PET PEEVE! - Evangelical Class Warfare! Big City vs. Big Country

AD Robles

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All right, just a quick video today. I was thinking, and I'm trying to not let this turn into a rant, so time to get measured.

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All right, so I was thinking this morning, I remember I was thinking about early on when

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I was a Christian, when I first came to Christ. Some of you may have heard the story. I'm not gonna get too much into it, but one of the primary motivating factors for me to return to church,

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I visited my father who lives in rural Ohio. He lives like right on the Ohio -Kentucky border, and I went to his church over Thanksgiving, and they were preaching through the prodigal son, and the pastor was leaning super heavy on Tim Keller's book,

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The Prodigal God, and that was kind of my first kind of reintroduction into the gospel of Jesus Christ, and so I read

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The Prodigal God. I found out that Tim Keller was in New York City. I lived in New York at the time. I lived in Murray Hill in Manhattan, and you know,

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I went to his church, and I started, you know, I realized that he had a ton of content online, so I started listening to sermons, podcasts, tons of stuff from Tim Keller, and I remember this one sermon that I thought was really, really good, and it was about, it was about, oh man,

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I think it was Jonah, where Jonah doesn't want to go to Nineveh, and God says to Jonah, should

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I not love that great city where there's so many people that don't know their right hand from their left, and the whole purpose of the sermon was to talk about, you know, the strategic, you know, value of planting churches in the city, in urban environments, and I thought it was great.

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I mean, I lived in the city. I'm a city kid, you know. My family was from the Bronx. I lived in New York City for like eight years.

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I love this city. I'm a Mets fan, a Jets fan. I'll always be a city guy, but I spent a lot of my childhood in rural

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America as well, and there's this attitude among city folk that rural people are like essentially

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Neanderthals. They're essentially like these big ooga -booga, you know, like, and everything wrong with the country is personified in like the rural sort of, you know, camouflage -wearing country bumpkins, got a straw in his mouth, you know, spitting tobacco, that kind of thing.

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I remember one time when I told, at the time I was a Republican, I remember I told someone that I worked with that I was a

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Republican, and he told me, and I don't have any reason to deny this. He said that I was the first Republican he had ever met that was normal, and I said, well, how many

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Republicans have you ever met? He goes, well, not that many, like maybe five, you know, because the idea is Republicans aren't normal.

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They're lesser. They're lower. And so you get this idea of like a flyover country and rural people.

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That's just backwards. Everything about them is backwards. And I don't think that that Big Eva intentionally does this, but if you look at their messaging and what they promote and things like that, it's very clear that they're kind of along the same wavelength as the general culture at large when it comes to the cultural elite, when it comes to the urban centers and their attitudes towards regular everyday

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Christians, because think about this for a second. If you know any urban church planters, you probably see tweets or Instagrams or pictures like this.

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And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, by the way, so you probably, if you know any, you'll see a picture of the skyline, the city skyline.

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God loves this city. There are so many people in this city that God wants to speak to.

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I love this city. And just like a lot of, a sort of, there's definitely a love for this city.

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This is good. And there's a sort of pride. If there was a, if there was a city version of nationalism, a lot of our urban church planters would be that, whatever that is, you know what

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I mean? And so there's a sort of pride that Big Eva has and teaches is okay and actually right for the city.

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But if you try, if you dare to have the same kind of thing, except replace the city with the nation, or replace

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New York City or Chicago or whatever city it is, replace it with the United States, right?

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And maybe you post memes of a majestic looking flag and an eagle and things like that.

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A majestic looking picture of Donald Trump, God forbid, you know what I mean? Like if you do anything like that and say the same quotations about how the

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Lord loves this nation or the Lord loves this city, you know, like the city, just replace the word city with the

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United States and you will be condemned. And so if nationalism is incorrect, if nationalism is evil, should be preached against, it's a form of idolatry.

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But the city one isn't and it's actually promoted and that's the kind of air that you get from Big Eva church planters in the city.

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Then what does that leave? If you do the mathematics, listen, I'm not a math genius, you know, my father was a nuclear engineer, but I'm certainly not.

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But if you do the math and you say, well, then if you say the nation's good, but the city's good, what does that leave over?

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It's really the rural part of nationalism that's the problem. It's not the city part.

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The cities, you see, the cities are so cosmopolitan. The cities are acceptable in our culture, whether it's the culture at large or the

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Christian culture. The rural people are the unacceptable ones. They're the ones with backwards beliefs.

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They're the problem with nationalism. It's not the cities. And again,

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I don't think this is intentional by a lot of people, but this idea that if nationalism is something that is automatically idolatry, you got to reject it, well, you better start rejecting those photos of a majestic looking city skyline talking about how great this city is.

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I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Now, I would say that there are some people that do do this intentionally.

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And if you look, I mean, again, the rhetoric, it's a lot of the rhetoric. It's just so, it's so steeped in progressive, cosmopolitan, you know, propaganda.

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You remember that interview with Matt Chandler and Vice where he's like talking about there's the fearful

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Christians that voted for Trump. They're just sitting there at their hootenannies and their hoedowns, and they're just terrified of these transgender bathrooms.

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I mean, I know he, I don't want to say he did that. He did that intentionally, but you don't see it the opposite way.

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Now, I'm not saying that there isn't any hate for city folks. I mean, city slickers and all that. Again, like I said,

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I had a mixed background. So I lived in the city, also lived in the country. So I know that people rip city slickers as well.

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But, and so I'm not saying there's innocence on either side. But if you look at the general thrust of Big Eva, I really hate that.

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I really hate that. This idea that regular everyday folks are just like country bumpkins. They're just losers.

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They're just backwards Neanderthals. I went to, I think I said in my last video that me and my wife are considering buying a house.

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And so we've got, there's two houses that we were looking at in particular. One of them is in the town, right in town, and it's a smaller house, and it's got a little bit of land, but not that much right in town though.

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So it's like very convenient, and there's a lot of benefits to that. And then there's this other house that's in the country.

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And it's a bigger house. It's got a lot of land, and we're not sure about it.

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But anyway, we toured that house, and the owners were home when we toured it. And they seem like great folks, you know, they seem like great folks.

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And the husband was watching Fox News. I've never,

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I haven't watched Fox News in like probably the last three, four, or five years. I watched a little bit with this guy as I was talking to him.

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And he had Trump bumper stickers and things on the wall. These are the people that like the progressives sitting in their hoity -toity, you know, neighborhoods in New York, you know, that kind of thing.

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They fear these people. These are like the scum of the earth. And this guy and his wife were just fine people.

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I loved chatting with them for a bit. And I don't want to say like these are my people, but man,

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I hate when people like that get slandered. I really do. I really hate it.

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I don't know why that just grates on me, but it really, really does. It grates on me when hoity -toity types, people that have a ton of money, you know, they spend six dollars on a latte at Starbucks every morning kind of thing, you know, rip common everyday folks that are just trying to get by.

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I hate that. I don't know. I don't really know what the point of this video was, but maybe you feel the same way

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I do. Maybe you don't, but but I really dislike the whole attitude. Anyway, I hope this video wasn't too depressing.

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I hope it wasn't too angry. God bless. You know, one of the ways you see this kind of work itself out is you see people talk about the strategic value of planting churches in the city, because the idea is in culture that cities set the trends.

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You know, what's popular in the city today is going to be popular in rural areas tomorrow. And so, you know, you win the city for Christ and the rural areas will follow.

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That's something I literally remember hearing in a workshop saying that that was what would happen, and it doesn't really seem to work that way.

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You know what I mean? I would say that a lot of the aberrations from what biblical theology is definitely starts in the city.

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And, you know, the rural people get, you know, browbeat for not adopting it right away. I mean, I don't know.

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I'm not a sociologist. I don't know how this all works. But mark me down as very suspicious about this idea that cities set the trends and the rural people are just, you know, we'll follow.

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Sure. Sounds good. You know what I mean? Like that kind of thing. That's kind of the impression, and I just really don't like that.

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The other thing is, you'll also see this kind of work itself out in some of the ways that people are portrayed.

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If you've heard any, you know, mainstream Big Eva conference, you know, you know, podcast, thing like that, you know, they'll talk about sort of the victimhood of poor people in the city and how they're oppressed and things like that.

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And, you know, I don't really know what Big Eva thinks about poor people in the rural areas. I mean, I'm sure that there are some people that talk about them as victims as well.

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But you just don't hear much about it. You don't hear much about it. And if you do hear anything, they're probably part of the oppressor class a lot of the time.

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The poor people in the rural areas, they're actually oppressors, did you know? And so, you know, I just, I don't know. I don't have a lot of sympathy for that kind of mentality.

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My experience tells me that it's not accurate. And I don't really see anything biblically that would insist that, you know, the strategic value of winning a city for Christ as opposed to winning a backwater, you know,

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Podunk town for Christ is really all that, you know, important or all that special. Not saying you should neglect the city, but, you know, let's get our heads here for a second.

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Now, I know that there are conferences that focus specifically on rural, you know, church planting and small town church planting and stuff like that.

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But let's just be honest when it comes to the big sort of marquee events in Big Eva, you're not going to get on the main stage with a message like that.

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Maybe you'll have a workshop or a side session or something like that. But it's really not the main event.

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If you want to be flashy, you want to see people flock to you for your advice and stuff like that.