Bible Belt Conference!

Justin Peters

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Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today.

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I want to thank you so much for joining me for this podcast, and this is mainly to let you know about a conference that is coming up entitled the

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Bible Belt Conference, and it is located in the Bible Belt in Jackson, Mississippi.

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It's sponsored by Christ Church and my ministry as well, but primarily Christ Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and one of the teaching elders there, one of the pastors there, is a friend of mine named

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Theo Davis. I met Theo five or so years ago out in California where he was a seminary student, and so I'm really excited about this conference.

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So that's just a little bit of introduction. So here is Theo. Theo, brother, thank you so very much for joining me today.

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How are you doing tonight? I'm doing well, brother. How are you? I'm doing well, doing well, trying to stay warm up here in Montana, but speaking of Montana, I shall soon be coming down to warmer climes, that of the

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Magnolia State, so and that is where you are right now. So Theo, tell us a little bit about yourself.

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Give us, if you would, just a little sketch of your testimony and what you're doing now.

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Absolutely. So the state you're coming to is Mississippi, obviously, and that's my hometown.

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I was born and raised here in Jackson, Mississippi. I grew up mainly in South Jackson, and so I graduated high school there.

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I wasn't a believer until about 21. I came to know the

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Lord at Mississippi State at 21 years of age, and so I went to the church, just like kind of what we will talk about with the culture of the

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Bible Belt. I would go to the church with my grandfather, and I really, he wanted me to get baptized.

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I was just excited to get in the water, so as they say, I went down a dry devil, came up a wet devil, and so I really, just a cultural

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Christian, I love my sin. My sin of choice was people pleasing, womanizing, and believe it or not, the

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Lord knows how to bait a good hook, and that's how I came to know him in Mississippi State. I was going to the library to get, and I saw a girl cutting up flyers in the library, and I was going to get her phone number, and she was cutting up flyers for a

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Bible study, and so I ended up going to that Bible study. I remember the corny pickup line

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I said in everything. I said, I said, what are you cutting up there? And she said, these are flyers for a

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Bible study, and she said, you want to come? And I said, yeah, I'll be there if you're there, and so I ended up going to this

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Bible study, and I mean, I was immediately arrested by the Lord. I sit in the back of the auditorium, and the

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Lord saved my soul in the back of that auditorium, but here's the punch.

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It was a charismatic Bible study, and so it was a word of faith Bible study at the time, and that's a whole other series of stories on how the

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Lord graciously brought me out of the fallacies of those doctrines, and you were a tremendous blessing there, and just seeing how our stories intersected and overlapped, how you were from Mississippi, going to Mississippi State, you know, me going to Mississippi State, and eventually meeting again at the

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Shepherds Conference in Los Angeles when I was in seminary, so it's just a small world, so I just kind of giving you the

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Reader's Digest version of my testimony, but the Lord was gracious and kind to save me at 21, and so eventually, fast forward,

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I started to have an appetite to want to go into ministry, and my pastor at the time, he was seminary trained.

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He went to Grace Theological Seminary. It was one of the dispensational seminaries at the time, kind of the old

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DTS, and he sight -read Greek from the pulpit, and that just impressed me.

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I'd never seen that before. That was the first time I even saw a Greek text. It started to open the door for me to really get serious about the

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Bible, the Word, hermeneutics, and being an expositor, and so that kind of led me to the

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Master's Seminary, and we trained there, and we came back to Jackson, Mississippi, my wife and I, Jessica, to plant a church here.

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Wow. Brother, praise the Lord. What a journey. Praise God. Absolutely.

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Yeah, man. Yeah, that's, you know, that is what salvation is, isn't it?

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It's deliverance. It's deliverance out of darkness into light, out of deception into truth, and so you attended seminary at Masters, the

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Master's Seminary that's headed by John MacArthur there, and that is where we first met, right?

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What, about four years ago, four or five years ago? It was about, yeah, probably five or six.

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I think it was 20, yeah, 2018, so yeah, about five years ago. Yeah, yeah, about five years ago.

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Okay, and so you are now one of the pastors, teaching pastors, elders at Christ Church, correct?

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Correct. Christ Church in Jackson, Mississippi. Christ Church in Jackson, Mississippi. Okay, and you have a wife and two kids, right?

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Is that right? I do. Yeah, so Jessica, we have a three -year -old Abel, and a one -year -old, he'll be soon, he'll soon to be two.

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His name is Elijah, so we call him Eli. Love it, love it. All right.

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Okay, brother, well, wonderful. So I'm gonna put all the pertinent links down below in the description there, dear one, so you can find out all this information, and let me say, too, before we talk about the conference, if you're in, anywhere in the

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Jackson area, and you are looking for a good, doctrinally sound church that has expositional preaching, as any true church should, and does

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Believer's Baptism, Lord's Supper, Church Discipline per Matthew 18, go check out

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Christ Church, because Theo, as you and I both know, you and I are both from Mississippi, both born and reared in Mississippi.

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I was about a 50 minutes or so due west of you there in Vicksburg, but Mississippi is, yeah, it's, it is often thought of as kind of the heart or the buckle of the

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Bible belt. I remember looking up statistics on this some years ago, maybe it's probably been 20 years ago, it may have changed somewhat now, but as of 20 years ago,

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Mississippi is the most churched state in the

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Union, and it also has the highest percentage of Baptists of any state in the

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Union. When I looked it up 20 years ago, it was like 51 % of the population of Mississippi was

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Baptist, so there's no shortage of churches, to be sure, but there is a real dearth of biblical churches that do expositional preaching and do church discipline.

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Why, what are your concerns about, why have you entitled this conference the

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Bible Belt Conference? Tell us a little bit about that and your concerns and the heart behind this.

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Absolutely. One thing that always stuck with me is

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I would listen to Q &As of older pastors who were at the end of their life, and you know, they would always be asked, what are the two things you wish you could do better in your ministry?

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And two things always come up, I hear, well, maybe three. One is,

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I wish I would have spent more time with my family. Another one is, I wish I would have prayed more. And then another one

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I hear is evangelism. And so I just made those hallmarks of my ministry.

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I said, if that's a regret of wise, mature men, I don't want to miss it there.

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And so one thing that we did here is when we came to plant a church here, we started door -knocking, and I said, let's hit our knees every morning, let's be men of the

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Word, let's be men of prayer, and let's evangelize, let's knock on doors. And so that's a staple in our...we

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even do corporate evangelism with our church once a month, and that's a staple. And one of my friends and I go out door -knocking every day.

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So our goal last year was 40 doors a day, and we knocked on 40 doors, and when you do the math on that, five days a week, we ended up knocking on about 10 ,000 doors last year.

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And so what that did was it gave us a lot of data, and that's what we wanted.

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It gave us data. Obviously, the response rate was about 20%, but the people we came in contact with, we would ask them a couple questions.

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One is, were they Christians? And more likely than not, you would always get yes.

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And the question...and that opened the door for our follow -up question. The next question we would ask is, is

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Jesus the only way to obtain righteousness from the Father? Is there one way to heaven, or are there multiple ways?

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And we would try to phrase it in a light way where it didn't feel like we were coaching them in any way.

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And the overwhelming majority...and this is what was staggering to me. Ninety percent of the people said multiple ways.

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And so that kind of...like you said, a dirt...that kind of combats the statistics that you just gave about a church being on every corner.

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And just a little sample pool that we've gotten from Jackson in the Tri -County area, that's what we pulled from this area.

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People don't have a sound Christiology. They don't have a sound soteriology.

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They believe that there are multiple ways to the Father, and it's just sad. And so it's...we all knew that.

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We all knew that there was cultural and nominal Christianity here, but to have hard data, that just broke my heart.

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And it just showed me that we were doing a good work with building and planting the church in this area.

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And another thing it wanted me to do was to call in reinforcements. So the next thing

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I did, I said, I want to get some solid guys here, friends of mine who will come and speak to this issue, the

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Bible Bell Conference. And it's kind of a play on words, you know. It's actually attacking the title of the conference,

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Confronting Culture and Nominal Christianity. And I just want guys like yourself,

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Bodie Backham, Mike Riccardi, EZ from Living Waters, Carl Hargrove, and we have a list of great expositors who could speak to this problem here in the area.

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And you're really good, the Lord has given you the discernment, and you're really good with diagnosing problems and showing how we got to such a state, such a desert.

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And that's one thing that I would love to spark this conference out, with you showing how we got here, and then systematically allowing all of the speakers to say, okay, this is how we got here, and this is how we get out of this.

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We get out of this through the sufficiency of Scripture. We get out of this through preaching the Word. We get out of this through prayer.

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We get out of this through good, sound ecclesiology. And so I just,

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I'm calling for the Avengers to help me. Because after seeing those depressing statistics, it's just a work needs to be redone here.

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And so actually, we're trying, I know it's an audacious claim, but we're just so bold enough to say we really want to redo this work here in the

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Bible building. We're looking for people in the universal church to come help join us and lock arms so we can move forward together.

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Yes, indeed. Indeed, brother. Those statistics that you cited are just stunning to me because,

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I mean, you're saying 90 % of the people that you talk to in the heart of the

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Bible Belt, I mean, in the center of Mississippi, the buckle of the Bible Belt, said that there are multiple ways to get to heaven.

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Absolutely. I mean, most people

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I know that grow up in a typical Southern Baptist church in the Deep South, granted that most of those churches are not solid churches, but you would think they could at least give the first grade

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Sunday school VBS answer to that. Exactly.

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Wow. No, no Romans, no John 316, no

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John 416. I'm the way, the truth, and the life. You rarely heard that verse.

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And so like you said, basic Sunday school answers we just didn't get. Right. It was shocking.

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Now, were a lot of these same people, did most of them claim to be Christians? They did.

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Absolutely. Very rarely did we get someone to say they weren't a Christian. Right.

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Right. Because I can almost count on my hand the people that said that they weren't Christians. Huh. And so the assumption is that most of these people were probably baptized too.

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I would think. I didn't collect that data point, but I mean, looking at my testimony and people that I associate with in the culture here,

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I would think that that box would be checked as well. Yeah. Yeah.

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I imagine for most of them it was. And I was much same way you are.

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I was baptized in a church when I was a kid.

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I was seven years old when I was baptized and born and reared in a Southern Baptist church, but was not converted, wasn't converted until much later on in life.

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But anyway, there's a yeah, there's I mean, so many people think that because they're in the

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South, because there's so much of a cultural Christianity in the

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South and, you know, nice people, you know, nice people, warm people, excellent food.

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I'm living up here in Montana. I miss my catfish. I miss my fried okra, but, you know, great food.

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But there's yeah, the Christianity there sadly is just, you know, it's a mile wide and inch deep.

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It's cliche. It's tradition. You know, we believe such and such because well, we've always believed this.

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You know, we do it because we do these things because we've always done it this way. And so few people actually question, question what they're being taught or what they're seeing in church.

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And I'm so glad you're doing this conference. So some of these names, Theo, I mean, go through these again,

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Bodie Balkam, E .Z. Wayne, who works for Ray Comfort there,

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Living Waters. He's a friend of mine. Bodie's a friend of mine. Carl Hargrove. Now, some of these names

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I'm not real familiar with, but if they're coming, I have no doubt that they are able, qualified men of God that will preach the word.

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And I'm so excited about this. No, yeah, absolutely. A lot of the names that are on there also are some of our co -pastors.

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So we're plurality of elders here at Christ Church. And Jeff Barber and Joseph Martin are two of our other elders here.

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But the guys you name are the guys that like Carl Hargrove and Mike Riccardi, those were elders and professors of mine at school.

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So, yeah, yeah, I know those men, fine men, both of them. So brother, if I wasn't a speaker,

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I'd come just to attend. Praise the Lord. Yeah, absolutely.

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So, Theo, tell us. Okay, so give us some of the particulars. When is the conference and where is it going to be?

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Yeah, it's March the 25th through the 27th. So it's a three -day conference.

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It's a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday. And a lot of people kind of raise eyebrows about it being on that Sunday.

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And that was kind of strategic. The reason is we didn't know who would be coming here in the

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South or whether they did have a good ecclesiology. So we simply wanted to have church service on that Sunday morning and just give a good, solid model of what a biblical church looks like.

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So that is embedded in the conference on Sunday. And obviously, Bodie will be in on Monday.

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And so that he will kind of close the conference out for us. And it will be located right on the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi.

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There's a city, Pearl, Mississippi. And so it's a Truett Baptist church at Pearl, Mississippi.

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So our local assembly holds about 200. And immediately when we started opening up registration,

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I knew that it was going to be a bit overwhelming for our local assembly. And so we reached out to another church that's been very helpful to us.

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The pastor Dennis there is helping us out and allowing us to use their facility.

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And they're hosting the conference for us. And it seats up to 500.

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So that just helped us out tremendously. Oh, that'll be great. That'll be great.

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Okay. And there is a cost to come, right? If memory serves, $59.

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Is that right? It is. It's $59 is what we're currently charging.

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And we have a discounted rate for students for $39. And we also have a live streaming option there for,

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I think it's right around five bucks that we have it priced at. Okay. Okay.

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All right. Live stream. That's good. That's good. So if people want to watch the conference, but they live in Walla Walla, Washington or whatever, and they just can't get to Mississippi, they can stream it for five bucks.

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And man, with this lineup of speakers, that's probably best five bucks you ever spent in your life. But if you can come, dear ones, if you can come, come.

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I mean, live streaming is great if you can't make it, but boy, there's nothing like being there in person.

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It's just more impactful in the fellowship, the fellowship with like -minded believers.

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You can't put a price tag on that. So if you're anywhere in the area, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, or even further, come.

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Get out of the winter cold. If you live up north, come down to Mississippi in March. It's a beautiful time of year in Mississippi.

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So great. Well, Theo, I'm going to put all the links again down below in the description.

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I think that's a great idea of what you're doing too on Sunday to model what a true church service looks like and how church should be done.

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Because quite honestly, a lot of people in the Bible Belt have never really seen that.

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Brother, before we close out, I got to ask you, who is

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Uncle, I know it's you, but tell us about Uncle Theo. What's going on with that? Absolutely.

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My social on Instagram is my name, Theo J. Davis. Basically, when

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I initially got started in business, I'm bi -vocational.

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I do real estate as well. I had to figure out how to build a business from scratch.

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I made a lot of mistakes along the way, bumps and bruises. I said, you know what?

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I just wish that I had a game plan on how to be entrepreneur successfully, biblically, someone to share the gospel with me, someone to increase my biblical literacy.

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It just kind of went off in my head. I thought about a show I used to watch when

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I was young called Fresh Prince. A guy by the name of Uncle Theo was on there.

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He brought Will Smith in to help raise him. It just reminded me that everybody may not have a father, but everybody could have an uncle.

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I want people to allow me to be their uncle, to bring me into their life, and just to help teach them life skills and how to think from a biblical worldview and shepherd them.

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You know the staggering statistics of African Americans, high 70 % single family home.

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It's just having to make up the difference was difficult for me, but by God's grace, he helped me to grow a real estate business and scale it to a way where I was able to uproot and move to seminary.

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Real estate completely funded all of that. I was just so thankful to be able to figure that all out.

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I just want to pass that along and give back to people through mentorship on social media.

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That's kind of the idea behind Uncle Theo there. I love that.

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I love that, brother. I appreciate that so much. You're definitely putting feet to your faith and helping folks in a real tangible way.

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I really appreciate that. God bless those efforts. Thank you, brother.

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Absolutely. All right. Well, dear ones, I will put all of the links for the conference down there below in the description.

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You can find those. Theo, I'll get you to send me any other personal information like how to reach you on social media or whatever you'd like me to show and share with folks.

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I'll put that on there as well. I would love for you to come. Theo and I would both love for you to be there

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March 25th through the 27th, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, $59 per person.

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That is to cover expenses. They're bringing in a lot of speakers and there's plane tickets and hotel rooms and meals and all that stuff.

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There's a lot that goes into putting on a conference. You're not going to be using this to go out and start shopping for a private jet, are you?

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No, not even. We'll be glad to even break even, but even if that doesn't happen, this is more important to us.

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We're knocking on doors and I'm thinking about the military. We just want to hit it from land, air, and sea.

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I just feel like this is an air attack and the money isn't the issue.

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We just really want to see lives change here and we want to see the gates of Hades pushed back here in Jackson, Mississippi and in the

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Bible Belt. That's the whole goal. Amen, brother. Theo, thank you so much, brother.

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Thank you for joining us. No, absolutely. Thank you for having me, brother. We absolutely will get you fried okra here when you come visit, okay?

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Now you're talking. All right. Okay. All right.

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Well, dear ones, I hope this was encouraging for you, edifying for you. If you can come to the conference, we would love to have you.

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Again, all the links down below in the description. Thank you so very much. Until our next time together, may the grace of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit be with you all.