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Make it happen. The link is in the description. All right. All right. We got here. Who's this guy on the screen? I don't know. I don't know. I need to pop his in for this one. This one will be a little emotional, you know.
But yeah, this is me. This is me. I think I'm definitely a little thinner. I feel like I look healthier now. I don't know. Maybe I was just stressed out or something. Who knows? But this is an old video of mine back when I lived in Vermont.
Five years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday. Five years ago. This is the video I put out when I had stopped being a pastor. I had resigned from being a pastor of a small church in Vermont. I put this out there, and I was definitely a little vague with the details because I was trying to spare the congregation and people who knew me the gory details and stuff like that.
I haven't thought about this in a very long time, which has been good. That's been a very good thing. But unfortunately, Blake Callens here kind of reminded me about it today. If it was just Blake, I wouldn't really care so much.
But this has been something that people have brought up from time to time, and I've had conversations with people about all of that. A lot of people do know the details here. But what I figured I'd do, just to kind of save me time in the future, is I'll have sort of a little bit of a longer explanation of kind of what happened here, why I'm no longer a pastor, and all that kind of thing.
That way I can just kind of point to the video and say, hey, here's what happened, you know what I mean, if you're interested. Not that many people are, but maybe this will be interesting to you, maybe not.
But it's just going to make life easier for me. And so we'll go from there. But Blake initially had said that I was forcibly removed for my online behavior and that I was pressured into resigning or whatever it is.
And none of this is actually true. And there's so many reasons why. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to play my own video, and I'm going to start and stop and respond to myself, and maybe we'll crack a few jokes at my own expense.
We'll see how it goes. But anyway, that's what we're going to do today. This is an explainer for why I am no longer a pastor. My co-elder, after a long time of making videos and doing content, he revealed to me that he had been kind of harboring a secret, not a resentment, but he had something against me for a long time and never brought it up until it kind of boiled over one day.
And he confronted me about it. And we had a discussion, a very long discussion, numerous ones, as you might imagine, about it. And it was about, well, we'll see what old AD has to say. But anyway, so first the announcement.
So many of you started following me probably about a year ago at this point. And so you know a little bit about my history. If you've watched my videos, you know that I've talked about living in Vermont, pastoring a small church, things like that.
Look at those twig arms, man. Wow. Look at that. Definitely not as strong as I am now. I feel like I'm as strong as I've ever been right now, and I'm five years older, so that's good. Well, I've decided to resign as a pastor from my church.
And it's not, I did not disqualify myself or anything like that. In fact, I'm still a member of this small church for the time being. And I'm not going to tell you the whole story about why I did it. But suffice it to say that it has to do with my social justice content.
Definitely does. It also has to do with the 11th commandment. If you don't know what that is, that's okay. You don't have to know what it is. And you might be like, 11th commandment? I thought you weren't, I didn't think you were a Southern Baptist.
And I'm not. I'm not a Southern Baptist. However, there is a prominent Southern Baptist who took issue with my content and was able to convince my co-elder at the time, now he's my pastor, that criticizing people who claim the name of Christ, even if they're spreading a false message or a false teaching or a false gospel, is not correct.
You shouldn't do it. So that's all true. This is all true. And I think part of the confusion that people had initially with this is that I mentioned a prominent Southern Baptist. And it's Jared C. Wilson.
And that's, I'll just say the name now. I don't care. Jared C. Wilson was the person. So, but we were a Southern Baptist church. So it's not like, so some people thought there was like official action taken against me or something like that, because I mentioned a prominent Southern Baptist person, but that's not the case at all.
We were a local congregational church, essentially. And so that was the story. And the connection, the reason why Jared C. Wilson was involved is because I used to intern with him, essentially. I was like his intern.
And the other, the co-elder that was there, he never interned with him, but he was an elder at the church that Jared pastored. And I was there as well as an intern. And I preached there for a while and all that kind of stuff.
So we were both connected to him and my co-elder really respected him and looked up to him and all that kind of stuff. So that's how he was involved in the story. And there's other details here, which I will spare you the details of all of this, but that's essentially what happened.
And over time, this person, he had this thing against me, did not tell me about it until it blew up. And it was a very weird kind of a situation. And so let's continue. And so I resigned. And the reason I'd resigned is not because I think I've done anything wrong.
I don't think I have. But I did it for the local church, for the unity of the local church, because the reality was that I was not willing to pastor the church on my own. And if I continued to pastor the church and I continue to hold the positions that I hold publicly, then the co-elder was going to resign from the church and the church would have been over.
The only solution that allowed my church to continue meeting on Sundays as a body was for me to resign. And I came to that decision of my own volition. So this is what's so funny about this, like Blake and others, it's not just Blake, but others who don't like me, they say that they know what really happened, that I got pushed out, that I got forcibly removed, that I was forced to resign.
And they're reading that into my words. And when I say, well, no, I mean, I said here that it was of my own volition. It was my idea. All of that is true. And they say, well, I'm going to need more evidence than that.
And what's funny about that is like every piece of evidence they have is for me, like everything is my word. The only reason people know about this is because I revealed it. Everything about my situation was told by me.
Nobody has gone to other people to describe what actually happened. So it's like, so you're taking my words, but you need more than my word to actually take all of my words. It's just very weird. But you know, that's how people are when they're against you.
But all of that is completely accurate. I wasn't pushed out. Now, it is the case that, of course, if this brother didn't have a problem with me, then none of that would have happened. But here's how it went down.
This is exactly what happened. What happened is we were both elders. None of us were greater than the other. You know, he was my pastor, I was his pastor. We had equal standing, equal authority. And he came to me with all of these problems, which he told me he could not live with anymore.
He could not do ministry with me anymore because I was willing to criticize the likes of Matt Chandler and Russell Moore and things like that. He could not live with that and he was going to resign. That's what he told me.
He wanted to resign and let me pastor the church. And I told him, hey man, don't resign. And there was two reasons for that. Number one, number one, let's try to hash this out. You know what I mean? Like we don't have to go zero to 60 instantly.
And number two, if you resign, that's the end of the church. Because at the time, I was unwilling to pastor the church on my own. In fact, I thought and from my perspective, that was illegitimate. That wasn't a biblical model.
So if I was the only elder there, I would think that I would be sinning in doing that. Now, I think that I've changed my mind about that since then. You know, I think that plurality of elders is still the ideal model.
But you know, in extenuating circumstances, it wouldn't be sinful to be a pastor on your own. So I think I was wrong about that. But that's where I was. That's where I was. So I said, hey, man, don't resign.
Let's try to hash this out. And so what we did was we brought all the heads of household in the church, all of them to the man, all of them together. And I said to him, pick a third party that's not at the church, a pastor that you respect, pick somebody that can be sort of like an arbiter here so that he can kind of guide the conversation.
He can kind of cross-examine us. You know, he can kind of, you know, weigh in, essentially. And that was my idea. I said, let's do that. Let's do that. Because this doesn't have to be, you know, hey, we disagree, so now we have to part ways.
And the pastor, the co-elder that was involved in this, you know, he kept trying to be very pious. You know, oh, this is just our moment, just like Barnabas and Paul when they separated. And I kept saying, hey, let's cool this off a little bit.
It doesn't have to go that way. Let's try to figure this out. And so we did that. And I let him select the third party too, which was a little risky because it could have been, that could have gone against me big time.
But I let him select who's a pastor that's local, that knows us both, that cares about us, that loves us, that loves our flock. You know, who's somebody that we could pick? So he picked a guy. He picked a guy.
And we had like a four hour conversation. And sometimes it was contentious and sometimes it was very nice. And, but it was, it was a very respectful conversation. And here's what happened during that conversation.
Every single person involved, with the exception of the co-elder, every single person involved agreed with me that what I was doing online was not sinful. They did. And some of them said, hey, I don't agree with your positions, but it's not sinful.
Every person, every person, including the third party arbiter who like probably shouldn't have said, given his opinion, but he did and he had completely agreed. And so, so, you know, from my perspective, you know, look, we're, we're, we're approaching this like Christians.
It wasn't really a church discipline issue per se, but it was along those lines. And so we, we, we, we brought in the, the, the, the body of believers, you know, you tell two or three people about it, you tell somebody else about it, you got your pastor there or a pastor there.
He wasn't our pastor. And every single person agreed with me that I wasn't sinning. Even people who did not like my message, that is pretty shocking. It is pretty, I mean, it's impressive that someone's willing to put aside, you know, I don't agree with you on these, but you know, you're not sinning.
And I obviously wasn't sitting obviously. I mean, if you look at my content during this time period, it's not hardcore at all. I am 50 times worse than I used to be. There's just no question about it.
And I mean worse in a nice way. So that should have been the end of it. And my co-elder should have taken that as, okay, we've gone through these, the steps of, you know, a discipleship problem, a discipline issue per se.
Well, again, it wasn't like I was being excommunicated, but it was along those lines. And he should have been humble enough to say, you know what? I'm just, I'm wrong about this. But he wasn't. That's the bottom line.
He wasn't humble enough to take his L and walk away. And he thought about it for a day. And he said, I can't do ministry with you. I can't, which left me at a loss. I mean, what can we do? You thought you had something against me.
Everyone says you don't, but you're still unwilling to take, to be humble about it. I wasn't mad at him. I just, I was like, I'm mad now, but like, I'm not mad about it now, but I'm expressing anger right now.
And so I said, look, I mean, the only way forward, because I did, I do genuinely, I did genuinely care about this body of believers. In fact, one of the families of the church followed us to the next church, even though I wasn't the pastor, because they wanted to be with us.
You know what I mean? That's how much we loved each other. I said, for the sake of the church, I know this isn't going to look good, but I love you guys. And I don't want this church plant to fail just because of this problem.
The only way forward is for me to resign. You can still be the pastor, and I'll still be at the church. And because he didn't have this issue of, he didn't think it was sinful for him to be a solo pastor.
So that's why that worked. And he agreed. He agreed. And that's what we were going to do. And I also agreed with him. I said, look, I'll cool it on certain kinds of content. That's what I said. And we came to some kind of agreement on that.
I said, for your sake, you know, I'm under your authority now. Everyone agrees with me that I wasn't sinning, but I can cool it for a little bit on certain things. And so, you know, that's one other reason why I want to tell this story, because it, I mean, if anything, the story actually makes me look really good.
I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. You know what I mean? It does. It does. So that's what we did. And then a week later, two weeks later, I think it was like, I think it was less than two weeks later.
It was like one more Sunday and that was it. He emails the church in a tizzy. I can't do this anymore. The church plant's over. That's what he decided as a pastor. So despite my efforts to save the church, you know, from not existing anymore, to keep unity, you know, I was willing to be humble about it and not take you to the mat and not do all this stuff.
Despite all my efforts, he was dead set on having nothing more to do with the church, even with the concessions, even with everything. So we ended it. And then it was a great blessing because we ended up going to a church in Ludlow, Vermont.
Pastor Jerry Schuman was so kind to us. You know, I preached at that church. I did Sunday school at that church. You know, like it was a great experience. Jerry is a great guy. Pastor Jerry Schuman, he's on Gab.
And we found a great church body full of people that we love just as much as we loved our previous church. It's as simple as that. And even there, like there are people that didn't agree with my positions, but there was a lot of mutual respect and there's a lot of understanding and just warmness.
It was a wonderful situation for us eventually. But that's what happened. That's how it went down. I resigned not because I was in the wrong, because I was fully exonerated if there was charges against me, which there weren't.
But I was exonerated by everyone that was involved in the issue. Every single person who was present at that meeting, it was the entire church. Well, not the entire church, but the heads of household and a third party.
They all agreed. They all agreed. But I resigned so that we could continue. But that wasn't enough for this guy. And quite frankly, in my opinion, this guy just was sick of it anyway. He didn't want to pastor anymore, is what the bottom line was.
Because he had tried to quit a number of times. Not because of this issue, because of other issues, which was probably a red flag in retrospect. I probably should have done something about it much sooner than I did, than all this.
But anyway, that's what happened. Let's see if I have any other tidbits here. It might not have been the right decision. Honestly, it might not have. And I understand if you want to criticize me for it.
Even at the time I questioned the decision to resign, I said it might not have been the right decision. That's what I said. Because I was conflicted. I was conflicted. Because I knew how it would look, but I also knew what was really happening.
Right? And I didn't want to spill the beans on the whole situation because it wasn't my place. I didn't want to hurt the people in the church and all that stuff. So I didn't tell anybody for a long time.
And looking back on it, this was the mistake I made. There may have been a couple mistakes, but one of them was the fact that I didn't address the pastor low-key quitting numerous times, the other elder.
And the second one was resigning. I think it was a mistake in retrospect. But you live, you learn, and that kind of thing. In my opinion at this point, now you should make them force you out. Right? That's what I think.
But they weren't going to do that because they didn't see any reason to, you know, as simple as that. But this guy who couldn't do ministry with me anymore, I was so bad, he couldn't even face it. He was willing to lead me with the church because he knew.
He knew that nobody but him and this SBC, you know, D-lister had a problem with it that he knew. But he was going to leave me with the church. That's all you really need to know. That's how bad I was.
He was going to leave me as the sole pastor of this church. That's how evil I was. It's truly an unbelievable story. And there's a lot more to it, as you might assume, and a lot more side conversations and things like that.
And there has been no reconciliation there. None. Because it's squarely in his court, and he has chosen not to reach out to me and stuff like that. But that's what went down. And it was not fun, obviously.
But I regret nothing. I regret nothing about my conduct online. Nothing. And I didn't at the time. And again, everyone involved, everyone, not a single man, said, your conduct is unacceptable. None. It's all you really need to know.
I was thinking about, you know, other people besides myself. And so anyway, that's the situation. So I'm no longer an elder at a church. I hope you understand. I mean, I'm sure the whole story will come out at some point.
But for right now, I just ask that you would just keep my family in prayer, my church in prayer, and all of that. I also just ask if you know people involved or anything like that, don't reach out to anybody.
Don't try to get any answers or solutions. I will say this, though, if you have concerns that maybe I have disqualified myself and I'm under church discipline or something like that, feel free to contact my pastor about that.
He will be glad to talk to you. And he'll be glad to explain that I have not disqualified myself. That's not why I resigned or anything like that. So that's my announcement. Now the future of the channel, I want to talk about that.
So I'm going to continue making videos. I have agreed with my pastor that as long as I'm a member of the church, I will not make a video criticizing the words of a fellow believer. Maybe I do regret something.
I mean, I shouldn't have even agreed to that. But again, I was not thinking about myself. I was thinking about the church, and I wanted the church to continue. And I didn't want to cause any problems.
And even to this day, like people always ask me, how do I talk to my pastor about XYZ? And you know, like, I do talk to my pastors about things, but I try not to be a problem. I do my best to not be a problem.
And that's as simple as that. And so I did agree to that, even though I shouldn't have had to. Because it's not a sin to criticize another brother. It is not a sin to criticize another brother. It is obviously not a sin to criticize another brother.
But I agreed to it to keep the peace. I mean, listen, if your boy's trying to toot his own horn, this is an easy way to do it. I didn't come up with this line of attack against me, but hey, I'll respond to it, because I'll say I'll be honest.
It makes me look good. I can't do that for very long. I don't think it's a legitimate requirement at all. And that's okay. That's a difference of opinion. And so I'm not going to. So for now, for the next week or so, I'm not going to do videos like that.
I am going to continue doing videos like that, because I don't think it's wrong. I think it's actually required at times. So just wanted to let you know what to expect in the short term. In the short term, I'm going to do a series of videos about some verses that I feel are important to the social justice conversation, verses that have kind of changed my perspective on things since the time when I started following Jesus to today.
So I'm going to talk about some verses that I think you should know and you should really consider. And I'm also going to talk about some verses that... One thing I can't really remember how exactly this part went down, but I did remain with the church, and I had planned to do so for the short term.
But I can't remember if I had also said, hey, look, and we'll probably look for another place, you know what I mean? I can't remember if that's how it went down or what. But I think based on what I said there, it sounds like probably that was discussed at some point.
But I think what had happened was we decided we want people at the church to know that we still love each other, so I'll still come here. I'll still be in... I'll take communion here. That'll be a good thing.
I think. I'm not 100 sure on that. I think we are really, excuse me, seriously being misunderstood. Anyway, I think that's the end of it, because that's what I did. Oh, I got some stuff on tone here.
Oh man, maybe we'll have to get back to this. We've been at this for 20 minutes, but yeah, maybe I'll talk about the tone. Yeah, let's see what the old version of me said about tone. Because you can see my style is a little different in this video than it is now, but it's still me.
I'm still there. Let me know. Let me know if you wanted me to review myself about tone, because this rest of this part is just about a few videos that I was planning or whatever. But anyway, that's the thing.
So if you've ever heard this story about me, now you know a little bit more. There's still a lot more, and it's all of the same type. It all makes the opposite side look very unreasonable, and it all shows me to be worthy of the title, The Reasonable Latino.
You heard it here first. In any case, I hope you found this video helpful.
