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[Music]
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This is Undaunted Life a Man's Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
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Hi guys, today we've got a special guest on the podcast. Her name is Alyssa Childers.
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So she is a former contemporary Christian music recording artist turned Christian apologist.
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So I've never found one of those before. So it's a pretty awesome conversation.
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She was a part of the all female Christian pop music group Zoe Girl back in the day. So
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if you were like a 13 year old girl in the early 2000s, you probably knew about Zoe Girl.
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After her music career, she found her way into the world of Christian apologetics and she is an
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outspoken opponent of what a lot of people would call what she would call progressive Christianity.
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So she's the author of the book Another Gospel, a lifelong Christian seeks truth in response to
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progressive Christianity. Now, this was a very, very interesting interview to me because I circled
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this one on the calendar for whatever reason. I felt like we were going to have an amazing
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conversation because again, you guys know my standards when we have gals come on the podcast,
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they've got to be gangsters. They've got to have a way of speaking that is going to speak to my
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predominantly male audience. And Alyssa certainly fits that bill. But if you saw the notes for my
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interview versus what we actually ended up talking about, you would know that the interview went
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well because we kept running into subject matters. I was like, no, no, we've got to talk about this
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more. We've got to take this to bedrock. We've got to keep going. I really, really enjoyed my time
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with her. We're going to have her own again later on this year to talk some more about some other
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books and some other things that she has going on. But this is a great one for you guys for today.
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So without further ado, let's get into it. Alyssa Childers, welcome to on Dawn to life a man's podcast.
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Great to be with you. Well, I was just telling you off air. I've been looking forward to this one
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for a while now because here's the thing. This is a man's podcast, the overall majority of the
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people that listen to this and my guests are male. But when we bring a gal on, there's only one thing
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they got to make sure that they do and that's be a gangster. And I feel like between, you know,
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some of the things we talk about off air and some of the things we're going to be talking about,
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I feel like my audience is going to agree with my assessment of you. But before we get into some
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of those really, really rough topics, we need to start small and start easy. Give us a little bit
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of information on your upbringing on your childhood. Just kind of establish the foundation for Alyssa.
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Well, thank you. It's an honor to join the Boys Club for a little while here. I'll do my best.
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So my background, I grew up in Los Angeles, California. I've been a Christian my whole life.
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My mom and dad, you know, gave me the real gospel. They modeled an authentic Christianity for me.
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And part of that meant they were reading the Bible with us and, you know, repenting in front of us
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and to us and praying with us. But also, we did a lot of homeless ministry. We did a lot of
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street evangelism growing up. So my dad would take us out to Hollywood Boulevard on Halloween.
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And we would share the gospel with people. So in that sense, I didn't grow up in a Christian bubble,
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but I just I never really had tested my faith intellectually. So that wouldn't come so much
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later, but a little bit more about my background. So my dad was in what is arguably the first
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Christian rock band to ever gain nationwide success. So this was back in the 70s when he and a
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bunch of his hippie friends all got saved in the Jesus movement. And so I kind of grew up with a
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dad who toured a lot. I got to travel a lot. I followed in his footsteps and was a part of the
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Christian pop group Zoe girl between about 1999 and 2007 or eight. And then so I moved to Nashville
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in 99. And then this apologetics thing I'm doing now and is brand new and never saw that coming
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because I've never viewed myself as an intellectual. I've always been much more of a flaky artist. And
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so that's what I'm doing now, the writing books. And I've been called a professional party pooper.
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So that's kind of what I do now. Well, when I was reading your books, that's all I felt the
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entire time. I was like, she's just raining on my parade. No, that's obviously not what we're
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going to be talking about. But we are going to get way, way, way more into some of those things
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that you talked about. But you didn't mention Zoe girl. So you're right there smack dab and the,
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you know, contemporary Christian music industry. And we're not really going to get into the industry.
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Everybody has their own opinions on it. But what I want to kind of address is on episode 176 of
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this podcast, no reason I know that's because I'm asked about it constantly. I did an episode
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called contemporary worship music is for women and effeminate men. And it is something that I wanted
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to talk about for a very, very long time, because me and a lot of guys like me, they when they listen
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to contemporary Christian music or when they're at church and that's being sung. And you know,
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I don't really understand music, but it's a little too high for their vocal range and all these
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different things. A lot of guys just sit there with their hands in their pockets. And they don't
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know why they're not like getting into it. There's something wrong with them. I had a worship
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pastor tell me that I wasn't saved because I didn't listen to, you know, contemporary Christian music.
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And so for you having been in the industry, but obviously you still pay attention. I'm assuming
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that's still kind of part of your playlist. I don't know if Zoe girl still part of your
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playlist that seems a little self serving, but like maybe that that's something like tell us a
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little bit about that because I'm not alone. And that's been the overwhelming thing I've gotten from
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guys is Kyle, you gave a voice to something that I've been worried about since I was a kid. I just
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can't get into this music. Okay, so you're about you opened a big can with me on let's go. Let's go.
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So I have some thoughts on this topic. I actually up until COVID, I was a worship leader at a church
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where I was an artist in residence situation. So every four to six weeks I would travel to this
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church and I would do all the music for the weekend. And it you I didn't have I couldn't do
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everything I wanted. You know, if I could wave a magic wand, I would have probably done things
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different. But you know, as a learning experience, but one of my frustrations was exactly what you're
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describing. But I actually felt like you what you're describing a lot of the music that we would
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seeing a lot of the songs that were in the rotation. And these were just, you know, the songs that all
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the churches are doing were extremely frustrating to me. And even as the worship leader up on a stage,
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I felt myself struggling to to get into it and to feel what I'm apparently supposed to be feeling
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while I'm singing these songs. And so I did a bit of analysis on it just in my own mind.
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And I think that part of the problem is that, first of all, this whole this whole topic of
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modern worship, the way that it's evolved, it's like a brand new thing. There's no biblical precedent
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for what we do in most churches on a Sunday morning. And what I mean by that is, of course,
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we know we have the songs him spiritual songs. And then there's there's evidence in church history
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of there being the singing and that type of thing. But this whole concept of get on a stage with,
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you know, put on a basically a rock concert for 20 or 30 minutes before the pastor preaches,
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that's something we've come up with. I'm not saying that that in and of itself is wrong.
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But that is something that we have invented along with, you know, the contemporary Christian music
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industry. In fact, I mentioned my dad, often people will say, well, he was a founder or pioneer
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of the contemporary Christian music industry. And I'm always kind of like, no, he's actually
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not because none of those guys ever saw that as being a career. They didn't think you could make
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money or become famous. They were singing their Jesus songs. And then it turned into an industry
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that I don't think any of them were planning on or foresaw. So you have the mix of
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being a part of an industry that is primarily a money making industry. So most of the Christian
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record labels are owned by secular companies. I think that's a bit different in the worship realm.
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But even in my experience of being in the Christian music industry, whatever sort of lyrical thing
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that's popular, that's what the writers are pressed to write more of. So again, I've been out of the
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industry for 2020. No, I don't know how many years I'm really bad at math, but it's been a while.
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But back when I was in the industry, they had this model of a person they were marketing the music
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to and this was a woman named Becky. So Becky was a soccer mom in a van and she's one you're
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marketing your music to. So this swings around to your idea of the feminization of worship music.
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So Becky listens to a lot of worship music. And so what I noticed happened maybe 20 years ago when
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the worship industry started to emerge was that songs started to move away from declaring the
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attributes of God. I mean, think about how great they are. Think about a mighty fortress is our God.
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It moved away from that and it moved more into how I feel when I'm worshiping God.
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The problem with that is that not everybody feels that way when they walk into church.
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So when I'm expected to start the worship service singing a song about how great it makes me feel
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to sing this song about God, but I don't actually feel that way. Then I feel like I'm
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being disingenuous and then I have this whole internal struggle with the entire worship set.
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And so as a worship leader, I wish that worship leaders would get back to actual worship, which
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doesn't have to be with smoke machines and lights and all that stuff, but just get up and sing about
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the attributes of God and worship him. And I think we would see more men becoming involved in that.
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Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull's bend.
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And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.
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I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow.
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Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more.
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9:44
Go to linkedin.com/campaign terms and conditions apply.
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So I opened up the can of worms and you took us way down the rabbit hole, so we're going to stay
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here. No, we're staying here because this is important. I'm going to blow up the rest of my
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interview. But a few notes that I was jotting down as you were talking is I can tell because I'm
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like, I'm very critical of how people present themselves. That's kind of my training. That's kind
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of my background. So I'm very critical of myself and how I present myself. But I can tell whenever
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you're trying to manipulate me with music, whenever you do the bridge and then the bridge again,
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and then you do the bridge bridge bridge and then another bridge and then the course. And then
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we're going to crescendo. We're going to create this environment. And there are people that literally
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are on staff at churches to help the spirit move during worship to help, you know, and for me,
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we've created an industry of giving out spiritual skittles. And so you go to the mega church,
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you're there for an hour. It's, it's efficient. You know, you find your parking place, you know,
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a golf cart takes you inside. And you know, you grab your chips and your cookies and you go in
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there and you get your rock concert. And then you get your TED talk with a few Bible verses
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sprinkled on top, you know, we're I suggesting all the scripture as opposed to ex-egeting it
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and all those things. And it becomes a massive issue when these people think that they're doing
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what is honoring to God in that moment. And it's like, you have no idea. Like, I went to one of
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those churches for over 10 years here in my backyard. And I didn't grow at all because I wasn't
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being discipled. It was one of those things that was, that was very unnerving for me to kind of go
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through. But to talk about that a little bit more, because the other thing I know is that in a lot
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of these worship bands, the only actual Christian might be the lead singer, the person with the,
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you know, the acoustic guitar and the type pants on. And the rest are just professional musicians
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that they're just getting paid to do sessions, you know, five, six, seven sessions over the weekend.
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And it does, like, I know that and it distracts me so much. So I don't know where you want to go
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with that, but keep going. So yeah, let me. So what you're describing with the bridge and the
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bridge and the chorus and then another bridge, I've done that. Like, I just, to admit, I have done
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that. And part of the problem that I experienced as a worship leader is that when you step into that
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role, you're kind of becoming part of a machine that's already well-oiled and kind of going down
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the road. And so you have to find your place in that machine. So I don't know if the average
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person knows this, but with most of the modern worship that you go into a church and you're
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singing in that service, there's backing tracks that are in the ears of the people leading from
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the state, which you don't really have a choice. You have to do that bridge again. And of course,
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if you're doing that model, and sometimes you don't have power over whether or not you're doing
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that model. And so it's, and then, you know, for myself, I was constantly, I found myself in this
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internal struggle because I looked around at the people that I was working with. And these are
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wonderful Christian people. Like, in this case, these were real Christians that they were just
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wanting to do what they thought they were supposed to do to lead people into worship.
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And sometimes we had great worship experiences. So I don't mean to like throw the whole thing
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under the bus, but it was a bit frustrating for me because I always had this woman in my ears,
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we called her Edna, because she sounded like this junk lady smoke in a cigarette like car.
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And so Edna is like screaming in your ears. And it's very hard to get into a posture of worship
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with, you know, a drunk lady yelling in your ears, but we'll see next. But it's like this machine.
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And then there's people who are hired to train other people how to do this thing that I'm sitting
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or going, maybe we should question why we're doing it this way in the first place. I mean,
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some of the most meaningful times of worship I've ever experienced were when a guy just got up
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with a guitar and saying, "Hems." And, you know, I'm not a hymn sob. I think that there's some great
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modern hymns that people have written. There's even some really great modern worship songs that
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people have written lyrically. But I'm like you. When I feel like I'm being manipulated,
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it's such a turn off. And then what happens is, because I want to do the right thing,
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I have this internal struggle. And then I spend the rest of the worship time fighting with myself
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inside, trying to be cooperative with what they're doing, but also like not wanting to compromise
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what really feels wrong. Right. And it absolutely makes sense. And one thing I did with that
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episode is I introduced people to things like Christian metal. So bands like For Today or
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Oh, Sleeper or any of these bands that when you read the lyrics, it's like reading a modern worship
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song, except we're storming the gates of hell, right? We're not talking about this Jesus guy,
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like he's some sort of like soft feature Danish guy that we're just going to embrace into our
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bosom and any cutie wootsie in the whole time. Like, it's aggressive. And that's how I worship,
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right? Now, there's not a whole lot of churches that are going to go out on a limb and have that
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style of music being played from the stage. That is a niche audience. But the concern I have, and
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guys, I've already said it, we're blowing up this entire interview, because like, we have to keep
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going to bedrock on this. I feel like we're worshiping worship, right? Because when you hear people talk
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about, Hey, are you an elevation person? Or are you a Bethel person? Or are you still a Hillsong
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person? And I think they're just they're not even calling themselves Hillsong United. They're just
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Hill or Hillsong or something. And it's like, they're you're I've I've heard people and I've heard
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myself say it if I'm being honest, man, I really like that church, but I just couldn't get into the music,
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right? When it's like, church is not about you. The Bible's not about you. The worship set
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shouldn't be about you and your preferences. But at the same time, I think this back ends to
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modern church being very, very repulsive of men. When men show up at these churches,
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you know, the church staff is shocked when men don't volunteer. And you know, men aren't there,
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but their wives and kids are and they're off playing golf or at the shooting range or you're
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getting ready for fancy football draft or anything like that. But it's like when the church keeps
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communicating to a man, this isn't for you. We didn't have you in mind when we built out this lessons,
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you know, this series, we didn't have you in mind when we thought through the music and the song
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choice and all those different things. A man, if he doesn't feel like he's needed, he will go
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somewhere where he feels needed. And that could be into the arms of another woman. It could be in
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into the garage. It could be into the gym. He'll go somewhere else. And the church is just lament
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that and they love to dunk on dads on Father's Day. But it's like, look, bro, you're the problem.
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You're one of the major reasons why these men aren't coming in here. So I think it has a lot to do
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with the macro issue of manhood being, you know, suppressed in the church. Do you agree with that?
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Yeah, I think that it's a even if it's unintentional, it's a nod to feminism to modern feminism.
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I think that even what I experienced among women who are otherwise godly and they love the Lord,
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but there's this sense in which, oh my gosh, if I say out loud that I don't think a woman should
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teach the Bible to a man on a Sunday morning from a pulpit, that's utterly shocking to most
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to a lot of people. But I think, of course, I think that the roles that God has put us in are
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beautiful and they contribute to everybody thriving when everybody is doing what they're
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supposed to be doing. But I wonder too, as you were talking, I wonder too if there isn't fear,
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because we're seeing a lot of abuse scandals coming out. And I wonder, and there are, I know
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women who have had horrible relationships with the men in their lives. And I think they're scared
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of how do I tell what's an unholy and ungodly type of dominance or masculinity versus what
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God unleashing, what God has actually created men to be. And I think there can be attention
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in a lot of people trying to figure that out, because I had pretty good men in my life for the
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most part, like my dad was, I mean, I always felt like my husband's its way, my dad, man,
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they're my biggest fan, they're cheering me on. They want you to do this, you know, there are no
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limits on what, you know, but a lot of women have grown up, I think, with some men pushing them down
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and not considering their opinion to be important. So there becomes this confusion like, man, when
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a guy talks like that, maybe that's toxic masculinity. And that's just going to oppress me. And there's
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just a lot of confusion, you know? Yeah. So if you weren't going to say it, I was going to say it.
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The funny thing about toxic masculinity is almost every cultural description of it
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is inaccurate, right? Because they're saying, you know, a man opening the door for a woman,
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that's toxic somehow, you know, a man telling somebody else, hey, can you watch your mouth?
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There's a bunch of women in here like that's that's old fashioned. I remember I used to work
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in New York City. And I, you know, people ask me, Kyle, why don't you cuss? Like I've never heard
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you cuss. I was like, well, just because it's like, is that the only word you have available in your
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brain? And it comes out of your face. It just seems really, really uncouth like, why would you do that?
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And I, and they're like, Oh, are you one of those guys that would like tell guys to chill out with
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their mouth if they're around women? It's like, yeah. And they looked at me like I had a boob on the
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top of my head. They're just like, what, what in the world? Like, are you kidding me? I'm so old
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fashioned. But the I love it. I love it though. When men do that, I was taking a my class to get
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my carry permit. So I was the only woman in the class. And the instructor cussed. And you just
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looked at me and said, sorry, ma'am. I love that. It's chivalry. Like, I learned so much from just
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watching my father. And I saw him be chivalrous when this is a man who lost his father when he was
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13. And so we had to kind of find his own way into manhood. And he did it, you know, imperfectly,
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like all of us do. But part of the thing, Elisa is these women that can't tell the difference
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between toxic masculinity and biblical masculinity. It's because they're not reading their Bibles.
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Because that's another thing inside the church is like, we pay a professional Christian to read
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the Bible for us so that we don't have to, right? And we go to church to check the box so that we
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feel better. And so I think that's part of the issue as well. Because you love people love,
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especially atheists, they love to just kind of throw things out there and say, this is why Christianity
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is bad. And you know, look at the Inquisition and look at the Salem witch trials and look at the
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Crusades. And it's like, are you really judging a worldview based off of its abuse? Like, on what
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planet does that make any philosophical sense? But you say it on Twitter and people like, oh,
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sounds really, really good. Because they're just a dumb seal. And they're like, they'll just say,
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yes, anything. But do you feel like there is that because I noticed it even in myself.
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I've got a stack of Bibles here that sometimes I have to blow the dust off of them before I dig
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into them again. But why do we do that as kind of a modern Christian whenever people literally died
19:53
so that we could have a thousand versions of the Bible on our phone and all kinds of ones that are,
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you know, leather bound and sitting right next to us. I think this was a lot of confusion. I think
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biblical illiteracy is a huge problem. It's an epidemic, a real epidemic, it's really real.
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But here's the problem, too. Even if you have people who know the Bible, there are so many people
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out there twisting it into a hundred knots. I think about the Garden of Eden, when the serpent
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says to eat, did God really say, I don't think that's the question that the serpent is typically
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asking anymore. I mean, he's still asking that. But more than that, he's asking and behaving
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like how he behaved with Jesus when Jesus was being tempted in the wilderness. You know,
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of course, Jesus appealing to the authority of scripture to ward off the temptation of the devil.
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Well, the devil quotes scripture back to Jesus, but unlike the situation with Eve,
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he actually quotes it accurately. I believe it was Psalm 91. But what he was twisting wasn't
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what the words were. It's what the words meant. It was interpretation. And so we have this whole
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post-modern culture where everybody's afraid to make any sort of statement or claim to what the
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text could actually objectively mean. I mean, I think it might be shocking to some people,
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I don't know, probably not your audience. But when like when I tell, especially young people,
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when I'm training, I tell them, there's only one correct interpretation of absolutely every
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single Bible verse. Right, correct. And they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, I mean,
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you may not always get to it perfectly, but there is one correct interpretation of every verse.
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And so our goal should be to figure out what that is, not just pick the one we like or
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say, well, I heard this person interpret it that way. So that's just my interpretation. And you can
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have your interpretation. I mean, it's we that's a that is totally bowing our need to post-modernism
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and the deconstruction of texts that we saw come out of the post-modern philosophies of the 60s,
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where, you know, hey, words don't really have singular meanings. So, you know, the interpreter
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has just as much authority to say what it means as the person who initially wrote the text.
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I mean, that's what we see with our Bible. So even in the cases where people do know what it says,
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they're clueless how to figure out what it means. I agree with that. And also,
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we love bumper sticker scripture. We love coffee mug scripture. We like things that we can fit on
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a t-shirt. And the problem is, is when you read the story of David and Goliath and think that you're
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David, right? And Matt Chandler pointed that out a long time when he basically went to Stephen
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Furtick's church and just like took a dump on him. Sorry, that's a little rude. But yeah, I apologize,
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madam for saying something. I was so uncouth there. But like, that is a real thing that people,
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they think that the the one snippet of the scripture was meant specifically for them.
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When in actuality, that scripture might be meant for a specific people group at a specific time in
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history within the context of a larger story. And I don't mean the super hyperlink, you know, Bible,
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where this refers to this and this refers to that necessarily. I just mean, maybe the entire chapter,
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you're pulling out one verse, but maybe you should read the entire chapter to have any idea what
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Paul is actually trying to communicate to. But I sort of goodness, I'm, I'm, we have to get to your
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book, because I thought it was fantastic. So I'm here, I am going on all my diatribes. But we do
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have to talk about this book. Thank you so much for shooting my way. It's called Another Gospel,
23:08
a lifelong Christian seeks truth in response to progressive Christianity. So we're going to pop
23:13
into and out of this, obviously, because I've already messed up my entire interview. But from
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the very, very beginning, there was a quote very early in your book. It said, today, many of the
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most popular Christian authors, bloggers and speakers are progressive. Entire denominations
23:25
are now filled with those who identify as such. Yet many other Christians sit in the pews every
23:29
Sunday, completely unaware that their church has adopted progressive ideology. Now I said this to
23:34
John Cooper, who's a mutual friend of ours, the fight used to be Alisa between atheists and Christians.
23:40
That was the fight, right? How are we going to prove this? And you know, are we going to have
23:44
to use the cosmological argument? Or are we going to have to use experience or we have to deal with
23:47
the problem of evil? That's not the fight anymore. The fight is now biblical Christianity versus
23:53
progressive Christianity, because you can't fight on a divided front. So I can't cosign what these
23:59
progressive Christians are saying and then take that into an argument or a debate with somebody
24:04
who doesn't believe in the spaghetti monster in the sky, as they would call it. Do you agree with
24:09
that? Because I know some people get a little bit, you know, they're like, Oh, we shouldn't be
24:12
disputatious and we should love our brothers and we should avoid the schism that Satan's creating,
24:17
but we can't effectively evangelize in my opinion until we get people on the other side of this
24:22
progressive ideology. No. Oh, don't get me started on. I just got you started. You have to go now.
24:28
We're in it now. Yeah, this whole unity thing. It's like if you this is why, you know, jokingly,
24:34
I was referred to as a party pooper because, you know, if your goal is unity, then you might as well
24:41
just become a universalist. If that's the only goal. I mean, when Jesus prayed for unity, when the
24:46
Bible calls us to unity, it's calling us to unify around the real gospel and anything that threatens
24:52
that or seeks to change that or is trying to pick people off and make them disbelieve that,
24:57
is to be cut off and removed and guarded against. And I think this is so hard for so many Christians
25:03
to think this way because they've been so trained, frankly, just this culture of niceness, you know,
25:08
just so trying to be to be nice. And, and hey, if you go around saying, hey, you know, this,
25:15
this person is actually leading people to hell with their theology. And they're telling people,
25:20
this is a Christian view, we have to stand against that. Then you get accused of, you know,
25:25
not promoting unity. But we have to understand that when the Bible talks about unity, it's unity
25:31
around a very specific thing. And the Apostle Paul, when he talked about divisiveness, he blamed
25:39
divisiveness on those bringing in the false gospels and the heresies, not on the people defending the
25:45
real gospel. I think that you're absolutely right. And for the most part, again, people are unaware,
25:51
they're sitting in the pews and they're unaware because they're not really paying attention. As I
25:54
said earlier, they're just checking a box. But when you go through this in a lot of detail in the
25:58
book, and so that'll be in the show notes, guys, we're not going to be able to get into the whole
26:00
book, obviously. But in another gospel you talked about and you alluded to this from the beginning as
26:04
well, that this all came to a head whenever you kind of joined this class that was taught by a
26:09
progressive Christian pastor. Now at the time, you didn't have the language for progressive Christian
26:14
pastor or any of those things. But there was a major egg flag early in one of these, you know,
26:18
a sessions with this guy, he said he would consider himself a hopeful agnostic. This is a pastor who
26:25
says I would consider myself a hopeful agnostic, which for a guy that didn't grow up in church and
26:30
started going to church on my own as a teenager, trying to figure this out, I didn't, you know,
26:33
get marinated in the Bible stories or something like that. Even I would hear something like that
26:37
and be like, what did you just say? You're a hopeful agnostic, but you're actually a pastor.
26:43
But that was kind of the nexus in the hinge point for the remainder of your book. So give our audience
26:48
a little bit of an idea of this class that you went to and kind of your interactions with this
26:52
progressive pastor. Right. So my husband and I started attending this church after Zoey
26:57
Girl came off the road after we were kind of done with with the music business. And we loved the
27:02
church. And so the pastor invited me to be a part of this class. And in that first class, he said,
27:09
I'm a hopeful agnostic. Well, of course, as you can imagine, this red flag goes up. But you know,
27:14
this was right at the height and the full blossoming of the emergent movement. So you had people like
27:19
Brian McLaren and everybody was sort of thinking. And I knew that I mean, of course, I had a red flag.
27:24
I was not theologically sophisticated then. I was biblically literate. I'd read the Bible
27:30
and studied the Bible my whole life. But I just didn't know much else. And so I thought when that
27:37
red flag came, I thought, well, you know, I'm going to I don't want to be judgmental. So I'm
27:41
going to keep it open mind. Maybe he's just being really honest. But essentially what the class was
27:46
was a tearing down and a deconstructing of all of the precious beliefs that I had held about
27:53
Jesus and God, and especially the Bible, the Bible was under attack more than anything else in this
27:57
class. And so it was much like what you would imagine going off to a secular or even a Christian
28:05
these days, university, and having your faith deconstructed by professors. That's kind of what
28:09
it was like, although I'd let my guard down because this was a church. I mean, I would have had my
28:16
guard up had it been a college or something. But my guard was down because I thought this
28:21
pastor and I were on the same page. But what I found out later, Kyle, that I only found this
28:25
out even after I wrote my book is that he actually in during that time, he had already been through
28:31
deconstruction. And he was intentionally trying to get people into deconstruction so that he could
28:37
convert them to progressive Christianity. And he was really good at it. So while I was in the
28:42
class, I would try to debate with him, whatever the topic was, I go home and I Google stuff. And I
28:47
would kind of push back on it. But there came a point in time when they invited the spouses to come
28:51
to the class. Now, by this point, my husband was used to me coming home saying, Oh my gosh, you
28:57
won't believe what's about this week. But I think when he experienced it for himself, I'll never
29:02
forget we got in the car and he just kind of quietly, he just said, we're done, you're done.
29:09
We're not raising our kids here. And I was honestly really relieved because I was hanging on because
29:15
there were Christians in that small class that had just come into the church. This was their first
29:21
and only experience with Christianity. So I was trying to maybe help them. But my faith was getting
29:27
wrecked. And so it was after that when we were away from the church, that all of those doubts
29:32
began to grow in my own heart. And I was propelled into a deconstruction, I think it's probably more
29:36
accurate to say that pastor deconstructed me. But you know, and we can continue with that story
29:42
if you would like. But I really went through a crisis of faith that that was a deconstruction.
29:47
Although I didn't want that to happen. And I didn't know what that was at that time.
29:50
Right. We're definitely going to get further into that because my hope and my prayer and my
29:54
I'm assuming this is going to happen, that pastor is going to pay for what he's done for
29:59
helping people deconstruct. Because that's one thing that people don't understand about pastors
30:02
is they're going to have to give an account one day to God about how they shepherd at his flock.
30:06
And if you do something like that, I'm assuming it's not going to be a great meeting with father
30:10
God, but it's kind of this growing. So you talked about deconstruction. So we need to talk a little
30:14
bit more about deconstruction, because that's also part of this ex van Jellicle movement.
30:18
deconstructions like this new cool thing to where it's like, I don't know why this is coming to my
30:23
brain, but it's like, when you're in high school and everybody likes this band, but you like that
30:26
band, it's like, Oh, I'm going to be the contrary, and that likes this band. And oh, everyone likes
30:30
that movie, but I don't like that movie. That's what deconstruction feels like. But the interesting
30:34
thing about people that are deconstructing in these progressive Christians, not only do they
30:37
always deconstruct and then become an ex van Jellicle, they become a non believer. How many people do
30:42
you know of that, you know, rebuilt up their faith in a particular way? But my contention is that
30:46
progressive Christians just want to be liked and accepted by the cultural elites. And the cultural
30:50
elites all just so happen to be secular humanists. And so what is the best way to impress a secular
30:56
humanist than to say, Oh, I've deconstructed my faith. And I've gotten rid of all the things that
31:00
don't jive with your worldview. Aren't I so nice? Will you pat me on the head now? Do you feel like
31:05
that? That's kind of what's happened because I feel like this is burst completely out of the
31:09
walls of the church at that point. And we're all over culture. We are now downstream from
31:13
culture and trying to be like it. Part of the problem in the, I'm actually currently writing a
31:17
book about deconstruction. So I'm deep in the weeds of this right now doing the research. I've
31:21
actually met privately via zoom with people who have big platforms in the deconstruction space.
31:28
Some wouldn't meet with us, me and my co-author, but some would. And it's really interesting listening
31:35
to their stories because in my experience with the people I've talked to, many are just like
31:40
what you're describing where it's kind of like they just didn't like that their parents voted
31:45
for Trump or they didn't like that, you know, certain things that in their minds were some sort
31:50
of a moral cause moral confusion for them, which I have theories I think because they've already
31:56
been so influenced by the world that when, but here's the thing that's so interesting.
32:01
Most of the people in the deconstruction space who are still retaining the title Christian,
32:05
which obviously many don't, they'll say, well, I'm just deconstructing the cult, the American
32:12
cultural aspects of my faith, but I'm getting to what authentic Christianity is. But remember,
32:18
we talked about how deconstruction is so closely tied with postmodernism. So in my experience and
32:24
with this research, listening to all the deconstruction stories and even talking with many
32:28
is that you have this phenomenon where they're not trying to identify, even the sincere ones,
32:36
they're not trying to identify authentic Christianity based on what the Bible says,
32:41
they're trying to identify authentic Christianity based on whatever beliefs they perceive to be
32:47
helpful or harmful, oppressive or not oppressive. So when somebody says, oh, no, no, no, I'm just
32:54
deconstructing the cultural aspects, you need to ask more questions because you need to say, well,
33:00
what are those cultural beliefs that you're deconstructing to get to authentic Christianity?
33:05
And there's going to be two things that are very often said, number one, substitutionary
33:10
atonement, because that is being marketed as a belief that was invented to control people,
33:16
to strike fear in people, to basically to control and to prop up these white supremacist systems,
33:24
so that I hear a lot. And then the other one is the issue of sexuality. I'm deconstructing
33:30
the idea that God wouldn't fully affirm LGBTQ+ and all of that in trans ideology and radical
33:37
gender theory. And so when you actually ask the questions, you realize, oh, no, they're
33:43
deconstructing real Christianity also. So only one or two times have I talked to somebody where
33:48
they said, no, I'm more biblical than I've ever been. And you ask more questions, and it's true.
33:53
And then I say, well, why do you want to use the word deconstruction? And they'll fight for the
33:56
word a little bit. And then in a couple of cases, they were like, you know what, I don't know why
34:00
I'm using that word. Maybe I should just call this sanctification or engaging with my doubts or
34:06
reforming my faith to make it line up with scripture. So it's this beast of a word that everybody
34:11
wants to define in a hundred different ways. And everybody for some reason that I am still trying
34:16
to figure out wants to turn it into this positive thing. Well, I think maybe you nailed it on the
34:21
head. They want to be accepted amongst cultural elites, like the secular elites, because you know,
34:28
it's what I've observed, Kyle, that tends to happen. When a quote unquote evangelical thought leader
34:34
comes out, you know, Roe v. Wade gets overturned. And you'd think we'd be celebrating in the streets,
34:40
but you have evangelical elites going, Oh, no, I fought for this my whole life. But
34:44
I'm not so sure this is great now, because now there's all these compliments. There's so much,
34:50
you know, nuance. And listen, I'm all for nuance, real nuance to make things clear.
34:56
But when a lot of elites say we want to nuance something, what I think they actually mean is
35:00
obfuscation. They want to make it unclear. They want to muddy it so that it can just kind of mean
35:05
everything. But that's postmodernism. And I think what I've noticed is when an elite does that,
35:11
they get a big write up in the New York Times, or they get a big write up in some, you know,
35:15
what they perceive to be this institution that that's credible in their eyes. And they get their,
35:22
you know, like our friend John Cooper says, they get their woke cookies.
35:25
Yeah. Well, the funny thing about the word nuance is that's a word that dumb people use to sound
35:29
smart. It's like, Oh, this is a, this is a nuanced issue. It's like, is it, is it though? Because
35:33
that's one thing that I did after the leak came out about the Roe v. Wade decision. I basically,
35:38
you know, biding my time and spend about a week to 10 days kind of absorbing everything. And the
35:42
one thing that I noticed about a lot of these woke evangelicals or these woke Christians,
35:47
they got real quiet all of a sudden. And then some of these other, you know, kind of like
35:50
t-tollers, these people are like, they were just like, Oh yeah, now they're all of a sudden really,
35:54
really bold on the pro life issue. And it looks like they're going to be on the winning side,
35:56
right? So I saw both of those things happen. But it's the same thing that would happen with people.
36:01
So I was supposed to be doing a debate with Kristen, something, something, whatever,
36:06
who wrote Jesus and John Wayne. And the entire book is just this slobbering nonsense about
36:11
patriarchy and white supremacy. And it read like a jaded girlfriend wrote it. And the thing about
36:15
it was is the woman that wrote it who was supposed to be debating me on Justin Briarley's show,
36:19
at the last minute, it's like, Oh, you know, I just can't really debate this. These people don't
36:23
want their ideas challenged because they know that they won't stand up to scrutiny. All they want to
36:28
do is they want to be in their echo chamber with people that agree with them and that are just as
36:32
intellectually elite as they are. The thing that I'm liking Alisa is that a lot of conservatives.
36:37
So you can talk about it politically, but you can also talk about it in the evangelical Christian
36:40
world as well. We're not being as nice as we once were because I talk to people that are
36:45
Democrats that love Mitt Romney because he's essentially a Democrat, but they hate someone like
36:49
Trump because he's so bombastic and he's so much further to the right than they are. But you have
36:53
these individuals that are on the conservative side that for years and years and years, they
36:57
would let you push, push, push and their backs against the wall backs against the wall. And then
37:01
they'd be like, all right, that's far enough, buddy. You just get out of here. You're making
37:04
me uncomfortable. But now we're actually pushing back in culture, you know, undaunted life. We're
37:08
here to equipment to push back darkness. You can't allow these people to define everything for you
37:14
and just sit there and be nice because for a lot of these nice guys and nice gals that are in the
37:18
evangelical world one day and I say this all the time, they're going to wake up and the war will
37:22
be over and they will never picked up their sword, never put on their armor and never put on their
37:26
helmet. And then they're going to look around like, what happened? It's like, you happened dummy.
37:30
You didn't decide that there was any hill worth dying on. So why do you feel like that's that's
37:35
constantly happening? Is it? Can we just wrap it up in in Marxian postmodernism or something like
37:40
that? Or does it go deeper? I've watched church after church go from conservative to progressive.
37:46
And the main reason that it does that is the mushy middle. It's all the people that actually
37:53
don't really agree with these new ideologies that are coming in, but they want to be nice.
37:57
They don't say anything. They don't want to confront anyone has, you know, people don't want to make
38:02
difficult choices in who to maybe they need to make a decision to fire a pastor. I've seen even
38:10
even people you would think would be like, we got to get on this and take care of this problem.
38:15
They count out to it because they don't want to be perceived as judgmental maybe,
38:20
or they don't want to do anything rash. And I sort of in a sense, I get that tension.
38:24
We don't want to just be reactionary. We don't want to just go fire some guy after he says one
38:29
dumb thing, but there has to be like, this is what I tell people, you have to speak up. The things
38:35
that I'm saying should not be controversial. I'm not saying anything controversial. The new
38:41
ideologies that are coming in are making those things controversial. But I mean, 20 years ago,
38:46
nothing I said would have been controversial among Christians. So I'm not going to change
38:52
the message because now all of a sudden it's unpopular. And it's, you know, it's so it's just
38:59
it's stunning to me how people like maybe me who is just I'm literally just saying what we've
39:04
always been saying about what the Bible says and what the gospel is are being painted as the people
39:11
who are bringing controversy. I'm not bringing any controversy. I'm just not buying into these
39:16
new things you're trying to bring into the church. But I honestly think the biggest problem is that
39:21
mushy middle, it's the moderate people in the middle that actually don't agree, but they don't
39:26
want to say anything about it because they don't want to cause trouble or make waves. And I've watched
39:31
churches get swallowed up by progressivism mainly because of that large group that doesn't
39:38
really agree with it, but they don't say anything. And people are fearful of being shouted down in
39:43
public about people sending them a bunch of nasty messages online. Maybe they're a business owner
39:47
and they don't want their their business to get a bunch of one star reviews or get turned into the
39:51
local business board or something like that. Because that's what these people will do. But
39:55
what you have to understand is that is a very, very loud minority of people doing those things.
40:00
And if you just batten down the hatchets and ignore all that for a week or two anytime this
40:04
comes your way and just rest in the fact that you're on the right side of the issue.
40:08
So that's why I talk about the abortion issue so much is because there's so many Christians
40:12
that are just so unwilling to actually take their ideologies to bedrock. I've talked about this
40:17
before on the show, but one of my best friends that goes to church with me. And this was before,
40:21
you know, he kind of changed his mind and doing large part to a lot of things that I talk about on
40:26
my show. But his entire pro life ideology fell apart whenever you asked him about rape and incest.
40:32
And so you would ask him it's like, Hey, are you pro life? He's like, yeah, pro life all the way in
40:35
my friend. And then well, what if the woman's raped by her uncle? Oh, man, I guess we can kill that
40:41
baby. And it's because they've never thought through these things that they're not a thinking
40:45
Christian. And so like, there's no nuance to any of their opinions. And then a progressive
40:50
that is well versed on these issues. They do they go one step beyond of univariate analysis,
40:56
and then get your entire worldview to fall apart. And that's one thing that I was very interested in
40:59
with how you responded whenever you were going through this class and how you responded whenever
41:05
there was all these people that were deconstructing and how you responded to your doubt. So kind of
41:10
take us through the 30,000 foot view of what you began to do whenever you kept getting hit by these
41:15
arguments that you couldn't get around. So yeah, that so when I was going through maybe the darkest
41:21
part of that point was I had a baby while she was kind of heading more toward hot toddlerhood
41:26
now and I was pregnant with my son my second. And I so it was a really weird time in my life,
41:33
you know, kind of first time mom and isolated away from people anyway. So it was very it was
41:37
very lonely. And so I would search online to try to find articles about this progressive Christianity
41:43
course. I didn't know that word yet. I don't think that phrase progressive Christianity was very
41:47
big yet. It was more like the emergent church. And so I'll be looking for anyone who might be
41:53
analyzing the movement because it was a huge. I mean, all my friends were falling for all this
41:57
stuff and deconstructing out of their faith. And I couldn't find anything. And so the Lord led me
42:03
to apologetics, which interesting. This is what was so fascinating to me is when I found people like
42:08
Frank Turic and J Warner Wallace and Greg Cocle and some of these guys, they were interacting with
42:13
all the same arguments that this pastor have brought about in the class, but they were addressing
42:19
atheists, but it was all the same stuff. So their work and you know, even diving a lot, they were
42:26
kind of my gateway to get into it. And then I started reading like scholarship and taking seminary
42:31
classes, auditing seminary classes. But the deep dive that I did, I mean, it was I was just so hungry
42:37
for truth. I needed to know that somebody could answer this pastor because this is how naive I was.
42:44
I was raised, I love, I love that I was raised this way because it's given me a perspective,
42:49
a broader perspective on the church. But I was raised in that bit more of the kind of charismatic,
42:54
not the super wacky charismatic, like not hyper hyper. But like, I didn't know what hermeneutics
43:00
was until I was an adult. I never heard that word. So I realized now looking back, my, the way I
43:05
interpreted the Bible was some, you know, it was kind of subjective at times, like I would pick
43:10
out an Old Testament battle, like, you know, and be like, okay, I'm going to be David. And
43:13
this is how the Lord's going to answer my spiritual battle or something. So you know, even, but even
43:18
despite that, because I knew the word and because I really was hungry for the word my whole life,
43:24
when when the pastor would take things out of context or even misquote versus that's when I felt
43:30
like, okay, I'm on the same level here because I know that he's actually taking that. So that made
43:35
me question all the other things he was saying about church history and about science and about
43:39
all this other stuff, which made me kind of dig into all this other arguments. So for me,
43:44
it was, it was very holistic and kind of grassroots where it was just like, whatever question I have
43:49
right now, I need to pursue that, that would open up a can of 10 more questions. And so I just
43:55
tried to not get overwhelmed, but address each question as it came. But I just, I'm so thankful
44:00
to my parents for teaching me to think critically because I mentioned my dad was kind of this hippie
44:05
musician, which did kind of cause him to have this idea of like, I'm going to question, you know,
44:11
the man, I'm not going to just go with whatever the guy on the stage says. So I grew up listening
44:16
to my parents discuss the sermon and even disagreeing with each other on what they thought maybe the
44:21
pastor was saying. So I never had this perception that I just had to listen to that authority and
44:26
take it in. So I was always taught to measure it against scripture. And so I'm thankful for that
44:30
grounding because it made me question the pastor. And at the time that I was so naive, I thought
44:37
he was thinking up all these things for the first time. But I knew deep down, I was like,
44:42
there is no way that the church has been around for 2000 years, if it can be taken down this easily.
44:48
There has to be somebody who knows the answers to these things. And so I'm so thankful for the
44:52
faithfulness of God to leave me into that deep study of apologetics and theology and
44:59
hermeneutics and church history and all the things. But this was over the course of several
45:05
years. So it was five, six, I think maybe even seven years of this deep study to become settled
45:11
in my own faith. But I'm thankful that he shepherded me through that.
45:14
Well, and the thing is, is a lot of people think that if you have to do deep study on something,
45:18
that it's inappropriate. I remember listening to a podcast years ago, it was the bad Christian
45:22
podcast. It was like one of the members of the band Emery and a couple other guys and like,
45:26
hey, we're going to custom, we're going to do whatever, because we're cool. We're like the,
45:29
you know, the counterculture Christians or whatever. But I remember this one quote that one of the
45:33
guys on the show, I can't remember which one said, he's like, if something has to have
45:37
deep level apologetics, then it's probably not true. It's like, if you have to constantly,
45:42
you know, work through your arguments, and if you have to constantly read and study and all these
45:47
things, then the core of the message is not easy enough to be understood. And I remember thinking
45:52
to myself, what is this person talking about this person's that's supposedly, you know, a Christian
45:57
and all these different things. And I was going to ask you about this later, but I guess it kind
46:00
of goes to this point, you know, there's an issue that I have with folks that are kind of in the
46:04
reformed Calvinist camp, which I lean more towards that side of things, because these people seemingly
46:10
want to argue to death about the most obscure things. And they can't seem to present the gospel
46:16
in one sentence, right, that they can't in one sentence tell somebody how that they can be saved.
46:21
And it causes people even Christians to be very worried about their own salvation. The more that
46:26
I've studied Calvinism and gone into those ideologies and I've argued this with John Cooper,
46:31
I've even had more attacks on my personal faith than in those moments. It's like, man, am I actually
46:36
saved? Is my fruit tasty enough? Like for all these things that are happening? I talked to this one
46:41
guy and I he's a reformed guy and I'm talking to him later on the show, so I won't use him by name.
46:44
But I told him that I was like, I don't think a Calvinist can tell me in one sentence how to be
46:48
saved. And this dude literally launched into a 10 minute explanation of reformed Calvinist
46:53
systematic theology. And I'm just sitting there taking it. And I'm like, you're proving my point
46:57
every single time you give me another sentence, you're proving my point. And so the thing about
47:02
the Calvinism and all that is like, what did Christians do for the first 1500 years of Christianity
47:07
before John Calvin was born? It started like thinking things up. But the thing is, is if I'm
47:11
asking these questions and I'm marinated in it all day, what about the guy that is doing good to get
47:16
to church two or three times a week and doing his best to kind of lead his family? That's kind of
47:20
where I have this inner dissonance on. Yeah, let's go deep. Let's figure out all the hermeneutics
47:25
and theology and all that. But at the same time, we're making it so unbelievably complicated that
47:29
it's almost unattainable. That is so interesting that you would actually bring up bad Christian
47:34
podcast and the reform thing, because I actually went on the bad Christian podcast. I think it was
47:39
in 2017. It was the first sort of publicly, you know, not it wasn't hostile because I talked with
47:46
Joe. He was really nice, but it was definite disagreement. Yeah. And one of the things he asked
47:51
me was about that, you know, what how can you claim to know what the gospel is when you guys can't
47:56
even agree between Calvinists and non Calvinists about what I know. I had no idea you were on the
48:00
show. That's amazing. Yeah, it was like it was from it was a good conversation, I thought. But
48:06
so what's interesting, it's funny that that's your experience because I'm also I'm not reformed,
48:10
but everybody thinks I am. So that's like one of the number one questions that I get because I
48:15
really defend penal substitutionary atonement, which is not one of the, you know, points of
48:20
tulip, by the way, everybody, that's just like a Christian approach to the atonement. But I get
48:26
that question a lot. But mostly the reform people are like, cool with me. I think they're like,
48:31
we kind of like her, we're, we'll get her saved eventually, but we like her. But yeah, I get what
48:37
you're saying, I think that, and I think that's probably the main reason I'm not reformed. This
48:41
is what I've said to my my Calvinists. And by the way, love reformed teachers. I've learned a lot
48:46
from them. Read books and learned so much from scholars who are reformed for sure. But the main
48:53
thing I come boils down to for me is I don't even think I'm rejecting Calvinism. I just don't
48:58
understand it. And when I talk with a Calvinist friend, and I keep asking questions, and they always,
49:05
and you know, please, I know there's reform people listening to us. I love you guys. I love
49:10
you guys. I love you too. Yeah, email me because I'm not going to debate you on any more. But um,
49:15
but you know, when I ask the people in my life who I know and love who are Calvinism, we can
49:18
have this conversation. And I asked deeper questions, you know, what, what, how does this work together?
49:24
And at the, at the bottom of it, I can never, if I can't understand it, then I can't affirm it.
49:30
Right. And you can't share it either. Right. And so, so I think there's some validity. I would
49:35
agree with what you're saying. Um, that, you know, I mean, of course, not an issue to divide over,
49:40
but, um, I just don't, I think I don't understand it at, at the, at the bottom. There's a, there's a
49:45
lot of people in, uh, there's a logical contradiction at the bottom of it that I can't resolve. And we,
49:51
as a church, we do try to resolve those. Like, you know, God is one. God is three. He's one being
49:56
three persons. Like, how do we solve that? Well, we come, we, we come up with the word trinity and
50:01
we hammer that out. But with the, what's at the bottom of the reformed deal, I can't resolve it.
50:06
So well, also, uh, Lisa, I think that there's, and again, I love the Calvinist reform folks as well.
50:13
Again, if I had to plant my flag somewhere, it'd be in and around their camp to be honest. Like,
50:18
I'm not Armenian. I'm not any of those things, but there seems to be this intellectual snobbery
50:22
that they love how complicated it is because they have figured it out or they're pretending
50:28
that they figured it out. And so they look at a guy like me that, you know, I don't have enough
50:32
intellectual power to lightly toast a piece of bread. I mean, I get it. Like I just wasn't gifted
50:37
in that way. Like I'm not smart. I just talk good, right? But it's just kind of one of those
50:41
things that's interesting to me that I asked these Calvinist folks and these reformed folks,
50:45
I'm like, why, why if there is election, then why do you have Calvinist missionaries?
50:51
Explain that to me. And I know there's an answer, but they can't do it in a cogent way that helps me
50:56
understand how I can apply it. Because that's one thing that we do here with our show is like,
51:00
it's great to have all this, you know, exegetical, deep theological knowledge.
51:04
But how do you apply it at the school board meeting? Like, how do you apply it in your home when your
51:09
kid says, Hey, daddy, you know, my teacher says that, you know, since I like, you know, girl things
51:14
sometimes that I might actually be a girl. Is that a real thing? How do we apply it? And it's like,
51:18
if I can't understand the main point, then I certainly don't know how to apply it to a real
51:23
world world situation. But we're gonna get off that before, you know, Calvinist, because again,
51:27
they love arguing and drinking their IPA. So I don't want them throwing stuff at me whenever they
51:30
see me, you know, at their cigar shop or something like that. I do want to talk about one more thing
51:34
for your from your book before we kind of bounce out of it. And again, guys, another gospel,
51:37
it's a fantastic book because you go into so much detail on all those different questions about
51:43
why you started reading the early church fathers and, you know, why you gave this much attention
51:47
to this thing or that thing. But this was kind of one of the main points here, because I think it
51:51
really speaks to our time right now. It's this quote. However, with their denial of the atoning
51:55
work of Jesus on the cross, many progressive Christians take it one step further. Jesus is no
52:00
longer our savior, but an example of how we can do good works in the world and forgive others.
52:04
That has become the highest virtue. And all other true claims are truth claims are judged by it.
52:10
Thus the progressive progressive gospel is Jesus plus social justice. That's where we're at right
52:16
now, because the Christians that felt bullied into posting a black square, you know, after,
52:22
you know, George Floyd died in police custody a couple of years ago. These and they were doing
52:26
it because we wanted to be nice and we wanted to be inclusive. And we didn't want people to think
52:31
we were racist. And the only way to signal that apparently is by posting a black square on Instagram
52:36
and those types of things. But yes, we have added to the gospel that it's not just Jesus anymore.
52:42
It's Jesus plus do these things that happen to align with a very particular secular worldview.
52:47
Am I crazy? No, I think you're right. And that was an interesting social test of where people were
52:54
at because I think even more than anything, people were doing that because it was really just,
53:02
I don't know how to articulate this. I don't even think for most people it was to be inclusive or
53:07
to be, you know, loving or anything. I think it was just, I don't want to be marked as the person
53:13
who didn't do it. And I think that's a really bad like way to make decisions. That's a terrible
53:20
way to decide what you're going to post on social media or not post on social media.
53:25
But with cancel culture and everything we see in Twitter, I got off Twitter. I just it's too toxic
53:31
for me. I just I just can't with Twitter. And because I constantly every time I open my Twitter,
53:37
I felt pressured to signal something that, okay, today I'm on board with the mob. So I got to say
53:44
this or I got to say that I just I don't need that in my life. And so no, you're not crazy. I think
53:49
what that demonstrated and ever really since 2020 and COVID and everything, it's really,
53:55
it's I think it's shined a big light on where everybody's hearts were at. And a lot of that was
54:02
hard to navigate. That was really tough to navigate, but it's interesting that I can I traveled all
54:08
through COVID speaking and things. And so I don't know if it was just maybe the churches that were
54:13
trying to stay open during COVID that would have me in, but I experienced like the church of Jesus
54:17
Christ thriving all over the country and being very unified on on things. And so I think in many
54:25
ways that it unified the church, not just COVID, but all the things that were going on in that time.
54:32
And then this confrontation with the critical social justice ideologies that were coming in.
54:36
Yeah, it's just it's fascinating to me how that divided the church.
54:41
Well, and it's continuing to divide the church is dividing denominations and you have people that
54:46
are, you know, the SBC, they're trying to decide whether they're going to do this or do that.
54:49
But it is splitting churches as well, because, you know, I was talking to a pastor here recently,
54:55
and he said he got back to back emails, literal back to back emails. One was, Hey, man, you don't
55:00
talk about race enough in your church. So I'm leaving the very next email. Hey, you talk about
55:05
race way too often. And for that, I'm leaving. And so it's put a lot of pastors in a really,
55:10
really tough spot, because again, the churches accepted its position as being downstream of culture,
55:15
or they've gone to the other extreme, you know, the astronomy type of extreme, which is hard for
55:21
people to really look at as well. So I feel like that puts a bow on another gospel. So guys, again,
55:25
that is in the show notes. But I think that this all dovetails into the book that you have coming
55:29
out later this year, I believe it's on October the 18th. So it's called live your truth and other
55:33
lies, exposing popular deceptions that make us anxious, exhausted, and self obsessed. Now I'm
55:38
going to be real honest with you, Lisa. You tricked me initially with the name, because when I saw
55:42
you post and I saw live your truth, I was like, Oh my gosh, I've been following this girl for all
55:46
this time. And now she's going to go woke on me what happened. And then I read the next things,
55:50
and I was like, Oh, okay. Okay, we're good here. So you got me. So I'm sure that was, you know,
55:54
some very, very smart person that made sure you named your book that. But talk to me a little bit
55:58
about that book. And so is this the book that you're you're in the middle of writing right now,
56:02
trying to complete for for release later this year? So no, this one is finished. And I'm actually
56:06
wishing that I would have made the the second half of the title a little bit bigger on the books.
56:11
So what would be that it's and other lies. Although I wonder, though, if there might not be some
56:16
advantage to people saying, Oh, live your truth. I want to do I'm going to get this right. Exactly.
56:19
No, this book is already written and completely finished, ready to come out. And I wanted to
56:26
write it because with another gospel, another gospel was much more of a memo. It's kind of a
56:31
memoir meets theological treatise. So it's it's engaging with all of the pushback from progressive
56:38
Christians and then helping give Christians language to refute those things and to interact
56:42
with progressive Christianity. But there's this broader thing happening that I really wanted to
56:48
address in a book. And that is these sort of social media influencers. A lot of them are women,
56:55
but there are men to and a lot of men following these women, interestingly, people like Jen Hatmaker,
57:00
Glennon Doyle, Rachel Hollis. And they're sort of in that progressive milieu, but they're influencing
57:09
way beyond that. And they're they're they have big platforms in the secular spaces. And yet,
57:14
they're still identifying themselves as Christians. And so after reading their books, I thought,
57:20
this really needs to be addressed. So originally, this book was going to be a book for women because
57:26
these are, you know, primarily dealing with glen and dual. But honestly, we changed the title,
57:32
the title was going to be something else. We changed the title to make it more neutral,
57:36
because so many men, I personally know men who read Glennon Doyle's book, and then came out of the
57:43
closet and left the families. So these the influence of these women and others is really profound,
57:49
which is the and so each chapter in the book addresses one of the lies that is coming from that
57:54
world. So things like live your truth, you are enough. That's a big one. You only live once,
58:00
you're perfect just as you are. I'm trying to think, you know, love means, I forget what the
58:06
chapters about, but it's like love means just accepting everyone. So it's these kind of big
58:11
cultural slogans that are not just exclusive to progressive Christianity, but they're being
58:16
filtered out into the church and into secular culture through progressive Christianity.
58:21
So it's it's the book you'd want to give somebody who kind of follows Jen Hatmaker, but they're like,
58:26
I don't agree with everything she says, but she's really funny and I like her and she gives good,
58:32
you know, cooking advice and she's really funny about her kids. Like give them this book because
58:37
I think that it's going to be persuasive for the, you know, the person who's all in on that. But
58:43
I think it's going to give Christians language to go, why is you aren't enough wrong? Why is that
58:47
wrong? And so there's it's there's a lot of humor in the book too. So I do a lot of storytelling and
58:53
and so hopefully it's engaging for people. Well, most of those things, I'm excited to read it and
58:57
have you want to talk about it again later this year, but most of those things again, it kind of
59:01
goes back to bumper sticker Christianity. It's like, how can you disagree with live your truth?
59:05
Because it sounds so cute. And when you put it on like, you know, the side of a brick wall and
59:10
some sort of cutesy downtown or midtown area, and you take your little selfie with it and all that,
59:14
it feels good. It's like this, even though it doesn't mean anything, you could have said
59:19
and it would have given the same amount of, but it makes people feel good. It gives them those
59:24
warm fuzzies inside of them. And then it kind of leads them on. It's that inspiration. And I'm,
59:28
I talk about inspiration all the time as being one of the worst motivators possible. Because if
59:32
you wait until the moment that you feel inspired to get in shape or inspired to, you know, learn
59:37
more about a particular book of the Bible, it's probably never going to strike you brother. And
59:41
so one of the things is is you have to be disciplined enough in your approach to life be able to get
59:46
all of your different theology theological underpinnings to bedrock. And so I'm excited to kind of
59:50
look at that, even though it's, you know, probably a little bit different than some of the stuff I
59:53
do take down a year, I read some kind of crazy dark stuff and I'm glad you tackle some of these
59:57
subjects. But there's no real great transition to kind of talk about this. But I did want your
1:00:01
opinion on this because I'm not sure exactly when this will come out. But just recently there was
1:00:06
the release of the SBC report about the sexual abuse inside the SBC. Literally, at least are
1:00:11
right before we hopped on this interview, I was watching a video on Victor Marx's Instagram of this
1:00:16
pastor that had raped a 16 year old girl for for years, one of his congregants. And he was,
1:00:22
you know, this came out in the SBC report. And so he's up in front of this church and, you know,
1:00:26
asking for forgiveness and basically trying to grease the wheel so he could keep his job. Oops,
1:00:30
the girl that he had been raping for all that that time went up on stage and snatched the
1:00:34
microphone and talk. And I was so mad, Elisa, that I could spit nails. And the thing is,
1:00:40
is we see a lot of this, unfortunately, these prominent pastors that fall into serious sexual
1:00:45
sin. So you have Ravi Zacharias, all the stuff that came out after he passed away, you did a long,
1:00:50
really well, really well thought out YouTube video on that Carl Lynch from Hillsong. And
1:00:54
then you had Brian Hewson basically hiding the sexual impropriety of his father. You have Bill
1:00:58
Heibels, you have all these people just pick one. And part of it for me is the good thing I think
1:01:04
about it is is for people that were worshiping at the altar of Carl Lynch aren't going to do that
1:01:08
anymore. Right. Maybe they're going to think twice about the next super cool dude, bro,
1:01:12
who hangs out with Katie and Justin Bieber and says, is there anything else there,
1:01:16
aside from the cool clothes and the funny glasses? Because I think that it's kind of woken some
1:01:21
people up to be like, wait a minute. If I base my salvation on something that Ravi Zacharias said,
1:01:26
and my salvation can disappear because we found out that he was a horrible sexual deviant.
1:01:31
It means that they were probably never saved to begin with. So talk to me a little bit about that
1:01:35
because the sexual sin epidemic, we love to talk about the Catholic church, but then Protestants get
1:01:39
real, real uncomfortable when we talk about it on our side. And I love it. I want more of it. I want
1:01:43
more people to be called out. I want these people in jail. And if not, tell me where the Lynch mobs
1:01:47
meeting, but before I get myself in any more trouble, you go for it. Well, no, listen, I think
1:01:52
that you need to take that message into the progressive world because the perception and
1:01:55
the progressive Christian world is that anybody who holds to conservative theology is just trying
1:02:00
to cover all this stuff up. And we don't want anything exposed. But like you, I wanted exposed.
1:02:05
I have friends who have been through horrific experiences of spiritual abuse under narcissistic
1:02:12
pastors. I want all that stuff exposed. And honestly, I want the church to be what the church is
1:02:19
supposed to be not not following the model of this business model that the world has laid out.
1:02:25
But you know, the thing about the Ravi thing, it's interesting that probably should have hit me
1:02:31
harder personally than it did because Ravi was the first apologist I ever heard. So when I was
1:02:40
crying out to God in this dark place, I remember just saying, Lord, if you're real, if everything
1:02:47
I've believed my whole life is actually true, please send somebody who can talk to me and give me
1:02:52
some answers. Because at the time, Kyle, I didn't know anybody who could answer these questions that
1:02:57
this has to happen. So I was in the car. And I talked about this in the book. I was wondering
1:03:02
who it was. I wrote in the margins of the book. I wonder who it was that you were thinking about.
1:03:05
That's interesting. It was Ravi. I didn't say his name in the book for the same reason Frank Turic took
1:03:11
Ravi's introduction out of his book. And I like the way Frank said this. He said, I don't ever
1:03:15
want one of Ravi's victims to have to read his name, at least, you know, in my work. So I just took
1:03:21
it out because I didn't want someone to be tripped up by that. But I have addressed it publicly. So
1:03:26
yeah, it was Ravi. So I hear this voice on the radio answering all the questions of this pastor
1:03:31
I'd been asking almost in order. And so it was through Ravi, you know, his radio program that I
1:03:36
discovered Southern Evangelical Seminary, which is pretty much where I planted roots from then on,
1:03:41
discovering people like Frank Turic and J. Warner Wallace, and then the SES professors that were
1:03:45
just so gracious to let this stay-at-home mom, you know, annoy them in the class discussion groups
1:03:52
and ask all the questions. I had no idea how academia worked. Like I was calling professors
1:03:57
by their first names. I just had, I didn't know any of that worked. And I was just driving everybody
1:04:01
crazy. But I think, you know, ultimately, they loved that. That's why they're there. They want
1:04:06
to help people with their questions. But you know, and then when the Ravi thing happened,
1:04:12
it was, you know, I waited for the report because I wanted, I wanted to be sure that the allegations
1:04:17
were true. I don't think we should just believe everything everybody says. I think there things
1:04:20
need to be vetted. I get people say a lot of things about me every day that I know are not true. So
1:04:25
it makes me kind of skeptical. And I think that's, there's a healthy approach to that skepticism. But
1:04:29
when the report came out, it was like, this is, this happens. Like this is irrefutable. It didn't
1:04:34
shake my faith at all, not even a little bit. So my, my instinct was to go on YouTube and try to
1:04:41
help other people walk through that because I had a suspicion it was rocking the faith of others.
1:04:46
And the reason it didn't rock my faith is because my parents taught me from a very early age not
1:04:50
to put faith in a person that, and growing up with, you know, in, in a ministry family, you know,
1:04:55
that ministers are not perfect. So you don't expect them to be, you don't have them on a pedestal
1:04:58
of thinking. Now, obviously, I didn't foresee the horrific thing that was going on with Ravi.
1:05:05
It was hard to believe, honestly, but, you know, I didn't put my faith in Ravi. I never put my faith
1:05:11
in Ravi. God certainly used his message to help me and to lead me to other folks that were reliable.
1:05:19
But yeah, I think, I think this cultural celebrity Christianity is very dangerous. I, I have a lot
1:05:28
of tension with having a YouTube platform and how I approach social media. I don't tend to post
1:05:33
tons of personal pictures. And because I, I mean, there's a certain sense in which people do connect
1:05:40
with you as a person and they connect with my story. And I think there's something good and
1:05:44
godly and healthy about that. But that can cross really easily over into just like, hey, I'm going
1:05:50
to find the person that I'm just going to emulate them every day. And that can be really dangerous
1:05:54
if that's not a person that's in your life, discipling you in real life who knows your stuff,
1:05:58
you know their stuff. And you're walking through it together because the temptation to put people
1:06:03
on that kind of a pedestal is really strong and the way and social media just fuels it.
1:06:10
So like when I'm, when I, we were looking for a church about four years ago, and one of the first
1:06:15
things I did was go to the pastor, the main teaching pastor, I went to his Instagram,
1:06:20
Twitter and Facebook just to see what he's trying to build. There's nothing. There was no platform
1:06:25
vaulting. There was just, hey, we're meeting at seven. Everybody come if you want to be there,
1:06:30
just, and I was like really impressed by that. I'm like, this guy's not trying to become a national
1:06:34
star. He's shepherding his local flock. And that's what I was looking for. So yeah.
1:06:39
I think it's really important that you bring all that up because we are built to worship,
1:06:44
but it's way easier to worship a person that we can see and touch and follow on Instagram
1:06:49
than the creator guy at the universe because we can't see him the exact same way. So I think
1:06:53
that that's really important as well. But back on the Robbie thing, and then we'll put a bow on that
1:06:57
and then move on. I think it's somewhat, well, I think we need to be cautious as Christians,
1:07:03
canceling someone's entire catalog of theological work because of something they've done that was
1:07:09
sinful. So I was talking about this with somebody and they vehemently disagree with me, which is
1:07:14
totally fine. But I was just like, I'm not going to stop saying origin, meaning morality destiny.
1:07:19
I'm not going to stop walking through, you know, worldviews using that framework now. For me,
1:07:23
I will say an apologist taught me this, origin, meaning morality destiny or those types of things,
1:07:29
because again, just using the name becomes very problematic. And I'm so stupid about two weeks
1:07:33
before the report came out, I did an episode of my podcast called R.I.P. Ravi Zacharias. And
1:07:38
here I am two weeks later, because I waited too long. And then here I am having to eat crow a
1:07:42
little bit. But that was a point that I made is like, you can still watch his videos and still
1:07:47
listen to the things that he said, but couch it with the understanding that again, he was a
1:07:51
horrifically terrible sexual deviant. And for me personally, I wish that he was alive
1:07:56
whenever that report came out, right? He died in a horrific way with the cancer that he had.
1:08:01
But I wish he would have had to have dealt with those people while he was here. We know that he
1:08:05
received judgment for those things. But again, I think that it's you have to be cautious about
1:08:10
canceling someone's entire catalog. Unless you're a Carl Lins or a Brian Houston or one of those
1:08:14
people, whenever it's like, your catalog probably shouldn't be canceled from the very, very beginning.
1:08:18
But I do want to talk about your podcast and your show, because obviously you do have a fairly
1:08:22
large profile. You have a successful YouTube channel. The Alyssa Childers podcast is great.
1:08:26
Whenever I popped right right onto the scene and I was kind of climbing the charts, I kept seeing
1:08:30
your picture on there. I'm like, who's this chick? And then it's like, Oh, it's a Zoe girl girl.
1:08:34
And I didn't have the negative response that everybody else did like we can't listen to her.
1:08:37
She used to be in a pop group. I just thought it was cool that we were, you know, in the same
1:08:41
area on all these different charts. So talk to me about that a little bit because there are people
1:08:45
that don't feel the need to have one of these channels or have one of those things. But there
1:08:49
are a lot of people that are connecting with your message. Yeah. And I've been really thankful for
1:08:53
that. And I'm also, you know, I think there's a benefit to being underestimated. You know, I've had
1:08:59
people say, Oh, what does she know? She's a ex pop star or this or that? And
1:09:03
wasn't it the veggie tales people that whatever dumb podcast they have, they're like, are we really
1:09:08
going to listen to the Zoe girl per it's like, yeah, that's your analysis of her entire life,
1:09:12
you lose her? Like anyway, what's hilarious about that is it's like, well, then do we pick Larry,
1:09:18
the cucumber or Zoe girl, like, take your because I mean, if you're going to, if you're
1:09:23
going to take that line of argument, don't be Larry or Bob the tomato, whichever one he was,
1:09:28
I don't know. But yeah, so I think there's a there's can be a benefit to being underestimated.
1:09:34
I openly say, look, I have zero college degrees. I have zero credentials or authority to say
1:09:41
anything I'm saying. So therefore take what I'm saying and vet it. See if I'm telling the truth.
1:09:46
Go look at the sources, look at my sources, my primary sources. Am I telling the truth? You can
1:09:50
agree with me or disagree with me. But I think that a lot of people have discovered my work because
1:09:57
they're facing their boots on the ground in their churches. And they're they're seeing, you know,
1:10:02
it's interesting. A lot of progressives will say, oh, she doesn't understand progressive Christianity.
1:10:06
That's kind of their main thing about me. And it's like, okay, that's fine. But but
1:10:11
I've got 80% of the people who are writing the email saying what you've described is exactly
1:10:16
what I'm facing in church. And so that's that's what I need to hear to know, okay, I'm on the right
1:10:22
track. I am definitely describing what people are going through. And it's and hopefully it is
1:10:27
helping people. So you know, the journey for me was very difficult. It was very lonely. There wasn't,
1:10:32
like I said, anybody sort of analyzing this movement as a whole when I was trying to figure it out.
1:10:38
And so it's the greatest joy of my life. When somebody says, I saw this happening in my church,
1:10:45
I didn't know what it was. I had red flags, but I felt very confused. Then I read your book or I
1:10:50
listened to a video and then I had language and I understood what was happening to me. And that
1:10:54
is just like the greatest joy and it makes it worth it. And this is a thing too. You were talking
1:10:59
earlier about, you know, people saying nasty things on social media, I can tell you from experience,
1:11:04
like you will not die. I have a feeling you know this day, die. If somebody calls you stupid,
1:11:11
you will not die. And people, this is the thing Paul talked about spreading the fragrance of the
1:11:16
knowledge of Christ. When you do that and you're doing it right, it's not going to hit anybody
1:11:23
neutral. It's not going to hit anybody in the nuanced zone or in the neutral zone. They're
1:11:27
going to love it or they're going to hate it. And that's because the gospel has a smell. And Paul
1:11:32
said to those who are being saved, it's the fragrance of life, but to those who are perishing
1:11:36
its death. So we need to speak the truth. And we need to, of course, in love and all of that and
1:11:42
persuasively and as winsomely as we can. But the fact of the matter is, is one of the questions I
1:11:48
always get is, how do I make a case for biblical sexuality in a way that won't offend anyone?
1:11:54
And my answer to that is you cannot. It can't. It's not a thing you can actually do. Now, you can,
1:12:00
you can do your best to try to not, you know, be a bulldozer or a bull in a china shop with it.
1:12:06
But ultimately, when you get to what it is, people are going to love it or they're going to hate it.
1:12:11
And they're going to say nasty things about you if you're, you're not saying what they like.
1:12:16
But you know, like I said, you're not going to die. And those who are looking for truth,
1:12:20
they're going to find it and it's going to smell like life to them. That's what we want.
1:12:23
Yeah, and we shouldn't be casting our pearls before swine. And I've told people this as well,
1:12:27
if all the hate's coming on one of these things, I'm holding up a phone for those just listening
1:12:31
to this. Guess what I can do, Elisa? I can set it down and not pick it up and not look at it.
1:12:36
But I will tell you, for me personally, I'm so competitive and I'm so critical. Like literally,
1:12:41
if people had to hear my internal self dialogue, they would be astonishing how mad and angry I am
1:12:47
at me all the time. But when you give me a one star rating, because you don't like my intro,
1:12:51
outro music of my podcast, or you think I talk too fast, or you think my face looks dumb,
1:12:55
like I will internalize that over the 100 last positive five star comments that I've gotten.
1:13:01
So I do have to kind of check that a little bit. But again, it's like, who's am I?
1:13:04
Do I belong to these people? Do I belong to these nerds that are spending their time on their
1:13:10
day giving me a one star review? Because I said something that didn't jive with their personal
1:13:13
worldview, or am I owned by Christ? Is that the person that I'm serving? Am I serving the likes?
1:13:18
Am I serving, you know, the shares on my serving, the five star reviews, or am I trying to serve
1:13:22
Christ? So that's something that I always try to do as well. But Elisa, we've we've gone
1:13:26
everywhere in this conversation, but I do like to kind of close out some of my interviews with
1:13:29
the segment that I call, what would you say to someone that said? So I'm going to say,
1:13:34
what would you say to someone that said? And then I'm going to fill in the blank with something.
1:13:38
And regardless of what I say, you have 30 seconds maximum to respond to that. Okay, so this is
1:13:43
lightning round. If you go past 30 seconds, I will make it awkward. So are you up for it?
1:13:47
Sure. Okay, let's go. We'll ease into it as much as we can. But you know, we got several. So here's
1:13:53
the first one. Yeah. Yeah. Are you going to say your own stopwatch? Yeah, I'm okay with that.
1:13:57
All right, here we go. First one here. What would you say to someone that said,
1:14:00
I hate contemporary Christian music? Okay. I mean, I, I don't know if I've got a response to that.
1:14:10
I don't think I would try to convince them to like it or hate it. I, I'm not a, I don't follow
1:14:16
contemporary Christian music personally. So I don't really know what's popular right now. And
1:14:20
I might just say, that's fine. You don't have to like it. Yeah, you're into what you're into. All
1:14:24
right. Next one here. What would you say to someone that said, why would I listen to the Zoe girl
1:14:28
chick about apologetics? Well, I would just say, you don't have to listen to the Zoe girl chick,
1:14:33
go listen to Frank Turic, listen to Jay Warner Wallace, listen to Kyle, listen to the Undaunted
1:14:37
podcast, listen to Natasha Crane, um, I'm in a list authority. I just give him a list of resources.
1:14:42
You know, if you don't want to listen to me, that's, you don't have to.
1:14:44
I'm going to clip that out because in the same breath, you said Jay Warner Wallace,
1:14:50
Frank Turic and me. So I think I'm Christian famous all of a sudden, thank you for dubbing me
1:14:55
Christian famous. I appreciate that. Let's keep going. What would you say to someone that said,
1:14:59
pastors don't care about people. They care about money.
1:15:02
Uh, I would just say you are most likely buying into a social media narrative in which
1:15:09
there are tons of platforms that all they do is find some wacky guy from some church somewhere.
1:15:15
And it promoted out and say, this is what most evangelicals believe. It's not true. I travel
1:15:20
a lot. And I go to churches all over the country where there are humble pastors serving their
1:15:25
congregations, authentic, true, genuine Christians. And it's just not true. All right. Next one here.
1:15:30
What would you say to someone that said, you shouldn't need apologetics to understand God?
1:15:35
Uh, I would say, I would ask them one question about something they believe about God,
1:15:42
try to refute it and then demonstrate to them why they need to be able to give an answer for
1:15:46
what they just said they believe. Absolutely. Great answer. We got a few more here. What
1:15:50
would you say to someone that said, the lion of Judah is too scary for me to contemplate.
1:15:54
Wow. I've never heard that one. You know what? Hey, here, we're going to pause. I'm going to
1:16:02
pause my own thing here. We're going to come back to that. And that's how we're going to end it.
1:16:05
So let me go through the rest of these. We're going to come back to that one. And I'll explain
1:16:08
why I asked you that specifically. You cool that? Yeah. All right. Next one here. What would you
1:16:12
say to someone that said, Zoe girls should make a comeback. I agree. We should. We've actually
1:16:17
talked about it. So we, we all have kids now. And for about, I don't know, maybe 10 years we've
1:16:22
been talking about making a lullaby album with some of the songs that we sang to our babies when
1:16:27
they were little. And it just, we're just so busy. It never happens. Hey, but we can figure it out.
1:16:32
I think the world, the inner 12 year old girl in me needs to make sure that that happens. So we'll,
1:16:36
we got a couple more here and then we'll end with the line of Judah stuff. What would you say to
1:16:39
someone that said, a loving God wouldn't allow bad things to happen to good people?
1:16:44
Um, well, I would say that that sounds actually like an unloving God who would not allow bad
1:16:51
things to happen. Well, first of all, there are no good people, you know, in the, in a moral sense,
1:16:55
we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But if God doesn't allow us to make choices
1:17:00
and bear the consequences of those choices, then he's not a loving God because love in my view
1:17:05
requires choice. You can just, you can program people to behave a certain way so that nothing bad
1:17:09
ever happens. And they don't do anything bad to each other. But then you're overriding their complete
1:17:14
free will. And then at that point, they're just robots that have been programmed to behave a certain
1:17:18
way. And that's not love a world full of automatons is not a world worth creating. That's what CS Lewis
1:17:24
said. All right. Last one here. And then we'll, we'll close out. What would you say to someone that
1:17:27
said, I'm afraid my pastor is going woke. Hmm. Speak up, speak up. And you can do that respectfully,
1:17:35
but don't just stay silent and wait, you can take maybe take notes every time he says something that
1:17:40
causes you questions, write it down, take your questions to him in a meeting, be respectful.
1:17:46
I tend to think sometimes these meetings don't go well, but do it anyway, speak up. And then if
1:17:53
there comes a point when it's not received and it's very clear that the church is going off the rails,
1:17:58
leave. And honestly, somebody else said this, but take as many people with you as you can.
1:18:03
Absolutely. So I know we're running up against time here, but let me give you a little bit more
1:18:06
context to that line of Judah question. So it was what would you say to someone that said,
1:18:09
the line of Judah is too scary for me to contemplate. So part of the reason why this is our logo,
1:18:14
I've got a line over my shoulder here. Why, why we look at that, why I sign off every podcast with
1:18:18
keep seeking the line of Judah. It's because we're over, we're overwhelmed with the description of
1:18:24
the Lamb of God, which gives us an incomplete understanding of the totality of who Jesus is.
1:18:29
Now, people have heard me say that and they're like, you're saying the Lamb of God isn't important,
1:18:33
and you're saying we should only focus on the line of Judah, you hear it tick and all that. And
1:18:36
it's like, okay, well, I can't fix stupid in every single scenario. But the thing is, is for a lot of
1:18:40
men, they don't, they don't understand the Lamb as much naturally, whereas they do understand the
1:18:48
line. But every time I go speak to a group of men, I'll have them raise their hand. I say, hey,
1:18:53
if in the last year you can recall a time when your pastor said, Lamb of God, raise your hand.
1:18:57
100% of the hands go up every single time. And then I haven't put their hands down. I say,
1:19:01
in the last year, if you can recall time when your pastor mentioned the line of Judah,
1:19:05
two, three hands in a large room of people. And I think that it gives Christians an unequal
1:19:12
understanding of who Jesus is, because he didn't come 50% grace and 50% truth. He's 100% grace and
1:19:18
100% truth. He lives outside of mathematics. He lives outside of all these things.
1:19:24
So let me kind of tee that up for you then. A lot of people don't like thinking about the line of
1:19:28
Judah. They don't like the Jesus that, you know, uses premeditated violence to clear the temple,
1:19:33
because, you know, with righteous aggression, they like the Jesus that tells them how cute they
1:19:37
look in their tunic and kisses them on their noses. Why do we deal like that? Man, that's a great
1:19:42
question. I think it's because with the influence of progressive Christianity, they have brought in
1:19:48
this idea that Jesus is just this kind of meek mild, hippie guru that's smoking pot and just
1:19:52
loving on everybody and all of this. And I think that what that does is that separates Jesus
1:19:57
actually claimed to be the God of the Old Testament. And the God of the Old Testament is the same one
1:20:02
that commanded Israel to go in and wipe out the Canaanites because of their just profound wickedness
1:20:09
that he gave him 400 years to repent for. So he's a God of judgment. Jesus is the judge.
1:20:14
And so we like to just ignore and sweep under the rug the revelation Jesus who's coming back
1:20:19
to make war with his enemies. Like you, I've started to talk that way more with young people
1:20:25
because I don't think they're even aware of a Jesus that's coming back to make war
1:20:29
with his enemies. But ultimately we all have a choice. We can be at war with him or we can be
1:20:33
at peace with him. Aren't you so glad you have the choice to be at peace with him? And the reason
1:20:38
we want him to be the victor in all of the wars is because he's going to end evil. But he's also
1:20:44
provided a way to end evil without ending us. And that's like the best news I can think of. But
1:20:49
this is difficult news to convince people of if they don't understand their sinners,
1:20:53
which is a hard, that's a hard sell in this culture. But if you know you're a sinner,
1:20:57
you want Jesus to be the lion of the tribe of Judah because you need something with,
1:21:02
you need a leader with some teeth that can end the evil that's wreaking havoc all over the world.
1:21:08
It's kind of the thing culturally is we're scared of the sheepdogs. So we want them to be quiet
1:21:14
until we're in trouble and we need a sheepdog. And then we're wondering where they're at. It's like,
1:21:18
I'm so sorry, you let the wolves take over, right? And now the sheep are suffering because the sheepdog
1:21:23
scared you meekness, which does not mean weakness, but this unbelievable power that is bridled
1:21:30
to where it's only used when it's necessary is a hard concept to wrap your brain around. But God,
1:21:35
you need it. You absolutely need it. And whenever the time comes and you need that unbridled power,
1:21:42
well, if you've castrated the horse at that point, it's going to become a massive issue for you and
1:21:46
your your flock. So again, I feel like we could flow for another half hour on that. But you got places
1:21:50
to be I got places to be. But as for now, that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get
1:21:54
off your chest? No, I just I love this. This was so fun. I really, really enjoyed it. I wish that
1:21:59
you could debate Kristen Dumey. I'd really love to personally see that. So I maybe you could keep
1:22:04
push. Hey, I keep picking fights. I keep, you know, every time I'm on someone else's show,
1:22:10
I mentioned her name and I want her to keep hearing it because she needs to have that ridiculous
1:22:15
worldview destroyed. But yeah, I'm not holding my breath. I tried to get through the book and I
1:22:21
will finish it. I was walking through it with a book club. But it was like somebody was asking me
1:22:26
to read a book of fiction that I wasn't even interested in. It was the I couldn't even believe
1:22:33
what I was reading. So I really hope that you get to to debate her. Well, and the thing is,
1:22:37
I'm a nice guy. I just have some pretty rough ginger edges. Like it's okay. Like I've said
1:22:42
some things in this podcast you probably wouldn't repeat. It just kind of is what it is. But I kind
1:22:46
of made a mistake where I read before I go to bed. I couldn't read that book before I would go to bed
1:22:51
because I would be up for the next two hours, like basically screaming at the wall. But again,
1:22:55
I'm trying to bring this thing to a close Kyle, you can do it. A Lisa Childers. Thank you for
1:22:59
coming on on Dante Life of Man's podcast. Yeah, I loved it. There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed
1:23:04
my time with a Lisa Childers. But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
1:23:07
Adam daunted life, our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that for
1:23:11
just spiritual, mental and physical resilience. So I've got a link to two books today. One is
1:23:15
another gospel. That's the one that we spend a lot of our time talking about today. And the other
1:23:18
one is the one we mentioned toward the end of the interview, which is live your truth and other
1:23:21
lies. That is book, the book that she's going to be putting out later on this year. So you can go
1:23:24
and preorder that now. I've also got a link to her website, YouTube channel, Instagram, and Facebook.
1:23:28
All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. We do appreciate it wherever you're
1:23:31
listening to this. Please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five star review. If you want
1:23:35
to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email to info@andonto.life.
1:23:40
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else,
1:23:45
including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way. Just go to www.andonto.life.
1:23:50
And as always, we want to thank the band August Burns read for allowing us to use their music
1:23:54
for our content. The music on this podcast is our song, "Cutting the Ties," which is off their
1:23:57
10th anniversary re-recording of their album, "Leveler." The links are in the description.
1:24:02
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual,
1:24:08
mental, and physical resilience. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:24:38
[music]