163: Samuel Farag Loves the Rural Church

Christ the King and the Local Church

To the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it. The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Brother, I told my wife yesterday that this is like the longest summer ever, and I don't know what it's like in the state of New York, but I can tell you right now, it is hot in Arkansas. What's your temperature today?

Today seems like it's a pretty cool day. I wanna say it's in the, what is it right now? In the, yeah, it's 65 right now.

Oh, man, it's like almost 80 here.

Yeah, we've had a few days where it was like, oh, it was a nice day, not too much breeze and everything like that, and we're by a lake right here, too, so yeah, it's been pretty good. Before that, though, we've had some brutally hot days, but no, it's been much more cooler now.

Brutally hot is what? Oh, for here, yeah, it's nothing close to, so I used to live in Texas, so it's not that Texas. In fact, when I spoke to some people, some friends in Texas, they were having like 105, and it hasn't been down to 100 and all this, so when I say hot, yeah, it's just warm in comparison.

We are so far having the hottest September, I think, in Arkansas history, so yeah, it's crazy, but anyway, you didn't join to talk about the weather. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I am your host, Alan Nelson.

I'm one of the elders at Providence Baptist Church. We're a Reformed Baptist Church here in Central Arkansas, and with me is Pastor Samuel Farag, and should I ask you before your church's name?

Bethel Baptist Church of Gorham, New York.

Bethel Baptist Church, and Pastor Samuel is the author of his new book, it's how I got connected with him, of Eastern Orthodoxy Through the Eyes, or Through the Lens of Soul Scripture, is that right? Okay, I should know, working with him, and for Free Grace Press, that has been a phenomenal seller.

Heard tons of great feedback. I think it's really been a help. When you wrote that, did you think of, I mean, what's your measure of the success here?

The whole step, I've been blown away, from the people who endorsed it, and supported it, and have been praying for it, to the amount of people who have been able to utilize it, and share with me how it's been helpful in their own journey, whether helping certain people make decisions, or ministering to other people.

I'm just completely in awe of it all, especially when I know who I was myself, and when I used to be in school, I used to struggle with even reading at a very young age, and everything, and to see the Lord uses those who are weak to do His will.

So I'm just very thankful to be used by Him in any way.

The Need to Address Eastern Orthodoxy

So I'll make a couple comments. One, when that came across my desk, as it were, and I saw that we were gonna do that, I thought to myself, huh, of course I didn't know who you were, so I was just thinking, huh, I don't, is that really something that is a need right now?

Like, because I'm just completely oblivious, and apparently it's a huge need, because that has been such a great seller, and so that's pretty amazing. I just, I didn't realize how much of an issue it was of evangelicals even seeking to move into that.

Yeah, and being part of Village Missions, and being part of a ministry that's about missionaries in rural areas, to have other people in very rural areas coming to me and saying, hey, we're having this problem in our church, that's when, for me, it was also a huge wake-up call.

Like, this is actually infiltrating many different areas, and it's a big problem that we as a church need to address. So I'm very happy to see also others starting to get involved in the process, and people like Dr. James White addressing this issue and having debates and everything.

So it's a blessing that others are starting to see the need to address this.

Amen, yeah. The other thing, and our mutual friend, Jeff Player, may not want me to say it, but I'm just gonna say it. The other thing, hopefully he doesn't listen to the podcast. The other thing is, pick up this book, Eastern Orthodoxy Through the Lens of Sola Scriptura, but I can tell you pretty confidently that I think it's gonna be on a pretty good Black Friday sale.

So by the time this comes out, if you need to get it, I think this will come out, oh, this will come out late September. So you're talking about November, maybe six weeks or so. So if you need to get it, go ahead and grab it.

But if you can hold out, I'm pretty sure Free Grace Press is gonna have a good sale. Of course, you can get it on audio. And I think there was some issues with Kindle, but have we got that going back, right?

So we have the Kindle on the Free Grace Press website, but on Amazon itself, it's been an issue because it's been attacked because the other side, they would prefer the information to be silenced is the best way to put it.

But yeah, we're still working out the issues of Amazon.

Yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, I invited you. And by the way, would you, well, so let's say someone wants to hear more about your story. They wanna hear more about Eastern Orthodoxy, this sort of stuff. Do you, could you recommend like, I know you've been on tons of podcasts recently.

Do you wanna recommend a couple that someone, if they wanna know that aspect of you, can you give them somewhere that they could go and check that out?

Yeah, if they do a search, say for example, on YouTube, a lot of the different interviews and podcasts that I've been a part of will pop up. And a few of the ones that pop up on the top are real good ones if you wanted to know a little bit.

Also, if you go to American Gospel TV, that lays out a 10-part teaching series. And the first episode does a little introduction on myself. And the rest of it focuses on the different issues. A lot of it is what's gonna be touched in the book.

So if you prefer a video format, there's American Gospel TV is a good place to look for certain videos on that.

Actually, some of that's on the Free Grace Press website, isn't it? Correct, yes. If they go to the Free Grace Press website and pull up your book, Eastern Orthodoxy, they can look through that. But I wanted to have you on the podcast because we share a commonality in that we're both rural church pastors.

And this is, after all, the rural church podcast. So I thought it'd just be a fun time to just get to talk with you, get your mind away from the Eastern Orthodoxy stuff and pounded with that. And let's just talk about why we love the church, why you love the rural church.

The Gospel: Sin, Substitution, and Saving Faith

But as we ease into this, I'm gonna give you just a softball question. So instead of dealing with all the Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, all the false things that we could deal with, why don't we start out, and you, brother, just lay out for us here in a couple minutes, what is the gospel?

That's a great question. So in order to talk about the gospel, we really gotta go to the very beginning. So you see that God created everything and everything he created was good. But man fell because they wanted to be like God.

And we have to realize that the cost of sin is death. And Adam being our federal head meant that all of us are guilty. And the reality is, even if you look at all our lies, every single one of us is sinful.

Even one little lie is considered treason against the most high God, and that's a death sentence. So that's the story at a certain point, and that's the bad news right there, is that every single one of us, if left to our own, would be doomed to go to hell.

But the beautiful part is even amongst the folly, go all the way back in Genesis, you see it. There was a promise that the Messiah would come. So we look in the Old Testament, they were looking forward to the coming of that Messiah.

And in the New Testament, we see that with Jesus Christ coming down, the Messiah finally coming, rejected by his people, but he lived the perfect life. And that's one of the important things that we have to realize is that he lived the perfect life and he was obedient to his father and he took our place on the cross.

What we deserve, that wrath that we deserve for whoever puts their trust in him, he took their place on the cross. So the important thing is that we believe in the Jesus of the Bible, not just any Jesus that anyone promotes, because there's a lot of false Jesuses out there, but to believe the Jesus of the Bible, to believe that he truly came down, that he physically rose from the dead, that he is coming back again, to believe in that message and to surrender to that message and to understand that what belief means is not just an intellectual understanding.

The demons have an intellectual understanding. They know that he is Lord, but the important thing is, yes, you have to understand that fact, but to actually surrender to him so he is your own personal Lord and Savior.

And for those who surrender their lives to him, they will live in eternity with him. They will be truly saved, saved from God's wrath. So that's the sparks notes of the gospel message from hearing the bad news, but also understanding the beautiful good news.

And as believers, we wanna share that message with those who will hear that in this world.

Amen. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Amen. It's good. I like Joe Beeky's sort of what I'd call experiential, Calvinism, the idea that you have to know Christ experientially, not just, it's not just this cold clinical theology or whatever, but so it's good, brother.

I appreciate that. So tell us a little bit about your church. How long you been there? What do you guys got going on? What do you love about serving? I mean, you're in New York, and I think for the average person, at least me anyway, I do know a little bit better because I know that there's rural portions of New York, but for the average person, when you hear New York, you think, oh, you're in a metropolis.

So tell us about rural New York and your church and just how things are going.

Village Missions and the Rural Church

Yeah, yeah. So we've been here for over four years. I'm actually part of a mission organization called Village Missions. And what Village Missions does is they send pastors to be full-time pastors in rural areas, in places where a church wouldn't be able to afford a pastor themselves.

So we live off of support. And also their areas, and this is the important part, is that if that church closes down, there's no gospel witness in that area. So you'll actually see, if you actually look at the map of where all the Village Mission churches are, they're not even in the South, in the Bible Belt, because typically there, even if it was a church that closed down, within a close distance, you'll find another Bible-believing church because there's so many of them.

But in our area here, for example, that wouldn't be the case. The churches that are directly in our vicinity, unfortunately, do not teach the gospel message. So the area that we're at is Western New York.

So we are about 45 minutes from Rochester, about two hours from Buffalo. So yeah, very rural area here. We have a large Amish and Mennonite community. So you'll be seeing horse and buggies passing by.

Even as I'm doing my sermon prep work in my office, I'll hear horse and buggy passing on by. So it's a very rural area here and beautiful in the fall. We're actually in the Finger Lakes area. So we're in between two of the Finger Lakes.

So very beautiful area in the fall, intense winters. But praise the Lord, they know how to handle the snow pretty well. I used to live in Texas. So like every other year, you might get some snow and just a little bit of snow would shut down everything.

But by here, they get massive amounts of snow and it gets really cold, but praise the Lord, they're pretty good at getting the roads cleared up pretty quickly and everything. So it's a beautiful area here, but the challenge in this area specifically is it's identified as the burnt over district.

So this is the area, if you look back at the second great awakening, where Charles Finney came in and he had some bad theology and he would get people all excited to be saved at the expense of not giving the full truth.

And a lot of it was experiential. A lot of what you see in very charismatic prosperity churches. He would call people up to the very front of the pews and kind of reach out people and trying to get them to make an emotional decision.

But why they call it the burnt over district is he'd get people excited, they would convert and then he would leave to go to the next place. There was no discipleship and that was a breeding ground for false teachings.

And that's why for us within about a half hour from where we are is Palmyra, which is where the birthplace of Mormonism. And in fact, interhistory who was second to Joseph Smith actually came from Gorham, New York.

So that's actually one of the things we actually deal with a lot of actually false religion here with Mormons in this area because a lot of people go to their holy sites just a half an hour from where we are.

But a lot of other false religions have come here. So you bring up the word Christ in this area. They have a very negative idea of him. It's a very dark area spiritually. I've even had certain people say, not to me, but to others who had shared it to me that, oh, I shouldn't even try in this area because it's such a dark area.

But we know that Christ can do the impossible and we're gonna come here and continue sharing the gospel and continue loving on people in this area. But significant prayers are definitely needed in this area.

A lot of people here are into the new age. They're into being spiritual, but they wanna avoid having an actual relationship with the Lord.

Defining the Biblical Jesus

Yeah, I think you said something earlier in your gospel presentation that I've circled back to it here. The thing is so important because I'm actually gonna, I'm actually in God's providence preaching something similar this week.

But in Acts 9, Paul begins to preach and he's preached Jesus saying he is the son of God. And preaching, one of the comments I wanna make in the sermon is just talking about the name Jesus in and of itself, without being the right Jesus.

In and of itself, the name Jesus is not powerful unless we're talking about the right Jesus. And we have some of those similarities here. We have Mormons, we have Jehovah's Witness. You could say the name Jesus, even within the context of, and I know that there's a lot of overlap with Roman Catholicism in some, at least in Christology and the Trinity and those things.

But still, even with that, there's problems with just saying the name Jesus without defining who the real biblical Jesus is.

Yeah, I always like to point out that if you actually look at the golden calf, they actually named the golden calf in the Old Testament Yahweh. Yeah. And they even gave the golden calf credit for getting them out of Egypt.

So getting some facts right and saying that you believe in Jesus doesn't mean you actually believe in the true Jesus. And that's why when someone says, hey, I believe in Jesus. Okay, well, tell me, who is this Jesus you believe in?

Like, which Jesus do you believe in? And the only Jesus that can save is the Jesus from the scriptures.

Amen, amen. So tell me, in four years at your church, what kind of things have you seen? Anything that's been encouraging to you? Or, I mean, if you wanna share, discouraging?

Church Revitalization and Blessed Subtraction

Yeah. Well, I'll start off a little bit of discouraging at first. One of the first things that happened was you saw a decrease in the church, which was already small itself. But you saw a decrease because people wanted to hear a feel-good message.

Wow. And they would even say, oh, it sounds like you're teaching an angry Jesus, but we're just going through the gospel of Luke. So there was a decrease. And for the most part, this is not always the case, but one of the advantages of being in a small church is you're very close with the people there.

And we actually know almost all the reasons why, like when everybody left, they've given us kind of a reason why. And all the reasons of why people left were unbiblical reasons that we couldn't change.

So we understood that the reason that majority of people were leaving, they were looking for something that didn't align with what scripture said. And it got pretty thin at a certain point, but in God's providence at his time, because we're not looking for, and this is one of the reasons why I love Village Missions.

We do have our reports that we put together and we send every month, but they never look at the actual numbers. They're really looking at the spiritual growth. And that's what we've seen. Though the physical numbers went down, the amazing part was tithes and offerings actually stayed the same, if not increased actually.

And then you saw the spiritual growth of people also increasing from who the people were when we first got here till now. We've seen massive significant growth spiritually, which is amazing. And we've actually now seen other people come, one of which is a person who actually even came from Jehovah's Witness and he's become a dear friend, but he also experienced a false religion.

And he's now with us at the church here. So many different people coming from different backgrounds. Some people come from a Catholic background. There's a lot of Catholicism in our area too here. And almost every person in our congregation, whether themselves or they have family members, they've experienced some type of false religion, but the people who are here, they want the truth.

They're seeking to go deeper into scriptures. And that's been extremely encouraging as we're serving here is that we're really seeing people hungry for the gospel. And that's what we've been praying for even before we knew which field we were going to because Village Missions chooses where you're gonna be sent off to.

And we were in Texas at the time. And we knew that we were going somewhere, but we didn't know exactly where, but we were just praying, Lord, wherever you send us, may they be hungry for the gospel, to prepare their hearts before we even get there.

And to see that happening is extremely encouraging.

Yeah, amen. One thing, I mean, we didn't talk about this before, so I don't know necessarily where you might stand and I don't know, maybe our church context may be a little different, but the fact that you're sort of in kind of like a revitalization sort of project.

I mean, that's how I've seen this. But one thing I think that we don't do well sometimes is we have a long range view, which I think is good, but sometimes we come in and we're just gonna tiptoe, tiptoe.

I mean, look, you gotta be wise. Don't come in like a bull in a china cabinet. I get all that, but you've gotta come in and you've gotta preach the truth. And you have to understand that in preaching the truth, God's gonna do some things with that.

And sometimes, like you said, sometimes it's gonna be weeding people out, but, and of course I don't know any of these people or anything like that, but what I'm saying is sometimes when God removes the right people, it does a beautiful thing to the rest of the church that you didn't even know.

I mean, if you're coming into it, you're wanting everybody to stay, but you realize as God is sovereign over that church that His moving folks around is sometimes answering your prayer in a way that you weren't expecting.

Yes, I've heard it said a blessed subtraction. Yes, sir. And really, and again, it's not like a personal thing against certain people who leave. And again, some people who leave, they may have different reasons or even preferences, but if you're leaving because of, especially because of the gospel issue and there's conflict there, well, in order for, if a person stays in that congregation, they'll actually cause more division.

So you find that when they're not there, you see this greater unity. And in fact, that's what we've seen. In the beginning, there was some tension of different ideology that conflicted with the gospel.

And once those people decided to find other places, you saw a unity there. You saw a stronger bond together. You saw that things were much more peaceful in that sense. You're always gonna have certain conflicts come up in a church, but you saw a united family that was like-minded and it's a beautiful thing.

Amen, yeah, that's encouraging. Do you guys, kind of a double question here, but one is kind of like the state of New York, because when I think of New York, I think pretty liberal ideology. And of course, it's no secret that New York City elected the Muslim mayor and then, so what's it like in that context?

And then also, does that make it particularly challenging in evangelistic sort of things?

Or what about that? Yeah, so definitely in this area here, there's a lot of people who are liberal and progressive, but I would say it's different from the city. I used to, before I lived in Texas, I actually lived in New York and in, New York closer to the city, I should say.

So I used to work in Brooklyn. So a lot of experience in the city. So it's not, it feels like a completely different atmosphere including the political climate. I would say here, it's almost 50 -50, maybe leaning even a little bit more on the conservative side with most people here.

A lot of people here are farmers and everything, but you also have people who, they travel to go to the city, whether to go to Rochester or Syracuse for work. And in this area here, so though you'll run into a decent amount of liberalism, you have a lot of people who are conservative, but sometimes they're conservative, but without Christ, like Christless conservatives.

So you see that a lot where, though we may agree on certain things politically, and they may even look positively on Christianity, they themselves are not true believers or they may identify as Christian, but not actually truly practice it.

So that's what you see in the area here. But yeah, I would say it leans a little bit more conservative. And though New York City is part of the same state, they do definitely feel like they're a distant relative in a sense.

Yeah, I hear you.

No, no, no. Yeah, I mean, we don't even, I mean, our whole state, the whole state of Arkansas has 3 million people. So we're not even anywhere close to you guys, but there is at least some parallels in the sense that anytime you kind of get in a more urban area, it's a little bit different kind of Arkansas.

So like the Northwest part of the state, Fayetteville area is pretty, fairly more progressive liberal leaning, whereas out here, it's a little different. Out here on the outskirts of Toadstook, that's a real town, by the way, or a real community, I should say.

Yeah. So what are you preaching through right now? The gospel of Luke. So when I first got to the church

Okay, you're still on Luke, okay. Yeah, when I first got to the church, it was, I actually went through 1 John. And the reason I went through 1 John is because it really lays out what is a true believer.

And I figured, let's get that out there from the very beginning. And then I wanna go through the gospels, well, Luke, and then, and because of Luke, you have the synoptic, so you're actually covering a lot of Matthew and Mark and still bringing in some parts of John.

And then probably go into one of the epistles and then go to Acts. So I really wanna go through with the church, the gospel and Acts all together, and basically cover that narrative as a church together.

Preaching, Teaching, and Discipleship in a Rural Church

Amen. So tell me about what your week looks like as far as teaching and preaching. Are you just, I saw you have a Sunday school, right? And then you have preaching. So how much preaching and teaching are you doing during the week?

So on the Sundays, it's usually me who's doing the preaching. Every once in a while, I'll have a guest preacher come in. I'll do the Sunday school. We actually took a break for a little bit and we resumed it back.

So I'll usually do the Sunday school. And then we have Bible study that we have every first and third Saturday, actually at the Parsonage, we'll come together. The first hour, we'll have some games and snacks.

And then the next hour, we're actually going through Acts through the Bible study. Amen. So it's pretty busy. I'd, of course, love to see more. We've tried to do some things midweek, but one of the problems is because it's a small community here, you have people who are working on farms and everything.

So they're busy. And then you have people who are in the city. So the schedules here are kind of tough. But once we moved the Bible study to the weekend, that helped a little bit to have more people able to come and everything to different studies.

Yeah, no, amen. That's good.

Church Affiliation and Biblical Church Governance

So you guys, your church, are you guys affiliated with any Baptist organization or are you just kind of independent? Yeah, we're not affiliated with anything. That's one of the things with village missions.

When they partner, when the church partners up with village missions, they try to make sure the church is not affiliated with any specific group. And so the only main group that we're actually associated with is a village mission.

So not any certain type of Baptist. You would say belief-wise as a Baptist church, be similar to say like an SBC church in a certain way. I myself am a Reformed Baptist, but not everyone there is Reformed Baptist.

Does a church have a confession or a statement or anything?

Yeah, we have a constitution that lays out the beliefs of the church and everything. And one of the first things that I did early on when I came here was to update the constitution to make sure it was very clear like where we stood on the definition of a marriage and a biblical definition.

And even clarifying certain things, it was interesting. They're like certain things they never clarified because they didn't think they needed to. But we have to make it very clear. Okay, only a male can serve as a pastor and we had to clarify certain things and put it in with scriptural references.

But we did update the constitution to make sure everything was biblical. And also it protected that in the future that it would be that protection to preserve a biblical understanding of things. Because in order to change the constitution, you need a unanimous vote.

So, and that was again, also part of God's providence in it all. I didn't think of it until afterwards, but with the removal of certain people who had different views, when it came time to change the constitution, we were so like-minded as a church, it was actually a very smooth process.

Yeah, amen. Well, what would you say is the most exciting thing about what's going on right now? Just, you know, maybe you wanna talk about ministry or maybe your church specifically, or what is the Lord doing in your life that gets you up, ready to go?

Hungry for Expository Preaching

To see people who get excited for the gospel, who for so many years felt like they were hungry and seeking to go deeper, like to hear that from people and say, yeah, we were praying that we would find, like our church would go deeper into the word and to have that and to see that they feel like their prayers were heard, that's so encouraging to see and to see people excited for the gospel.

That's just a beautiful thing, because I remember when I was in Texas, I saw certain people saying, I believe it was Vody, he was releasing like where he was preaching and a person said, well, how come he doesn't come to the Northeast here?

We need more expositional preachers to come and visit here. And he says, well, actually, they just don't get a lot of requests in this area here, which is, so to see people getting excited, they wanna really go deep in scripture.

Like one of the people who came and visited the church said, hey, does your preacher preach expositionally? Like, that's a great question to hear and to see that there are people who are paying attention to that.

They are looking for that verse by verse type of preaching. I find that very encouraging. And I'm part of a group called the Reformation Society of Western New York. And though they are a little more spread out, there are other like-minded pastors in the Western New York area.

And that's a huge encouragement to know that there are brothers who are also into weeds, who are also in the front lines, sharing God's truth, being faithful. So that was a great encouragement. Because when I first got there, it did very much feel like you're completely by yourself because in the immediate vicinity area, there weren't many faithful churches, but you go out a little bit more, you find that there are other people who are dealing with similar challenges and they're like-minded and they're sharing God's truth.

So that was a great encouragement for me.

So how far, I was trying to look up here. How far are you guys from, do you know Nick White? How far are you from Hamburg? Yes, yeah, Nick White.

I'm not exactly sure how far he is, but he's relatively close. In fact, I connected with Nick White online and then when I was at the Shepherds Conference, spoke to him and realized how close we were.

And then I had a few conferences that I was speaking in the area here.

And he actually came in support and everything. So yeah, I love Nick White. So I think he's a faithful brother. Nick's been on here a couple of times. Years ago, Nate Pikowitz was on and I don't know how far you would be from him.

And then I don't know if you know, do you know Jacob Tanner?

He's in Pennsylvania. Yes, yeah, yeah, I know Jacob.

Yeah, he's Well, of course, Nate's in, what? Is it New Hampshire? New Hampshire thing? Anyway, but all up there, if you're down in the South, you know how it is. You're down in the South, all that up there is the same.

You know? Exactly, right? Yeah. Yeah, in that area. But what's cool is, so I know there's gotta be so many more faithful brothers, but what I'm saying is what's cool is just me immediately off the top of my head, men that I've known, spoke with, shook their hands.

I know that there are a handful of faithful brothers that are preaching the true gospel. And that's encouraging. It's great to know that you're connected. And I think, I don't know how you'd say it, but I think that there should be a warning because the South, we kind of lag behind culturally.

And if we're not careful, we're gonna be the burned over district too if we keep accepting this anemic Christianity and don't care about doctrinal preaching. And then all that happens is in a hundred years, we look like what's going on there.

I don't know if you have any comment, thoughts about that.

No, I see that a lot. When we were in Texas, I remember it was a lot of huge mega churches and a lot of these churches. And again, not that the church is big, makes it bad or anything, but a lot of them that are big, you're attracting certain people who are, they're tickling certain people's ears.

So that is a huge concern because if you have that over time, it will be destructive. And a lot of these people were to have a church that's based off of a person's personality or a person. If that person has a moral failing, well then that church and then the satellite churches, which I have a huge issue with the whole entire concept of satellite churches and all that, they all fall down.

So if we're not careful and we make things, but oh, we don't have to be so strict on doctrine. We know that historically that has always been destructive and certain denominations that have gone in that direction have suffered loss in that.

But for those who stay faithful and stay firm, they tend to stay solid even when the cultures and everything changes. So there's always reliability and standing in the firmness of God's truth. Amen, amen.

Encouragement for Rural Pastors

Well, that's a good place to kind of, we'll kind of wrap it up here, but there's, I have several pastors that reach out to me periodically. They listen to the podcast and that's encouraging. You know, this isn't a big podcast, but we do have a pretty good nucleus of pastor friends and folks that listen to it.

So you have their ear for just a minute here. And what do you want to say to them? This is a wide variety of people, a wide variety of churches, but what would you want to say to those pastors? Like what would you give them an exhortation, encouragement, something like that?