only made and insisted upon in a church that someone detects a lack of kaleidoscope of melanin.

If it's a black church, it's fine. If it's a, if it's the Korean deaf church down the street from me, that's fine.

If, if there, if it's a Filipino church, it's fine. If it's a Hispanic church, you know, and they're going to be either

Guatemalan or from Mexico, probably not going to be grouping up. That's all fine.

But if it's something else, then that's not fine. That perspective smacks of rank hypocrisy.

And it, it's built off of not, not Darwin, but it's built off of Marx.

And that's. And it doesn't even like practically speaking, doesn't make sense, but you have to have someone represented from all of these different cultures.

Do you want me to force them to be here? Like, yeah, we've got to fly people in from Southeast Asia now. Yeah. And then if they went to find a church that speaks their language, they have to be here that it's practically speaking, it doesn't make sense.

But it was, it's a susceptible, it's a, it's an attractive, a susceptible argument, one that was kind of in the air for a while.

And it was hard to not agree with the basic sentiments given the promise of our unity in Christ.

But our unity in Christ doesn't mean that we try to reverse

Pentecost. Okay. In other words, they want to reverse

Pentecost. They want the miracle to be that everybody hears the same language. It's not that everyone hears the same language.

Babble is that everyone hears the same message in their languages. There's nothing more basic to difference between culture than language and dialect.

Well, you were saying, we've been talking in Sunday School in Galatians, there's places where Paul says there is no slave or free, male or female, you know,

Jew or Gentile. So he says that broadly speaking, given a specific context, but then what's he doing?

Giving directions to men, giving directions to women and slaves and children. I thought those were distinctions were gone.

No, they're not erased. But the context is in salvation, there's nothing preventing you.

Those things don't prevent you from coming to Christ. Those things, those things were of incredible distinctions and distinctive importance in the old covenant.

It, it mattered. If you were, if you were this or that, male or female, slave or free,

Jew or non -Jew, that mattered a great deal in the old covenant about how you related to the covenant and kept covenant.

It mattered a great deal. In the new covenant, it doesn't have any bearing on your relationship to God through Christ.

Okay. That doesn't mean that you're no longer male or female. It doesn't mean that you're no longer slave or free, but those things do not come into play in terms of your relationship in this new covenant.

It's so, so much the fact that even though you still are, you could say across the room, now this person over here is a

Gentile slave woman. Okay. But she does not hyphenate her identity.

She is not a slave Christian. She's not a female Christian. She's not a Gentile Christian. She's just a Christian who is female, who is a slave, who is a

Gentile. And so all of that stuff is still true. And there's meaning there. There's background there.

There's experience there. And the discipleship process is going to take those things into account, but it has nothing to do with her standing in Christ.

Her standing is the exact same as the male Jew slave owner. It's the exact same standing in Christ because it's

Christ's righteousness, Christ's identity. And that's the point that Paul is making there. And I think that this is the only way we can really make sense of, but this could be very confusing because it's in,

I don't know how this actually works, but when you go to a church that has all these little different safe spaces for all these different groups, what is their message?

Their message is all about, we're not going to make any big deal about any distinctions, but we're going to make a really big deal about all these distinctions.

It's a bit confusing. It's like, we're going to have women's groups and women's only groups, but also we don't think it should make any difference at all if a woman preaches or not.

How does that work? We think that we're going to have black only spaces, but when it comes to our worship music, we need to have a different type of style that it's not so white.

It has to be more, you know, so black only, but then we're going to have, there's a lot of clumsy attempts to try to figure out how to push forward this idea that they have, this is what the love of Christ means, that we have to act in these certain ways.

Because why is it clumsy though? Why does it not make sense? It's because it's pushing forward a synthesis between Marx and Christ in a liberation theology that makes a hash out of the church.

And we see it a lot of different places, and there's a lot of people who are very, very concerned about it. Yeah, well,

I think we answered that as best as we could, but we'll go ahead and move on to our recommendations for the week.

Michael? My recommendation would be, I think, is a book by Ian Murray called

Evangelicalism Divided. His subtitle is A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000.

So this was the book I read of Ian Murray after Revival and Revivalism, which talked about the

Second Great Awakening and how we ended up with so many of the expectations and customs that we have in church today.

But this was very interesting to hear how it was from the onset of Christianity today with Carl F.

H. Henry, Billy Graham, and a lot of things that began to change and how it impacted that second half of the 20th century.

And so reading it now, you're looking 25 years past, looking at some background information of, oh, this is kind of why we are where we're at today, because you can see the trajectory from this vantage point.

So I think it's a fairly valuable book to kind of reflect on the direction of things. I think connected to that in another way is

John MacArthur's book The Truth War. And this is going to be an easier read than Ian Murray.

And it's going to be more on the pastoral side. Ian Murray's going to be more on the historian side.

But both of these books were very helpful for me to think about how to understand the current controversies and then how to respond.

Chris? So I don't know if I can say this being before Thanksgiving, but I'm in full

Christmas music mode. Angel's Messiah over there? Yeah, practices and getting music ready and rehearsals and stuff like that.

So my reading has slightly dropped off as I'm preparing for that stuff. But I would recommend, obviously

Christmas music, but find something, because we have kind of our standard go -tos,

Christmas music, you put it on, things you grew up with. I would recommend finding some eclectic or just maybe songs,

Christmas songs that you haven't listened to before. But find some new—there was a gentleman at one of our previous churches that every year he would make a

CD of Christmas music. But it was the same songs, but it was different artists and different styles.

And so it was really interesting to hear, because there's a lot of artists out there. And so it was fun.

We always looked forward to that CD coming out that he'd give to us, and just varied music of Christmas and it all worshiping

God and for what he's done in creation. Did you ever get any Frank Sinatra from him? No, it was so—I didn't recognize any of them, hardly any of them.

And you know, because there's all those go -tos that are like standard, you hear every year, the radio is playing them, and they seem to play the same ones every year, because that's what people want to hear.

But he would put stuff in there like, what even is that? Is that reggae? Is that ska?

What's going on here? Yeah, but it's like, okay, that's interesting.

It's something different, but it was all Christmas music. The tunes you knew, but it was just like different. I haven't heard ska since college, so that just threw me back hard.

Well, my recommendation for the week is the Oren McIntyre podcast,

A -U -R -O -N, and he deals with some of the current news surrounding political things or political happenings, and he does so from a

Christian perspective, and I think he's associated with Blaze Media, Glenn Beck's organization, but I've really come to enjoy him.

He's kind of adjacent to the Contramundum guys, Andrew Isker and C .J. Engel, on how he analyzes things, but he's more on up -to -date things, whereas those guys will put something out every, like, one to, like, two to three weeks that's kind of open and free, and Oren McIntyre is, like, kind of two to three times a week, so he's really staying up -to -date on what's happening and how he views certain things that go on, but I really appreciated his analysis and his assessment of the historical moment, because I think he does a lot of reading historically, and how a lot of things have occurred and happened in American history, and how these might match up or how they might differ from it, and so I really enjoyed him.

That's Oren McIntyre. Michael, what did we think before this week? I am very thankful for my father.

He's getting married. From the date of this recording podcast, he's getting married in a week and a day.

Been over nine and a half years since mom died, and he met a great lady at my brother's church,

Dolores, and so they're getting married, and so thankful for the

Lord's grace in his life, and thankful for them, and looking forward to see what

God will be doing with them. I was just reflecting on everything my dad has been through.

One of our missionaries passed away today. Denny Johnson and Vern have been by her side through her whole cancer, and it's been very, very rough, and just kind of hearing, reading between the lines in these emails that have been coming down, you know, and just remembering what it was like with mom, and then trying to encourage

Vern from a distance, and praying for him, but then seeing my dad, you know, well over nine years later in the

Lord's grace in his life to this day, and so not something I can say to Vern right now, just pray for him, but you know, there's a lot of good ahead, and I'm just thankful for my own father's example there.

Amen. Chris? This week marks the anniversary of my best friend's death a few years ago.

He kind of took me under his wing in college. I lived with him for many years, and it was neat that we were all music people in college together, and so he knew

Brooke separately from me. They were in some of the same classes that I wasn't in, and then

I knew him because, you know, he was much older, unmarried, but much older, and he passed away during all the

COVID stuff. But this week, just being very thankful for the time that I had with him, and that I know that I'll see him again.

He was a Christian, so I'm very thankful that he was a Christian. We got to have good conversations about that, and to celebrate,

Brooke made his favorite dish that she would make for him, and then he taught her how to make peanut butter pies, because he would make me peanut butter pies, and then he'd make her a chocolate pie.

So he taught her how to make the pie crust and then the filling.

So every year, Brooke will make that on that anniversary. Then on his birthday, she'll make—he wouldn't have cake, he would have her cookies.

So she'd bake him cookies and make that for him. So I'm very thankful for Philip and for the time that I had with him.

Amen. Thankful for the Lord giving us like moments in our family as we're going through family worship or teaching our children, where there's like this like burst of progress.

And like the other night, we were in family worship and we were in one of the

Psalms. I think we were in Psalm 2 or Psalm 1. I can't remember which one it was when they they kind of burst out with this, but they just start asking questions left and right.

And then we get into like, what is heaven? What is hell? We get into salvation issues.

We get into kind of sanctification issues. They're learning about sanctification and TAG. So that kind of perked their ears up as well.

But like most of the time, my sons are they're squirming in their seat. They're fighting each other.

And so it's like we're getting through just portions of a chapter some nights. Some nights we're getting through a full chapter with some correction.

But you know, it was just like this thing where I saw both of them had to ask a question and they asked another one.

And I looked up at Heather and I'm like, here we go. Let's do this. And so we're sitting there ready to answer their questions left and right because they're in an inquisitive mood.

You know, they just hit this mood. And for some reason, Charles and I think Meadow was down, but Charles is like just sitting there.

He's not like, and he never sits there. Right. He's like always running around the room as we're doing this. And he just, he's like sitting there quiet, letting it all happen.

I'm like, this is great. Like, yeah. And I know it's not gonna happen every night. Right. But I'm really thankful that you get some of those sometimes as a, as a, like a,

I don't know, like kind of an energy boost or like, yeah, you know, these things, they come about. So like, I'm, I'm ready for the next one now.

And I know, I know like I can, I can hurtle my way through those more difficult nights to, to teach and to, to walk through this with them.

But those nights when they, they kind of pop their heads up and they're like, wait a minute, what was that word you said?

I'm all right here. Let's talk about that word. I'm really thankful for that. And that wraps it up for today.

We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with having not read.