Two Live Reports from the SBC in Nashville

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It's not the day we're supposed to be doing The Dividing Line, but long story short, we just decided we needed to move it to today. Actually, we were supposed to be picking up our travel rig today, and I won't go into details, but hopefully tomorrow.

I don't want to go there. But the point is that much is going on in regards to the Southern Baptist Convention, yesterday's presidential election, yesterday's resolutions, the resolutions committee, the head of that committee, and the comments that were made.

And then today, the resurrection of the resolution calling for the abolition of human abortion, and the amazing specter of the ERLC, Denny Burke, and what you might call the deep Southern Baptist state standing against this resolution.

And this leads us directly to the issue of the reality that a lot of us are not aware of, that I wasn't aware of for a long time, and that is that there is now a pro-life industry that refuses to call abortion what it actually is, and hence is more than happy with a restriction here, a restriction there, a restriction here, a restriction there.

Meanwhile, the Holocaust continues of Black babies and Hispanic babies and white babies and every other color of baby. While the idea is, well, we can restrict it here, restrict it there, rather than just simply calling for its abolition in toto.

And especially when that involves identifying it for what it is, murder, and the people engaged in it as being engaged in murder. That's where the pro-life industry simply says, no, we will not go there.

Women are just victims. And of course, we know that many of these women are nowhere near victims. They are rejoicing in what they do. But be it as it may, the resolution had not even been brought to the floor.

And then I believe it was Brother Askell, who, not Tom Askell's brother, brother, brother, brother? Anyway, gave an impassioned plea, and it was resurrected by two-thirds of the folks in the auditorium.

And so it was debated today. Last night, the pro-life industry came alive. Seeking to argue against it. Like I said, Denny Burke put a whole series up. The ERLC argued against this from the floor. This is another fracture point, fault line, shall we say, that is becoming clearer and clearer as time goes by.

And my understanding is while the resolution passed, it was, in the words of Jeff Durbin, gutted by an amendment. Others say weakened. So our hope now is to have Tom Buck join us initially via Zoom, and we'll get his take on the elections, on the Southern Baptist Deep State, and everything else.

And then hopefully we'll be able to get hold of my fellow elder, Jeff Durbin, who is also at the SBC. And in case anyone's wondering, no, Apologia is not an SBC church by any stretch of the imagination.

But he was doing some speaking, and he was working with the Southern Baptists who are seeking to end abortion now. And of course, Apologia is the home church of End Abortion Now. So that's where that connection came from.

And so I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to talk about along those lines. Have you heard anything yet? So I'm just waiting for Rich to give me a sign that Tom has been able to get to a location where he can actually have a good enough signal and hopefully sufficiently low ambient noise to allow a meaningful conversation to take place.

If I recall correctly, a couple years ago when we had him on, he ended up outside. I hope he doesn't have to end up, I don't know what the temperature is in Nashville. I can guarantee you he would not want to be outside here in Phoenix, Arizona right now.

It's actually not, it's cooling off. Oh, 113. Okay. All right. It's only 113 degrees in the shade in Phoenix right now. So there you go. It's actually, the amazing thing is, I think one of the reasons it's been, when you were walking in, did you notice that it was orange?

If you look at the sunlight, there's a, yeah, yeah. There's a major fire over near a town called Globe, up sort of northeast, east northeast of the valley. And the winds are carrying all the smoke right into us.

And so I think that's one of the reasons we haven't set a bunch of new high records here in Phoenix. So I am sort of watching a few other things at the same time. So if I look like I'm not paying attention, it's because I'm actually distracted by the fact that Jeff is texting right now, and I'll see what he has to say.

And then we're just watching for the opportunity to talk to Tom Buck. Obviously, the election, the major thing that was on everybody's mind was who was going to be elected as the president of Southern Mass Convention.

But before that vote took place, and it was a very close vote, many of us outside of the convention who have close friends and people in ministry that we work with all the time in the convention could not help but see what was going on.

I have said for a while that the cancelling of the convention last summer and simply giving a third year to J .D. Greer was probably suicidal on the part of the convention in the sense that the president has a great deal of influence over who is placed on various committees.

And what I saw anyways, and we can confirm this when we get a chance to talk to Tom, what it seemed to me anyways, was that the committee that was in charge, the resolutions committee, was in charge of bringing these resolutions to the floor, which I understand is a challenging thing, but was pretty much made up politically by the people assigned by J .D. Greer.

And as a result, especially any type of pushback on Resolution 9 from two years ago, which opened the door to the acceptance of utilization of Critical Race Theory, that whole pushback was, in essence, flushed.

And so you saw that taking place. So Rich says that he has someone on Zoom who is a troublemaker from Texas. And so I'm going to put my earpiece in here and see if Rich can make things work. Hello, troublemaker from Texas.

Hey. Oh, man, you're wearing a jacket. I am. Can you hear me? We don't know if we weren't able to do a test. Yes, yes, you sound fine. Okay. I mean, of course, you're demonstrating the standard error of placing a light source behind your head, which makes you look evil and things like that.

I can close this. That'll make it better. Do you want me to do that? Yeah, it'd probably be wise, because when you do that, it does sort of, you know, it's the Darth Vader type thing. Well, now I'm in the darkness.

Yes, well, it doesn't matter. Anyways, well, thank you, Tom, for taking some time out. I imagine it's been pretty wild there over the past about, what, 36 hours or so. I've been sort of watching from the outside, and I was just giving some of my thoughts, but you're there on the floor.

What have you seen taking place at the Southern Baps Convention? What are your overall thoughts as it stands right now?

Well, it's been an interesting week, to say the least, and someone asked me at the beginning of the week what would be the worst case scenario, and what I said would be the worst case scenario has ended up being the case.

So, for me, that would be that the messengers were not given an opportunity to address Resolution 9, which would include that our resolution, which we had over 1 ,300 co-submitters, which I don't know if that's ever happened before, of the resolution that we had on the incompatibility of critical race theory and intersectionality with the Baptist faith and message, which I helped author that and write that and was a submitter.

So, they just squashed that, didn't bring that out. So, those two kind of things go together, and then if Ed Litton was elected as president, that would be the worst case scenario for me, and all of those.

Things took place. Right, right. Now, so, obviously, I've seen some of the conversations and some of the video clips and stuff like that. What was the excuse that was given, the reasoning that was given for not allowing that resolution in regards to CRT?

I saw someone saying that it was dealt with in another resolution, basically. No, it wasn't. I mean, if it was, they didn't.

Even mention the letters, CRT. The only time it was mentioned is when the head of the resolutions committee, the chairman of the resolutions committee, made a cringeworthy statement saying, you know, he gave a lecture when we tried to bring Resolution 9 up.

He gave a lecture that he wished that some of us were as passionate about the gospel as we were critical race theory, and then said he didn't find critical race CRT anywhere in the Bible, but yet he said he did.

Christ reigns or returns triumphantly. And so, I responded by saying that, remember when Paul said that, I wish people were more passionate about the gospel than they were being against the Judaizers.

I mean, it's just an absurd, false dichotomy, but that's what they do. And then when they were asked about the resolution, they said, as you typically get, Baptists turn charismatic, and they talk about how they were led of the Holy Spirit, and they prayed as if no one who submitted this resolution, the 1300 people, didn't pray, not led of the Holy Spirit.

I get so tired of that kind of language that sets the people up to go, yeah, we should trust them because they have prayed and led of the Holy Spirit. So anyway, they gave no more reasoning.

Than that. So, obviously, everybody at the top, everybody at the ERLC, everybody in J .D. Greer's office, they were well aware of the fact that there was a pushback on Resolution 9 from 2019, and that there was a large movement of people that wanted this addressed.

But is it fair to call this the Southern Baptist deep state now, in the sense that, especially given J .D. Greer was given three years to solidify this deep state situation? Well, I mean, here's the thing, and.

You can determine after I tell you what happened, you can determine where you classify that as deep state. We were very open about what was going to be done. Tom Aspel was very open that he was going to make a motion to rescind Resolution 9.

They were totally prepared for that. In fact, at one point, when Tom made his statement regarding that, J .D. said, well, give me a moment to confer, turned around and came back and read from a statement.

They had a statement that was prepared. It was clear that James Merritt had his statement prepared. I don't know how long he worked on that acronym. He might have needed to take a few more days on that one.

But they were prepared to say what they were going to say. So, you know, I mean, that's the power or the advantage of being in control and the power of the stage, because they get the last, they get the first and the last word, and they get to take as long as they want to, to, you know, to filibuster or whatever.

So they were prepared. They had all their ducks in a row. And the people on the floor were prepared that were against these things. They called for the question at times very quickly on a couple of different things so that they could end the discussion, even though they knew that we wanted to discuss more.

And that had directly to do with Resolution 2, which is what they replaced our resolution with. That came out that inherently is not bad, but it did not say enough and it did not.

Address CRT. So that obviously took planning and forethought and everything else. I heard that stuff going on in the morning, but I didn't know what that was going to mean as far as the afternoon election.

And so when the voting took place for president, what was it like in the hall? Did you have a feeling at that time of what direction things were going? Because there ended up having to be a runoff. And so was there, what were people saying, especially when it was determined that there had to be a runoff?

And in fact, that it was between Stone and Litton, and that Mueller had only gotten a relatively small percentage of the votes.

Yeah, very early on, I sensed that Dr. Mueller was in trouble. You know, he's a friend of both you and me in the sense of we had a brother we love and respect. But it was clear that he was in trouble.

And what I mean trouble that he was not going to get a lot of support. I based that upon the fact that when the nominations occurred, how people responded after that. I was I was shocked somewhat by that because I really by the support of Mike Stone.

And so two or three weeks, you've had a smear campaign like none other that I have ever seen against Mike Stone. Even the night before, there was a weird situation that occurred where this and I'm not saying that that was set up.

I don't know. And I certainly want to be careful speaking to this. This woman, I would say young lady, I don't know, you know, that's OK. Summer.

And I actually talked about on the dividing line yesterday by name. So don't don't worry. Don't worry about it. We did discuss it. So, yeah. And she she needs to be a person who is protected, not someone who's being abused by being used in the way that she was used in that situation.

But it was very clearly aimed solely at him in a public context. And there had been other things. I don't know if you heard Doug Wilson's blog in May blog where he talked about Baptist baseball, but he did a great job in analyzing the allegedly leaked letters that came out from from Moore after he had resigned from the ERLC.

And so, yeah, I mean, this was this is like watching all the drama that takes place before the major political conventions and things like that. It was the same same playbook, except it was being done in the Southern Baps convention.

So there was all that stuff going on. And so but once it came down to once you saw the numbers of the initial vote, did you did you run some some statistics, some algebra and go Stone's got a good shot?

Because I did, because I might I'm just sort of naively thinking that the that the molar votes are going to split and they're going to break for Stone. And they it was really close. I mean, what was it?

What was it? Sixty sixty vote difference, something like that. OK, at what point at the first vote of it at the end, it was it was no,.

It was more than that, but it was less than six hundred. It was five hundred or so. OK, but that's still, I think, a minuscule amount of votes when you consider three weeks almost of ongoing attacks and smear of Mike Stone.

And he still he won, if you will. He received the most votes in the first round. Right. By about the same margin, about six hundred. And then he ended up losing. So here's what we can say without any doubt.

The supporters of Albert Moller elected Adler. Yeah. That there's no doubt that I'm not saying Al Moller did, but his supporters, the people that supported him ended up swinging the vote for because and I spoke to some that did.

And of course, Randy Adams was more in Mike Stone's. His supporters were more in Spokes Mike Stone's camp. They certainly didn't vote for Litton. They because Litton is way over here. Right. Litton is going to be a disaster.

He's theologically sloppy, to say the least, in what has already came out with. Yeah, yeah. Today on Twitter, which amazingly, I must live for rent free in these guys' heads because I tweet and it gets changed in a matter of minutes almost.

But he has already been interviewed, Ed Litton has, by the Houston Chronicle. And I don't know if you've seen this or not, but they asked him on the ordination of women. And here was his answer. He said, the Baptist faith and message does not address ordination.

It needs to be approached first step by the associations, but we're going to try to keep it within the boundaries as much as we can. Then he said he does not think now he doesn't think the Baptist faith and message addresses ordination.

Then he says that BFM doesn't need to be tweaked because there needs to be room in the debate. And I'm quoting for less narrow conceptions of complementarianism. So it's very clear. Ordination of women is not addressed in the Baptist faith and message.

Let's leave it to the associations. But let's dare not tweak the Baptist faith and message because we need to leave room for women ordination. How else can you read that? So this is what we all said was going to happen.

He's not conservative whatsoever. And I was interviewed by the New York Times and they said we're ultra conservatives. I said, I'm not an ultra conservative. If I'm an ultra conservative, everybody in the conservative Baptist in the past 25 years are ultra conservatives.

I am standing where we have stood for 25 years. These guys are progressives at best. And they're leading us away from where we were at the conservative resurgence because we left the liberals behind when they were ordaining women.

Now we're moving in that direction. We're not ultra conservative. They're progressive and moderates. And that's what I believe is the case.

So if history repeats itself, and I said this on Twitter earlier, if history repeats itself, what you're going to see is the pressure will start building up for modification. And it starts the way that you just described it.

Well, we're going to leave it to the associations, da, da, da. But eventually the pressure builds up to get the Baptist faith and message in line with where history is going. Obviously, the terminology will be opening up opportunities of ministry for women and getting on the right side of history and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Historically, that's how it has happened in every other denomination over the past 150 years that we have watched march down this road. And obviously, at some point along the line, a split takes place and somebody says, no, we can't go there.

The one group that has tried to hold itself together despite all that are the Anglicans. And I just don't know how much farther that can even go. I mean, they've got female bishops and people blessing same-sex marriages and the whole nine yards.

And it's just a part of the DNA of Anglicans to try to find the middle road. The problem is that that middle road keeps going left, left, left, left, left. That's not part of the DNA of Baptists at all.

And so we have this taking place. What's the trigger point where, I mean, already I know there are some churches just like, okay, that's it. We're on our way someplace else. But is there a trigger point that says, okay, that's it.

We all need to get together and do something different.

Well, that's the discussion that's taking place right now. And I'm trying to be as careful as I can be because I've got to get back and talk with my elders. We've got to talk with our own congregation.

I definitely don't want to signal from afar what we're going to be doing. But here's what I can say without any hesitation. We can't keep doing what we've been doing. For one thing, this is a distraction for me from my own congregation and from my family.

This is not what I desire to do. I want to pastor a church. And as I told, I haven't been in politics in the past. I told the New York Times this morning that we elected conservatives to do the job of watching and protecting our institutions so that we could do our job.

They need to be doing their job so I can do my job. But conservatism has failed in the SBC. Conservatives, I should say, have failed us in the SBC. And the proof of that is Ed Litton was able to be elected.

They have failed us tremendously. Danny Akin tweets out support of Ed Litton. And he didn't even have a clue that Ed Litton, by the way, when he supported him, said he's the guy for me. I said not from my standpoint, which when you consider that they teach standpoint hermeneutics there, it tells you all the problems in the world with that seminary.

But he didn't even take the time to check and see that Ed Litton doesn't even have a good, strong, solid statement about the Trinity on his own website. But yet we're supposed to trust. I mean, that's what you would think the president of a seminary in the Southern Baptist Commission would have the instinct to do before they would go and say he's the man for the hour, a man who says that the Father, Son, and Spirit are co-equal parts of the one God.

We're in deep trouble in the SBC. And if we take what happened with the lack of support for Dr. Moeller, you do have to wonder if the mantle's been passed to Danny Akin. And if the mantle's been passed to Danny Akin,.

We're in big trouble. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, you know, I was going to ask you about the abortion stuff, but we've actually got Jeff Durbin will be hopping on with us, and he was working with Brother Askell on that stuff.

And I don't know if you ran into him.

At all there. No, I've been trying to meet him, and I've been unable to meet him. Nobody will connect me with Jeff Durbin. And he may have told him, don't let Tom Buck get within five inches.

Well, I will definitely communicate your desire to get to meet him when we talk just now or in our elders' little chat thing that we have, whatever. We'll make sure to get you together.

Let me say one thing about that, and I said this earlier. I wish that the leaders of the SBC would be as concerned about a resolution to abolish abortion as they are about protecting Resolution.

9. Right, right, right. Yep, and to have the ERLC speaking against it from the floor and everything else, amazing thing. But we'll talk with Jeff about that. Well, so it wraps up today. Is that how it works?

Lord willing. And then you're going to be heading home, and then after that, we've still got to talk about whether you're still brave enough to actually have me come by Lyndale with my, if I ever get my fifth wheel set up, and the Alpha Omega Roadshow stopping by Lyndale.

But you did tell me that in Lyndale now you have Chick-fil-A, right? We do have Chick-fil-A.

Now, so I mean, you can come and stay and have every pleasure that you need in life right there. Well, I hope that. I can also get you to Cain's. We have a close Cain's, too.

So Rich tells me that as soon as Tom left us, Wirecast crashed, and so I don't know if that means that it just went blank or just what, but he's telling me we're back on. I don't know. I'm going to assume that we are, or at least that we're recording and we'll be able to upload this or something.

I don't know. So if I sort of stopped in the middle of a sentence or something like that, that's what live webcasting is all about. That's just sort of how it works. So we're trying to get hold of Jeff Durbin, and I sent the link to Jeff to see if he can join us so that we can sort of get to the other aspect of the story, and that is the fact that there were Southern Baptists for the abolition of human abortion who presented a resolution that was not initially brought to the floor, and then an impassioned plea was made, and two-thirds of the delegates, messengers, I'm sorry is the proper term to be used.

Tom just texted, I killed the DL. Yes, well, I'm not sure you really have that power, but something did. I don't know what. Actually, I'll take that back. My phone told me yesterday to expect, wow, what is this?

You are live on YouTube. Yeah, but I've never gotten a message on my phone before that said you are live on YouTube. That's weird. It's a little freaky, a little scary, but I have an app on my phone that warned me of possible telecommunication disruptions today due to a solar storm, so Tom caused a solar storm.

Well, okay. Tom gets blamed for pretty much everything, so we can go ahead and throw that one out if you want to. Join on in. We'll see if we can get ahold of Jeff, but as I said, two-thirds of the messengers had to vote to instruct the committee to bring the resolution to the floor, which they did, and so it was brought up today, and so while Rich and I were sitting around wasting half of our day today, I was watching and watching and watching to see what was going to take place, and so with that, let's find out what did take place.

Aha, a face I have seen up close and personal more than once. I can't hear him, though, Rich. Can you hear me, Jeff? It looks like you're muted. All right, how's that? Ah, that's okay. I'll never hear out of that ear again, but yes, good.

I haven't gone on mute. It just did it by itself. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's Chinese. What do you want? Yeah. It just does whatever it wants. It's going to mute you all the time because it doesn't want to hear what you have to say.

They're listening to every word right now. Oh, they are, and we hope that they are convicted as a result. That's our desire. Okay, so we had Tom on. He sort of went through what happened yesterday and the politics and the resolutions and everything else, and then I've told what I know, and that is that the resolution—who was the primary writer of the resolution that was voted on today?

Well, to my knowledge, there's a number of people.

Who were on it. There's a lot of people who are behind it, a lot of pastors supportive of it, but Bill Askle, Dusty Devers are two of the primary guys behind this. Okay, and so it was Bill.

That made the appeal to the gathered messengers and had somebody holding a baby next to him. I believe so, yes. And that that resulted in a two-thirds vote from the messengers to instruct the committee to bring the resolution forward today.

That's right. Okay. All right, so that's Bill Askle, who is Tom Askle's brother, right? That's right. Okay, so founders is everywhere. I mean, they're very, very busy and doing their thing. And in essence, what was different about this resolution than the vanilla pro-life stand that has been taken by the SBC in.

The past? So this resolution was actually really—it was really well written. It provided biblical definitions, provided clarity, and tried to address inconsistencies. This resolution was essentially a truly consistent Christian worldview applied to the area of abortion, and that's the best way I can describe it.

Providing proper definitions, defining the role of the gospel in this, defining sort of the role of the church in this. And so I think it was a really well-written resolution, and it should have passed.

I think with anybody who's a believer that believes in the authority of Scripture, who understands that the gospel is the answer to this, they should easily vote yes on this. I think the problem is that we have, as Christians, been so indoctrinated by our culture and, unfortunately, by the pro-life industry, not the pro-life movement—that's the people who are principally pro-life—but the pro-life industry that has sort of worked on the Christian mindset in terms of how do you address the issue of abortion.

And I think it's important for people to understand when we talk about this, the pro-life industry has a doctrinal statement undergirding it. And I use that term, doctrinal statement, because we know what that means.

They have a specific worldview. They have a particular set of beliefs about what's wrong. Is abortion murder? Is the woman guilty? What's the solution? How do you end this? Long-term goals, short-term goals, all that.

And so what I think is important to recognize is that one of the major hitches in this for people is we have allowed for 50 years the pro-life industry, who professes to be neutral in this fight—not committed to Christ, not committed to the lordship of Christ, the biblical worldview, the gospel—we've allowed them to lead this.

And so many of us have just assumed that's our team. These are the ones who are trying to end abortion. And we don't understand that the incremental approach that they have been doing for so long, and even the long-term approach about ending abortion, is in opposition to much of what we believe as Christians on this issue of abortion.

I'll tell you what I mean by that. When we talk to the standard pro-life industry leader, they'll tell you, A, we're not explicitly Christian in our commitments. We're not doing this as Christians. We're not standing on the word of God.

This isn't a gospel issue for us. And when you talk to them, they will very, very proudly say, this is not a secret among them. This is what their position is consistently across the board. They believe that mothers who kill their children via abortion are themselves victims.

And so in all of their opposition this past year to the bills for equal protection for all human beings, starting from conception, in all their opposition, they have said consistently and every single time, we are not trying to end abortion with any penalties for the mother or the parents who are involved in this, because they say that they believe that mother and baby are both equally victims.

And what that does from a Christian standpoint, a gospel-centered standpoint, is it robs women who are post-abortive, and it robs women who are going to have abortions of the gospel message itself. Because what they're saying to women is that you're not guilty for killing your child.

You don't need Christ in that. I call this the fatal flaw of the pro-life industry. And so that's underneath all of this. When we talk about the approach to ending abortion, all of that, the sanctity of human life, the pro-life industry is not trying to end abortion in the sense of criminalizing it, abolishing it, in the same way, say, you would with slavery or sex trafficking.

They say things like, we want abortion to be unthinkable. And to that, I say, well, the only way it's going to be unthinkable is if we have a change of heart, and you can only do that through the gospel and a consistent Christian message.

But I don't just want abortion to be unthinkable. I want abortion to be a crime, like slavery, like sex trafficking. I would like sex trafficking to be unthinkable, and I would also like it to be a criminal act.

The abortion, sorry, the pro-life industry approaches this from a position of neutrality and from a position that is fundamentally flawed and inconsistent with the gospel message. They say the mother is innocent, that she is a victim like the child.

And so they do not want to ever have this ended via criminalization, like it used to be in a society that was influenced by the gospel. You can look pre-Roe and even see currently in states across the union that abortion is still seen as murder and homicide and a criminal act in the states.

Those laws, many of them have never been changed, and they're still on the books. And the pro-life industry also approaches this, seeing Roe versus Wade as law. And it was one of the things that was difficult for me to hear sitting in there just now when you had somebody who was opposed to this resolution.

They essentially said that. They said, you know, Roe versus Wade made abortion legal in the states. In fact, it did not. It's a court opinion. And the states who had legislation on their books criminalizing abortion, actually, if they agreed with Roe, they had to actually change the laws of those states.

They were supposed to change the laws of the states because Roe versus Wade does not create law. Congress creates law in our nation, not the Supreme Court. So we don't understand how our law works in this nation.

And one of the ways to highlight that is this particular point. During the last election, resident Joe Biden did a town hall and there was a young woman that came up and she was concerned with another four years of Trump and what that would mean for Roe versus Wade, but the people he's adding to the court and all that.

And so she was concerned, like, what if Roe versus Wade is overturned? And Joe Biden understands the law in our country better than many pro-life industry leaders. He said that when he becomes president, he wants to give Roe versus Wade the force of law.

Right. He said that because that's true in our nation. It says in our constitutional documents that that Congress creates law. It's not the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has made many, many fallacious court opinions and they've been resisted by the states many times, even during a time of slavery of the court case of Dred Scott.

And in that case, the states resisted the Supreme Court's very evil opinion. And that needs to be done at the state level on the issue of abortion. So I'll just say finally to this, one of the things that was actually kind of disheartening to hear was one of the the vocalizations of opposition against the resolution was if we pass this resolution, which everybody says we agree with it.

Abortion is murder. It's a sin. It's a gospel issue. We need to abolish it. If we pass it, then these pastors are going to have to go back home and have essentially one perspective on this. And that's consistent with the resolution.

This is murder. It needs to be abolished and essentially say all of our past pro-life moves. You know, we were wrong on those. And this is what we're going to do. And only this. I thought to myself, is it is it is it a Christian virtue to say that I was wrong and that I was to not say that I was wrong, to not say that I was inconsistent or we did something inconsistently?

If we spot an error in our thinking, if we spot an inconsistency, if we see that an industry that we've been paying to fight this is inconsistent and in many respects fundamentally opposed to the gospel itself and to Christian commitment, if we see that that's a problem, aren't we allowed to say we need a course correction?

We have to fix this. We've got to approach this consistently as Christians. And so that was disheartening to hear that one of the objections is we're you know, is it wrong to point out that if Roe versus Wade is overturned tonight at midnight, that tomorrow abortion will still be legal in many states across our union because of the pro-life legislation that's been put into force.

In other words, when you put in pro-life incremental legislation that says you cannot kill a baby in this state past 18 weeks or 22 weeks, it actually puts into the force of law that you can kill a baby in this state under 22 weeks or 18 weeks, and that's pro-life legislation.