Question and Answer: Seth Brickley, David Wheaton, Jeff Kliewer, Russell Fuller, and Jon Harris

It's a logical question here, right? I mean, we don't, I mean, I can tell you my view, but I'm the moderator, so I'll pass this on to you guys about where do you see this going? The present woke movement, I mean, we call it the state religion.

We were talking about that at dinner. It's really the state religion. Where do we see this going in the broader church and in our country and in the world? This is for all of you.

I'll go. Can you hear me? I've become quite optimistic recently about defeating the whole woke culture of death because the abortion holocaust is really coming from the left. And the LGBTQIA movement really produces no life.

By definition. And you look at countries like France where for the first time they're not able to even reproduce to the level of keeping their society going. I think 1946 was the last time they had such a low birth rate.

Whereas Christians are more and more having larger families. I think there's some signs, like at least where we are, and even though we're in very blue New Jersey, signs of revival that the conservative churches are packed and the more liberal churches are dying.

I'm optimistic that we are going to see revival before the return of the Lord. But in any case, I'm optimistic because, well, I'm pre-tread, pre, what do you say? Pre-millennial. So either way we win because either Christ is gonna come back and rescue us while we're here battling or we'll have some more victories until that time.

But I've become more optimistic that this culture of death will eventually peter out. And we might have to fight another battle after that. But one of the theses of War-Torn Church is just that we've had battles like this every century.

Now for 20 centuries. And this will, I think, be the same thing. But maybe I'm naive. Anyone else wanna take that one? The pessimistic wing is over here. And he's more pessimistic than me, so I'll let him answer it.

The Church, Revival, and the Woke Culture of Death

Doom. At least in the near term, I'm not as pessimistic, not as optimistic as Jeff. But look, the gates of hell will not prevail against the true church. So with that, we have our blessed hope. Christ is the hope of glory.

And so, listen, the church is not gonna die out. God will raise up faithful servants of his. And so in one sense, I'm very optimistic. I don't mean to disappoint John here. But on the other hand, now let's get pessimistic for a second.

When you see a church denomination start to accept the world's philosophies and so forth, well, wait till the next thing comes through, and they're gonna accept that as well. Once you break away from scriptural bounds, once you start, what's gonna stop you from accepting transgenderism?

What's gonna stop you from stopping the next thing coming down? Because once you go down the secular path in the church, where's the end? Well, we can sort of see it. The United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church USA.

If we look at the mainline denominations, you can see a denomination that wants to go in those directions. Churches that want to go in those directions. We see their end, you see. So I'm optimistic, but at the same time, I'm pessimistic.

And I hope and pray for really true godly revival in some of these denominations and in these churches.

A lot of questions there. Yeah, yeah, we gotta get through them at some point here.

Name, maybe I'll just talk about it, sorry. Yeah. Name. Three to four good seminaries, and a couple of good, maybe three or four courageous pastors.

Courageous Pastors and Safe Seminaries

Okay, the pastors thing is easier for me. So I'll just, I mentioned at the end of my talk that there's some younger guys who, can you hear me now? There's some younger guys out there who I think are more courageous than perhaps the generation above them.

And so I think like Eric Kahn out in Ogden, Utah. You might not have heard of some of these names. I think Joel Webben down in Texas. I think Andrew Isker, who's I think in Minnesota actually. Just south of the Twin Cities.

I think those guys are, those are just three guys that came to the top of my mind as being very courageous, willing to say things that are gonna get them in trouble and take a shot at the woke movement.

As far as the seminaries are concerned, you know. And by the way, Seth, I'm not leaving you out of this at all, or Jeff, because you guys are both courageous pastors. I just figured everyone knew that already.

So I thought you meant three other courageous pastors. We've got two of the most courageous are right here. But as far as seminaries, that's tough. Like I can't wholeheartedly endorse any seminary. I've said that on my podcast.

I've said, well, there's like Southern Evangelical Seminary. They took a very hard stand against the woke movement. There's the only seminary I know who did that overtly. Doesn't mean I endorse everything about them, but hey, they're one that maybe you should look into just because of that.

I know like Appalachian Bible College was pretty, and that's not a seminary, but they were pretty overtly against the woke movement as well when it was going on, which I think is a really good sign. I don't know, I tell people who are going to seminaries, no matter what the seminary is, that what they need to do is just realize no matter where you go, you're gonna run into it somewhere along the line.

Be prepared for it before you get there and know what you want in the seminary. Like if you're just going there because you want the certificate, don't go. If you're going there because you wanna get into academics, I would seriously pray about that and seek guidance as to whether or not that's the direction you want your life to go.

Maybe it is. But I think you need to know what tools you want. So if you wanna go to seminary because I wanna know the Bible, and that means I need to know the languages, and I need to know maybe some systematic theology, you need to know some church history, take those core classes and use those things, but just be on your guard.

So here's a, this is a common one. You know, the question is, I mean, the Christian nationalism question, it says, our pastor pretty much says keep politics out of the church, does not provide solutions to the problems of our day.

And yeah, so in other words, pastor feels, kind of feels out of touch with what's going on in the world. That's kind of how I would summarize it. And this person feels like if they address it, that they'll get shut down.

So how do we, what counsel can we give that person? Am I again? Okay.

I guess I'll take a crack at that first. I also, I've been really influenced by John MacArthur just to the previous question. And he has been, I mean, he's not no perfect man, but he's really stood up a lot.

He's been sort of a bulwark against, even COVID didn't shut down his church, that he's a very notable person who had kind of a, I guess you could say a lot to lose from a standpoint of how well known he is worldwide.

But I think he'd be another one, the seminary he leads. Again, I agree with you, John, that you can't just probably wholeheartedly say, this seminary is just great. It's always made up of people, just like Southern, there's probably really good professors there that are worth learning from, but then there are others, as you mentioned, that are not.

As far as the Christian nationalism issue, I think there's a couple, I don't want to take two sides of the issue on this, but I think there is a responsibility for pastors because politics and civil engagement is a part of the Christian life.

We live in a civil society. I think there's a lot of room for pastors to be informing congregants about issues, even about the situation in Israel right now. I've been, I'm not in every church, of course, I'm in our own church, but it doesn't seem like there's very much talk about, I mean, as you talk about your eschatology, I share that, pre-millennial.

I mean, that's where things are gonna happen. That's where things are happening, and we need to watch that part of the world, and there is a blessing for blessing Israel. That doesn't mean we overlook everything we do, everything they do.

It doesn't mean that their rejection of Christ at this point should just be completely forgotten, but I think there is a major place for pastors to be informing and helping their congregations know how to think with a biblical worldview about issues going on, and so then when you get into the political realm, I personally do not believe there's any political solution that's gonna turn around this country.

It has to be spiritual. That being said, there's very much room for Christians to be involved in politics and to be engaged in politics. I think it's a matter of priority. Where's our priority? I think our priority has to be in the church, our individual growth, our families, and so forth, and there's an influence there that percolates out from there, and some of those people within our families or our friends who are influenced who are led and called to go into politics could make an impact there, but I don't know if I see it turning around from a standpoint of going back to some America where Christian values are venerated and so forth.

I don't see that happening, but I also don't see that as losing either. God has a plan for where he's going to the end. He's not losing down to that plan. He's actually ordaining the way things, I believe, are going.

It's almost like he led Pharaoh into the trap of trying to rebel against him and he's going to be glorified in the way he totally ruined that country when he brought the people out of Egypt. I think it's the same way.

He's just gathering the world into this globalized, governance, anti-Christ system you read about in Revelation, and Jesus will return to judge and to reign and he will get them all's glory. So, we're just called to be faithful in whatever we're in the meantime, whether we're in politics, or business, or a pastor, or a mom, or a dad.

Be faithful now.

So, the power of lawlessness is already at work among us, but he who restrains it will restrain it until he is taken out of the way. And that restraint, I think, is the Holy Spirit working through the church.

That's the salt and light that is restraining the work of evil. So, Hitler could have been the anti-Christ, but God used the church, and especially America, and Russia also, by providentially his design to restrain Hitler from taking over the world.

Right. But if a pastor in Germany is sitting back and saying, well, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen, then he's not the instrumental tool in God's hand that he ought to be. So, while we do accept the sovereignty of God over these things, we have to encourage pastors to step up and speak when the culture gets more and more dark, and it's gotten so dark in America.

So, the pastors need to know what time it is, right? And if you're in a church where your pastor just doesn't say anything, doesn't speak because it's public issues or it's political, they don't wanna get political, you need to encourage them that anything they say, you reinforce and say, hey, I loved when you addressed abortion today, or whatever it is.

Be an encourager and also maybe network that pastor with other pastors. So, in South Jersey, there's at least 30 of us now after COVID that we realized if they ever locked down again for 15 months, it's not just gonna be a few churches here and there, we're all together gonna take a stand.

And so, you've gotta find those networks. And I think TruthScript is gonna be key in doing that on a more national level. Because if you have that church finder, where's David? If you get that church finder operational, then we can know how to find those churches and network together with those who are taking a stand.

So, if a layman is in a church, pastor's not really interested in that, shuts them down, does that person leave?

I guess that's for me. Possibly, but it really depends on the situation. So, it's hard to know. I get these questions all the time and it's hard to know without knowing more about the situation. So, it's like a general matter of prudence and advice.

I would say that it's similar to what I said in the first talk about institutions. Like if you try to bring up an issue that's a legitimate issue, hey, the Lordship of Christ is overall, we're supposed to discipleship.

It's not just evangelism, it's discipleship that Christ called us to do. That includes ethical issues that are presented in scripture. You're not doing that. They apply to the situation that we're all talking about outside of church.

Why don't we talk about it in church? If there's no response to that or if you're shut down and you reach a point of no return where you're just saying, okay, I can't get anywhere. This pastor just refuses to take a courageous stance on biblical truth, then yeah, you do find another church or you look around.

But I don't think you just do that, like I don't think that's your first move, right? So, you start out by taking your stand on scripture. Like if you think there's an issue that the Bible addresses that's not being addressed, like find those passages.

Show your pastor, hey, I'm looking at these passages. This is what the Lord's showing me. And I think maybe this is something that we should address because this is a challenge that a lot of people are experiencing, not just myself.

And see what happens. Start there. So, I don't know where this person who asked the question is in that process, but I think that you possibly could get to the end of that process and determine it's better to leave for the sake of you and your family.

This one's denominational. So, when a local church leaves an association, does that church become vulnerable to corruption? Is there benefit in association with other like-minded churches? And then what advice would you give to a lone church to help avoid theological drift?

Local Church Associations and Denominational Drift

I think associations are healthy. You have a good association with strong pastors. We can sort of keep each other in line. And so, I think it's a very positive thing that churches in town, if you have a church that's encouraging either heretical doctrine or immoral practices, it's good for the other churches to sort of put that church on notice and so forth.

So, I think associations of local churches is, I think, a very important thing.

There's two things I'd say to that real quick. Number one is the farther you get up in an institution, the more pressure there is to conform to what the elites want you to do. So, local associations, I think, are measurably more important than national or international associations.

And in the SBC, what we've seen, and I'm sure it's happened in other denominations, is they've consolidated. A lot of these local Baptist associations have been kind of gutted and their funding has been transferred to the North American Mission Board.

And so, it just feeds kind of like this bigger association. And you want there to be more, you want there to be local associations because there's more accountability in that. You know the people that you're with and that kind of thing.

I can't remember the second point I had, but I think it was good. I don't remember what it was, though. Yeah.

Let me ask about that, too, because some of us that look at the SBC have never been a part of it, never been in an SBC church. But the SBC is basically a parachurch, right, of local churches. And so, when you get into a parachurch situation, it doesn't have, it seems like God designed the church to have the authority structure of pastors and elders and so forth, qualified pastors and elders and so forth.

And when you start getting beyond that into an institutional organizational means, lots of time and energy and money is spent. And it seems like it can turn into what it has at the SBC. And so, I'm wondering whether it's, I'm not saying it's wrong for there to be an association or a denomination by any means, but I think it's, parachurches are fraught with drifting more than a sound local church.

I think that's true. One of the things here, I just realized,.

Even in this room, it's a small conference. This is a parachurch, kind of. It's hosted at a church. But we came from different churches. There's people represented from different churches. We're networking.

What's going on? There's associating going on. Like this, that's what naturally happens. And hierarchies naturally emerge. And so that's, I remember my second point as you were talking, which is that, like even with John MacArthur, who you mentioned earlier, he's not part of a denomination.

But you can't tell me there's not an industry built around John MacArthur. He's got like, there's a hierarchy and a clout that he has over a lot of churches that associate with him, that go to conferences where he is and stuff.

And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. But the more it happens naturally, the more it happens with local associations and built-in trust, and of course, around leaders that actually have solid virtue and character, the better.

And the worse, you know, when you have, the situation at the SBC is bad because you have like a bunch of elites, really whoever shows up at the convention, and now we know a lot of them are paid to show up by North American Mission Board, making decisions for the whole denomination about who their favorite guy is that no one knows about and no one cares about.

So like, that's a different situation in a sense. And it's the bureaucracy and managerial elitism that we kind of see in the federal government and the deep state. So that's what you don't want. So I think like an organic getting together, that's what we want to see.

Yeah, the Southern Baptist Convention, it was formed for missions and for education. And as a principle, that's a pretty good principle. So we want our churches to sort of pool together resources for missionaries, for education, things of that nature.

But as the bureaucracy builds within an organization and the money, those things are, they take over. And so in the Southern Baptist Convention, the tense gets, oh, very wide. Broaden the tent all the time.

For money purposes. As long as we can bring in the money. And all of a sudden, money is now, that's when things get out of.

Deconstruction and the Loss of Faith

Yeah, so we have a question here about deconstruction. Define deconstruction.

I'm answering a lot of the questions. Someone else want to take that? Well, that's the opposite of construction, right? That's my definition. I'm a simple guy, okay? Just, I should take that one. So you construct a faith.

You built it on a foundation of the gospel, believing the gospel. And then block by block, it's grown with certain doctrines. And you develop a biblical faith or a biblical worldview. Deconstruction is just basically the opposite, where you start questioning and doubting everything.

And pretty soon, you believe none of what the Bible teaches and you've made up your own religion. And I think that's about as simple as I can answer it. But maybe one of you can add. That's pretty good.

Yeah, yeah. Here we go.

Are we satisfied? That's good. I'm actually gonna say, so Adam Wallace, my dear friend in the back there. So you went to a church in Nashville. So he's in Nashville. He goes to this church, doesn't know anything about it.

He and his wife are on vacation. And it was a deconstruction sermon where the guy was talking about his faith journey and how he deconstructed. And it was like he had reached this certain level of spirituality and he thought it was a good thing.

And really what it was, is he just walked away from the faith. So churches, but not real churches, of course, they're actually out there. And it's really frightening. Okay, so David Wheaton, here's a question for you here.

So two in a row, yeah. And I think I know who asked this question. We have a guy in our church who's really passionate about this. Regarding Romans 12 .1 and the man-boy Daniel, what should a Christian look like physically in your mind?

I think I know what this is referring to. We did a radio program about two weeks ago on Romans 12 .1 and about the body. You know, what is the call for us to steward our physical bodies? And I think there is a call there.

And I think a lot of the verse that the bodily exercises of the little prophet, but I don't have the rest of it memorized, but your spiritual life is basically a priority. That's true. But God has given us a body.

There's a physical body. We aren't just a spirit. He created us. He owns us. When you become a believer, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. That's a place of worship. Not to take things into our body that would harm the body or have things come out of our heart that would be a bad representation of who we represent, Jesus Christ.

And so from a physical care of our body standpoint, I think there's two ditches on this. There's obsession with our physical bodies. And you can be obsessed with your body image and how you look and trying to do things to yourself and exercising all the time.

This is a young lady we had in the program who was obsessed about it. It was an idol to her. She was exercising constantly. She talked about having to take a fast from the gym. I mean, who wants to fast?

I mean, I fast from, I don't even want to fast from food, let alone the gym. So anyway, so there's that ditch. And then the other side, there's the, I think maybe more common, perhaps, is the neglect side where we think it's of no importance.

It's sort of like the Gnostic idea that only the spirit's important and the body is unimportant, what you do with your body. And so I do think, and I was talking to someone, I'm not sure if this person answered the question, he was mentioning that, you get someone who's a Christian who's preaching or telling you to be disciplined in one sense in your spiritual life, and you can see that they're likely very undisciplined in their physical body life.

And I think there's a conflicting message there. Now, that's not to say that Christians need to be triathletes like you, Seth. You're triathlete, right? He's a runner. But I do think there's a lot of room, because you can serve the Lord better when your body's healthier.

So the three things you can think about are how you move your body. Don't even consider it exercise. Your body's meant to move. Number two, the nutritional aspect of it, eating good, whole food, and that whole industry in our country, I've had to really change a lot of things because of heart heredity in my family, and just you begin to learn more about the whole food industry.

It's like a lot of it's really bad. And then third is the rest, the recuperation aspect. So if you focus on doing those well, I think that we all can probably improve on all three of those things.

And Seth, didn't you run like a 402 mile at one point or 406? Yeah, and he was number 12 in the world in tennis. So I'm just sucking in right now and puffing up my chest. I heard you play college basketball.

What about you, Russell? I'm 64 years old. I'm just glad to be here.

Okay. When we are physically fit, we can do more for the kingdom. I mean, if we're always sick, I mean, yeah, so. So with so many denominations moving away from orthodoxy, this is a good Jeff question because he's such a positive guy.

The 26 page hit piece against you, it didn't come out that way, but how do we keep from throwing these denominations under the bus?

Speaking the Truth Without Abandoning the Church

I'm sure there's people who think that I did that through the denomination under the bus, but a slap from a friend is better than a kiss from an enemy. A prophetic rebuke has the intention of leading towards repentance.

I think that it is okay to speak the truth, right? Paul even said to the Galatians, have I become your enemy by telling you the truth? So a lot of this has to do with what's in your heart. It's hard to know what's in somebody's heart, right?

But you have to guard your own heart and make sure it remains pure because it's easy to get into war mode where you're just battling. But you have to remember that you're fighting for something and across this country, I still believe that a vast majority of evangelical free and Southern Baptist folk just love the Lord and love His Word.

And there may be this like intelligentsia in the woke leadership that has an agenda to move it to the left, but the people don't want that. So you have to remember, you're fighting for your grandparents that were at Medicine Lake and their legacy and for so many free church people who want to stay faithful to the Word of God.

So it's keeping your heart pure and remember...

How do young people who have not grown up with healthy traditions or cultures obtain them to get away from individualism? That sounds like a John question, yeah.

Recovering Tradition and Community

So I don't know if I put this on Twitter or not. I'm trying to remember if I told someone this or if I put it out there, but I know I was having a conversation the other day about how there just aren't really communities and maybe there's exceptions.

I'm sure there are exceptions. Maybe this is one of them actually, but there's not a lot of communities that have a healthy, robust tradition going back to generations past because you have so many factors against it.

Really, much of them coming from the liberal order that I described earlier, but you have entertainment industry, you have mass immigration, you have the way that the government even, I guess, handles or prevents small businesses and things that involve voluntary associations from forming and so, and I could go on, but there's just a number of things that prevent or at least impede what I would consider to be organic communities.

And organic communities and the natural relationships, organic communities tend to produce traditions and ways of living. And so when you're living in an area for a long time, your grandparents were there, their grandparents were there, there's a certain level of trust that's built up and there's kind of like all these unspoken rules that develop that help human flourishing.

And so like you, you might like, for example, have like a pasture land that you use as a common pasture and everyone's cool with it and no one has a problem because this has been a tradition for a long time.

So there's a lot of things like that. Most of them we're unaware of, but they get super destroyed in the modern world through technology and all kinds of different things. And so the question is someone who is young and I know of several young guys especially like this.

I mean, this is like a tidal wave of young guys who like generation Z who think they've been kind of like deprived, that there's this rich heritage and they're looking at like Eastern Orthodoxy now, they're looking at Roman Catholicism, they're trying to go to other places to find, to tap into something that's real because everything in their world just seems fake to them.

And so it's a really good question. It's a problem that I wish I had more time to answer. The simple short answer I'll give is like it definitely starts in the home. You have to cultivate a family identity I think.

You have to know who you are as the father especially before you can lead your children in this way and it starts at a young age. And that would include like what kind of family's activities you do, what kinds of like devotional time around the table.

I mean, even that like cultivates a sense of tradition. Just the way you treat each other. I mean, there's so many things that people from stable households have an advantage of in this, but then it extends out to the community.

And so I've noticed one thing. Parents, it's just my own observation, but parents who have homeschool kids, some of them go off the deep end because they've been so sheltered. It's a shockwave when they go to college, right?

And I'm sure your book's probably about that in some way or at least addresses it. There's other parents though who like, I was in a family like this where, hey, we were in soccer, we were volunteer fire department, we were in Boy Scouts.

We were involved in our community, we were invested in the people around us. We learned to love actual, tangible, real people. And that builds trust, that cultivates a richness and I think a cultural embeddedness.

And so this starts at your church, but I think it goes beyond that. And so it's a matter of getting involved, really. So there's so many more things I would like to share, but we'd be here forever, so.

Yeah, thanks, John. So David, here's a question for you. Did King Darius, I pronounce it Darius, is that correct? Hebrew scholar? Yeah, okay. Did King Darius become a true believer in God?

I didn't get that far in Daniel, actually. No, I think I'll yield my time to Russell on that one. I think you probably did, but you probably would know better than I.

I don't know the answer to that. And the one they really debate is Nebuchadnezzar and some of his... So there are a lot of folks who believe that Nebuchadnezzar actually got saved. Of course, others don't.

And we can say the same about Darius.

What is the correct application of Matthew 18 in reference to public issues?

I think Matthew 18 would have a general equity to it, even if in a public situation where I tried to contact, I think I named like 30 people in Woke Free Church. I did try to contact a number of them and had opportunities to do that with some.

But I think the difference between Matthew 18 and Galatians chapter two, which is where Paul rebukes Peter to his face and in the presence of everybody, has to do with whether there's a relational difference there.

In Matthew 18, you're kind of in a church context. And the discipline gets progressed from he won't listen to me, the individual. Then you bring witnesses who would have been able to speak to this. And then finally to the whole church.

If you're not in that church context, then you end up like this John Lindell guy who is trying to church discipline Mark Driscoll for speaking out at his men's conference about a sword swallower who did some weird stunt.

And it's just this weird drama. And the issue here is you're too far removed from it. You can't exercise church discipline. You can't pull off a Matthew 18 situation in this big public... We're having a giant national debate about wokeness and social justice versus biblical justice.

And to try to implement Matthew 18 in that context is just completely unworkable. And it's not the intent of Matthew 18.

Russell Fuller, did you contact John Piper today? No, I did not.

When you write something for the public, it's fair game in my opinion that you can respond publicly as well, okay? Now, if it's something within the church, if there's something in private conversation, then yeah, and if I've personally offended him or something like that, then yeah, we'll try to work that out privately.

We'll try to do those things. But if he made a public teaching that is not consistent with the Word of God, I think it's fine to publicly correct that teaching.

So here's a question here. What evidences do you have of these quotes and interactions that ostracized you from the Southern Baptist Convention or the EFCA? So this is Russell and Jeff. Are there any evidences of fundamental Baptists becoming woke slash liberal?

I can answer the EFCA side of it. EFCA and socialjustice .wordpress .com shows all the evidence. There's a website that, in their own words, what they've said, including the 26-page report against Jeff.

I mean, you can say more.

Let me just tail onto that for one other thing. The whole point of writing a book was so that I would force myself to quote everything exactly, publish it, and put the evidence in writing so that that would be interacted with.

Instead, what happened was they invented things that I never said. You're referring to a 26-page document where they would say things like, well, Clewer has concluded that any conversation about race or social justice is not allowed in the church.

But I never believed that or said that. It was just an invented quote, and there were just a number of cases of that. So, yeah, the evidence is all documented in the actual book, in the series of books, and that's why I published works so that it would be something that's falsifiable or testable, not just subjective opinion or I think this is woke or not.

It's what was said. They're actual quotes.

So, yeah. How about you for your? Yeah, within the Southern Baptist Convention, I did see a document that was written fairly recently. It's on the website of the Conservative Baptist Network, and I would just Google that and maybe put in social justice, other words like that, and see if you can find it.

I don't know the exact name of the document, but you can just, in some ways, go to YouTube and search for like wokeness in the Southern Baptist Convention, critical race theory at the Southern Baptist Convention, and John Harris will pop up, and you'll see all the evidence right there.

No, I'm kidding. But you'll see the professors themselves teaching these things, okay? And there's many, I mean, you could watch this for hours and hours, for days. You could watch professors of Southern Baptist professors teaching exactly what we're talking about in their own words, okay?

Several questions about Israel, and I'm just gonna generalize it. Should we support Israel, and why?