Interview with J. Warner Wallace | Rapp Report Weekly 0009 | Striving for Eternity

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All right. Well, welcome to another edition of the weekly edition of The Wrap Report. And today

I have with me a special guest, and we are gonna give actually not only some information that he and I worked on some together, but I will say that for The Wrap Report, we will have some exclusive content later on in the show.

So you're gonna wanna make sure you pay attention, because there's some big things going on with the

Striving for Eternity and this podcast. But I wanna welcome on none other than J.

Warner Wallace. I'll just call him Jim. Actually, I should ask, why do you go by J. Warner Wallace?

I'll first ask that. Well, my grandfather's name was Warner, and that's my middle name. But there's a

Jim Wallace from Sojourners in Washington, D .C. that if I do radio and podcasting and things like that when

I was on different shows, they would confuse me for him. So I started to change the name just so I wouldn't be confused for Jim Wallace from Sojourners.

Now, he spells his name differently. He is W -A -L -L -I -S. I am an A -C -E at the end of my name.

But on the radio, you can't tell that. So that's why I ended up changing the name. And I think a mutual friend of ours, someone you know better than me, though, is

Greg Koukla has something to do with that, right? Oh, yeah. Usually, I sit in for him when he's gone.

And if I do that and I introduce myself as Jim Wallace, then people will say, like, you know, next week, Jim Wallace will be hosting the show.

And they would say, really? You're pretty open -minded, Greg, that you would have because we're pretty polarized in terms of where we would stand on certain issues.

And so he said, you all told me a long time ago, I said, if you're going to continue to do this, you're going to have to change your name.

So I wrote the first book. I did change the name to J. Warner Wallace. And Jim Wallace is a name that is a longtime name in the

Los Angeles Police Department, where you're originally from. Yeah, in our agency, you know, I work in a suburb here in Los Angeles County.

It's called the city of Torrance. And so we're the third largest municipality in this area. And so my dad started here in 1961.

He has the same name I have. My son is still working here. I have one open case. I still want to work.

So I hope to get that done here in the next couple of years. So, yes, we've had a 57 -year tradition of being able to answer the phone if somebody calls looking for Jim Wallace at our agency.

So, yes, it's been kind of fun. Has anyone ever called there and gotten, looking for your father or for you and getting either you or your son?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, when I first started as a detective, I would call around and people would, you know, if I was talking to an officer who had retired or talking to somebody who my dad had dealt with in the past, they would always assume

I was him. I don't think that's probably happening as I could be happening to Jimmy. I don't know. Maybe that does happen.

And sometimes I've done cases where my dad was a part of the case.

I work cold cases. I work old unsolved murders. And if my dad was part of the investigation team back in the day, well, his name is going to be on paperwork.

And so people will see, how could that be? I mean, you wrote this report in 1979. Well, no, my dad wrote that report in 1979.

So, I mean, I've always asked, you know, do I look so old that you could think for a second that I wrote that report in 19,

I guess I do, because you wrote this report in 1979. So I don't think

I look that old, but I guess I guess I do. So you're a cold case detective, and we're going to get back to it because you did a book with sort of with that title.

But you have 20 years. And if I remember correctly, you never lost a case. Well, yeah.

I mean, that always sounds good. But the reality is that if you're going to take a case to the

DA, you, for the most part, taking the case is the cream of the crop. The DAs are elected officials.

And so they want to be able to run on a great record. They want to, at the end of four years, be able to say that they, you know, they win 97 .9

% of all their cases. And they do, because they only file about 40 % of what is presented to them.

So they kind of cut the bad cases out early. So if you get a case filed with the DA, and that's one of the kind of difficult things about it, is that if they're only filing the cases that are slam dunks because they have to run on their record, it makes it hard if you were somebody who would say, for example, you had a heart to do defense work.

And you think, I want to defend people who are being falsely accused. Well, the problem with the system is that they file cases that are really, you know,

I have a hard time getting the case filed. If it does get filed, that's a case that probably is going to be a hard case to defend because, you know, the ones that were easy to defend, they didn't file to begin with.

So a lot of this is a matter of, you know, how the system works. But so to say that I never lost, it sounds good.

But the reality of it is that there were several cases they just wouldn't file. So I think it's all those losses, right?

Well, those would be, those just wouldn't count. Yeah, I'm just not going to count those. But you have an experience as a detective, you have a way of pursuing investigations and things that really has influenced your life as a

Christian and the way you approach Christianity, apologetics and your books. Yeah, I mean,

I try to, I learned a long time ago that, you know, everyone has a gift that God has given them, some attribute of their character, some set of life experiences, maybe even some opportunities to be educated in certain areas.

And I'm not going to come out, I have a master's degree in theological studies, but I don't have really any pedigree as an academic.

I'm not somebody who's a textual analyst. I'm not somebody who's got a degree in textual criticism.

I'm not a theologian, a historian. That's just not who I am. What I'm, I'm a guy who has been taking, you know, for 30 years now has been looking at events in the past.

These are murders and saying, hey, if you have no access to any eyewitnesses, maybe not even access to the people who wrote the reports 35 years ago, would you still be able to put the thing together?

Would you still be able to figure out what happened? Would you still be able to identify a suspect and get that guy convicted?

And so that's that's a very kind of, you know, limited. I've always known that my value to the church, it was going to be to to be able to kind of help people understand the nature of evidence, how we make these cases.

Also, I know that the culture is fascinating. You know, no one's doing, you know, TV shows about historians and theologians.

They just aren't. I mean, I think it's fascinating, but I don't think the culture is kind of caught on yet. But they are doing shows about, you know, doctors and firemen and detectives.

So I knew that if I could kind of show how these principles could relate to the stuff that really historians and, you know, textual critics and these kinds of folks are usually using these similar tool sets.

I knew we could actually draw people into the investigation in a way that maybe we wouldn't be able to do it if we stayed purely academic.

And so that's why I stay in my lane. You know, I don't try to step out of my lane. If there's if it's not an issue that I can bring,

I can shed some light on it by way of showing how in a certain investigative process would help us to come to a conclusion.

Then I just know it's not an issue I need to be talking about. So so I have tried to stay in my lane.

And there's a lot of stuff that you can talk about if you're a detective. You know, a lot of this, face it, a lot of the analogies we see, you know, evidence that demands a verdict, you can name it.

There's a lot of historic kind of efforts to make a case for Christianity and theism have borrowed from the kinds of or at least from the terminology.

But when you read those things, you go, yeah, this is all good. But it's clear that whoever is doing this has never worked a case because sometimes we'll use language wrong.

You know, people will say, well, you need to have said there's no direct evidence for this or that. They don't know what direct evidence is.

I mean, they never have actually had done a case with direct evidence to know how this works. So that's where I want to step in and just be able to kind of put some light on some places that and I stay

I do stay try to stay in my lane. Yeah. You know, it's funny you mentioned evidence demands a verdict because that will be the topic of next week's rap report.

But good. But, you know, I was helping someone edit a book on evangelism and apologetics.

And I gave him some of your videos that I had to show him like, you know, he is not a pastor.

He's actually a dentist by trade. And I was I was using the examples that you give you to have a talk where you put on your your your

SWAT vest or your police vest and you go through all the different aspects of training.

Right. And you use all of the things that you'd have as a police officer to do that.

And I was explaining to him that he needs to do some of that. And he responded. He says, yeah, but being a detective is cool.

Being a dentist just doesn't work. Oh, my gosh.

So so, you know, it's funny about that. There's two ways. And we've been talking. I just got back last week and we were doing the cross exam and instructors academy.

And what we do is we take people who want to be able to make the case kind of up and coming of Christian apologetics, apologists rather.

And we kind of walk them through some some basic do's and don'ts. And then we had last weekend we did the advanced academy where we're really taking, you know, the 10.

This is the 11th year that we've been doing this. And so we've got lots of people have been to the academy once.

And now we had 30 who were kind of the advanced. You know, they're already out there speaking. They're already out there writing.

And so we talked about this issue. You know, how do you influence yourself? How do you increase your influence in culture?

I think there are two ways if you're listening and you want to be able to make the case for Christianity. As a believer, maybe even teaching in your local church or working in your local community,

I think there's two ways to do this. And one is kind of speaker centric and the other is audience centric.

And so what I mean by that is that that one thing you can do is you can ask yourself, well, how are you uniquely gifted?

I call this X factoring where you say to yourself, OK, there's something about me that is just who

I am. It's so much of who I am. And if your friend's a dentist, I mean, he's worked probably very, very hard to get that.

You've got to go to med school in order to become a dentist. It's not easy. So he's invested a lot of time, a lot of energy, and that is who he is.

And there's a lot of us would be like, that would be awfully I'd be very proud if my kids became a dentist. So so that's his identity.

And if he's been doing it long enough before, I'll say his name is Joe. Well, you know, Joe, the dentist.

Oh, yeah, the dentist. OK, well, that's his identity. As a matter of fact, it's such a strong identity that you could exchange the dentist for Joe's name and people would go, oh, you're talking about him.

I know him. He's the dentist. The dentist does apologetics. I mean, that sounds crazy, but there's probably not very many of those.

And that's the second thing. If the X factor you have that is so strongly connected to your identity is unique, it's a unicorn.

Well, then you're even going to have more influence if you're the only one of those guys out there. So, for example, let's say you're somebody who you want to preach the gospel and there's a lot of guys who want to preach the gospel.

OK, great. But I am a championship world class surfer. So that's there's fewer of those.

There's fewer world class championship surfers who have enough understanding of the gospel and of theology to be able to preach the gospel.

Right. So that's that's OK. That's that's now you've got an X, you're a world class championship surfer and you're you're separating yourself from the crowd.

Well, how about this? I'm a female world class championship surfer who wants to preach the gospel.

There's even probably fewer of those. Right. Because I think there are probably fewer women surfers than there are men surfers.

How about this? I'm a woman surfer who is a champion and had her arm bitten off by a shark.

OK, well, there's one of those. There's one of Anthony Hamilton's. And now because you have that unicorn identity, well, you've got opportunities.

Nick, I think his last name is Wojciech, born without legs and arms, a little flipper for a foot there.

He always makes fun of his own foot there. But he has been doing tent revivals now for a couple of years and drawing huge crowds and preaching the gospel.

And here, the thing that's unique about him and his unicorn position is really what we would probably have considered to be an extreme disadvantage, a disability that he has turned for the glory of God.

And so I think it is the error of one of us has to say that's that the first approach then is speaker centric.

What is your ex? And now you may think I only have a crazy great ex. Well, I've got a friend in Natasha Crane who writes about apologetics for parents.

And what she does because she's a marketing, you know, her degree is in marketing. What she has said is, no,

I know it's not about that. I know me this well or that I have this unique ex is that I know the audience

I'm trying to reach. And she's trying to reach parents of young kids who are starting to see that their kids are being challenged and need to have answers for their questions.

And so she knows that it's parents of young children who get it, who are sensing that the culture is starting to threaten their kids faith.

That is her specific audience. And what she does. So for me, as somebody who's looking at it from my my

X factor, I know it's not it can't be talked about from the perspective of a cold case homicide detective.

I'm probably not talking about it. Natasha, on the other hand, says if it's not interesting or of importance to parents of young kids who have this, you know, get it, then

I'm not going to write about it. So we're each using a one direction or the other to increase our influence.

Either you're going to be speaker centric or you're going to be audience centric. So so it's just a matter of us deciding, you know, which way we're going to go.

Yeah. And by the way, the dentist's name is Anthony Silvestro. His book is called On the Origin of Kinds, which is basically addressing it's a complete rip off of Darwin's book, but he basically shows how

Darwinism doesn't work. Yeah, that's awesome. So so a lot of this is, you know, either you're either he's going so you have to figure it out.

Look, sometimes your audience is such you learn who the audience is and you realize that audience is going to require a particular kind of writer or they're not going to pay attention.

And then you can go out and try to get that pedigree or try to become the guy they're going to listen to. So a couple different ways to do this.

But, yeah, it's tricky right now. And this is a very noisy world. It's cluttered with all kinds of voices and noises and trying to stand out in that kind of a world with the gospel is is going to be more and more of a challenge.

Yeah. And I don't think social media has helped completely. It has opened some doors, but it's created a lot more noise, too.

Oh, it absolutely has. Are you kidding? Yeah. I mean, I think and also, you know, look, before you were going to have to split your attention now.

And that's another problem. Social media is that you're going to have to. And I always say it this way. You know, there's two things.

We all have a message we want to communicate to a culture, to an audience. And we think of our developing of the message, you know, how refining the message, learning our theology, understanding the biblical text.

All of these things are a holy work of God because we always think we want to work on one side of that equation, you know, this message we want to deliver to an audience.

But growing your audience, we kind of see that as like dirty marketing, you know. And what's happening in this culture is if you have, you know, no knowledge and a huge audience, you can lead them astray and you can be a danger.

If you have great information and great ability to communicate, but no audience at all, then you have no impact.

So you have to grow both of these things. And I think that both kinds of efforts are holy works of God.

So I don't look at marketing anymore like, oh, that's that dirty thing. But you're right. Social media has forced us now to not only kind of refine our skills as communicators and as students, but also to refine our skills as social media marketers.

Because this is the world we're living in now. You know, give me an example of this. You and I just got involved in this book on evangelizing

Mormons. And this is not, you know, it used to be that you'd write a book and once the author was done writing the book, he would hand that text to the publisher and the publisher took it from there.

Their job was to kind of run with the ball that was handed to them. And we actually had a publisher come out and talk to the academy last week.

That has completely changed. That is not the way publishing occurs anymore. You have to write it and you have to market it.

It's self -marketing. And they're only signing those people who have a platform from which they can market their own material because we're living in this crazy social media world.

Everything has changed. There's not even any more brick and mortar stores where we're selling books. Everything is an

Amazon kind of online world. Yeah. You know, it was interesting because when we were working on that book, and we'll get to that later discussing it, but it was interesting.

They wanted to know how many, how many followers on Twitter and Facebook and basically how many people are on your newsletter list.

And it was interesting that those were the things the publisher wanted to know. But there's no doubt. It's two questions.

What's the idea for your book? Okay. And who are you? And only the second question really matters.

Okay. You have a great idea for a book, but if they don't think you can sell it, they're not going to sign it.

So it's sad, but this is where we are. And, you know, it's some things you brought up that are very interesting.

You brought up, you know, Josh McDowell's book, famous book, Evidence Demands a Verdict. And really,

I think what shocked people or got really got that so well known was there wasn't anything really like that in the marketplace of ideas.

There was scholarly work, but some of when he did More Than a Carpenter, it really opened it up.

And people like myself who got More Than a Carpenter ended up getting the more technical two volume set that they were back then.

And then it's been where it's more easily readable and not so much of notes. And really, there wasn't anything for people to dig into back then.

And apologetics has taken on different forms and somewhat of a bad name in the atheistic circles.

And you've been doing, I know that you've been doing something for years, which is really kind of a changing of the term.

But when you talk about case making, not so much about apologetics, why this switch?

I think because for me, I wasn't part of a kind of a Christian culture growing up. I didn't have that background in the church.

And if you saw I was 35 when I first started getting interested in even looking at scripture. And I right away made inroads into in terms of what do

I believe is true about the text. But I really couldn't understand. There's kind of two questions. You know, what do we believe as Christians?

What are the claims of Christianity? And there's also for a lot of us who come to this late, we have a second question we hardly ever talk about, which is why are we doing it this way?

You know, like, like, I mean, if I did, I always put it this way. If you were an alien who was coming in, kind of exploring the universe, and you got like your adjutant who's kind of helps you to prepare for the landing in each planet you land on.

And you're coming in toward Earth and you're, you know, you're getting closer and now you're about as far away as the moon. And your adjutant says,

OK, it's time for us to to get ready to meet these folks. And a lot of these folks are Christians. So you might want to read this

Bible in order to know what you know all about this group. So you're this alien who only has the text, only has the scripture to learn about Christianity.

So in your mind, as you're getting closer to the Earth, you're going to start to formulate ideas about,

OK, given this book, I expect that Christians are going to look like what? I mean, how, how are they going to organize and what will their structure be and what kind of social groups will they have and what kind of organized, what would the meetings look like?

I mean, all that stuff, right? All you have is the text. That's it.

What do you think you're going to expect to find when you get here? And do you think that anything we see today is what you would expect to find if all you had was the text?

And that's how I felt as a nonbeliever. I was kind of coming in and, you know, I'm, you know,

I'm thousands of miles away and I'm no experience with no church traditions to kind of say, oh,

I know a church. When I used to put in that, you know, evangelical church, that was the first time

I had put in a church like that at all. I mean, I've been at funerals and weddings, but that's that's a little bit different. Right.

And I've been in Catholic masses as a kid, but I really had no experience with the church, why we do church the way we do church.

And I think that for me, that's always been the thing I've had a harder time getting my hands around. You know, why do we do it this way?

Yeah, you know, I can relate to that being raised Jewish and never being in a church before I became a

Christian. Actually, I think it was several years, about two or three years after being a

Christian before I actually walked into a church. But, you know, I totally didn't understand

Christian lingo. You know, people to me seem like they talk funny.

However, I also realize that if you were to come to a synagogue, it would sound the same.

Sure. We have our own lingo. Yeah, yeah. No, no doubt. And that whole idea, you know, the word apologetics, the reason why

I don't use the word very much is that, you know, not everyone's talked about how confusing the word can be and blah, blah, blah.

But you just know from a world of social media or digital, we're all in a digital world that is very, very gives you very, very brief opportunities.

If you have to, if your book, you know, the idea of a second line, a subtitle, you know, sometimes subtitles don't get read where this is a noisy, cluttered world.

If you have to take a breath and explain yourself, you've already lost because somebody else out there is just trying to pitch a similar idea who's managed to do it without another need for explanation.

If I'm going to stop and say, well, this word comes from the Greek that means this, you've already lost. So we're really talking about is can you defend, but defend that can sound defensive.

I don't think I'm not, I'm not defensive. I'm just going to make the case. This is what we do. We make the case.

And, and, and so I thought Christian case making was a better way. And by the way, whenever I put it that way, no one asked me a follow up question.

So what do you do? I make the case for Christianity. I'm a Christian case maker. And they're okay. They already get it.

It doesn't require the subtitle, you know, or what is that? You know what, you know? And so it's not just that apologetics can sound like, like it's, uh, submissive or defensive or that it's apologizing for something.

It's just that it requires the second line. And we're in a world right now where we don't get time for the second line.

Yeah. Well, let, let, we're going to take a break now. I want to get back to, I want to get to talking about some of your books and maybe even how you came to Christ.

So let's do with that right after this quick break. Can you prove that God is a Trinity? Can you prove that Jesus is

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or at the strivingforeternity .org store. All right. So Jim, we alluded to this, but you, you were a professing atheist for 35 years of your life.

Well, not exactly. I mean, you were actually very much against Christianity and you became a believer.

Explain to our audience, because not everyone may be familiar with you. How did that come about? Well, I think that a lot of us who are in my dad's in this category right now, he's not a believer.

And he just seems to be sometimes immovable on these issues. But he would go to church with you because he thinks that, you know, first of all, two things.

He loves the kind of tradition. He lives in the South and he loves the structure that emerges from a

Christian ethos. You know, he loves the kind of culture that emerges from a

Christian worldview. And he lives in the middle of that. And so he's appreciative of it. You know, he would much rather live in the midst of the

South, where there's still a pretty strong, he's in that Bible Belt region. Then someplace else.

But number two, I think he would say that he actually agrees with the values that are taught in Christianity.

So if nothing else, this is a source of the values that he affirms. So you would say, hey, this is in essence a useful delusion that seems to produce the kind of world

I'd like to live in anyway. So if you want to go to church, I'll go. And he's culturally familiar with the church enough to be able to sing the hymns and do all of that.

But he is very committed to his non -belief. And that's kind of where I was as well.

I just was not, I thought this was so ludicrous on its face. There wasn't much point. I didn't think you could, all the

Christians I knew could not make a defense for what they believe. So it seemed like the only way in was something

I was not willing to do, which was to kind of blindly accept. You know, I think cops too are not probably the best candidates for being told what to do.

It's just kind of the nature of what happens to you if you work this job long enough. You're usually in a position where someone's calling you because their life has fallen apart and you've got a few minutes to fix it before the next call.

So I just was not ready to submit to anything like that. But my wife was certainly more open to it and had been raised in an environment where her mom kind of left an open, wide and inviting door to the possibility of belief.

And although she would have said that God exists, I think she would have said that, but didn't have any idea what

Christianity taught. But she did kind of think when we had kids, like my dad, she would help them to form their moral views based on something that maybe, you know,

I didn't have to agree with it or believe it in order to see its value. And so I was willing.

Now, look, I have tried my best to avoid it because it's going to take time and it's going to be boring and I didn't want to go.

So I avoided it for probably three years in this neighborhood we were living in. We had been together about 18 years before she got me to go.

But this particular church we walked into really was a church for unbelievers.

I mean, the pastor was clever enough to always contextualize it in a way that there'd be some nugget that would catch your ear if you were a nonbeliever.

He said a bunch of stuff that first day. But the one thing that I always remember is he said that Jesus was smart, really smart, and really was a great moral teacher and pretty much affirming the kinds of things that my dad and I would have said, you know, on the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth stood the entire

Western culture. And here we are enforcing the laws of Western culture. And I just wanted to see what he said.

In other words, I was really just interested in red letters. And so I bought a pew Bible for six bucks that allowed me to at least read what this guy had to say.

And I kind of suspected it was going to be more like the writings of Baha 'u'llah or some prophet of some other world.

I didn't anticipate how these letters were going to be encased in this historical narrative.

And that really intrigued me. And that's really what started for me that the whole investigation of whether or not that text could be reliable.

Was it telling me the truth? Was it telling me something true? Was it filled with ridiculous exaggerations?

And I was a very committed philosophical naturalist. So I just assumed up front that it's going to be full of a bunch of either lies or misperceptions or hopeful, wishful thinking, because I don't believe in miracles.

And so once I got to those passages, I would typically I began by just kind of skipping over them. But then eventually

I tested the document using all the tools that we use to test documents. We test documents all the time when we're working these kinds of cases.

And there's a set of tools in place to do that. And that's what I tried to do. And those tools became a book.

Yeah. And it took a while to kind of, I never, I just didn't, I didn't see, I didn't think of myself as somebody who was making the case.

I just needed to know if it was true. And I figured everyone who comes into Christianity must do something similar, right?

I mean, they must have to do the same thing I'm doing. It took me about six months. And so I did it. And then

I started living my life as a Christian once I became a Christian and I went to seminary and I never really revisited the manner in which

I got in until I became a youth pastor. And I saw these kids were struggling and needed to know.

And then we started taking trips to Berkeley and Salt Lake City and places where we could really stretch them.

And they're both their understanding of theology and of philosophy and of evidence. And as we started to do that,

I just, I said, I started sharing, you know, the journey that I took and I was with training.

For example, we were in Berkeley. I was training the students and I was with Sean on that trip,

Sean McDowell. And we, I'd done these trips with Brett Kunkel and a bunch of other people. But on that trip,

I think it was just me and Sean. And he said to me, hey, you should write a book about this. And that's how the whole thing started.

And the book is called Cold Case Christianity. And I mean, one of the things I loved about that book was the fact that when

I went through and read it, it was easy to understand, which is always good. But the fact that you brought in your history as a cold case detective, bringing examples of what you're explaining from cases, being able to explain it in a way that, look, this is what eyewitness testimony should look like.

And so much, and as you know, I am on the streets.

My seminary professor has a PhD in presuppositional apologetics. And he had me come in to teach a class.

And I'm like, you have a PhD in this. Why am I teaching? He's like, I teach in a classroom. You take it to the streets.

There's a big difference. And I hear all the time from guys on the streets. Well, if the

Bible was accurate, everyone would be saying the same thing. You wouldn't have these different accounts.

But your years as a cold case detective, is that true? Yeah, I think, you know, so let's go back for a second.

If you think about how you've had that experience that teaches you something, and that's why

I think your professor probably said, hey, you know, you can't subtract yourself from this. And what we do in courtrooms, we have this opportunity, we have this epistemological laboratory, where all the academic approaches we might take, the theoretical approaches we might take, well, now the rubber meets the road.

So now we got to put this out and see, how do people learn something? How do people know something is true? At what point is enough enough?

At what point do you have enough sufficient reason to believe something is true to actually act?

Like, how do we know what we know? In essence, we're testing theories. And I've been on a lot of different trials.

We tested different theories. And then we get a chance to interview the jurors after it's over to see what worked.

And that process of trying and trying and then afterwards asking people, well, that wasn't very good, but I, you know, that was better.

I, oh, this is the piece that really convinced me, or this is the approach you took that really convinced me. It was really in the interviewing of jurors after the fact that we learned so much, right?

That's where you learn what you did wrong as well as what you did right. And so I think there's a huge value.

The fact that you're those students who were in that class had listened to both the kind of high theory, 30 ,000 foot view, and then they had you to come in and give them the boots on the ground kind of view.

I'm sure that was probably, they probably loved that because I think it kind of unites. It gives you at least a well -routed view of how to do something.

Well, sort of like your book, it gave them the stories of it being applied, not just, hey, this is.

Yeah. No, there's no doubt. Yeah. Yeah. We're in a narrative world right now, right? Like Gen Z, if you're going to speak to Gen Z students, you're going to, the story is going to be important and you're going to have to be able to contextualize everything in a story.

The truth will be less important than the story. Yeah, and the truth will only be as important and as, well, let's face it, we've already seen this, right?

We've already seen that if I want to convince somebody of a political position, what's going to happen is during some political speech is they're going to refer to someone's story and introduce that person sitting in the front row.

And this story is going to be gut wrenching. And the idea is going to be that I can draw you to this emotionally faster and more firmly than I can by drawing you to it with reason.

I think we can't neglect one for the other. I think we're going to have to, if we're competing with that, then we're going to have to remember how important story is.

At the same time, we know that you can tell false stories and you can tell powerful false stories.

And so we're gonna have to make sure that we have a high value for truth. But if you came onto a scene, so let's say you come onto a scene and everyone has a story about what happened and all of their stories are exactly the same.

They had a chance to sit before you got there. You get on the scene, they're all together.

And now you separate them and you ask them their story and they all tell you exactly the same details. You more or less trusting in the account?

Yeah, absolutely. You're less trusting. As a matter of fact, the one thing I'll tell Dispatch, and I get called out in the middle of the night and it's been a number of years since I've done a fresh homicide.

That's one of the great things about doing cold cases is that you can kind of pace yourself, right? But when you're on the call out team for a fresh homicide, you're stuck.

And if that's your week and you're going to get called out, you can be called out at any time. And so you don't get a lot of chance to prepare.

You have a bag pack that's sitting in your room that's got everything you're going to need in it. But then you're going to get that call at the worst time.

And I would always tell only one instruction. I have one instruction for the Dispatcher. Because usually it's going to come out of the

Dispatch or your Sergeant's going to call you, one of those two. And they're just going to tell you, we're on the corner of this and that.

And you've got a murder that occurred. Some very, very limited details you're going to get.

You're going to get on the road and then you get more details on the way in. But what I will tell people when they call me the first minute

I hear about it, I'll say, I only have one request. You've got officers at the scene. Separate the witnesses and do it right away.

And so I make sure, and I've done, listen, when I first started, I would sometimes forget to say that. And that creates a problem.

Because by the time you get there, if they haven't been separated, they're talking to each other. And then you get a lot of alignment between the statements.

And I'm not looking for alignment. I don't, well, in the end, everything, truth aligns. Okay, so in the end,

I'm going to puzzle this back together and all the misshapen testimony of one person will fit the exact misshapen testimony of the other when

I'm finally done with it. But that's my job. And that's the duty of anyone who's listening to testimony from more than one person.

You don't expect it to be the same. With the actual act of working through history or the discipline of being a historian is really tied up, for the most part, in reconciling accounts.

So you can get back to what actually happened. Because you know that if this thing happened 20 minutes ago, there would still be four witnesses with four different stories.

I mean, no one ever, ever, ever, ever agrees. That's just not going to happen. It's just not the nature of,

I used to run these tests with students to show them this, even if something happened right in front of their eyes right now. Because it's important for them to see the level of variation.

And what happens is, after you've done this for a while, you kind of get a sense of, kind of innately or intuitively, where you see variances between people's statements and it's not shot.

You almost have a sense that it needs to vary in order for it to be legitimate. Because that's what it is.

But if it varies to a certain degree, it's almost like it has to be that Goldilocks, you know, not too much, not too little.

There's a Goldilocks kind of zone of variation between statements. And so right away, and as you do this more and more, if you know if it's outside that Goldilocks zone, well, that's when you're going to probe deeper and maybe think someone's telling you something that's not true.

So a lot of that, when I first read this through the scriptures, I was struck immediately by the fact that this thing felt like it was in the

Goldilocks zone, where it had the kind of variation I would expect, none of which seemed to me to be irreconcilable, none of which seemed to me it couldn't be harmonized.

But I just knew there was no, like you'll see a lot of people now, and a lot of academics now, will jump to some other explanation to try to explain the differences, to try to explain why these accounts don't match.

And sometimes they'll even go so far as to suggest that maybe this is an exaggeration over here.

Maybe there is some corruption of the text over there. And I feel like saying, time out. You don't need to go there.

Because this is exactly what real witnesses, I mean, current witnesses you can actually talk to are going to sound like.

In our own generation, if you took this approach, where you thought, you know, maybe this is a genre issue, maybe this is an exaggeration issue.

Maybe this is a real corruption of the text. And you just investigated my cold cases, you'd never solve any of them.

Because you're taking the wrong, you just have never, you have to work with witness statements for some period of time before you go, yeah, that's what they look like.

So it didn't surprise you. In fact, it strengthened the position that the Bible was accurate when you saw those differences.

Yeah, well, let's put it this way, it did not exclude them. Now, I wouldn't say you could look at variation as a proof, right, or as a piece of evidence.

But it did not, I would not look at it as something that's exculpatory, where like it excludes, it eliminates them from contention.

So what it did for me was it, you know, all the kinds of things we sometimes talk about from historical purposes, like the principle of embarrassment, these are kinds of things.

Well, you know, self deprecating statements, self embarrassing statements. I have also worked guys who were good enough liars that they included these kinds of details.

So it's an art for sure. It's not a science. It is an art that you get better at the more you do it.

Forensic statement analysis is not a science. It is a discipline. And it's probably closer to art than it is to science.

And the more you do it, the better you're going to be at it. And now there are people out there that are so good at it that it almost becomes like a science for them.

But in the end, it's still a skill that you have to do a lot. And everything is open to interpretation.

The fact that he skipped this piece of his story when he's telling me what he did yesterday could be explained a number of ways.

It may simply be that he's covering something. But it might also be that, you know, while he was, I had people do this, they'll skip pieces of their story because they're guilty of something, but they weren't guilty of my murder.

I had one guy who was cheating on his wife. And for a long time, I worked this guy because I thought some of his deception was because he was trying to hide from me his involvement in my crime, when in fact, all he was trying to do is hide from the world his involvement with an adultery.

So you have to kind of be able to explain what you're seeing. And that, of course, always has more than one explanation.

So that's why I say sometimes it's more of an art than a science. Yeah, you know, it's one of the things I always bring up is, you know, who is it that Christ came to first was women.

The women were the ones in that culture telling the disciples that Christ rose.

And it's like that wouldn't happen in that culture. Right. I mean, that's one of those things that if you're trying, especially if you thought this is going to be some kind of conspiratorial lie, if it is then, and especially if it's a late conspiratorial lie, because if it's a late conspiratorial lie and there's no one really alive still who could kind of call it out as a lie, well, then you can put any character you want into that first position.

It doesn't have to be Mary. You could put Nicodemus in that first position. You could put Joseph of Arimathea.

You could put somebody who was actually kind of around the tomb and would be a likely candidate. Joseph would have been.

I mean, that's why I think in the end, even that act of putting Mary in that position in the narrative tells me that it was that even is more consistent with the early dating of the gospel than the late dating, because if it's early and she just happens to be the one who did it, well, then you're stuck with her.

So you have to say it the way it is. If it was late, you could put anyone in that position. I think you probably pick somebody who's a little more believable to the audience you're trying to influence.

Yeah, you wouldn't choose women who were known to be prostitutes or things like that for sure. So we're going to take another quick break and then

I want to get into really briefly talking about some of your other books. And then we want to hone in on one that we recently worked on together.

Yep. Christian, are you ready to defend the faith when false religions ring your doorbell?

Do you know what your Muslim and Jewish friends believe? You will if you get Andrew Rappaport's book,

What Do They Believe? When we witness to people, we need to present the truth. But it is very wise to know what they believe.

And you will get Andrew Rappaport's book at WhatDoTheyBelieve .com. And we're going to be talking about a book on Mormonism in just a moment.

But you've written some other books that, and one of the things I do like is you've gotten several of these books, not only for adults, but you've rewritten them for younger audiences that your youth pastor heart comes out.

And so you've gotten some of your books on forensic faith and that are written also to children or to younger audience,

I should say. Yeah. So when we started, you know, I was teaching in these larger categories, right?

How do we, how do our students defend all the objections leveled up against Christianity?

Well, that's in cold case Christianity. That's just kind of the case for Christian theism. God's crime scene is the case for theism in general from evidence in the universe.

Forensic faith is the case for making a case because the problem I had is that lots of times you'll, you know, you get asked to talk, to speak on a topic.

And you know, if you're in a church audience, there's like this unspoken question on the face of everyone in that audience and I can see it.

And that is, why are we talking about this? You know, this is great. This is really interesting, but, but do

I really need to master this? Do I really need to know this much? I mean, I'm glad you know it, Jim, but I don't, well, okay.

So I needed to make a case for why we ought to be making a case. And that's in forensic faith.

That's a book that I hope that people will give to people. If we love apologetics, the problem is that nobody else does.

So, so it's a matter of getting people interested. And what I tried to do with each of these, because you're, you're right about the idea of, see,

I, I saw early on that we were having this attrition rate of young Christians leaving the faith.

And we, when we first started polling for this back in the nineties, late nineties, you could see that, that people were starting to spot it.

And, and, you know, they'd be, they, they would have, they'd do these interviews of kids in their early twenties, and they'd find out that they're no longer

Christians, even though they were raised that way. And so that kind of polling went on for probably five or six years into the two thousands.

And then they started asking questions like, like, you know, well, why are you no longer a Christian? So we had some of that polling for three or four years, and now they've started asking questions like, okay, well, when exactly did you walk away?

And I think the assumption was, at least for me, it was, is that, you know, okay, they're with us. They're there. And I saw this in my own youth group, right?

They, they're with us and they come to youth group and then they're in their freshman year of college and they're no longer a

Christian. So I was thinking, what's going on in that college that is causing this to happen? When in fact, now, you know, the data shows us that nothing's going on in the college.

It's not like the college is that aggressively trying to strip your kids of their faith. Yes, they're happy to embrace your kids into secularism.

Don't get me wrong. But what's happening is that when you ask the young people, when did you leave? It's 10 to 17.

I mean, all the statistics are the same. They will self -report that they are walking away from the church between the ages of 10 and 17.

And so it used to be that kind of 85, 18 principle. If you didn't reach someone by the age of 18, 85 % of Christians were reached by the age of 18.

Well, it's dropping. It is dropping dramatically. It's around 12 right now. So, so what it means is, is that we have to do a better job of training up our kids while the bad news is that folks, it's not your colleges that are stripping your kids of your faith.

It's happening while they're with you. The good news is it's happening while they're with you.

So you can actually change the trajectory of this, but it's going to mean that we're going to have to start embracing a more forensic faith, a more reasonable kind of thoughtful faith that then overflows into the life of our family so that your kids just don't think it's something you do before dinner and on Sundays.

It's going to have to be something that they, and you have to, and again, it's not just information.

We have to have incredibly close relationships with our kids in which truth is communicated. And so what

I see is when you're a truth teller, but you don't have an incredibly close relationship with your kids, it's not nearly as effective as when you do.

So it's about doing both of these things. But yeah, so that's why we write kids' versions and we have, they're from eight to 12 and we have them for all three books.

The Forensic Faith for Kids comes out September 1st. So there are a ton of work and there's a website called casemakersacademy .com.

You know, my background first, I was an illustrator. I got a bachelor's degree in design and then a master's degree in architecture.

And then I became a cop. Yeah, that makes sense. Not a good, yeah, it's kind of weird. You're good at drawing pictures of the case.

Yeah, I get to illustrate my, as a matter of fact, the first couple of years as a brand new cop,

I think I did every single murder scene in our city. I had to draw it because they knew I could draw these things in these homicides, but not as an investigator.

I was just the guy drawing them for the first four or five years. Anyway, but yes, we have these kids' books which are really designed and this casemakers academy is really designed and they're fiction.

These are not books that like, you know, like the case for faith or the case for Christ, but Lee Strobel, he's got kids' versions.

What we tried to do is we tried to take the kids' versions and kind of make it more like boxcar kids, only it's young cadets in a detective academy.

They're all like, you know, early high school or late middle school and like explorers, like police explorers.

And they're learning from a master detective. And each book, they solve a mystery that's not related to Christianity.

You know, one's about a skateboard, one's about a box and a shoebox and an attic and one is about a corgi, a dog.

So, I mean, they're solving these mysteries. And at the same time, they're developing skills that at the end of each chapter, the detective who's training them turns toward, you know, theism or toward Christianity.

You know, you hit on something that is so important because I know

Answers in Genesis some time ago put out a thing where they were like, well, you know, we're losing the kids and it's because of the material, because they're being taught that evolution is true as a fact in school and they're being taught that the

Bible is a storybook in Sunday school. I think really, I think a lot of it is two things.

One, the parents have given up Christian instruction to the church and they're not doing it as often at home and they're competing one hour of Sunday school or maybe two hours if, you know, if they stay for Sunday school and church service,

I should say, and against hours and hours of television, the school system, everything.

But I think a lot of the big problem is, you know, who in most bigger churches teach the

Sunday school or junior church if they have them? It's usually any warm body that's willing. They don't study.

They don't prepare. They're given material that they will maybe study the night before and just get in there and just read.

And it's not engaging. It's not getting them thinking. And it just seems like this isn't really believed by the people teaching it.

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, we just had a Pew report that came out. I wrote a town hall article on this last week and just kind of tracking, you know, the

Pew numbers are always kind of dismal. But on this one, it was really, I think, shocking to me.

It's, you know, a Pew Research Center study, and they surveyed almost 5 ,000 U .S. adults.

And here's basically just asking, this is abroad. It's not just Christians. It's anyone in the culture, anyone in the country.

They're surveying everyone. So what they found was just people will say they believe in God, maybe, but they don't believe necessarily in the

God of the Bible. And the numbers are bizarre. So only 56 % of Americans will say they believe in God as described in the

Bible, quote unquote. Only 56%. And the number of people who claim just to believe in God at all, or get this, or who self -identify as Christians, that is shrinking every year.

And Pew reports show that, and that's shrinking about a percent a year. Now, what's also sad is that of those who have a high school education or less, high school or less, 94 % say they believe in God as described in the

Bible. But if you have a college graduate, a degree, a graduate degree, only 45 % believe in the

Bible and God. So there's the difference is that we are less educated and we are shrinking in our numbers.

Also, we're aging because it's about 65 % of boomers will say they believe in the God as described in the

Bible. Only 43 % of millennials will say that. Gen Zs are the most atheistic generation of all.

And not only that, this is the part you're talking about. This is kind of hard to believe, but of those who say they are

Christians, right? They just say, yeah, I'm a Christian. And they identify that way. Only 80 % of those who said they were

Christians said they believed in God as described in the Bible. 20 % said they believed in a higher power or spiritual force other than God described in the

Bible. These are Christians, self -identifying Christians. So I think that what you have here is you have, you know, number one, you just look at the trajectory of Europe.

We are secularizing. I don't think that people will kind of try to push back against that secularization theory, but it just doesn't,

I don't see how they can do it with the statistics because the numbers are pretty consistent. We are becoming more secular and the groups that we would say they are

Christians are not really prepared to even tell you what Christianity is. So let's transition to a book you and I, because I want to make sure we get to this.

So I was contacted by Eric Johnson, someone you know, he's with Mormon Research Ministry, and he was putting together a book.

He wanted to call, I think the original title was Tactics to Reaching Mormons, I think was the original working title, but it's not with tactics in it, and he wanted to put together different tactics.

And he came to me being an open -air evangelist, and maybe one of the few he knows that he feels does it well, and he presented this to me.

I said, I'd be glad to write a book on what I call open -air evangelism. I try to stay away from the term open -air preaching because that just preaching aspect has a negative connotation, like street preaching type.

But I said, sure, and I had suggested some other names. You were one of them because I knew you have family members who are

Mormon, and I said, maybe we can get some others involved, and gave your name.

He was like, oh, that would be great. And you actually knew Eric. Yeah, we'd taken several, you know, every year we would take a group of high schoolers in June up to Salt Lake City, right around the time of the

Manti Miracle Pageant also. So we'd hit Manti, we'd hit Provo, we'd be there about six, seven days. So I had been with Eric twice, and all the people that Eric, MRM, his ministry, we work with them for probably about 15 years, every summer we would go.

So we knew each other, and we're kind of just like you. We have the same friends and all that. So he was kind of interested.

This is kind of a behind -the -curtain conversation we're having about the book. But he really wanted to write this book, and I think he really envisioned it at least first as a self -published.

Oh, no, it was definitely, it was definitely self -published. And I reached out to you, and you had said, yeah, you'd be interested in doing it.

And I had told him, you really, this should be a published book. You should get this out to more people.

Yeah. And so I think by helping in all these people, we've roped into this now. Now, this is a book that has chapters in it from a lot of people.

And I'm just hoping that that will give it a broader, I think it will give it a broader appeal. I mean, we'll see.

But I think it will give it some broader appeal. Every one of us, and I think he was wise to kind of move away from the word tactics.

I mean, there's a book by Greg Kokel. Greg wrote a book called Tactics years ago that I think is probably one of the most essential books that Christians should own.

I mean, it's a great book. In fact, I'll emphasize that. It is a book, whenever I do my evangelism training,

I carry those with me to have for people because when I train people to evangelize, and I have a part in there where I say how to ask good questions, that is the book you must read to learn how to navigate conversations when sharing the gospel.

No, there's no doubt about it. And, but at the same time, I have had, you know, is this not a book you're going to give your atheist friend?

And because if an atheist was reading it, and I've seen some of the reviews when atheists do that, they're going to say, hey, you know, this is like, you're almost like this devious set of tactics that you're using to nefariously maneuver around our conversations.

Well, the view of what tactics, it almost feels like we're, you know, like we're in this militant kind of, so I think the idea of just evangelizing or sharing good news, that is at least a little, probably an even more balanced, healthier way of saying what we're trying to do.

We're not trying to outmaneuver you. We're trying to share good news with you. Now, it's going to mean that we're going to have to be thoughtful about how we do it.

And in some sense, you might be able to call that tactics or call that whatever you want, but that is not our goal is to outmaneuver you.

Our goal is to share something we think is critically important with people who we're going to have to be thoughtful with because they have really built up a strong defense.

You know, if you don't think that if you're talking about Mormonism in any way that's other than affirming, you're an anti -Mormon and you're not going to make the kind of inroads you're hoping to make.

So I think this book just gives, it does provide a number of not tactics, they are tactics, they are strategies, let's put it that way, strategies that could be used in a variety of different kind of categories.

And you might read this book and if you've got Mormons in your family or they're coming to your door or you've got Mormons in your group or your workplace, whatever it is, there's probably a strategy for you in this book because, you know, every,

I wouldn't suggest you try all these, you have to kind of read through all of them to know which one, you know, this is a palette, a palette of approaches and your canvas is going to be different than mine and you don't know what you're going to dip your brush into that's going to be effective on your canvas and you just don't want one color of paint on your palette.

You need all that entire rainbow of colors on your palette and you only get that by kind of listening to how everyone approaches it slightly differently and then you go, okay, in this setting, you know what would probably work and I've read about that and this is what we're trying to do is give a, and along the way we're also trying to teach you something about Mormonism because one of the problems

I see is that people who want to be effective communicating to Mormons may not know much about what they believe.

So you're going to have to do a little bit of that too. I think the book does a good job of kind of balancing between here's what they believe and here's how we can approach them.

It's really good because there are some people who think there's only one way to be able to share the gospel with people.

I know this being in the open air evangelist community per se that a lot of those people think the only way is open air and you know, the thing

I love about this is the fact that it's a lot of different tactics. That's what I enjoyed about going down to Manti and I'll be there this

June. I don't know if you, are you coming down this June? No, I won't be there this June. I'm out of town this June. And I think that's the release of the book is for Manti, but you know,

I enjoyed seeing so many different tactics. Ones that are mentioned in this book that are really put into play.

And the reality is, is that, you know, there's some basic training approaches in here where Sean McDowell and Matt Slick, Brett Conkle have some chapters, but then like your chapters in the reasoning approaches.

So there's a bunch of different approaches from you and Bill McKeever, who people would know from Mormon Research Ministry, but those are, how do you reason with people?

Then you have personal approaches that, how do you, how can you approach someone when they come to your door?

Sandra Tanner, if anyone that studies Mormonism knows that name, has ones in there. There's invitational type of approaches.

There's event type approaches. That's where my chapter is in on open air. But, and then there's salvation type approaches.

So there's all these different, there's 24 different chapters giving different approaches to how to share the gospel with an

LDS person. And I think that's the whole thing is, like you said, we read the whole book because there's going to be things in there that maybe, maybe someone like a

Bill McKeever who just says, hey, here's these gold plates. And some people are going, what gold plates? Well, study

Mormonism, you know, but that's something Bill can do because of his study.

Maybe not everyone could do that, but he gives the information how you can explain something that really shocks many Mormons because they haven't thought about it.

And, and that gets them thinking and questioning and gets the conversation into what's the truth is.

Yeah. It was interesting about that. So there's so many different approaches and they're, they're kind of, like you said, there, there's not just, we have 24 that they're grouped by types, right?

When we talked about that, you know, they are definitely grouped by types that, you know, if it's just basic training or reasoning or personal or invitational or event kind of approaches or salvation approaches, because there are six segments of four chapters, you almost could, could, could kind of look at it like, well, you, whatever personality you have, if you just thought, well, of all these approach, these six sections,

I'm probably more this one. Well, then you'll find something. Or if you think I'm going to go to an event where I'm going to have a chance to do something, well, then you're going to have to kind of consider the approaches that are specific to events.

So yeah, there's just all these different, I think it's that, that should be helpful for people. They'll find themselves before they find their, their approach.

And I'll give you a website. I'll put this in the show notes as well. But if you go to sharingwithmormons .com,

you'll be able to pick up this book that we are talking about and get it and learn some different tactics.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's, that's kind of, you know, look in the end, we're in a culture that doesn't even read.

I mean, I figure what crazy percentage of people will say they haven't read a book since college, but it's a high percentage.

And so, so at some point, what motivates us to read is a felt need, some need that we need to address.

We have to get to a point where we have a sense of urgency about what it is we're trying to learn. So I suspect that the goal here is going to be, we need to help people who finally get to that place where their family member who's a

Mormon, there's an opportunity or they feel like now is the time or we've got to do something now. And that's what

I hope this book will be a quick read and quick access and kind of give us a quick tool. It's a quick, it's a fast read.

The nice thing about it is you don't have to read every chapter. You, I mean, each chapter is about six pages.

So, and they're all independent with different authors from most part for different authors. And so you can read the chapter that interests you at this time, maybe read another one another time, but it's six pages.

One of the things that I try to do in my books is to break them up in such a way that you really, you could read it in small snippets and make it an easy read.

That's, I mean, that's the thing that I keep getting feedback on my books is it's an easy read because I purposely try to segregate it or separate things so you can read just small sections and not have to read the whole thing to get the context of stuff.

And you could do that with this book. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. It's, it's a very, that's one of the beauties of being very disciplined about page count and about word count.

And if you can't say it in a certain word count, it can't get said in this book. And that's, that's really, I think been helpful.

And I think that people will receive it that way for sure. Yeah. And boy, was that hard when, when Eric kept us that, that, that page count or that a word count, because I had the seminary professor,

I remember having to deal with a topic on basically a view of the charismatic gifts.

And I really had enough information for 13 pages. And he said, no, it has to be no more than three.

That was hard. It was harder than writing the longer one. You know, there's no doubt about that.

That, that's, that's, that's the art of writing. I mean, that's what we do, right? We are, are, I forget who said we are murdering our darlings.

You know, we're trying to figure out what has to, what has to come out. Every word you write, you think is precious, but in the end, really, it's not, not necessarily the case.

So editing is part of the writing process for sure. All right. Well, I said that we're going to have an exclusive for folks who are regulars to the wrap report, and we're going to have that just after this.

The good news is striving for eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

That's right. The art and science of interpreting scripture. The bad news is somebody attending might be really upset to discover.

Jeremiah 29, 11 should not be their life verse. To learn more, go to strivingforeternity .org

to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. All right.

So for folks who are listening to the wrap report and subscribe to this podcast, we have been working on some behind the scenes since the beginning of the year.

And that has been that we are working on a Christian podcast community.

And by the time this podcast drops, you should be able to go to christianpodcastcommunity .com

or .org. I think both should get you there. But we are building a community of Christians that are podcasting.

So we would work together at producing good content, content that is going to be something that we can make a difference.

As you've heard Jim speaking about trying to handle the marketing of this culture.

Well, podcasting is one of the ways that people do that. And we want to work with each other as Christians to improve each other, to help each other get better and to be able to basically do it smarter.

So some of the stuff we're hoping to do is be able to reduce costs in podcasting by getting everyone pulling together and hosting together, making it less expensive.

But we're also, and actually Jim maybe doesn't even know this, that some of his influence on me is some of the cause of this.

But the reality is, I remember Jim, you and I talked about, you gave me a book called

Platform. You encouraged me reading that. And I had talked to you back then,

I just this, I see a lot of Christian ministries that instead of working together, fight with one another to try to make bigger than the next guy.

And it bothered me. And I said, we as Christians should be working together. How can we do that? And I've been striving to do that for many years and finding different ways.

And this is just another way we've taken on ways of discipling other ministries. We want to try to get

Christians working together, doing cross promotion. It's really simple. If I have 10 podcasts all promoting cold case

Christianity and Jim Wallace, well, they're going to be 10 people that don't know his, that aren't his audience.

And if those same, the 10 minus me are promoting rap report, guess what?

Those are people that don't already subscribe to this podcast. And it ends up creating more of what we want to do, but we're working together at doing it.

We're also going to look to try to help one another where I may have skills as a software developer and others that I could put up a webpage maybe for someone or help someone learn how to do podcasting in one hour.

That would, that took me weeks to figure out. And it was something, Jim, in a conversation you and I had a long time ago, we were talking about it and you had just mentioned about trying to get ministries working together.

And it put the bug in my ear saying, my original thought was let's, let's get different, smaller ministries together to go through the book platform.

And that was our original thought. And it's, I've tried a couple of different things, but this is something we're really excited about because there are a lot of people podcasting or a lot of people that want a podcast, but can't afford it.

Don't know how it's too intimidating. And that's where we're going to be able to help out because we're, we're going to help if people want to be able to podcast, but they can't afford it.

We have, we have plan. We're working on plans for that. We're, we're going to do all this, but here's the one gotcha that for folks to realize, you're going to own your content.

We, we know of other different podcast groups or, or tools.

If you have like Anchor and FM, I think they control your content. If you are on blog talk or if you're on different ones like that, they own your content.

It's not that you can't move it. We're actually going to have contracts with the podcaster. So you own it.

You want to move, you take it. And we're not going to say anything. We're actually going to put a contract in place to guarantee it.

So that's some big news that we're working on. And if you're interested, if you want to be, have a podcast there's going to be information.

There's going to be an application on Christian podcast community to find out about that.

Now, if you, if you just say, Hey, I'm not going to, I don't want to be part of that community, but I still want to learn to improve my podcasting.

If you're on Facebook, there's a Christian podcast community, Facebook group, that's open to anyone that has a podcast, wants to podcast.

What we discuss in there. It's not a place for you to spam with your podcast, but it's where we discuss what, how we can improve our podcasting.

And so that is some big news we've been working on since February. I encourage you guys to check that out.

And if you're interested, let us know. And I'm now going to transition to a game for Jim to play.

Okay. It's time now to start the spiritual transition game.

So this is a game now, Jim, you've seen this live at one of our conferences, but this is a theme where many people struggle in sharing the gospel.

It's really, they don't struggle once it gets into a spiritual realm because they understand the

Bible. They know the Bible. It's how do I get from the natural to the spiritual and where I could walk into a crime scene and you probably within a very short period of time can make some assessments that I would totally miss because you have 20 years experience.

This is something where I have the 20 years experience, but this is a game where the more you play it, the more you train yourself.

And if you, if you follow any of J Warner Wallace's teachings, you listen to his podcast, you will know he talks about training.

And this is the thing. It's about training. We have to train ourselves for those conversations, not wait for them to happen.

But if you go, if you're, you know, at the oh, why did I just draw a blank to the website, your website?

Cold Case Christianity. Well, Cold Case Christianity, but what was it? It's convince me. Please convince me. That was our old website.

Yeah, for sure. So, but, but, and the website is Cold Case Christianity. Yeah. And so if you're listening, if anyone listens to either of those, you know that you hear about training versus teaching.

This is a training. You train yourself to be ready for those occasions. So here's how this is going to work.

Jim is going to give me something and I have no idea what it is. I won't be editing this out.

He's going to give me something and I have to transition whatever he gives me to the gospel and I do it live.

I do this as an encouragement to others to say, well, if I keep practicing this, if I keep training this way, I can take any conversation from the natural to the spiritual.

So Jim, what do you got for me? Well, I don't know if you've heard this, but I was yesterday where I had a chance to go

Frank Turk and I went over to the Wells Fargo Championship golf tournament in Charlotte.

And we watched Jason Day win that tournament by two strokes.

And he really kind of pulled it out in the last two holes. And it was just amazing. You know, golf is probably,

I haven't, I don't watch golf, but I probably would like it because one of the things I had this, this took me a while to figure myself out.

And when it came to sports, there's only, there were two sports that I enjoy watching and it is mixed martial arts and tennis.

Now folks have an issue with mixed martial arts. Please don't judge me or wait to it. You already did. But and the thing

I ended up realizing, I like individual sports for exactly like you just said, I like watching that comeback.

I like watching that guy who's looks like he's losing and, and just, you know, is able to, to strike the ball, be able to do something that, that even though it looks like he's losing the whole 18 holes can win it in the end.

There's something about that, that I enjoy, you know, but it's actually sort of the, the story of my life in a sense, because, you know,

I was, I was a troublemaker as a child. I almost burned my house down twice because once wasn't enough.

I, I set it on fire twice. I was not a very well -behaved child and I was not be anyone that anyone would expect.

If they saw me growing up, I was a terror. You would not expect to see me in heaven because I was a terror, but you know what?

I will be in heaven, but it's not because of what I did. It's because of what someone else did. In fact, someone else came in and came in the last minute in a sense, but came in and won the game for me if you want to use that analogy.

But what is, is that God himself took my place. He took my sin upon himself when he came to earth as a man and died on a cross.

And he took that upon himself that I could be set free. And though I was headed toward losing big time because of the work of Jesus Christ, I was able to say that I have eternal life.

That's how I would transition. Yeah, I think that's good to do that for people too, because I think everyone will just kind of can think themselves, you know, it kind of, you know, you're kind of going through that where I'm kind of trying to figure out how you're going to get there.

You know, I think that it kind of encourages us to do the same thing. So that's good. Well, when you play it in groups, especially where I used to play this all time with the youth group and we would go around and you find that everyone has a different way of getting to the way.

And yeah. And the thing that's neat with it is sometimes you end up using those in real life.

And because you remember it. And the other thing is that you end up realizing there's a lot of different ways. Now, the first time you play, it's going to take maybe five minutes to get there.

But enough training, you get better at it. Yep, that's right. I think that's some teaching you've taught.

Yeah, that's so true, though. Right. So it's good. Really good. So before we go, give you anything else you'd want to share with the audience.

Any new projects you got coming? Well, I mean, now it's just a matter of we're always working with different companies and cable companies looking at potential projects.

So I think a lot of it is how do we impact the culture in the way that we think is the most powerful? Every one of us given our gifts and all the people are listening to this podcast.

They obviously have an interest and that interest we can blossom into actually action because everyone's got the ability to do something to contribute to changing culture.

And it starts with this, you know, as parents, are we parents there? You know, you don't have these big projects.

You have huge projects are called your kids. So I just want to encourage people to think that you don't have to be, you know, you don't have to have a podcast, do a podcast, write a blog, be a blog, be a ministry, be a 501C3.

None of that stuff's really necessary. Our first responsibilities are to our marriages and to our families.

And if we do that well, you know, we kind of ensure that this thing continues for another generation. So I just want to encourage people.

One thing for sure, you have to fill your mind with something. And if you're listening to this podcast, you're already kind of probably get that.

So nothing else. Let's just continue to fill our minds with the things that matter. All right. And I will say, not only do we have a great guest this week, next week, we're going to have another guest.

We're going to talk about the book Evidence Demands Verdict and also talk about the book

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. I'm going to have a different one of the authors on and we're going to be discussing some a lot of different things.

It's going to be very enjoyable. I'm looking forward to it. I hope you will subscribe to The Wrap Report so you don't miss it.