Training Christian Teachers with Mike Riddle

Good evening, everyone. I'm back. So sorry for such a long delay in getting back onto the show.

It's been unbelievably busy. It's been a great time of ministry over the last really year.

I know you've not been on a whole lot. I plan on being on a whole lot more over the next couple of months coming up.

And so for those of you who don't know me, I'm Dr. Anthony Silvestro from Strong Fraternity Ministries. I'm not sure who is joining us today.

I know Andrew is going to be out of commission for a few weeks, still mourning the loss of his mother.

And I'm not sure who else, either the Justins or Josiah coming on.

However, I do have a very, very special guest today that I'll be bringing in in just a moment.

So I speak with Strong Fraternity Ministries and part of Strong Fraternity Ministries board member and speaker.

I'm also part of another ministry named Creation Training Initiative, where the focus of the ministry is a little bit different.

It's about training up teachers in churches. So the fact is, is we've got a lot of not good teachers through churches,

Sunday school teachers, things like that, Christian schools. And our goal is to really train them up and start reversing what's going on in the country right now.

And so thank you, KT. It's been so long that Anthony has changed and we still recognize him. I think the only thing different today is

I probably lost a few more hairs on top of my head. So everything else should be the same. But hello to everyone in the chat room.

We'll be getting to you pretty quickly here. I first want to bring on my guest. So let's bring him in.

How are you doing, Mike? I'm doing great, Anthony. Had a great day. Got out for some good walks in this 70 degree weather and ate some good food.

So it's been a good day. You guys got 70 in Boise right now? Yes. Even got my pushups in today.

Wow. That is wonderful. Good for you. And so, you know, I first have to say, you've got a certain shirt on there right now.

And I can't say you used to be something. That's right. Better get it right or you'll be doing pushups.

So the show's over. So you are a Marine. That is correct.

And so you served years ago. Yes. Years and years ago. But we're always a Marine. That's right.

Wonderful. And you know, it comes across when you teach. So people respect you right away when you come across with your

Marine stance. The way you stand, you look like a Marine. So thank you for that. Everyone knows.

It just comes natural. That's right. So you are the president of Creation Training Initiative, of which

I'm now a board member of as of about four years ago now, something like that. So four or five.

It's hard. The time just flies, doesn't it? And so you had a vision in starting

Creation Training Initiative years ago. Now for your pedigree, people may want to know a little bit more about you.

So if you want to talk a little bit about your background with Microsoft and kind of go from there. Okay.

Well, I grew up a non -believer. I'll say this. I used to be an athlete.

I competed worldwide in track and field. I had some good jobs. You had a special opponent, though, didn't you?

Yes, I did. His real name is Bruce Dinner, by the name of Caitlin. We had good times together.

I really liked him at the time. I like him now. But anyway,

I grew up a non -believer. And as an athlete, you go to the gymnasium and lift weights. And one day I was in that gymnasium lifting weights, and a man came up and sat down beside me.

And for the first time in my life, somebody presented the gospel to me. Then he asked me some questions.

I answered all his questions wrong and just ignored everything he had to tell me and just walked away from it.

Seven years after that, I was on a business trip. I was in computers at the time, traveled all over the world doing computers.

I was on that business trip to Indianapolis. I got done work late one evening, got back to the hotel, got in bed, and so I lay there in bed that night.

I finally understood the message that man gave me seven years earlier. That is the night

I got on my knees and professed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. He was the only one to ever witness to me.

After a while, I got back and did. Hold on a second. He was the only person to witness to you? That's right.

So I've heard this testimony a boatload of times from you. And I have never caught that part of it.

The only person to witness to you. Yes. Wow. State of the church today. I've gone in and out of some

Methodist churches. My wife was Methodist at the time, but we never heard the gospel. We never heard anything that was remotely biblical.

But after I got off my knees, got back in bed, and I still couldn't go to sleep, I had a strong desire to teach the book of Genesis, which

I had not even read yet. So I reached in the door of that hotel room, pulled out the Bible, and began reading

Genesis chapter one. As I faced that first chapter, I thought to myself, if I can't believe what's in that chapter, there's no reason to go any further than the

Bible. Why trust anything else if you can't trust the very first chapter of Genesis? So I thought to myself, maybe some of what

I've been taught in the universities might not be correct. So being in computers and traveling, I had the opportunity to travel everywhere, and I'd stop and talk to professors and scientists, and I'd ask them questions about evolution.

I soon found a pattern to their answers, and a lot of great stories. But they could not directly answer my questions, and I could see the bluffing that they were doing.

So I thought, here's these people that tower above me in intelligence, but they can't answer my questions.

So I thought, why should I believe in evolution when they can't answer these basic questions? So I became not only a

Christian, but now I'm a six -day Croatian, because I believe the Bible from the very first verse.

Now a number of years after that, my wife and I were in a six -week speaking term. We used to go out for a month at a time for the

Institute of Croatian Research, and for that month, we'd cover a whole state. Every day, we'd go to a different church or churches or Christian schools and speak.

It was a wonderful adventure. You never knew what to expect next. And you didn't know where you were going, right?

I mean... Well, we knew where we were going, but Leslie knew. My wife knew better than I did. I just kind of followed her in the car, sitting in the passenger seat.

She was the driver. But we were in Jacksonville, Florida. We were on a six -week speaking trip, every day, another church or churches and schools, for six straight weeks.

We stopped at one place in Jacksonville, Florida, and that night, we were staying with the pastor. And after we got there, sat across from the pastor, we began talking about our background, what we had done, talked about some of the

Bible and talked about Croatian. As we kept talking, we found out we had both been to the United States Marine Corps.

And once you find that out, you have an instant bond. So we began to reminisce what we had done in the Corps, and we found out we had both been stationed at Quantico, Virginia, a large

Marine Corps training base. So we talked a lot about that, places we had been. Then we found out we had both been stationed at Yuma, Arizona, a small

Marine Corps -era missile base. So we reminisced some about that and talked a while, and all of a sudden, he just looked right at me and stopped talking.

Then he said this, I remember you. Do you remember me? Twenty -seven years ago, in a gymnasium,

I gave you the gospel presentation. Same man. See, that man did what he was supposed to do and what every single

Bible -believing Christian is commanded to do, and that is go out and give the gospel, give the truth.

But you know, you can't give that truth if you don't know it. And that's the real pandemic we have in this country today, is

Christians who can go out there and tell the truth. And we have a pandemic of lack of Bible knowledge.

That's the real one we have in the church. We're not getting that training done, getting that boldness to go out there and evangelize and be able to bring down the strongholds when they attack us with questions.

That is lacking in most churches today. You know, I get chills every time

I hear you give this testimony. I mean, it's amazing how we witness to people all the time and, you know, how many of us have seen somebody repent right in front of us or even find out about it years later.

And for this gentleman to do it and waiting literally 27 years to hear about your testimony and then all the stuff you've accomplished that obviously

God has prepared beforehand for you, but all the things you've done in ministry since then, it really is an astounding story.

Yes. What's so fascinating about it, it's really not about me. It's how God works. And this is something we've got to get across to people.

If God calls you, he's got you. And when he's got you, he'll never let you go. That's the part.

Amen to that. And that somebody was used as the vessel to be able to preach that gospel to you.

That's what he commands us to do. Don't just say, oh, God knows this. No, he commands us to go out there and do it.

And if we don't do it, we're being disobedient to his word. That's a serious issue right there. Yeah, absolutely.

We're told to go out. Matter of fact, I like to say this. We have a mission, and that is to go out and give the gospel message into enemy territory.

Not just in safe places, into enemy territory. That's what we're calling non -believers.

And I know you've been in some enemy territories when you do that street preaching in New York City. That's enemy territory.

And I've been in colleges, secular colleges, when you have surrounded by 10 or 15 people all throwing questions at you.

And you probably love it too, don't you? Oh, I absolutely love it. Yeah. I haven't had the opportunity to do it on a college stage like you have to be able to be part of debates that way.

But you're right. And it's all enemy territory. I mean, the Bible is very clear that you're either with him or you're against him.

And that the moment we get out of our safe zone in our church, we are literally in enemy territory out there amongst some believers.

Because you've got to figure, and I make this statement, probably about 80 % of the people in every community out there are on their way to hell.

Because you look at all the false religions, all the atheists, nonbelievers, agnostics, all the other religions out there that go by works, all have a false gospel.

That's a high percentage in our communities today. And it may be far higher than that, because I think 80 % would be pressed in our churches, right?

I think that we look at some of the research we talked about this last weekend in terms of Barna research and how they say that that's only,

I think it was 6 % or 8 % of people have a biblical worldview, according to Barna research. Even lower than that.

Christians. Yes. But then when you find out the questions that were actually asked, it's probably far lower.

Yes, it is. I've looked at some of those questions and they're really not big doctrines in the

Bible. They're how would you react in this situation? And that can be a little gray area in some of those.

And I know they do a lot of research, good research on the type of questions to ask, but see a biblical worldview has to start with biblical doctrines.

Do you believe this doctrine? And that's one of the things you and I and others came up with is a sound definition for a biblical worldview.

That's right. The 18 points of what we believe to be a basics for a biblical worldview of which, and I guess we'll get right into it now.

And then I'll bring, we've got somebody else waiting in the background. I'll get you in here in just a couple of minutes. So thank you for joining in.

So when part of a large part of the ministry is about training others to teach.

Yes. And so we started this. Yeah. Which it's not, it's not good enough.

The way that churches have done this is finding the person that has a pulse, says Jesus and is willing to teach the youth, right?

That that's way too low of a standard. Yes. You know what we do? You got to go to college for four years to teach children three plus one equals four in the church is who's ever available.

We've degraded education down to the bottom of the barrel of many of our churches. Now, that doesn't say that some of these teachers aren't good, but I'm just leaving it up to anybody.

We don't even have some requirements. We're making the statement now, this biblical worldview, we've come up with some pastors and you and I is before anybody teaches in a church, they should sign and believe that biblical worldview doc definition there.

And it's just basic biblical doctrines. And you need to hold to all 18 of them, but you just don't have a biblical worldview.

You got something else. So that's the importance of this. Before you teach, you should come under some kind of scrutiny, some kind of measurement that says you are a

Bible believing Christian born again. And you believe what the Bible believes. But we got a lot of people in churches teaching in central classes, simply don't believe the

Bible, especially in the Genesis camp. That's right. And, and they're teaching our youth not to believe the

Bible. So it's not just outside our borders. It's within our borders. We're being attacked. No, you're, you're absolutely right about that.

So, okay. So what's unique about you? And, and when I had, when we had met, it's, it's gotta be nine years ago.

Now we met nine. Was that a traumatic time in your life there? I think it's blocked out still.

Okay. No. So we met nine, maybe 10 years ago. And the thing that I was fascinated about is your understanding of teaching.

And that just because people go to school and get a teaching degree, master's in teaching,

PhD in education, doesn't make them good teachers. And one of the things you always said is that it's, it's, if the kids are failing in the classroom, it's, it's not on the, it's not on the kids in general, right?

It's on the teacher. Yes. There can be exceptions. Some kids will just want to fail.

But if somebody's not passing your class, the first person you look at as a teacher is yourself.

Maybe you didn't do the correct kind of teaching, the best teaching you could. No, we, we've developed lots of methods here at CTI on how to get people to better understand and better retain information.

In other words, when we're talking about education, there's these, there's the app, there's the knowledge level.

And that's about as far as most churches go. And they do, don't do a real good job of that either. But then there's the app. So let's stop right there, right?

And most people, you said a really key statement here is that most people believe that they are qualified to teach because they have a bunch of information in their head.

That's right. I make a statement. Having a PhD does not qualify you to speak in front of anybody. There's gotta be some other criteria.

You might be good in that field, but this is a whole nother field. It's called be able to communicate effectively.

And that seems to kind of go by the wayside. So there needs to be good teacher training.

And I've got the degrees in education, a vast degree in education, but it really didn't train me a lot on how to really teach.

They made the basic mean, medium mode and had a great papers a little bit, but it was nice.

But we've gone well beyond that. I got a lot of this in the industry too.

They have stricter standards. If you're going to be teaching in industries, they're not the best, but they're better. So, so let's talk about that because you developed some, some really strong teaching methods because you worked at a certain corporation and, you know, it's interesting.

You, you ran against and lost to a girl, Bruce Jenner. Yes. He was better than me.

Yeah, I kid, of course, but because you, you were an Olympic, you were an Olympic caliber decathlete back in the day.

So a lot of people don't know that about you, but you also worked for one of the most evil men today and directly reporting to him,

Bill Gates. Yes. So tell us a little bit about your Microsoft experience. I mean, cause you were, you were one of the early guys in computer development, computer development and technologies and whatnot.

And so you were hired into Microsoft for a specific reason. Yes. Well, let me first,

I, my computers, I started computers for a lot of people were born out there, 1967. For those of you who are taking,

I take this name as a, as an honor, a geek, computer geek. I look at that as an honor. We start with programming in ones and zeros.

There was no operating system. We just code up things in ones and zeros, plug them in. And if it didn't work, there were no diagnostics.

You had to go read through all these numerical systems and figure out what went wrong. That's probably why

I wear glasses today. But then I worked for some major companies, computers, and I was a systems engineer, but I was an instructor also.

And that's one of the reasons Microsoft hired me was they were starting up their software engineer training.

And they brought me in and to observe and interviewed. And what

I saw there was the same thing I saw throughout the rest of the computer industry. They brought these software people in for three, four or five days, one presenter after another.

These were the software developers come in and talk about their product one after another door would open at lunchtime that throws some food in and while they're eating, they're getting another lecture.

And that would go on for six hours a day, three, four or five days. Then they were expected to know all of this.

Well, I went around to the doctors and thought, we have a lot of ill stress related illnesses here.

They said, yes, a lot of young folks. See, when I joined Microsoft, I was 40 years old. I was the token old person in the company, 40.

But there was a lot of stress and it was all due to these people were under tremendous stress to know this stuff and they didn't know it.

When you're getting what they call the information dump, they're just hour after hour, a different lecture.

You can't know all that. If you have photographic memory, you might have it all, but you don't know how to put it together.

So we decided that as I hired my group in instructors and I had a specific kind of person

I hired as instructor. They're a self -starter, often role, and they already know the information. I will train them how to speak and teach.

So we went around the country looking to solve the problem. How can we give near the same amount of information and help them retain it?

That was the challenge. After about a year study, I would send my instructors out two by two. It's a biblical and they go around and it doesn't matter how much information they brought back in the knowledge of the subject.

We wanted to analyze other instructors and teachers out there. It's a real research project. After a little over a year, we finally got it.

We did one of those things because it was a simple process and we named it a time checkpoint for short,

TCP, time checkpoint. And what it is, what it ultimately is, it's a disguised form of repetition.

It's not a test, but it's timed. And this also presupposes, you know, how to write a valid performance objective, which is another part of teaching.

We don't even use those in Sunday school and that's sad right there. In other words, the students have no idea what's expected of them other than show up.

That's not good education. We need to change our Sunday school program in church education.

But what we do is after we cover maybe a chapter in one of our courses, we have a paper given to them that's face down.

And they may go anywhere from two to four minutes maximum, anywhere from three to six questions on them, really not one more than that.

And these are not true false and they're not multiple choice because that's not going to tell me whether you know it or not.

They're fill in the blanks or write a short sentence or two. But what we do is

I sit down and take the exercise myself and it's not a test, the exercise, and then

I see how long it takes me and add 30 seconds on. But the idea is it's time, but it's not a test.

People can't figure that one out. How can you have a timed thing and not be a test? Well, what they do is they take this exercise and you have and here's where the objectives come in, being able to write a valid for performance objective.

You take the questions off your objectives and put those on to their time checkpoint because they're the most important things you want the people to know in the class.

So you have a paper now, maybe it has five questions on it. Maybe this one's two and a half minutes and two and a half minutes are up.

You stop. You don't give them an extra second that defeats the purpose. If they know it, they'll be able to fill it all in.

Usually about 20 % of the people finish in the two and a half minutes if this one was that length of time.

And that's good because one, this is the first time these people are hearing this information. And sometimes it's a whole new language to them that they're hearing all these new words like hermeneutics, thermodynamics, big words, college words.

Then we're all done. Here's what comes in. Nobody sees their paper. Now what you do as the instructor, you go over it.

You go over the questions, give the answers or they can give answers if they want. And if they did not get the correct answer, they write the correct answer in.

In other words, we always end with correctness. Our job is to educate for success. That's what we want in Christianity.

We don't want to be hiding things and making, yes, eventually they're going to have to take a test. But right now, what the dynamics of this thing is they get the right answers.

This slows the whole class down for maybe 10 to 12 minutes. You're not giving new information and that's what you want to do.

And now they end with a sheet of paper that has just the correct answers in. They've normally heard it from me.

Now they've written it down. So that's another medium. And it slows it down enough. They can catch up on what they, the holes they had, something they missed, or they can ask a question.

So it slows the class a little bit down so people can catch up and get their minds back and train and not get a hole back there where they're missing something and you keep piling more on top of that hole there.

But we found out when we did this for the engineers, they loved it. I taught this one five day class.

I wrote from actually about a little over four and a half days. It was difficult. It was a difficult class.

And I introduced something to my consultant, said, you don't come to my class and listen. They had to take tests, a midterm and a final exam.

Another little test. My requirement was 80 % better on everything, not an average, but everything had to be 80 % or better, or you have to come back and retake that test.

This is their job to pass reading. In five years, we only had one person not pass.

We used those techniques and then principles of good education, good teaching. The only reason that one person couldn't pass, see your final exam was both written and verbal, and the verbal was videotaped.

That was scary. And his presentation was not good enough and he never came back to redo the presentation, because I felt he could have.

But if he came back, he could have probably passed. That's the kind of educational one. We don't tolerate failure in Christian education.

But how do you know anybody's failing or not in your class if you have no measurement system? Are you not helping them out? See, this is a disguise form repetition.

And also, it's a personal checkpoint. They find out what they know and they don't know. And we solve the problem.

See, that's the way we train athletics. We don't train for failure. We don't train for incorrectness. We train for everything to be correct.

Your arm movement, your leg movement, your body movement, your breathing. We train for correctness. Why don't we do that in Sunday school and church education?

Well, and see, that's what's fascinating, right? So I've listened to you and you've helped train your two granddaughters to get full ride scholarships and pole vaulting, because you are so concerned about every aspect of technique.

I mean, from hand position to foot position, I mean, everything you've analyzed on video for them and trained them up over the years in these.

And you've taken that same mode and brought it into the education, right?

That you have designed the way that you teach and have taught me over the last several years as well how to teach, how to stage information right, how to have disguise repetition, how to put these tests that aren't really tests in there.

All for the purposes that by the time they're done with their one hour session, their one day session or their five day session with CTI, that they've learned the information you've wanted them to learn over that period of time.

Right. They know the most important things in that class. You can't expect somebody to come out knowing everything.

So as an instructor, you sit down and set your objectives. What are the most important things you want them to be able to walk away with?

Not just knowledge, but what can they do? That's a whole nother facet of teaching too, is taking it to the next level, which is the application level.

Yeah. And so you did this in Microsoft with the sole purpose, I mean, your job was literally to get the engineers to learn over a weekend course or over a five day course so that they could come out and perform that job differently the moment they walk out of your class.

Right. They could go back to their customers and do the technical and fix the machines. And they were the ones who were getting the raises and promotions so they can actually perform.

That's called application. Yep. And so your teaching group, I mean, from what I understood, people were signed up for your course years in advance because they knew that if they took your course, they had raises coming their way.

I mean, that's how effective the training style that you had. Yes, there was a wait list to get in that class.

Yeah. And I enjoyed it. Yeah, we traveled all over the world, but I enjoyed it.

An unlimited budget, right? Well, back then we didn't have a whole lot of budgets.

Now we do. Yeah. But so you took those techniques, both from your background as an

Olympic type decathlete, dention to detail. You took what you garnered in Microsoft, what you helped develop in Microsoft, you took all of that and then brought it to Christian education, specifically in creation.

Right. You combine that with the Bible, you have a winner. That's the way you do it. Keep it to the

Bible. Use those techniques. We will have people coming out being evangelists and apologists.

That's right. That's what we have to have today. Because evangelism and apologetics goes hand in hand today.

That's right. And so in some of the courses that we offer through CTI is they're going to start learning these teaching techniques, right?

So how to stage the information. They're going to learn the information first, how to give it simply. Yes. And then be able to learn how to do this themselves as they continue to practice.

That's the third part. You've walked me right into that one. The three parts of education. There's the knowledge level, which a lot of places don't even get to that.

Then there's the application level. Very few get to that. Then there's the growth level. Have we trained them so they can go out and continue to grow on their own?

That's the third part. And we don't even touch that one. Right. And so there's a lot of people in Christianity today.

And I was one of them, right? When we met, I was already teaching in a church for several years. And you have spent a lot of time with me showing me that I wasn't actually that good of a teacher.

I didn't really say that too much. You didn't say it out loud. But the point is that a lot of us think, hey, just because we're dumping a lot we have great knowledge of the subject we're talking about.

We're dumping great knowledge on the students. We think that we're doing a good job teaching. And instead, we're just leaving them with their heads spinning, walking out the door each week.

That's right. It's called the information dump. Right. For instance, when you do a one -hour lecture, that's kind of the standard after one -hour lecture.

You can't expect everybody to know all that stuff. But what you do as a lecturer, you've got two or three things, no more than that, that you want them to really know and be able to talk about when they leave.

You're a winner if you can get that many. So in an hour, you can give a lot of information. I'm known for giving a lot of information sometimes.

What I do is sometimes, because the limitation of time, and sometimes I do it just to get the information out of them.

Most of the time, I want them walking away with two or three things that they're going to have up here.

They can walk away, I know how to do that. Yeah. And so when they get the confidence walking out of a class, knowing these two, three, maybe four things really, really well, it drives them to continue to learn more on their own and to grow that way.

Right. And those are the things we need to bring into our churches, that kind of training. And it will make a world of difference in your congregation.

Their confidence level will go up a lot because they now know how to actually use it. And they're not afraid to talk anymore throughout their week because they know they can bring down the strongholds.

They can catch bluffs. And in all our courses, we don't do any rocket science.

We found out you really don't have to have a PhD to do creation. You don't even have to have a degree in science to help you.

It helps. It really does help. What we can train you in everything you need to know in the sciences, it's just the foundations of science.

Where did matter come from? How did life originate? Where did the dinosaurs come from? Those kind of things. You don't have to, we don't have to get up there and show off how much we know.

In other words, here's another concept that I've been teaching on quite a bit. We are too much teacher focused and not enough learner focused.

In other words, we get our teachers based on how much information you know. How much information can you give out in an hour?

But who's asking what can the students or the learners do with it? That is the critical question you should write down before you go into any class to start.

Any class you teach, Sunday school, mathematics, anywhere. What do you want your students to be able to do or perform when you finish this class or course?

Before you enter. If you don't do that, you're cheating your students because they have no idea what direction you're going. We come to these

Sunday school classes week after week after week and we get new information, new information, new information.

You've done 12 weeks. What can you do with it? Here's another one I like to harp on a little bit. In the

Bible, in the Hebrew language, the root word for learn and teach is the same.

Therefore, if your students haven't learned, you have not taught. Simple as that, folks.

If your students can't do anything with the information you gave them, what good was the class? We've got to have some kind of measurement or standard we use.

It doesn't have to be necessarily a written test. But if you implement those time checkpoints, say, if you do one for the first chapter, maybe you do one maybe for the third chapter, which includes the previous information plus some new information.

So the most important things from the first time checkpoint, maybe one or two items come out of the second checkpoint. Maybe in a 12 -week

Sunday school class, you might do four of those. By the time you get to the end, they're going to have seen some of these questions and written those answers down two or three, maybe four times.

Guess what? They can take a test and do it from the top of their head. We're not talking head. You've achieved something there. That's right.

And the next thing we're bringing to our classes is the application. Here's another part.

We need to stop trying to teach everything. Jesus taught us that. When he was talking to disciples, he said, I've got lots more to tell you, but you can't handle it now.

So he gave them what they needed at the time. We want to get through this lesson, that lesson, that lesson, that lesson.

We've got to finish this chapter this week. No, that's not teaching anymore, folks. If they can't do anything, you didn't teach.

That's it. All you did was regurgitate information you knew. So what we're starting to do is teach less and do little workshops.

Now, I'm not a big fan of role -playing. So what I do is close to it. We divide up into groups of three.

One will be the born -again believer or creationist in our cases. One will be the non -believer and one will be the observer.

The non -believer challenges the believer, the creationist. And we see how well the creationist can verbally, not just sit there, but verbally give an answer.

The observer records what happens and they switch roles. And you don't sit around for 10, 15 minutes doing this.

Just get started, go. You got about two minutes, switch roles. So we don't have a lot of time in these.

And you'll find out people will get the job done if you put the pressure and the time limits on them. They'll get it done. So we don't have a lot of time where we sit around and talk about what happened on TV last night or what we had for breakfast.

We keep it going and they practice this over and over again. And at a 12 -week Sunday school class, if you can get people coming out of there knowing six or eight things, you've got a pretty good success there.

Because after so many 12 -week Sunday school classes, those six or eight things start building up.

Instead of trying to teach everything and they can't do anything with anything, why don't we come out and set a goal? I would like to have you be able to do or perform.

These six things we've all done. Then you teach that. It could be something like, who became Mary? Or how about this one?

I heard you answer this one the other day in one of your presentations. It was excellent. Aren't Christians told not to judge?

Right out of my mouth, it says, do not judge. You gave a wonderful answer and everybody understood it. So those kinds of questions are things like, how can

Noah fit all the creatures on the ark? So can you hold that thought for just a moment? I'm going to bring up Pastor Josiah in here and join the conversation because he might have some questions for you.

Or he might just be hanging out with us. But I want to go back to this idea of objective here. So hold that thought for a moment and let's welcome in Josiah.

How are you tonight? Or Pastor Josiah, I should say. Thank you. I'm better than I deserve.

Amen. So good to see you tonight. So Mike, Pastor Josiah is where I went and taught the basic course on my own in November or December of 2021?

It was November. It was November? Yeah. Yeah, I think it was mid -November.

So as a dentist, did he have to pull any teeth? No, no.

I got all those worked on before he came. Lucky. So thanks for being on,

Josiah. Do you have any questions at all at this point? Well, first, I want to talk about your little basic creation training.

You did an excellent job. Well, praise God. Thank you. Yeah. Mike, you taught him well.

If he was a terrible teacher before, he's definitely a good teacher now. Well, you know what it is? And the same thing with athletes.

If you don't get an athlete that's willing to do it, willing to pay the price, it's not going to happen no matter what you do as a teacher.

Anthony wanted this. He paid the price to get there. Right now, I'm going to put a plug here for you,

Anthony. Don't blush. But I think he's grown to be one of the top apologists in this country now. The top biblical apologist.

You're making me blush. Yes. I've seen a lot of apologists out there. I've seen what they do, and a lot of them don't even give correct biblical information.

But Anthony's got a good background in the Bible. He understands how to witness, evangelize, and he's good all the way around.

And his communication skills are excellent. So thank you for giving that plug, Josiah. You're welcome.

He did a great job. Everybody who went definitely knew the basic teaching points on creation.

People are going to think I paid you guys to say all this. The checkpoints were really what did it for my wife and my parents that attended.

That really made them think. And when they came back, there were some really good answers.

You could tell they actually got the information. That's good. And that's why you developed it, because it really doesn't take that long to do them.

And you could start to own the information as the learners. And that's where the focus has to be.

The learners, not so much the teacher. Yeah, the teacher has to have qualifications. They have to have biblical worldview.

But what they do and how they do it is not the most important part of the class. It's what can the students do.

That's the most important part of the class. That's how a teacher measures their success, not by what they do necessarily, but what students can do.

And again, if they can't do anything, then you just didn't teach. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so let's kind of develop this a little bit more, because the way

I look at it, there's a couple of different aspects to successful teaching. And part of it is the way the information is staged.

Part of it is this repetition. Part of it is going to be how the teacher communicates.

With hand skills, and we're going to talk about that a little bit, and the way they use their voice. But I want to talk about performance objectives, because this is really the key to it all, right?

We've talked a little bit about the repetition now. So these time checkpoints, several of them throughout a one -day course, so that they get this built -in repetition that helps get the information stuck up here.

So when they walk out, they know those things. But before we can get to the point of having these time checkpoints throughout the course, we have to write proper objectives.

And so this is a concept that most people, honestly, they just don't know what to do or how to do this in performance objectives.

So Mike, could you explain what a proper objective is and what not a proper objective is, especially in terms of words used for it?

Okay, in a proper objective, there's several components. One is, what do you specifically measure?

What do they have to know? It could be like they will be able to answer six out of the eight things there.

So what's specific on a particular topic? So let me say it like this.

So it would be like if we were doing a chapter on the days of creation, right? And we're saying, these are the 10 evidences of how we know that the days of creation are 24 -hour literal days.

And what not a good objective would be is to say, have a better understanding of how to give an apologetic.

The verb you use in a performance objective has to be a action verb or something measurable.

You cannot measure how well you understand something or how much you appreciate something.

They have to be action verbs, such as you will be able to state three of the six evidences that the days of creation were literal days.

So what do you want to be able to perform? Under what criteria and what is your measurement for success in there?

It'd be like 80%, you want 80 % of this or 90 % of this. So those are the components that you put in there.

But the main key is it's got to be a measurable action verb. Write something, state something or choose something out of a list.

Right. So basically every chapter that we teach through CTI starts off with chapter objectives.

It's that state, right? We have three to four maybe chapter objectives, each of which says be able to name three of the days of creation.

Name three or name four, name two. And so that people know what their expectations are right from the get -go.

There's no surprises. And we do it real carefully. The first chapter is each chapter we say, we read those off and say, guess what?

You're going to see these again. So a little warning there. There you go. And then they do, right? Because they show up on TCPs.

They show up on exams. Then as we teach through the chapters, when we come to one of those, one of those, we kind of highlight it.

This is one of your objectives for this chapter. So that's teaching.

Yes, you're teaching towards the objectives, what you're supposed to do. Those are most important things. Doesn't mean you can't add other things in there.

But these are the things students are responsible for knowing to achieve success.

Which is literally the exact opposite of what the education system does. I mean, for me going through high school, college as a double major, almost all.

It's a math and chemistry double major. I was one class away from history minor in college and go off to dental school.

And you get all these courses. And the teachers were never upfront about the information you needed to know.

It's not like read this chapter and you're going to get tested. Yeah. That's not teaching. And then they test you on the things that are insignificant that you'll never use in life.

Right. We had a zoology professor in undergrad who, he was a weed out course for everyone who wanted to become medical doctors or dentists.

And he literally would take the smallest of the diagrams throughout the chapters that were on the test.

And he would just white out some of the indescript things on it and expect you to know that. Again, things you would never, ever have to know in real life.

But this is the way. I always thought it'd be great if biology teacher gets in there and said, you want to pass this class?

Here's what you've got to be able to do to pass this class. You know, when we're in business, we do performance reviews of people underneath us.

Before we, at the beginning of the year, whatever the time period is, we tell our people, this is what you have to be able to do to get this level of performance review.

Why don't we do that in education? Why don't we do it in the churches? It's not scary. You can make it non -scary.

These time checkpoints take the scare, take the anxiety level off. You can teach it.

We have a five -day class and it is intense. We'll talk about that more and more later.

But I just want to point, it is intense. And you're not, you just don't come to class and listen. You've got to perform.

And your class sometimes from 8 .30 in the morning to almost 8 .30 in the p .m. We let you eat now and then.

But we do. But we have criteria in there. And my job is to make them feel comfortable during that intensity.

There's techniques for teaching when you get in those kinds of situations. We learned it in the Marine Corps when you're in an intense situation.

When you're getting ready to go to battle and things like that, you will bond together. But there's whole techniques on how to get people to work together as a team.

It's not I, it's always we as a team will work for success. I don't tolerate failure.

And that's one of the things I over and over again, will not tolerate failure because it reflects on me. And that's the attitude we've got to get.

We've got to start working for success that people can do things in the classroom. It will change churches.

I mean, look, the secular world has been doing this for a long time in terms of pounding information and their indoctrination of,

I mean, kids in public schools. But we also see this TV commercials, children's books.

I mean, the whole gamut is pro -evolution, anti -God, and they're just pounding the same stuff over and over and over again into these students' minds.

But you brought up a good deal. You know, the world is by far out -educating the church. They're doing a much better job with education than we are.

They get tested. But even our Christian schools, they're doing a good job at getting people grades and getting into college and even getting a job.

But as far as getting on the battlefield, the spiritual battlefield, they're doing a miserable job. And that's the whole thing with apologetics.

You go to most of these Christians, a lot of them don't have things on apologetics. But if they do, what you find out, it's mostly philosophy or history of apologetics.

You know, all the time I've been doing this, I've never had to use that in any discussion with a non -believer. Philosophy or history of apologetics has never come up.

It's useless. I mean, nobody's asked you about that? No, nobody's asked me. And you don't need to be a philosopher to be an apologist.

You don't have to even use it to be an apologist. But yeah, that's what our schools do. What they've become is academic.

You need to get down and do what's called biblical apologetics. Get down to where the real battlefield is.

The battlefield is not in philosophy. It's not in the history of apologetics. The battlefield is defending God's word.

That's where it's at. And that's the presuppositional approach. Not to throw out evidence.

I use that when I need to. I like to lead with the Bible. For example, I do this one.

This is one of my favorite ones. And I do this in my class. I actually do it before they even know anything about this.

I say, what's your best evidence for the existence of God? Now, I hear things like design of this, design of that, or some area of physics.

Some area of science. No, that's not our best evidence. Not by far. It's a simple answer.

And I'm going to show you a tactic here. This is a tactic we need to get better at. The best evidence for this existence of God is this.

Without a creator God, nothing could exist. Therefore, God must exist. Now, that's my answer.

Now what you do is you turn that whole situation around. Now, if you're a non -believer, could you give me any empirical science for where the original matter in this universe came?

They can't do it. I asked for empirical. That's observable and repeatable science. Evolution is based on faith there.

And that's what it is. So we get stuck trying to answer questions with design in this. And the other side never has to answer a question.

We've got to get better tactics and strategy. Because our job is to get the truth out there. Not just give the scientific explanation that might or might not be true in some cases.

So we need to challenge them for the hope that they have. What they believe versus just trying to give an answer.

My answer is, without a creator God, nothing could exist. Therefore, he must exist. Anything wrong with that? Absolutely not.

Because the Bible never goes out to teach that and prove the existence of God. It assumes that from the very first verse, he exists.

Let's use Bible because it is the power that we have in our arguments. I do the same for the dinosaurs.

How do you put dinosaurs in the Bible? Well, that's easy. On day six, God created animals, which includes dinosaurs and man.

Then I go on from there. Then man fell, disobeyed God, and all creation became corrupt.

And then man became so bad that God flooded the entire world. And that's why we see most of the dinosaur fossils and sediments laid down by water.

Now, could you tell me where your dinosaurs came from? Through empirical science.

They can't do it because I look at all these books. I go to museums and I see pictures of dinosaurs and dinosaurs. I don't see the hundreds of thousands of transitions that led up to them.

Why are they not there? Because they can't find them. That's how we do this. We give the biblical answer.

Don't be ashamed of it. Then you challenge them. So that's one of the first times

I ever heard that argument was in one of your videos, the four power questions to ask an evolutionist, right? Because you went right to the jugular, so to speak.

Scientists love to start with certain things. They like to start with the first cell to talk about evolution.

They don't want to talk about how that cell came about in the first place, how non -life turned into life, which is against all known laws of science that they would acknowledge.

And so they start with a single cell. When it comes to dinosaurs, they just tell us, hey, dinosaurs started somewhere around 220 million years ago, died off 65 million years ago.

And you came up with the question, where did the dinosaurs come from in the first place? Like in your world view, where did they come from?

Because we don't have any transitions going up to dinosaurs. All of a sudden, in the fossil record, dinosaurs appeared.

And the science we teach in our courses, we can teach for an eighth grade. Eighth grade can understand it.

You don't have to be rocket science. You don't have to have degrees in science. You don't have to have a degree in philosophy. We take the training that you need to get on the battlefield and be on the spiritual battlefield there and start getting the truth, the gospel out to people.

That's your end goal always. Because what is wrong with 116th saying, the power of salvation is not in my wisdom, not in any science arguments, it's in the gospel.

That's the powerful salvation. That's what we need to get to the people. That's right.

Go ahead. Of course, we live in a creation apologetics world that nearly everybody is an evidentialist or a classicist.

They want to start with evidences. They want to show off how smart they are with the evidences they can pile on onto the unbeliever, where we say, this is unnecessary.

The power is in the gospel. The power is in God's word. And our job is we can ask certain questions that we can teach.

I think it's not even just an eighth grader. I think we can teach these to a fifth and sixth grader at times in how to ask even a

PhD evolutionary biologist certain questions that they're not gonna be able to answer. That's right. And you know what?

Don't worry if they walk away. If you've given them the truth, that is our job. We can't convert them.

We can't save them. That's the only whole spirit. Our job is to give the truth. You don't always get the truth with just straight evidence.

Now, I'm not ruling out evidence because I know a lot of people have had strongholds brought down by the evidence that got them to start thinking.

So evidence can be very good. That's why we need to know both. You don't have to be a rocket scientist. You have to know the right questions to ask.

That's the origin of life, the origin of matter. Take it down to their foundations. Even on this concept of natural selection, which is now on the outs.

They've done a lot of research on this. The environment doesn't do anything. The environment has no intelligence.

It can't make any decisions. Yeah, this environmental pressures nonsense and natural selection doesn't make sense whatsoever.

And it doesn't. It's all the programming God has put into us and all the sensors that constantly monitor the environment and allow us to adjust rapidly and adjust back in some situation.

You have to give God the glory for that. Once you understand that, you can take care of all the different areas of evolution, cosmological, chemical, and biological evolution.

And that's Randy Gluze's stuff with his CET argument that he developed years ago with ICR that is, unfortunately, is not being adopted very quickly by the big organizations.

But nearly every creationist in the country who's read this stuff says, oh, that's exactly what it is.

That makes perfect sense. If you've been in computers, you understand this principle really easy, especially if you've done programming.

You understand that. Sensors, the amount of what kind of input you can put in a program, wrong input, won't do it.

For instance, we can adjust within limits. We will not adjust to staying underwater with no devices for half an hour.

You won't adjust for going to some place where it's 200 degrees and survive. But we can adjust within limits.

You go to a climate you're used to in 70, you go to a place where it's 100, you'll adjust. Pretty soon when it gets to 90, you might be wearing a jacket.

God has programmed us miraculously with all tremendous incredible capability to adjust and be flexible, but within limits.

And the point is, it's not the environment that's putting pressures on us.

It's that we're designed not only with the genetic information to be able to adjust to certain situations, but that we have sensors that are built into us by God's design as well that detect the environmental changes in order to affect change within our

DNA. Environmental pressures are nothing more than something we get exposed to. And then our body, everybody's going to be a little different here, and our body with the sensors sense that, send signals to the rest of the body to adjust for that.

So there's nothing wrong with those words, but it's not what we call nature doing it. It's inherent in us.

It's not external. It's internal. And this is the continuous environmental tracking.

And really, I encourage everyone who really enjoys creation science to go look up Randy Galuz's articles at ICR on continuous environmental tracking,

CET. And learn more about this because it's a complete paradigm shift in terms of what us creationists have been talking about for years.

I have a section of my book on natural selection that, what's funny, Mike, is that when I sat down to write this book and tried to write out natural selection,

I'm like, this doesn't work. This doesn't make sense. The way that creation has been talking about this for years sounds just like an evolutionist.

And it wasn't until I came across Randy's stuff, I'm like, that's the missing piece. So I'm working on a second edition right now so I can add some of Randy's stuff into there and close that loop into the book.

And I might have somebody here, Pastor Zia, who's going to be writing a couple of chapters in the book as well in the update.

So I want to break right there because we do have a couple of questions. And so, as always, if anyone has any questions for Mike and wants to ask about education, we're going to talk a lot more about that today because that's really what

I wanted to focus the show on. But if you've got questions about creation science you want to ask him, feel free to write it in the chat or go to the

StreamYard link on apologeticslive .com and be able to come in live and ask your question.

But so the first one is, ask them where the first chicken came from.

Now, this is a better question. Well, actually, let's start the other one first. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, the answer is the chicken. And God created the very first chicken kind. That's right.

You know, the first kind. So what the first kind looked like... So it's not from the T -Rex. No, it's not from a T -Rex. They did not evolve into chickens.

They usually look like that in the chicken nuggets that we get for the kids. They probably taste the same. I wouldn't mind tasting a

T -Rex. But yeah, so as we have in our

Cleveland Zoo, there's actually in the aviary section these birds are the modern ancestor...

I'm sorry, are the modern descendants of the T -Rex. It's insane. Most museums now promote that, and that's what they teach in schools, that birds came from dinosaurs.

Yeah, that's right. So here's another question. Now, this is your specialty. You wrote these chapters in the

Ancestors and Genesis books. So for those of you who don't know, we haven't talked about this yet. Not only did you work for ICR for years, but you also were a very, very popular speaker at Ancestors and Genesis for a while.

Both excellent organizations. I learned a lot from both of them. Yeah, so I know you learned a lot, and you had a lot of fun things to say about those two.

So here's the next question by Jason Cave. How do we debunk carbon dating?

So now this is kind of a loaded question because we would say that we wouldn't debunk it at all in that,

I think what he's asking is most people, most unbelievers will say, well, doesn't carbon dating prove millions of years?

And so how do you answer that question, Mike? And then next, how do you talk about carbon dating in general?

Because I think it's one of the greatest, if we're going to talk evidences, it's one of the greatest evidences we have as creationists.

Right, we win the carbon -14 debate every time. We should. And again, I've taught this to eighth graders. First of all, let's start with the

Bible. We know carbon -14 dating can't give the dates they're giving, like 10 ,000, 20 ,000, 30 ,000, 40 ,000, 50 ,000, 60 ,000 years.

We know that can't be true because the Bible debunks it right there because God's creation took six little days about 6 ,000 years ago.

So as a Christian, and I put that in quotes because everybody says they're Christian these days, but from a

Bible -believing Christian, we know that can't be true. So we can tell them what the

Bible teaches, but carbon -14 dating is based on one assumption.

It's again, it's a form of radiometric dating. It's based on one assumption. And that assumption is this, that the amount of carbon -14 being produced in the atmosphere is equal to the amount that's decayed.

So carbon -14 is what we call an unstable isotope or unstable atom. What that means, it decays and over a period of time, the carbon -14 atom will decay into a nitrogen -14 atom.

We measured that in half -lives about 5 ,730 years. So I like to ask this question, when we die, do we continue to eat or breathe?

Well, no, no, simple question. Some people take that as a strict question, but no. See, while we're living, we're taking carbon -14 into our bodies because we eat it and breathe it because it's in the atmosphere.

But once we're dead, since we no longer eat or breathe, we no longer take carbon -14 in us, but the carbon -14 that was in us continues to decay out.

We estimate after about 100 ,000 years, all the carbon -14 should be gone. So let's state that real quickly again.

Because of the half -lives and the type of equipment we have today, we can't detect carbon -14.

Right, there's so little residue left after 100 ,000 years, we can't measure it. And a theoretical 100 ,000 years.

Yes, and the maximum dating they give for carbon -14 would be about 60 ,000 years if it worked.

But see, there's that assumption that the amount of carbon -14 produced in the atmosphere via cosmic rays coming down from outer space, we can pop more of that down later, we need to do later, is equal to the amount that's decaying back into nitrogen.

That's what we call equilibrium. See, we estimate if this Earth started with no carbon -14 and the cosmic rays were coming down bombarding this new planet, it would take about 30 ,000 years to reach this equilibrium state where the amount that's being entered in the atmosphere is the amount that's decaying.

Well, here's the problem. That assumption has been proven false. Dr. Willard Libby, in his own book, who's the founder of carbon -14, didn't even recognize that but ignored that information.

What we have found out is we're about anywhere from 15 to 20 % out of equilibrium. If it only takes 30 ,000 years to reach equilibrium and we're still out of equilibrium, wait a minute, there's a problem there.

Then there's other things that are fascinating about carbon -14 dating. Again, after about 100 ,000 years, we should find no carbon -14 in fossils.

Which means that's the upper limit, right? So any fossil you test for C -14, if it has

C -14 in it, the upper limit is about 100 ,000 years old. Yes. Theoretically. So the problem here is for the nonbeliever is we're finding carbon -14 dinosaur bones all over the world and other fossils all over the world still have carbon -14.

That's a big issue. So carbon -14 is a powerful testimony to a young Earth.

And even though it can't be used to date rocks, it can only be used to date organic material, once living things.

There are a few exceptions like diamonds. They're basically organic because they have carbon.

They're just pure carbon. But you couldn't date a diamond with it because they're supposed to be billions of years old. So why are we finding carbon -14 in diamonds?

Well, and that's the thing, right? I mean, we're finding carbon -14 in dinosaur bones, diamonds, coal seams, oil.

And because we find carbon -14, I want to make sure people hear this, is that it cannot be older than 60 to 100 ,000 years.

Now, we would dispute it would even be that old. And as you talked about with Dr. Libby and his research, but the fact is they're not millions of years old.

Because they have carbon -14, they're not millions of years old. And we know it can't be that old. Why? Because the

Bible teaches Earth of about 6 ,000 years. Nowhere in the Bible does it talk millions of years.

Nowhere can you find that. You only get that by starting with your, notice how I say this, your understanding of the scientific evidence, not the science, but your understanding of the scientific evidence.

Then you try and put that into God's word. God doesn't need to change his word. He gave it to us so we can understand it.

And over and over again, it says six days. Matter of fact, three places in the Bible explicitly states six days.

Nowhere does it say million years, nowhere. Yep, that's right. So we have our Bible evidence first and foremost, you know, between beginning of Genesis, Exodus 20 and Exodus 31, talks about the six days.

31 verse 17 and Exodus 20 verse 11 both say six days. Matter of fact, in Exodus 20 verse 11,

God wrote it down himself. He wrote it down on the clay tablets here. Six days.

Does he not know what he did? Yeah. So our first evidence is always Bible. And then the second one we can go to is to say, hey, look, even if you want to believe

C14, there's an upper limit on this. And all these bones have C14 in it. It's not millions of years old.

And here's another problem we have in education, in the church and our schools. We're not teaching our students to have confidence in God's word, to take it as their authority.

Somebody comes along with something that contradicts the Bible. And maybe we're off to, it's like the Bible says, tossed to and fro by all these new schemes and ideas because these people have

PhDs. Raymond, let's train our children to have confidence and are used to have confidence in the

Bible. Start with there. If it doesn't agree with God's word, then it can't be true. Yep.

Amen to that. So it looks like we've got somebody else coming in the show. Look at this. Pastor Justin Pierce.

How are you? Oh brother, I had to jump in. I've been having trouble with Facebook and whatnot, but I had to jump in.

Guys, I've got a praise report that I've got to tell everybody about. I am overwhelmed.

Okay. Just a little backstory. My cousin, Tommy Boggs.

Tommy, I know you're gonna be watching this and I just want you to know I love you and I'm so proud of you. I praise God for this.

Tommy has been in and out of trouble all his life and he's been fighting and struggling against Satan and all the temptations that come from that.

And I just got a message from him less than five minutes ago and he and I started talking and he's been listening to Apologetics Live.

He's been listening to the sermons and stuff for months now and he told me that God saved his soul.

Amen. Wow. I've been praying for Tommy for 20 years.

Me and my grandma. My grandma died praying for our family and praying for the people in our family.

I preached her funeral and she insisted that I share the gospel and because she wanted, you know, she just wanted to see them saved.

And I want to tell you guys, you're my family and I just wanted to tell you all that this ministry,

I just want to praise God. This ministry, because of this opportunity, has been able to reach out and affect somebody in my family that I love dearly.

And Tommy, when you watch this, if you're watching now or whenever you watch this, I just want you to know

I love you and I'm so, I'm so proud. I'm so amazed. I thank God for it.

Wow. Amen. That is, what an amazing praise report. Thank you so much, Pastor Justin. Thank you.

I didn't want to jump in and like chipper. That's well worth it. Yeah. So I won't be able to say anything else.

I love you all. God bless. God bless you. Yep. Wow.

What an amazing story that is. And so Mike, you might remember Pastor Justin because he drove up to Andrew's church when we co -taught the basic course in December.

I think it was December last year, December or November. I'm getting those months mixed up now. But so Justin was up there with his family and in that basic course with us.

Okay. Here's another question for you, Mike, that came up and one of our listeners, now he knows a lot of theology.

I may not agree with everything that Rob Barnhart says. And so he's wrong in some areas, but he knows a lot of stuff.

Here's a question for you because this is a really important concept. We've kind of talked about this a little bit already.

What if I've been told I talk over people's heads? What's the problem?

What's the solution there? Bend down a little bit. No, that is a very common thing with some of our scientists out there.

They throw terms out that people don't understand because we get so familiar with the information that we expect that people, we just kind of take for granted.

They know this. Like if I were to say the second law of thermodynamics, not everybody knows what that means.

Or say hermeneutics, not everybody knows what that means. So you need to explain those terms. That's one thing. But sometimes it takes a little coaching to have somebody watch you.

And it's become such a habit. Habits are hard to break. But some people will say words over and over again, okay, or um, or right.

And they say it over and over again. They don't hear themselves saying that. And habits are hard to break.

That's where the coaching comes in. And that's what we've done, Anthony, and I do that with other people. Bring in and for two or three days, sometimes you have to teach a slide three or four or five or six times before you start getting.

So to break a habit takes a lot of repetition. It's like in athletics. I tell,

I coach mostly grandchildren now. You're going to have to do this a hundred times. Then it becomes automatic.

Bad habits, you got to break the bad habits. And that is something. Now, what about talking?

I agree with you on all that. What about talking? So if, so I think I understand Rob's question because I see his

Facebook posts. He's talking on a higher level than what people can understand. And that's understanding your audience to put yourself in the audience shoes.

They're sitting there saying what's in it for me. And if you don't answer, if you can't answer that question, you're going to, you can talk all, all the way a lot and never reaching.

Why do they want to be there? What do they know? Have they taken science classes? No, for instance, not a lot of people can talk to high school students.

Very few can teach creation to children because you have to use their terminology. What kind, how do they speak?

How do they talk? High schoolers, what do they know? What courses they've been in? And a lot of them don't like science.

So if you start talking science or you talk heavy theology, they haven't had that. So you need to think about explaining your words.

In other words, build your case for things. Tell a story around a concept, not to make it inaccurate, but a story that leads up to the conclusion there.

In other words, give some background on what you're saying. For example, one I use is

Ten Commandments. It's one I use a lot and other things. I will build a case for it. And that way people will get it more.

So those are concepts. And that's a whole style of teaching that you've got to think outside the box there.

You just can't be a giver of information. Those people, if all you do is go up there for an hour and give information, you've overloaded them.

And you've got to take a little time to make it interesting, make it personal to them. How do you do that?

Again, that takes training to do. It's not natural for a lot of people to be able to do that. Again, a lot of our scientists tend to talk over people's heads.

We've had some theologians get up there and use a lot of terminology, like regeneration or words like that.

Not everybody knows what that word means. So just don't throw those words out. Build your case for it first.

And yes, you'll go a little slower, but also you'll teach a little less information. Most times, that's a good thing.

And the bottom line is, is that if somebody is not understanding us, that problem is mine, not theirs.

I have to be the one to take it down to a level for them to be able to understand. I have to find different ways to explain it.

Or like you said, if you're teaching, couching it in certain stories or whatever to be able to get the point across.

It's good. I had it all. I remember one of my math professors. That was my degrees in mathematics also. You go step one, step two, step three.

Then all of a sudden, here's step 20. Say, oh, it's obviously intuitive how to get there. We're all looking, how did that happen?

So we got to avoid doing that. Be careful of your language, the words you use.

Don't take anything for granted that they know this. Yeah. And from a teaching perspective,

I always said that one of the things we have to be really careful of is we don't want to be that guy teaching in front of a class, whether it's at a conference that we teach at or in front of the classes we have, preaching in a church.

You don't want people to walk out of the auditorium or wherever we're teaching at and saying, wow, that guy's really smart.

Because usually if they do that, they've walked away without having really any information going into their noggin.

They've walked away from a guy who just was so high level that they're like, wow, he's really smart and I believe what he says and I'm sure that he's right.

But I got nothing out of it. Right. It's like I use another example. You did a great scientific presentation and two people come up and say, wow, that was great.

They might be the only two in the whole audience who understood anything you had to say. So be careful of compliments sometimes.

Might be the only people. But yes, we have to consider who is our audience. What do they need to know?

Do they need to know heavy duty science? No. Now you may show every once while you might give a little piece just to show them that yes,

God has given us this. They may not be able to stand it, but that's a wow effect. That's okay to do once in a while, but let them know what you're doing, that they're not responsible for knowing this.

But look what God has done here. Could be some physics. And then get back to speaking at their level.

In other words, what's in it for me? It's an acronym called WIFM. What's in it for me? What are they going to get out of this?

Yeah, that's right. Sometimes we come in with too high expectations. They're going to need to know all of this.

No, they're not going to know it all. Two or three things. That's right. So in two weeks, we're going to have a special guest on the show.

And it's going to be a familiar face. It's going to be Pastor Josiah. So I get to interview Pastor Josiah in two weeks because he did a wonderful, wonderful job in his books that he's written on Bible hermeneutics.

Explaining things really, really well. You didn't think you could write an entire book on like one passage.

But Josiah, you did a bang up job. I don't want to say a whole lot other than just saying, hey, you're going to be out in two weeks and we're going to walk through those books and how you did that so well.

So, okay, so Mike, let's continue on because so Rob had a couple other questions. These are all good questions.

They're very pertinent questions. So he said that I get that guy is really smart a lot.

So people say that to him. And then he also said right before that, I was just going to ask how we teach people without being perceived as talking down to them.

Yes, that guy's really smart. That can be an okay compliment. I've actually had one or two people say

I was smart. My 11, 12, 30 years of doing this. But sometimes it can mean they were really smart and I didn't understand anything what you said, but they're really smart.

So you have to be careful how we take that compliment or it's a compliment either way, but how it should be taken can have different meanings.

Yeah. In other words, they really enjoyed it. You're really smart for knowing all that stuff that you gave us. It could be all stuff they understood.

Wow. How'd you learn all that? It took me years. I have a passion for this.

But being perceived to talking down to them again, that comes from throwing out information they can understand and expecting them to know that's the problem right there.

Not explaining what you're doing, but expecting them to understand it. That's talking down to people.

Why don't you understand this? You know, here's a famous one. You all know. No, they don't.

Don't ever use that phrase in there because not everybody knows it. So sometimes it's the words you use and that's a famous one.

People say, well, you know, you all know this verse in the Bible. No, they don't necessarily. Not even

John 3, 16. I was in a church once and nobody knew that verse. They never invited me back. So it's the words you use, you assume things and you're talking down to them.

So we need to stop assuming that they know these things. Like I draw,

I use a word called hydrolysis. Now, how many understand what that word means? Well, what I do is take it apart.

What does hydro mean? Water. Hydrolysis literally means water splitting. What it means is if you've got amino acids in water, they're coming apart.

Water will take things apart. So you give a little thing behind it, not just say the word and go on from there.

Hydrolysis keeps life from starting. That doesn't mean anything to a lot of people. We need to stop assuming, explain our words or give a case or story about it.

Yeah, that's right. That's good. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit. So we've talked a little bit about how we stage information right in getting teachers to teach right, you know, slow down all the information, make sure that we've got well -stated objectives so that students know what they need to learn after that hour or after that day's worth of class.

So now let's talk a little bit about the intangibles of teaching because one of the things that you offer that I just don't see at all out there, other than what we teach through CTI is a three -day communications and teaching skills course.

So you're getting to the nitty -gritty of how to design your PowerPoints with the right colors and font that allow people to see it the best and understand it the best.

So we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. But you also talk about how people speak using their voice, right?

Voice inflections, varying the speeds. What's that?

Tone of voice. Tone of voice, right. I mean, a number of factors that you talk about as well as how we use our hands, right?

Hand motions that when we're talking about something big, use your hands way out here. When you're using points, use your hands this way or something like that.

When you look at the total package of a good teacher using their voice effectively, using their hands and body effectively, that that is also helping to get information in here into the students effectively.

It's called gestures. What they are is, I call them Italian PowerPoint. They're painting a picture with your body.

Yes. In other words, like you say, if something's big, make it big. Get on the screen there, make it big.

And if you're excited about something, inform your face while you're saying it that you're excited.

Little things like that. When you want to get a point across, sometimes you want to back up just a little bit or sometimes you want to come a little forward and lower your voice a little bit.

All these things. And how to emphasize the words correctly. Sometimes we put the wrong emphasis in the part of the word and come across kind of angry sometimes in the flow.

Learn to pause between periods sometimes. It gives a person a chance to stop. In other words, don't just read through sentences.

Take just a fraction of a second pause between paragraphs or between sentences so they can keep their mind up with you.

So we practice all those and we do it over and over again. But that three -day class, we only take eight people in there.

Why? Because half that class is you have to perform. And we grade you on all these things.

And coach you through it. We coach you. And that's all our classes are. They're coaching. And you have to do, for instance, two five -minute presentations.

Now, when I say five minutes, I have a reputation with this. I have a stopwatch there. Don't dare go a tenth of a second over.

It could be a point off your grade. That means pastors can't pass this class. No, I couldn't. We do a teaching practice, an eight -minute teaching, one or two of those.

And we do a final exam in there, which is also doing another presentation. We let you choose various topics.

We don't make all these things hidden from you. So our goal is to help people get better and better at what they're doing.

And we take this course around. And usually, Anthony and I will co -teach this class. Because it's intense and we need to keep track of all the different pieces.

And when somebody does a presentation, we need to go over that with them and help them improve. That's the name of the game, get better.

You want to come out much better than when you came in. And we've had people who haven't spoken before. They've made it through this class.

Because again, as Anthony said, it's coaching. And I've been to a number of different presentation skills courses.

Some are not all that great. Your first talk is an impromptu one. Then all the rest are your finalists.

You get to prep for half a day. Well, that's apples and oranges comparing there. We start you.

And we take you to what you can do. And we work with you and work with you and give you all the constructive feedback.

We don't try and sugarcoat anything. We don't guarantee people are going to pass that class. But we're going to try and get you better and better at what you do.

Because we need to be preparation speakers and apologists. We need to have good communication skills. That just goes with the game there.

Good communication skills. Again, just because you have a lot of degrees doesn't mean you can communicate anything. Yeah, that's right.

So this class is a wonderful class. And there's really nothing like it. People could pay a lot of money to go to Toastmasters.

And I still don't think they can get from Toastmasters what they can get if they just take your techniques and practice them in front of a mirror or in front of a video camera in their own home.

And that's another thing is practice. I advise people practice saying it out loud somewhere.

It doesn't have to be there with you. You can do it in another room. Because I will practice sometimes when

I have a brand new talk. I like to practice and time it. But sometimes I don't do it in front of anybody because I don't want to look really silly.

Because I'll say, wow, that didn't work there. Let me try that again. In other words, I'm always looking for how can

I make this more effective for their learning. But practice saying it out loud.

Don't just go through it in your mind. Because it's going to be quite a bit different. And the timing is going to be different that you have. Yep. It's amazing this technique you taught me.

Because I had to learn both for when I give expository sermons on a Sunday morning at a church or teaching that there's a major, major difference between reading through your script or reading through your slides versus actually standing up, setting up your computer or setting up your papers, your sermon notes, and actually doing it like it's a live audience.

And when you do that in front of a mirror, you're right. You work out all these kinks where reading it seems fine.

Speaking it is a whole different ballgame. And so when you do this type of practice, you are learning.

You're learning how to speak better. You're learning how to now write better in the future. And your brain is starting to think about how you can be more effective with certain things.

You say you learn what to stress in certain points. You learn where you can put voice inflections in or where you can use your hand motions better so that you get your information across.

Then you're ready for the transition from one slide to the next. A lot of times, you like to do that on a need to know.

In other words, you finish this slide, but there's something more. And that's the next slide. So they're always looking for what to know.

But one of the things I look for in educators, and we have a paper written on this, are three main things.

I look for command presence. You're really in charge of them. I look for leadership. And here's the third one, engaging.

Can you engage your audience or the students? That was one of the things we practiced with, Anthony, as you've been there, is

I want you to get away from that computer at times. Can you speak and not be standing in front of that computer?

If you can't do that, you don't know your subject well enough. But you need to know your subject well enough where you can get away from it, engage the audience in a let's chat here type of thing.

Those are the things. I want command presence. I want leadership. And I want engaging. Can you get your audience involved in your talk?

I do it in Sunday sermons. I do it in everything I do. I get people engaged, and they'll give answers.

And I have no problem getting volunteers. Never had a problem getting volunteers because of the methods I use.

Yep. And so the bottom line is even the Sunday school teacher, the one who just says, hey,

I'll volunteer to go teach, even they need to prepare. Even they need to practice before they go out every week so that they're able to be effective teachers week in and week out.

And also in this engaging, especially in Sunday school, can you engage everybody in that audience without embarrassing anybody?

Because you might have some introverts in there, and you embarrass them. You've lost them. So we teach how to engage an introvert and keep them with you the whole time.

Build their confidence up so they start volunteering information on their own. We teach all those techniques. Yeah, that's right.

And so people who learn these techniques end up being much, much more effective as teachers.

And as I've learned over the years from you and how to be a more effective teacher, it's amazing how

I can now sit back and watch some of the pastors. I mean, Wody Baca, right? There is nobody

I know that commands voice presence better than him. He knows how to use his voice and grab people.

And you can't help but listen the entire time he's preaching. Very few people have that gift he has.

He has his animation is in his voice basically. He doesn't have to move around, but he captivates you the way he uses his voice.

Very few people I've seen can really do that. Yep, that's right. Don't go out trying to do that.

I get really captivated through threatening me with push -ups. Yeah, that's a whole different story probably for a different day or your push -up box.

But so here's Rob. So maybe let's talk about this a little bit. Rob is asking, where is this class?

So there's a couple of classes we offer. One is the three -day communication teaching skills course.

We take eight to 10 people at most. There's two of us that are teaching it, Mike and I. And this is your church, right?

Your church says, hey, we're willing to host this. And it's for three full days.

Full day, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we'll come to your church to teach. And you do for a pretty cheap price.

Yes, we only take eight. We need a minimum of five in there because we lose money on this thing.

We lose because we have to pay for our travel and all that. So we lose a lot of money. But as our ministry here, we count on donors to help us.

So we can keep all our costs affordable to people. We can give scholarships to people who can't even afford our basic price.

So we're taking that role as a ministry. And that's where we need people in the churches and other Christians to step up.

If we want to get more people on the battlefield, it's going to take a lot of training. And the way we do it is, it's not our ministry.

No one ministry can do this. But the more people we get trained, the more youth we can start there, next generation there, to defend their faith.

But we rely on good donations to help us with this. We don't want to turn anybody away who wants to learn more about God's word or be more professional.

But again, that takes the finances. And you've said a lot in that, or I've heard you say many times that your goal is to put the ministry out of business.

And that you want to train so many teachers around the country that learn not only how to teach well, but how to teach others how to teach well.

Yes, that's basically our mission statement right there. Train others to teach so they can go out and train others how to teach.

That's 2 Timothy 2 .2. That's what Paul did with Timothy. Now let's train you, Timothy. You go out and do what I did. You train others how to teach others also.

By doing that, we can reach thousands of youth every year. Thousands of youth can be well -equipped.

No one ministry can do this. And you're not going to do it by reading books and attending lectures. That does not equip you.

Yeah, and that's a big key because people have asked you, Mike, about, well, can't we put these training courses online?

Can't we do video courses to teach people? And you're pretty adamant that it's not really possible to do this over video.

That people need to be live in order to be able to really gain everything out of the class. Yes, you can do online internet courses and video courses there.

But again, the highest form can be done live classroom together. And our courses are so dynamic where the instructor's moving around.

We don't just sit there and lecture for a whole hour. There's interactions. Like in a real classroom, you can ask questions anytime during the lecture teaching.

So it'd be too hard to try and video that because there'd be downtime, dead time. And trying to follow the instructor around the room could be real difficult too.

Not to mention, I mean, the interactions that we have in order to coach people through these sessions, you can't really do on video.

No, because I look at the whole body. I need to see the whole body doing its movements. Your foot movements, your leg movements, arm movements.

So maybe you could have, if you're over there and did this, it'd be more effective. We look at every little thing there. Yeah. So where people can go and look for courses is at creationtraining .org,

our website. And so if anybody wants to bring this to your church and talk to your pastor about it, that's the website you go.

And you'll have Mike's contact info on there to be able to bring us in. And so the communication teaching course is eight people, five to eight people.

And it's $150 a person, right? So for three full days of training, it's only 150 bucks. And they will walk out much, much better in terms of teaching abilities.

Yes. And we have many other courses. We have a one -day basic creation training.

We actually have a one -day advanced creation training, which gets real deep into the presuppositional apologetics.

All presuppositional. Show you don't have to be a scientist right there using presuppositional biblical apologetics, like we did that, the best evidence for God's existence, the dinosaurs.

We actually have a one -day educator course called the Dynames of Christian Education. That one, we can take a lot of people, but we don't do any performance -based things in there.

We just give a lot of information. So you get an idea of what you need to be doing. Then we have like our three -day communication teaching skills workshop that's only eight people.

We have another one called our Christian Educator Conference. That's three and a half days. And we're doing that one again in June at, in Dallas, Texas, at the

Institute for Creation Research. We did it there last year. We take a hundred people in there. And don't necessarily have to be a teacher, but we look for teachers.

And you can get recertified in your teaching course. We give you three and a half continuing education units off of that.

But we get parents, because you're teachers also, homeschool educators, Sunday school teachers.

But it's three and a half days, and we work with you.

And it's interactive the whole three and a half days. You can ask questions all the time. So we have that course.

And that one's coming up at ICR. So we piloted that course last year.

So we are now, I guess we should say this as CTI, we have partnered with ICR to help as like a teaching arm for ICR.

So we held the Christian Educators Conference last year for the first time. We're hosting it again this summer, this

June for three and a half days. Now, teachers don't get any practice in this one, but they get a lot of teaching techniques and good information during those three and a half days.

We have a whole chapter on there on just teaching skills and speaking skills, how to educate for success.

That's what we basically teach those methods in there. Then we have our flagship course. It's our five -day class called

Creation Apologetics Training College. We only offer that once a year. This year, we're going to be back in North Carolina again,

August 1st through the 6th. When people get done that course, they're on their way.

They're really starting to look at how to be a better apologist in there. Many of our people have gone out in there, started up apologetics clubs, teaching their churches now.

It is dynamic. And like I said earlier, it is intense, very intense. We only take 40 to 45 people in that class because we want a lot of interaction.

There's a lot of practice. You have to do two presentations. You have to do a defense presentation where we throw questions at you and see how well you can answer questions.

Then do a written final exam. We do a lot of techniques in there to keep the information up here.

Practice over and over again. And again, it's performance -based. So Rob, you may like this course coming up.

It'll be in August in Asheville, North Carolina, Ridgecrest Conference Center. And this flagship course,

I went to the first one you ever offered. Nine years ago now, I believe is what it was, eight or nine years ago now.

And then I helped actually teach it for the first time in 2019, the last time we held it because COVID kind of knocked out our years 2020 and 2021.

But the course is amazing. It starts on Monday, like late afternoon, early evening, just for the intro.

And then we go full days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then all

Saturday morning and end at noon on Saturday. And there's 22 chapters of information that we go over.

So creation, general apologetics. We go through some socialist issues.

So we brought in social justice for the first time. The problems of social justice in 2019, that'll be repeated.

Sanctity of human life, how do we give a good answer for that? Biblical marriage and whatnot. So 22 sessions we do on this.

Plus, as you said, students come in. Not only learn all this stuff and not just learn it, but learn it to be able to teach it to others and use it simply as an apologetic.

But then they also get actual teaching time. So we're going to split up. There's three instructors this year.

It's UI and we have Eric Coven actually joining us from Creation Today, which we're really excited about.

And so what happens is, in between the 22 chapters, we have times for the students to give presentations together, defense presentations.

And then we will break up multiple times through the five days where I have a group of 15 or so students.

You have a group of 15 and Eric has a group of 15. We go into different rooms. And during those times, each person gets up and gives their presentation to which we coach through and grade.

And so they get a lot of practice with this as well. It's an all -encompassing course that is absolutely amazing.

Yeah, I don't think there's another course out there in Christianity quite like this one. It's long days and you won't get tired.

You won't dare tell me you're tired through that class. But you know what? People can hold up in a week of intensity.

And the comment we get at the end of the class, people are happy but they're also very sad it's over because they have not experienced anything quite like this.

And it's a chance to be with like -minded believers for a whole week and discuss whatever you want.

And what's great about this course is it's $970. Which is a fraction of what it really costs because we have donors that help support what it should cost.

And so students get it at a reduced rate. And literally, what's really cool about this course is you're responsible to fly in and to take an

Uber or whatever to get to the conference. And then after that, your 970 covers everything.

It covers your training. It covers your hotel expenses. It covers your meals. So there's not a single other dime you pay while you're at this course.

Unless they want to pay me for the answers on the final. No, actually, you know what we do? We mail a copy of the final exam out before they get there.

Ahead of time, yeah. Our goal is we want them to know this stuff. And we give you all the information, the list of talks you can do.

Start working on that because I guarantee if you get your whole talk lined up, you're going to change it once you get there.

You find out what we're looking for. We even hand out to you before you get there, the criteria we're going to grade you on in your presentations.

We want success, not failure. In the sixth, this will be our seventh year to do this.

Our success rate is right at 100%. We've had people that fear to death to get in front of people and talk.

But we coach you through it. We'll get you there. And we look to see how much you can improve. This is what we need to be doing in Christianity.

This kind of education. We don't need to be sitting around round tables discussing opinions. You won't have a lot of time.

We give you a few hours off Wednesday afternoon. And then we bring you back about 6 o 'clock, 6 p .m.

And take you to almost 9 o 'clock. So we keep the intensity all week long, but you'll do just fine.

People will stay up hours at night studying for the final exam. That's what we want you to do. We want you to study because this is important.

We want you to know as much as you can when you go back. And people remember an awful lot. And people bond together in this class.

People stay in contact with each other in this class. It's such a bonding that takes place.

And that's what intensity will do. It's done right. That's right. I still have multiple really good friends that I met that first year, nine years ago when

I took that course. So that's absolutely amazing. And you said something else earlier about the five -day course is that this course has gotten a number of people ready to teach in their churches, to start creation clubs and creation groups.

So the success rate out of this course is really phenomenal. And we look forward to it.

It takes us a whole year to get ready for this because the manual they get is almost 390 pages long. We have to update this every year because new things are happening.

We find better ways to put the PowerPoint slides. The manual, we have a style of writing manuals that is geared towards the learner.

Every PowerPoint slide we give in the class is in the manual, shrunk down and beside it sometimes there's extra text.

So when you take notes, it's always beside the slide that was up there. We do white space on the pages so you can put the notes on there.

So it's better organized and that will help them remember it more too. There's notes are well organized when they get done.

So it's a whole style of writing manuals that we have. And I get that from writing a lot of computer manual, training manuals in my back in the old days, the other century.

Yep. And I kept my manuals for a long time because you're right. You've got your PowerPoint slides on the left side of the page.

The entire right side's blank with just lines for you to write your notes in. Things that you can go back and reference later if you need to.

And really an amazing job putting that manual together. So those are a lot of our classes.

And this year we're looking at, if we get the funding here, is doing parent training classes a day and a quarter for parents.

That way we do it any time of year, Friday evening and Saturday. To get them started, get equipped so they can teach their children.

Who's the number one teacher in a child's life? It's not the church, it's not the schools, it's the parent. And they've kind of been left out of this.

A lot of them don't have the background of politics or how to teach. We want to bring in some courses there and start writing the courses and start training the parents.

And again, we'd like to keep the cost as low as possible. So all the parents can come and attend this day and a quarter type class.

And we'll have a series of them. So first day and a quarter class, you'll learn a few things. Next day and a quarter class, you can learn a few more things.

But you know what the ideal thing is? Get somebody in your church trained in these things. That's what our ministry is about.

Getting other people trained so the churches can own it. That way they don't have to keep bringing this in or everybody else in. If we get somebody trained in creation apologetics, they don't need to invite someone in.

They can use the person in their church to do it. In the long run, they save money that way. We're trying to be financially, fiscally good with our monies, but we need the money to be able to do this.

That's what we need. Yeah, that's right. And so we've got some really cool projects that would be coming up too as we're looking for donors to partner with in some of these upcoming projects.

Yes, another neat one we'd like to get done, I don't know if we're going to be able to do it this year, is a three and a half day team apologetics boot camp.

And you know, in that three and a half days, if we can have them knowing 12 things, not just knowing it, but be able to apply 12 different concepts, one of them will be the gospel for sure, the full context of the gospel starting in Genesis.

We have a win. People say, oh, that's not many. Well, it's a whole lot more than just teaching everything.

They can't use anything. Our goal is to get at least 12 things that they will be able to walk away with knowing how to use instantly.

Which is 12 more things in general on average than what most kids know when they walk out of youth group.

Let's be honest. So we can teach them some of the tough questions, like how can you call God good if he allows bad things to happen?

We can train them on that so they can actually... Oh, I think your camera just cut out,

Mike. Yes, so you're right. We do teach on that subject. If God is so powerful and so good, why do bad things happen?

It is the number one question that gets asked of Christian ministries and not just creation ministries, but general apologetics ministries overall.

And most people don't know how to answer that question right. Especially because they don't get Genesis right.

If you can't get Genesis right, you can't answer that question of theodicy right either. It's important because the first thing we need to train people on, and especially youth, is the full context of the gospel again starts in Genesis.

And what does it mean to be saved? That's the first thing our youth need to know. Then we can take it from there.

We need to get them confident in what they know about the gospel and are they saved or not. If we don't teach that, we're missing.

Because we're finding out there's a lot of youth in these youth groups that are simply not saved. And that's dangerous.

But they can lick peanut butter out of armpits really well. So I mean, that's a success, right?

You can turn my stomach there. On that, Mike's camera froze up again. You're breaking his camera,

Anthony. I must be. This is a big concern.

People who know me know that I'm a family -integrated guy. I do not like youth group.

I don't think it's biblical. I don't see it in the Bible anywhere. The way it started was a much different idea back in the day versus what it's become today.

Having said that, most parents throughout the country want some sort of youth group.

They expect some sort of youth group. So if we have to have them, let's make sure that we are training our teachers to be good.

Just because you're a pastor doesn't make you a good teacher. Just because you've raised your hand and said you're a teacher doesn't make you a good teacher.

We need people who are thoroughly trained in order to be able to teach.

Yeah. When's the next time you're teaching that in the Midwest? Which course? The $150.

So this is one that any church can contact the ministry. So I'll put that back up.

Any church can contact the ministry or contact myself and we will be able to schedule to come to the church to do it.

We only need a minimum of five guys up to eight. Used to be 10. But five to eight guys or females for teaching youth and other females.

If we get that type of group, we will come to wherever and teach that course.

So we do have one in the fire, so to speak, coming up later this year.

So there's a church in Central Ohio, almost Central Ohio, about an hour from me that would love to do this course.

And they have just about enough people to do it. So if we can add one or two more to the course, we'll end up coming in and doing that as well here.

That'll be in Ohio. You might have just added me. That's great.

You got a place to stay if you come on out to Ohio. Just drive down with me each morning. Okay, that'd be fine.

I just got to talk to the wife about it and we'll have a good time. Yep, that'd be a good time.

And so we know that that's a popular course, and it's a cheap course for people to take compared to others that are out there.

And so it looks like Mike's camera went out or his internet went out. So I'm not sure when he's going to be back or if he's even going to be back because the show is going to be over soon.

And unless we do Anthony time tonight, we'll probably end it on time tonight. But having said all that,

Josiah, so you had a chance to have, or I came to your church and did this course.

And you talked a little bit about it earlier. How do you feel it benefited the people that attended the church?

Well, I think for the people that attended, it was mostly people from Springfield coming in.

And then we had my family there. My family really caught on to the basics of creation apologetics.

My wife was able to get it into my kid's head. The world's not millions of years old.

And she's the one who does the nursery at our church. And when we have kids coming in that aren't usually coming, we can tell which ones are from public school because they say, there was cavemen first off.

And then we came from monkeys or something or other. And my wife was able to just gently take him through the

Bible and use your teaching points to show them, we actually came from Adam and Eve.

God created them on day six, the world's only 6 ,000 years old. And she was able to give them the basic truths.

And I think what really helped was the Sunday school you did at our church.

It was basically a shortened version of your social justice presentation and how you were able to show the history of that.

And it really put a lot of people at the Sunday school at ease to hear, there's actually good biblical answers to defend this.

We actually now know where it's coming from. You did a really good job.

Oh, praise God. Thank you. Well, and the whole key to all this stuff is we need to learn how to just present this stuff simply.

I've listened to... So Mike's back on and so we'll get back to him. I noticed when

I went away, you started talking about cavemen. Didn't have anything to do with me, did it? No, no, no, no.

But I've heard a number of speakers even recently talk on social justice. And the talks are such high level talks that get into a lot of the theory behind the scenes and some of the philosophy behind the scenes and some of the major players that...

I wouldn't say are actually major players. They're really nonsensical information that doesn't help any of us in our apologetic.

And so for me, it was... When I set out to teach on social justice three years ago now,

Strive for Eternity, I don't know anybody else who is teaching in churches a systematic theology of social justice other than us at three years ago when we started piloting these courses.

And what was unique about it is we were able to take it, this information and distill it down to what is needed for people.

How do we break this down simply and biblically so that we can go out and combat it? We don't need all the high level stuff.

And that's something that Mike has done over the years in creation that not a lot of creationists have been able to do is take things and break it down simply.

And so we're confident that middle schoolers can take the basic creation training course and actually learn from it.

Yes, that's why I opened it up to teens and above. So they can handle this and we get them involved.

When they come to these classes, we get them involved. That's part of the engaging there. They're part of this and they need to know this because the statistics are horrible out there.

I have a second to give some of those. We're looking at over 60 % of our youth leaving the church today.

80 % of our youth lack confidence in God's word, have questions, they're not getting answers.

Over a little over 50 % of pastors have a biblical worldview. And it's really much lower than that because you look at the softball questions they get, it's probably more like 20 % of evangelical pastors have a biblical worldview.

And then you look at the generation starting from my group, Baby Boomers on down. The number that have had a biblical worldview is continually going down and down.

10%, 7 % to 6 % where it is 4 % today. You know what that means? What we're doing is not meeting the needs of our teens.

We need to change radically what we're doing in our teen classes there in our church.

We need to get people that are qualified to teach this stuff. And that's where we want to partner with youth pastors.

They've got an important position, a very important position. But the universities are not preparing them for this.

They're preparing for a lot of other things, but not preparing our youth to go out there and be evangelists and apologists and be able to share the gospel with their peers.

That's not being done. When I talk to youth pastors, I ask them one question now. It used to be a serious question.

I asked them one question. I've only had less than a handful give me the correct answer. If you had your students for one year, at the end of one year, what would you want them to know and be able to do?

The number one thing is to know the gospel, to believe the gospel, to share the gospel and defend the gospel.

That's the number one thing you want to teach them. You know what they can't do. What a sad commentary we have right now.

But youth pastors, you've got an important position. I don't know if you know or understand how important your position is.

It gets more and more important every year. We want to partner with you and get you trained to do this because you're not going to get it in university, but you're going to get this philosophy.

That doesn't do our youth any good at all. Let's get them on there so they can answer the questions like, where do you get dinosaurs in?

How can Noah fit all the creatures in the ark? What do you mean by the days of creation?

Does it really matter about creation? Because you're going to have a lot of pastors out there going to make that statement. That's compromise, folks.

Why don't we start training them to understand the Bible and have confidence in God's word that there's no science that contradicts

God's word. Battle's not between science and the Bible. That's offensive to God because he created all the science.

He's not in a battle with himself. The battle's between man's main wisdom called evolutionism and God's word.

And man's poor interpretation of some of the science too. Here's what's alarming to me is you brought up some statistics that come from Ken Ham and Britt Beamer's book,

Already Gone. And what was fascinating about the book is not that, look, if you're saved, you're saved.

You don't lose your salvation. So it's not like these kids walked away from the church because they got unsaved or something.

These were kids who weren't saved in general that walked away. Maybe some were saved and they walked away for time period before they came back.

But what was most interesting about the statistics for me was not those stats. It was the understanding that when you look back at why did the kids walk away from the church?

And it was always because of questions that seemed... We understand biblically it's because of sin.

Their answer was because they had questions that went unanswered. And those questions, we think as Christians start in the college years.

They go off to college. You go off to university and now all of a sudden they're being challenged by smart professors and that's why they walk away.

That's not true at all. Those things started in the elementary and middle school years. That's when the questions first started.

And so what was really fascinating for me is I don't get a chance to teach in front of kids a whole lot. When I was on the tour in Boise last week and we stayed with you, the first class,

I mean you saw this. You were sitting in the back there. The first class I taught on Tuesday last week was a

Christian school kid class. Now this was a, I think it was a Slavic school if I'm not mistaken.

And it was first through ninth graders that were in the class. There was what, maybe 60 kids -ish, 70 kids, something like that.

They were sitting there learning and several other teachers were there. The principal and his wife were sitting there. And the first thing

I did is my talk was called how do we know that the Bible is true or how do we know it's the source of truth,

I should say. And so I said, okay, teachers, kids, I have a question for you.

Teachers, principal, cover your eyes real quick. Close your eyes and cover them. And I said, kids, they're not looking.

How many of you are not sure? I said something like this. How many of you are not sure if the

Bible's completely true? And nearly every single hand went up.

Now this is a Christian school. I talked to the principal. He seemed to be pretty solid.

The teachers were tracking with me the entire time I was teaching. I don't think there's a lack of teaching going on in general.

But yet the kids had all these questions and enough that they were questioning the

Bible at their young age. That was really, really alarming to me. And it corroborated exactly what we see in the research that is coming out constantly.

And that means we need to get better elementary teachers in church there. And we got some good ones.

But we need to go beyond coloring in pictures and telling Bible stories.

We need to teach it as this was real. There really wasn't no, I'm sorry. Let me talk to you about what happened there.

Get down to what the Bible teaches. Let them know this is not just stories. These are real people now.

God really did create on six literal days. Let me talk about the creation there, what he did. And it's perfect order.

So we need to give them those kinds. We get to the high schoolers. Why is God sending people to hell?

Can we answer those questions? A lot of people can't. Those are the questions that these youth have.

Yeah, they have some social issues. But one of the things I'm starting to talk about, why do we have our youth in a separate

Sunday school? Why are we separating them? Are they not smart enough to sit in with the adults?

Or maybe the adults aren't teaching the right stuff either. Why don't we mix them together and get them involved?

These high schoolers are smart enough. They can handle this stuff. It's very practical. If we start training on apologetics, when

I go out and teach youth, they come alive when they're getting answers. They just come right out. They can't wait to get these answers.

And I love to do these kinds of sessions, called fireside chats. I'll go to Slug's house or go to a place. And for sometimes up to three hours, they just ask questions.

There's nobody else's answer. They find all these questions. Sometimes they're afraid to ask them. Well, that was, that was, so Josiah had to sign off.

He sent me a private chat, letting, he didn't want to interrupt you there, Mike. I think as he had to put his kids to bed.

But that was most alarming to me too, is the questions that these kids ask. Like people think that kids are in general, not that intelligent.

They don't, we're just kind of coaching them along as little children. The questions that were coming out of the mouths of these kids that we were teaching, both there and then at the library for the homeschooling kids were unbelievable.

I mean, asking me things like, why would God put a tree in the middle of a garden if he knew that they were going to sin?

And you're like, I cannot believe a second grader just asked this really hard question.

And the worst part is, is I know that nearly no Christian can answer that question appropriately. And so kids, kids are not dumb.

I've often heard Andrew talk about this, that teaching the Trinity to a child, a young child is much easier than an adult.

And, and so we don't give kids enough credit. We need to, we need to give them good apologetics.

We need to really start teaching these kids because if we don't, they're going to get the answers elsewhere and it's going to be out there in the world.

It's going to be the world answers. See, the example I give, if I can take a sixth or an eighth grader and train them how to take a computer apart and put it back together again, don't you believe they can learn the riches of God's word?

We're selling them short. Absolutely. Yeah. So Katie and Jesus said this.

The other thing is that Christian parents also need to not have TV and movies teaching their beliefs. Amen to that.

You're absolutely right. You're getting Hollywoodized. Yep. And they get this over and over bombarded with false teaching over and over again from the media, from the news, from the public schools.

And so they have about 85 % or better of our Christian students still go to public education where they get bombarded with evolutionism and they can't hold up against it because they're not being trained.

And they eventually cave in. The media just cave in, we're losing them. But we're not combating them. The church needs to get serious about education.

We have fallen asleep. We're in a slumber land and we need to wake up and see what's happening and get our youth and our home congregation trained to be on the battlefield and be obedient to God's word because efficiency gives the model for education.

We need to train up good teachers who will train the people in your church and then you send them out to do the work in ministry and evangelize.

That is the biblical model. The focus should not be on building bigger churches. That is not a biblical concept.

The biblical concept is train your people up and send them out through evangelism. And sadly, churches are not only failing at the kid level, they're failing at the adult level too.

I mean, there's even good churches across the country, churches that we would all look at and say, look, that's a good pastor.

There's good teaching in that church. They're doctrinally solid. They're not capitulating on social issues.

And yet the application out of the sermons is missing. The training in apologetics is missing.

And then on top of all that, there's literally no evangelism coming out of the vast majority of churches.

It's not being taught from the pulpit. And the thing is apologetics, people would do apologetics and learn more about apologetics and they have a desire for apologetics if pastors were encouraging people to evangelize.

Week in and week out, the function of the church is not to sit here and just keep getting fat on doctrine.

The function of the church is for you to come here, get fellowship, get fed, learn, and then go out into the world and do what you're called to do as an evangelist.

See, here's the breakdown. See, the pastor's job is to preach God's word from the pulpit, expires through our teachings.

But what's the purpose of Sunday school? See, the main purpose of Sunday school is to carry out the mission of the church, make disciples.

That is not happening in most churches. Even churches that have that as their message statement are not carrying that out.

We're going in there and just teaching our Sunday schools and no applications happening. We've got to redo our education system in the church.

We start to make disciples. That's being obedient to God's word because that is Jesus Christ's last words, his command to us, make disciples.

And you said it clearly there, right? This is not something that's just supposed to happen organically in a church.

This is not supposed to just be as it happens. No, there is a direct command to disciple.

There is a direct command to evangelize. This is intentional evangelism, intentional discipleship.

This is supposed to be programmed into the church that this is what we stand for in our church.

This is what we are called to do from Christ himself, taught over and over and over again through the gospels, as well as throughout the epistles.

And we are failing. Yes, make disciples is more than just one -on -one.

It's a good teacher in there, knows how to teach, knows how to communicate, knows how to engage and builds that entire class up to be disciples.

That's carrying out that command. That's right. You got teaching. We got one -on -one and he got teaching, right?

I mean, they go together, but we need to do it. Yes, that's where we're trying to get done here.

That's where we need people's help. Again, we have the team. You're a part of the team. We're building up others who are going to be master teachers.

That's our goal to build up many master teachers out there so the churches can own it. And so I can stay home in my older age.

That's kind of the goal we're looking for is carry out that, make disciples, train others to be able to teach also.

That's right. And you know, one thing I would like to talk about in the minutes that, because we're, not that we're out of time, we can go long if we want to go long.

So we have something called Anthony time on the show where we can go late. You learned that from pastors, didn't you?

I did, yeah. So one of our pipe dreams, if we find the right person to partner with, right?

So donor or donors to partner with is we want to be able to train apologists up.

And so we've developed, started developing a program that we believe will make people the best apologists in the country today.

And through certain books, through certain trainings and get people away from the philosophy, right?

Get people away from the evidential stuff, get people presuppositional, get people biblical and get them to know how to answer those commonly asked challenges out there and then be good teachers on top of it all.

And so we've been developing a program for this, that like everything else costs money to do, because we want to help supplement the costs of people that are going through this.

Yes. In other words, we don't want to turn people away who have a desire and passion to learn God's word and be able to go out there and teach others, teach their own children.

So we're trying to get the parents, we're trying to build apologists, we're trying to get the youth pastors and just all the educators.

The more educators we can get trained, the more youth we're going to be able to reach. You know, if we did it right, if we had all the finance to do it, we could get 15 ,000 youth equipped in five years.

And that would be easy to do if we can get enough teachers and youth pastors trained. Yeah, by training enough teachers, that's right.

So, I mean, and that's another appeal, right? Is that we want, not only are we looking for donors that can help in this type of project, but we also need teachers, right?

People who believe that they are called by God, that their pastor or others within the church believe that they are being called to teach.

We're looking for individuals like that who desire to be trained to be good teachers.

You know, and just to explain to everybody kind of some of the training that you did with me one -on -one is,

I mean, I would fly out to Boise for a long weekend and I would have stuff prepared, ready to go.

Usually it's out of our basic training course manual. And I would have practiced that multiple times on my own at home, learn the information well.

And then we literally, you literally take me to the church. We set up as if it's a classroom.

You sit in the back of the room with nobody else in there. And we've got the PowerPoint set up. We got the projector set up, everything ready to go.

And I'm teaching to you all day long where you're stopping me. Hey, say it this way instead.

Coaching me through this part of it. Hey, this is where you put your body, your hand motions in. I mean, this one -on -one coaching that really helped to take me and others to the next level.

And this is the type of stuff that you really desire to do going forward. Yeah. This is a passion.

I've always loved doing that. When I was at Microsoft, I took engineers. Believe it or not, got them to speak coherently so they could talk to other people.

That's hard to believe. I'm stereotyping there. That's what part of my job was to bring people in so they could teach others also.

Yep. It's fun to do, right? This is a passion. It's not even like working, never was.

It's more fun than computers any day. But here's something

I'd love to be able to do also. We actually did this about 15 years ago. We wrote a course strictly for Christian high school students who were attending public school.

And we brought them in for a day and a half and we trained them on some background information and how to ask good questions in the classroom and how to respond to the teacher's response.

How to write a report on evolution, which was the part of the rules and defeat evolution and get good grades.

We had those students going in there changing teachers' lives. We know it can be done. Just matter, do we really want to do it?

We would love to do that. But again, they say there's a bottom line. We have to have the resources to do this.

But we know it can be done. Somebody's going to start protecting your youth. Somebody's going to start standing up for them rather than just having playtime, a 15 -minute lecture on the

Bible, and then more playtime. We've got to get serious about this. We're losing too many of our youth.

We're teaching at such a high level that students are bored and either don't pay attention or stop coming to youth group, right?

No, it's that we need to learn how to engage. And we'd show you all the techniques to how to get people into the classroom, involved in the class, without ever embarrassing anyone.

Like I say, I never lack volunteers. I get a volunteer. Anytime I need a volunteer, I always get volunteers.

But there's a technique for how to do that without embarrassing anyone. Yep, that's right.

And so what other thoughts do you have about Christian education in general?

I know we've covered a lot of topics here. Well, the main thing is we've got to not reinvent education that's out there.

We need to change our focus from teacher -oriented to learner -oriented.

What can they do? Gotta get to the application, to the continued growth. It's a big change.

Advise churches, don't try and do it all at once. Take one class at a time. Pretty soon you have three or four classes you can do that in.

But first, you have to invest in your teachers. That's what whole area we're lacking. Just because somebody has the knowledge does not mean they're a good teacher.

We've got to stop this dryness in there. We've got to stop the boringness and just the droning on of giving information.

That has to stop. We've got to invest in the teachers to make sure they know their subject well enough.

Are they a dynamic teacher that can engage an audience and keep the students on the edge of their seat the whole time?

That's what we want to have. And by investing, meaning you're literally as a church viewing your teachers as missionaries in your own church.

And that the same way you would pay for missionaries to go out and do missions work, maybe pay for a training course or two for your own teachers so that it will benefit your own church and help train your church up better.

Right. For a lot of these courses, we come to your location to do these things. So that saves a lot of costs.

But we've got to make a change. We're getting beat up education -wise.

The world again is out -educating us. Are we willing to make a difference? Are we willing to stop resting on our laurels that we have

Sunday school where people are walking away not being able to use anything and taking up a lot of time?

Do we really want to get serious about education? Ask the question, are we willing to do this?

Are we willing to change what we're doing? I know it's difficult. It's scary for some people.

And some people might resist. But folks, once you see how proper teaching can be done and you can actually get in there and learn this stuff, you'll be amazed at what it will do to your church.

Yep. That's right. So Katie and Jesus put this up here and then I agree with her. So Steve Lawson teaches, read the text, explain the text, apply the text.

And I got a chance to sit and listen to him do a breakfast when he came to Cleveland, Ohio last year in October.

He did a breakfast for men on Monday morning before he headed out of town.

And he talked about one of the weak spots in pastors. He goes, even good exegetical pastors are doing this.

And we're seeing the same thing. Like you and I see this with youth pastors and youth programs is that even when they're teaching through the books of the

Bible, which we say, hey, great, teach the books of the Bible. Bible is what arms us to go out into the world.

But they're reading the text. They might explain the text. And then there's zero application, zero apologetic.

They're not showing kids how to actually use this. So they're getting all this Bible knowledge up here without understanding what to do with it.

And so Steve Lawson is famous for saying, as he said that morning, he goes, pastors, quit getting up there and doing fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.

And then sermon done. He's like, exhort people, right? Tell them this is what they need to go out and do.

You're teaching, you're exhorting, you're talking about application. I mean, there's like, so what?

So what about what you're telling me? What do I do with this? Yes, and I'd like to go a little step further.

Let's stop teaching the book of the Bible. That's the pastor's job to do that.

Let's start teaching what you're saying, the application. Let's apply the apologetic. Let's learn how to do apologetics.

I should learn how to evangelize. Let's get down to that level in our Sunday school classes, rather than just going through books of the

Bible over and over. Yes, you learn something. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but we need to equip our people to be able to take the message into enemy territory.

And that's not being done effectively. No, and it's obvious because our churches have fallen flat on their face in terms of what happened with COVID response.

I mean, I've talked about this many times on this show. Christians having fear because they don't understand what scripture talks about with our days being numbered.

We look at, as a Genesis, you know, I'm pegged as a Genesis guy. I like to believe I'm a Bible guy who just likes the book of Genesis and Romans a lot.

But when we're looking at the transgender movement, we don't need to get in all the nitty gritty details.

The Bible says God created them male and female, period, done, over with.

Biblical marriage, God made man and woman to be in a marriage, done, period, over with.

We can answer these questions when we take the text and we take proper application for these texts.

Unfortunately, the world has influenced the church more than the church has influenced the world. We brought all these ideas into the church and they get in there because we don't have good biblical literacy.

We don't have people who know the Bible well enough. And if you don't know the truth well enough, you're going to be easily deceived.

And over and over again, the Bible teaches, do not be deceived. In other words, if you want to find out what the difference between a real dollar bill and counterfeit, first of all, you have to know what the real one looks like so you can recognize it.

We're not taking that approach wrong. Yep. No, absolutely right. So we have our work cut out for us going forward as Christians.

I like challenges. I like big challenges. That means God's got to be in there involved all the way, make it succeed.

Yep. Amen to that. And so what else would you like to talk about as we're kind of getting wrapped up here?

That's covered an awful lot. It's an awful lot to chew on. It's a big challenge to the churches.

Even what we call the good churches, it's a large challenge to them. Are they willing to take the biblical approach and make disciples?

That is the mission given to us by Jesus Christ. Make disciples. It also has in there teaching them.

You don't teach just by giving information. Again, it's what can your students do with the information when you're done?

If they can't do anything, you haven't really taught. That's the one thing

I want them to come out with. We've got to change education. Get serious about losing too much. Our churches are crumbling fast.

Yep. Yes, they absolutely are. It's really sad to watch. And again, one final plug.

Anthony, get him to your church. A master apologist there. He can engage an audience.

He's interesting. Keeps it going all the way. You're the person we need to get in front of our youth groups all over this country.

That, we need to get that. Because they're not going to get the real truth from some of these apologists who compromise

God's word by talking about billions of years. That undermines many parts of the Bible. It's not just a

Genesis issue. It's the character of God, the foundation of the gospel, the very words of Jesus Christ.

We need to make sure they understand the truth so they can have confidence in God's word all the way through. Yeah, you're right.

When we look at the top 20 lists or top 50 lists or whatever it is on the internet, on the top apologists, the vast majority of them don't believe in a literal six -day creation, 6 ,000 -year -old earth.

And so when they don't, they think that this is an okay compromise because Christians in general have let this slide as an orthodox position.

And yet they don't understand it undermines so much of the Bible when we don't properly understand it, starting with the problem of evil.

Because if you put death before sin, I'm gonna turn the light on. Can you tell the sun just went down here?

I can tell, yeah. Maybe an eclipse just happened. But when you put death before Adam's sin, as millions to billions of years has to do, you've now pinned death on God rather than death entering its creation because of Adam and Eve.

I mean, that's a fundamental problem. Yes, it is. Plus it's a consistency problem. If you're using the scientific evidence, your knowledge of the scientific evidence to interpret the days of creation to be long ages, then you must use the scientific evidence to explain every other miracle in the

Bible, especially the resurrection because it goes against all known science for you to be dead for three days, come back to life.

So if you don't believe the six -day creation, why are you believing the resurrection? Because neither one is scientific by what we know.

So we're teaching our youth to be inconsistent. Well, I don't like this miracle. I'm gonna explain it away somehow.

That's exactly what we're teaching our children when we bring millions of years into the Bible. It is dangerous, dangerous philosophy.

Yep, and it's right off the bat too, right? I mean, we're telling you, here's a collection of 66 books written by God.

Oh, by the way, the beginning of it is wrong. Yeah, use crafty words. Like a day can have a lot of meanings.

Well, we know a day can mean a lot of meanings, but folks, it's context. They forget context. And the

Genesis one is written in the narrative style. They just throw hermeneutics out for Genesis one and come up with all kinds of stories, but every one of them destroys the foundation for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Why did he have to come and conquer death if death was not the penalty for sin? Yep, and that's the bottom line with it.

Absolutely. So Ethan Tanner. So what do y 'all think about Cedarville?

I'm here and it's going downhill fast. You know, I've heard stories about this because I was really excited about Thomas White.

I thought he did a great job cleaning up a lot of the junk at Cedarville, but I've heard some rumors, so I don't know all this stuff right now.

So if you wanna pop into the StreamYard stream here and talk for a few minutes, we'd love to have you in and talk about that.

There's still some good professors. There's some good professors. They're not going down super fast, but there's some cracks in there.

Let's put it that way. The last time I was in their bookstore, you found a lot of compromised books in their bookstore. If you don't have a good enough background, you can read those and think, wow, maybe creation really doesn't mean what it says.

Or you can read some other bad theology books. So you have to be very careful there. Again, you have to be discerning on the material.

What that means is know the Bible first. Believe what the Bible teaches in the book of Genesis. Then you'll recognize the false teaching.

That's right. So we had a question just come in, Mike. And this is something we teach on very...

We teach on this often, this issue. So Jason wrote, I've heard the argument that the creation days are equated to the scripture that says a day to the

Lord is a thousand years. The infamous second Peter 3a challenge. You want to answer?

You want me to answer that one? Well, you're the guest. Go ahead and answer it. Okay. Well, there's three things we need to approach this one on.

Number one, word day. What is the language in there? What type of language is that being done?

A fancy word there is genre, G -E -N -R -E. But what's the literature style? Number two, can we apply what we read in second

Peter 3a to the days of creation? In other words, let's look at the context there. Number one, when you read second

Peter 3a, there's a very important word in there, as. Or you might, some versions might use the word like.

The word as or the word like, turn this into what we call a simile or a figure of speech, which means it's not meant to be taken literally.

And we don't see that language in Genesis 1, because it's written in historical narrative format. Second thing, when you read above second

Peter 3a and below second Peter 3a, what you'll notice is, it's not talking about creation at all.

It's talking about the end times and the attributes of God. That God created time. He's not bound by time.

So if we try and apply second Peter 3a to what we see in Genesis chapter one, we're actually taking God's word out of context.

And that's a no -no. We're supposed to use God's word. If we can take God's word out of context, then I can take other people's words out of context anytime

I want. Let's stop playing games with God's word and keep it in the context it was used. When I say context, let me give you an example.

This is one of my favorite examples. If I were to say, and Anthony, you can be the person on this, pronounce the word

B -O -W. B -O -W. And it could also be pronounced

B -O. It depends on the context. And that's exactly what the days of creation in their context are literal 24 hour type periods.

And second Peter 3a, again, is written as a figure of speech, meaning it's meant to paint a picture of something.

For instance, if I were to say, it was raining like cats and dogs yesterday. Well, cats and dogs literally coming down from the clouds?

No, it's painting a picture of a torrential downpour. Or he said, maybe he runs like a gazelle.

That's another one I use. Am I calling a person now? No, I'm saying they run fast and they run gracefully. That's a figure of speech or a simile there.

And that's exactly what second Peter 3a is. It's painting a picture that God is the creator of time.

He's not bound by time. A thousand years is just like a day to him. Makes no difference because he's above time.

He's not bound by time. That's what the verse is saying. It has nothing to do with the days of creation.

Yeah, great. And so this is one of the things that we teach, right? Because this is a very common objection.

I hear it all the time from people. Well, days like a thousand years is just like a day, right? So days of creation can be.

And I'm like, no, let's hold on. Let's talk about second Peter 3a, what it is.

And so a simile, just for the listeners, it's a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind used to make a description more emphatic or vivid, right?

I like to say it's painting a picture with words. Yeah, yeah. Or just say that, right? But that's the point of it.

This is not saying a day is a thousand years. We're comparing two things. And yeah, for one idea.

It's also like, it's similar to we think have these things called idioms. We're like, his boss threw him under the bus.

Well, it's where you have a group of words that are not meant to be taken literally for what they mean. His boss threw him under the bus really means he put the blame on, his boss put all the blame on him.

So you gotta know the kind of literature read because there can be poetry, there can be figures of speech, there can be narrative history, and there's other forms of writing in the

Bible. We need to know where to take them literally when they're meant to be taken literally. And we need to understand the language it's written.

Yep, amen. So Ethan's writing on his thread from earlier, the immorality here, Cedarville's insane.

Everyone's just like the world. There are definitely some great professors here, but they are oblivious of how the students act outside of the classroom.

Unfortunately, that's true in a lot of Christian universities or what Christian name sometimes is what they teach is going so far worldly.

But yes, that does happen to quite a lot of universities. Good point that he's made there. Yes, we can't ignore that.

That comes down to we need to train these students about what it means to be saved. Not that works will do it, but you want to do the right thing once you're saved.

So yes, there are problems in our Christian universities where they're not being taught. They want to be liked by the world, and that's a danger because being liked by the world,

Bible uses a word called enmity. If you're friends with the world, that's called hatred.

Enmity with God. That's right. We're at war with God. Yes, if you're liked by the world, you most likely can be at war with God.

Yep, that's right. Thomas, Thomas says here, I'm saddened to hear that about Cedarville University, but I'm very thankful for you and Mike Riddle getting the truth out there.

So thank you, Thomas, for your kind words there. And there are a few good Christian universities out there.

There's a lot of small ones that don't have science degrees, I think, that are holding the line pretty well. But as far as ones that offer a lot of variety of degrees, there's only about a handful that are really holding the line anymore.

Yeah, sadly. I was at, well, it was called a Christian university. It was under the Baptist, and they just got finished firing their last

Christian teacher. They were almost a complete pagan university at that point.

Wow, it's amazing. Well, you know, from the tour that we did out in Boise last week, where I spoke,

I think it was 14 or 15 times over six days, something like that. You kept me busy out here. We kept, yeah, they kept me busy.

I ran across a kid, well, I ran across somebody who knew the kid, who's a senior at NNU right now, who called out professors for pro -homosexuality and some other stances being taught within that school.

And his letter to the administration was phenomenal. I am so excited about bringing him on the show at some point in the near future and being able to talk through what he saw at that school.

Yeah, a lot of parents are sending their children to these schools, so -called Christian universities, not understanding that they're going to lose them because they can be very dangerous places to go because it's so subtle.

And these students here, these professors with their PhDs, teaching something different about the

Bible, a false teaching, and they take it in and believe it. And we're losing a lot of our youth in Christian universities.

They can be very dangerous. Yep, that's right. And you're paying for it all. Yeah, you're paying for it.

You're paying for your kids to get indoctrinated in college. Yes, the wrong way. Yeah, yep, absolutely.

So any final comments, Mike, before we close out the show? No, I am fine with what we got across.

I really appreciate this opportunity and looking forward to getting together with you again. And we'll be together in June for sure.

And we'll be together in April in Florida. Yeah, so we got a couple events coming up. So April 23rd in the

Orlando, Florida area, so that's a Saturday, we'll be teaching the basic creation training course at Dr.

Casey Butner's church, Bula Baptist. So for anybody who wants to sign up, they're doing a great thing.

Normally, this is a $45 per person course to take. And the church is absorbing a lot of the cost, and they're only charging adults $25 to take the course.

And it is free for students. So they're giving a great deal for people to come in and take the course at their church.

We'll both be there that day, Lord willing. And I leave tomorrow for Alamo, Texas, teaching a lot of churches.

So I'm going to take high schoolers from a Christian high school and spend three days going through them with the basic course.

Yep, so yes, you'll be teaching it down in Alamo in some really nice weather for the next week.

Yes, upper 80s and 90, I'm going to enjoy it. Yep, so that'll be good. And then we've got coming up in June, the

Christian Educator Conference in Dallas at ICR. So if you come down ICR, you get a chance to walk through their museum and see their new museum.

If you want to sign up for that, just go to our website. We have a big box right there in the front that takes you right to how to register for this and then send your...

And it doesn't cost that much for an individual for three and a half days, $85. If you come in a group of five to nine, it's 75.

Come with a group of 10 or more, it's only $60 per person. So we get big discounts there. And we have a number of raving reviews.

I think several are on the website, if I'm not mistaken. There's one Christian school principal in Texas who brought five or six of his teachers last year.

And they all had raving reviews about the course. We saw others who absolutely loved it and knew they were going to be able to take some of this stuff back into their teaching.

So... Yeah, again, $85 for an individual for three and a half days. That's almost unheard of out there.

It's very cheap. But again, we rely on donors for helping us.

So we can get... We rely on donors. And teach as many people as we can. Yep, that's right. And then in August...

So Jason Cave asked, when was that at Beulah Baptist? That will be on April 23rd.

Saturday, April 23rd. You can go to either creationtraining .org, which I have up on the screen here.

And you can find their website through our website to be able to sign up for that course.

Or you can just look up Beulah Baptist of Winter Garden, Florida, and go to their website directly and be able to jump in and register for the course that way.

So we've got that coming up. And then we have our flagship five -day course, which we haven't held in a couple of years.

My guess is we may not even hold it next year. This might be one that we have to wait a couple of years to do again.

So if you want to sign up for the course, jump in it this year and do it quickly because we only have 40 slots for it.

And so that'll be August 1st or the 6th. Yep, August 1st through the 6th. And that's a gorgeous conference center,

Christian conference center there in North Carolina. Yep, that's right.

So those are some of our major events coming up. We have more planned, but we only do as much as we can do with the finances we get.

That's right. We enjoy hearing from you. And again, if you want to get in touch with me, I'll give you our info at creationtraining .org.

I -N -F -O at creationtraining .org. Get in touch with me there. And I'd love to hear from people.

And I'll get back to you because we're not just a project ministry. We're a people ministry. There's a whole lot of people out there walking around that think they're saved.

They're not. And there's a lot of people who have purposely, willfully rejected that. Yep. And I think people are surprised when they call.

When they call the ministry, it actually goes directly to your cell phone. Yes, it does. So you actually talk to people yourself.

Yes, I do. That's what I like to do. There's nothing special about me. Why did God choose me?

There's other people out there who could do a whole lot better than me. But I thank God every day that he allows me to be a servant. What a privilege.

Be a servant of the almighty creator God. Yep. Amen to that. So if you are somebody who wants one of these courses to be at your church, talk to your pastor and give us a call.

We can talk to your pastor as well for you. But give us a call at creationtraining .org. And we're happy to bring a course out to your church.

Yep, that's what we do. By request is where we go. Just don't ask us too much in the dead of winter sometimes.

It's tough to get through that snow, but we will come. I've been to Alaska in February. It was cold.

And for somebody who likes to be in 95 degree heat every day. Yes, I do. That is difficult for you.

I love to go to Southern Arizona in the summertime. I go out and do my running in the heat. I hike the mountains in the heat.

Yep. Camelback Mountain, right? There in Arizona. That's my favorite mountain. I hike up there.

Been up it dozens and dozens of times. Even at my ripe old age, I still go up that thing. Yep. Great.

Well, Mike, I thank you so much for coming on the show today. And again, if you want people to get a hold of you, creationtraining .org

or info at creationtraining .org. That'll get right to me. Yes, and I'll be glad to answer you back.

Um, great. So on that, the next couple of weeks, next week will be Pastor Justin Pierce and Josiah Nichols working through the social justice movement a little bit more.

I will be down at the Ark Encounter. My wife's going to be at the Ancestors and Genesis Women's Conference.

My goal is to jump online and be at a remote location and be able to be on that show next week as well.

The following week, we will have Pastor Josiah Nichols going through biblical hermeneutics and the books he's written, which should be a fascinating show.

Every time I talk to Josiah, I learn more and more from him. I absolutely love listening to him. And then we've got some great shows coming up.

I'm still working on the one that we're going to put together for why churches must do evangelism or they're failing miserably.

And so we're gonna have some pastors on that have done this in their churches. They've shown how to get evangelism going.

And I'm really excited about that show. And that might even be a couple different shows coming together.

And I guess before we go, I have to bring on Full Belly Bear. Should I tell people what your name is?

Because I don't think anybody knows who you are, John Malone. Anyways, he says, you guys came to my church before.

What great training. So John is a member of Pastor Andrew Rappaport's church in Pennsylvania.

And that's where we were out back in the end of 2021. You know, we talk a lot about what's wrong in the church.

You know, every once in a while, we get in these churches, they're doing the right stuff, they're doing the right thing and fighting the good fight all the way.

And we find these little churches out there. So that's the privilege we get from traveling around.

We meet so many wonderful Christians, brothers in Jesus Christ, sisters in Jesus Christ, but we do find some churches out there that are really fighting the good fight on the battlefield.

Yep, that's right. They're all doom and gloom. There's remnants out there, folks. Keep your chin up.

We got a lot to do. But what a great opportunity to go out there and be witnesses for our

Creator and Savior, Jesus Christ. Spoken like a true Christian Marine right there. You betcha.

Well, on that, everyone, have a good night. Thank you for watching. Thank you.