A Case Study in the Engaged Church with Pastor Gary Hamrick LIVE from Freedom Square
Charlie speaks LIVE from Phoenix, AZ at Dream City Church at Turning Point Faith's monthly Freedom Square gathering and welcomes Pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, VA. Charlie asks Pastor Gary how he awakened to the need for churches to get engaged in the public square and how that internal process for him as a pastor and as a church community came to a head in November of 2021 with the election of Republican Glenn Youngkin as the next governor of Virginia. What changed Pastor Gary's perspective on the role of the church in policy and politics? How did he activate his congregation to participate in a very hands on way? Most importantly, how can you replicate what Cornerstone Chapel has accomplished all across the nation. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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America Fest and Generous Support00:05:31
Hey, everybody, happy Sunday from Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona.
No advertisers in this episode.
So I'm only going to mention a couple things.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of you that are generously stepping up and supporting our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for that.
CharlieKirk.com/slash support is the way you can get behind our work.
Make sure you're coming to AmericaFest, everybody.
tpusa.com/slash A-M-F-E-S-T, December 18, 19, 2021.
I'm going to keep on plugging it because I want to see you all there.
It is going to be the biggest event of the year.
You don't want to miss it.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Thank you.
Boy, it's great to be here.
And, you know, we have a lot of competition tonight for everyone's attention happening right now.
And it's a perfectly understandable excuse if people are filtering in from there or they had to be there instead.
The Scottsdale Unified School District has a school board meeting tonight.
So I think that's the reason why some of my favorite faces are doing something that's, I think, more important.
You know, they could catch it on the live stream back.
But all kidding aside, I got hundreds of emails from moms that said, Charlie, I'm going to the Scottsdale Unified School District board meeting tonight.
I'm going to talk about that in a second because, and it ties perfectly into my really good friend that we're going to be introducing in just a second.
Because what's happening at the Scottsdale Unified School District feels very similar to what we just saw in Loudoun County just a couple weeks ago.
And so we're going to be talking about that.
But first, I just want to thank you guys.
What a year this has been.
This, a year ago, Freedom Square did not exist.
A year ago, this was just an idea.
And we went out to, you know, the Barnetts and I, we went out to lunch at the Henry.
And I said, what if all of a sudden we could organize thousands of people in this local area, Christians and believers, around what it takes to actually influence our local community?
And, you know, Pastor Luke and Angel immediately said, We wanted to do something like this.
And just credit to Dream City and Dream City Church for stepping into action and for hosting this.
Let's just, let's just remember in May, we kicked this off as just a total kind of an unknown idea.
How is this going to work out?
We went through the dog days of summer here in Arizona.
We heard from Jack Hibbs, we had Rob McCoy, we had Eric Metaxas, which was wild, as you guys remember.
And what was so amazing, I just want to share with you some of the success stories that have come out of this gathering.
We have dozens of people that are now running for local office, for school board, for city council, inspired from this gathering.
You might remember a couple months ago, we had Jack Hibbs up here, and I was getting pretty worked up when I was hearing story after story of young nurses that were going to be losing their jobs because they did not want to take the vaccine.
Well, I'm happy to say that some of those young ladies that shared those stories because of Freedom Square have found employment in other places because people said, hey, I'll mire you.
Not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands of stories of people that have said, Charlie, now I know I'm not alone.
Now I know that we can talk about the issues that matter most as Christians and as believers.
And so this is the last Freedom Square of the year for many different reasons.
Dream City, as many of you may or may not know, kind of changes into a Broadway musical act, I guess you could say.
So half of my conversation the last 20 minutes was trying to understand how elephants used to come on the stage.
I'm still not quite understanding that.
I'm told it will be pretty miraculous, though.
So you can see everything's already getting ready for Christmas here.
And so I said, you know what?
And by the way, and I do want to make sure I mention this, we have a pretty big month too at Turning Point USA in December.
We have America Fest coming up.
And that's coming at the Phoenix Convention Center in just a couple of weeks, December 18, 19, 2021.
I don't know if we have a graphic or not.
I probably forgot doing too many things at once.
But if any of you guys register and use promo code Freedom Square, you guys get a significant discount there.
We have Tucker Carlson coming.
We have Kaylee McEnany coming.
In fact, let me read all the speakers coming out here in Phoenix.
And we want to make sure we bless you guys so that you guys are able to come.
It's incredible when you see the amount of kind of talent that we've been able to have.
Jesse Waters, Greg Gutfeld, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Madison Cawthorne, 12 members of Congress, Kaylee McEnany, many others.
So if you guys want to come, it's tpusa.com/slash amfest.
You can't miss it, promo code Freedom Square.
But more importantly than that, everyone should come to the Dream City Christmas celebration.
Protecting Fellow Citizens from Nonsense00:10:20
Okay, that's more important than what we're doing.
But this is the last Freedom Square of the year, and we're going to kick it back off in a hurry in the new year.
And I could say this: that this gathering has really put people in an active posture to do what it says that we need to do in Jeremiah 29, 7, which is to demand the welfare of the city that I've put you in, because your welfare is directly tied to your nation's or your city's welfare.
We as Christians are called to care about the city that we are in.
My wife and I got married back in May, and I said, this is our home.
I'm not going to sit idly by and just kind of, you know, be a spectator as this entire thing falls apart.
So I want to share two things.
I want to talk about the Scottsdale Unified School District, and then I want to talk about an experience I had in the last 72 hours of someone I had an opportunity to hang out with and kind of learn from.
And you don't always get to learn from people that are significantly younger than you.
I guess some of you might.
I don't know.
That may or may not be true.
At least for me, that's not always true.
But the last couple of days were pretty impactful.
So let me start with the Scottsdale Unified School District.
For those of you that have sent emails, showed up at meetings, and had prayer and concern about this.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Some of you might not even know what's happening at the Scottsdale Unified School District.
So a couple weeks ago, because of the persistence of parents, one of the school board members, a man by the name of Jan Michael Greenberg, emailed a Google Drive link to some of the parents, kind of in outrage and disgust, saying, basically, trying to prove them wrong.
Now, I'm by no means a technology expert.
My team will make fun of me.
I kind of have boomer knowledge when it comes to technology.
No offense, okay?
We're all in it together.
By the way, I'm transgenerational, okay?
I get to choose what generation I'm in.
I disavow the millennials, okay?
And so I don't know technology that well, but there is this Google Drive link that then the parents logged into, and what they discovered soon made national news and was met with outrage from many people in this room.
That one of the school board members, likely in concert in collusion with the superintendent, was collecting dossiers, private information, hiring private investigators around moms and dads, you that might have showed up at school board meetings.
What was found in this document was school board meetings that were less concerned about the fact that Scottsdale Unified School District enrollment is going down, less concerned about how math and test scores are going down, less concerned that unfortunately teachers at Chaparral are sexually assaulting special needs kids.
I don't know if you saw that story recently, but that teacher just got arrested.
No, no, no.
The concern of the Scottsville Unified School District was creating dossiers, creating watch lists for you, the taxpayers.
And so I'll read just some of the information.
47 parents had in-depth research papers done on them.
Divorce records, social security numbers, vacation homes, pictures of them coming in and out of their cars.
This is what your school board is doing locally here in Scottsdale.
Mortgage data, traffic tickets, family members, and included pictures of multiple pictures of eight-year-olds.
Now, the Scottsdale Police Department and the Arizona Attorney General's office is investigating.
Thankfully, I don't know if this breaks any laws.
I can't imagine that this is in perfect compliance with the law.
It should be.
Thankfully, one step in the right direction has been taken, where the rest of the school board, with one dissent, decided to vote Jan Michael Greenberg, who by the way, was the president of the school board.
He was the president.
He is no longer president of the Scottsdale Unified School District Board, which is great.
And he is still a member of the school board, okay, still a member of the school board.
But right now, I know a lot of people are at that meeting and they are going to stand there till midnight to make sure their voice is heard.
And we have to demand the full and total resignation of this individual.
This is beyond uncalled for.
My experience with this, and all of you have this experience, if we've discovered this, it's probably worse than that, right?
That there's probably even worse behavior happening and occurring.
And we unfortunately learned from Loudoun County, which we're going to unpack tonight, that the depths that these school board members are willing to go to target parents and to almost criminalize parents who, by the way, you are the stakeholders of your kids' education, make no mistake, is really remarkable.
And so I do know that there are some recall petition efforts underway.
And if you live in Scottsdale and you have not yet signed those petitions, please go find the people that are responsible for that.
I was told they were going to be mingling around.
I don't know if they're outside or not, but it's incredibly important that we as citizens let our voice be heard and speak out in this local area.
I know I'm not going to put up with it.
In fact, I tried everything I possibly could to speak there tonight and be here, but I said, you know what, we're still trying to figure out the two places at once thing.
But and then it's come out in other details.
We know this, all the other nonsense happening in Scottsville Unified School Districts.
But I just want to encourage all of you, you have a voice on it.
Keep the pressure on.
If emails are read by these people, any sort of chatter you could create and say, this is unacceptable, I'm a taxpayer.
I'm not going to put up with this.
Whether you have kids or not in the district, think about the kids who are your fellow citizen, who are your fellow countrymen that have to be subjected to this sort of behavior and nonsense.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing that I just want to share from a personal perspective of the last couple of days, which actually was a rare kind of victory in the news cycle.
And I'm sure some people have differing opinions about this, but I think we can all agree on the general conclusion that Kyle Rittenhouse did not deserve to go to jail for the rest of his life.
I think we can all agree.
And so I had the opportunity to have dinner with him Saturday night.
And I had the opportunity to spend all yesterday with him.
And we have a whole episode discussion out with him that you guys can listen to.
I encourage you to do that.
And, you know, so the question is, why should we as Christians care about what happened there?
Well, it says in the Bible very clearly, let me just read a couple verses, which Proverbs 21, 15, when justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous, but a terror to evildoers.
Boy, does that explain the news cycle the last 10 days.
You had the right people cheering and the wrong people all of a sudden saying, no, the federal government needs to investigate this young boy.
And I use that word boy intentionally.
He was 17 years old when this entire thing happened.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about Kyle.
I got to know him.
He dropped out of high school as a sophomore to support his single mom with three jobs to try to supplement income.
Graduated high school online in nine months.
Then he enrolled at Arizona State University, by the way.
I'll get to that in a second.
I don't know if you've been following that whole circus, but that's a whole different saga that I'll get to in a second.
He was, he lived in Antioch, Illinois, northern Illinois.
A lot of you might know that.
Traveled to Kenosha often.
That's where his father lived and many of his friends lived.
Of course, none of this should have happened.
We know that.
The National Guard would have been called and we didn't have the open destruction of our cities.
Then all of a sudden you don't have 17-year-olds getting tangled in places they shouldn't be.
Kyle admitted he shouldn't have been there.
He said, I wish I wouldn't have gone.
That's not the point.
You don't put people in jail for not going places they shouldn't be, right?
Half of the Scottsdale kids would be that's not the point.
I'm so tired of hearing people, well, he shouldn't have been there.
Police, okay?
Enough of them.
The point is this.
He was walking down a street, and we all saw that video very clearly.
He was attacked multiple times by a mob and his life was put in jail of guns being drawn on him.
And he had a choice.
He had a decision.
Am I going to defend my life, which is a moral, it's a moral necessity to defend your life when it is imminently posed against?
And Kyle did defend himself.
And how was he met?
This is the amazing part of the story: he ran to the police after that happened.
I want you to think about that.
He's just a criminal.
He runs to the police and tells them, hey, this just happened.
And you know what they say?
Go home, kid.
He was arrested a couple of days later in Antioch, Illinois, where he spent 87 days in jail.
87 days in jail.
Eventually, he was released in shower for three weeks.
You guys heard a lot of these stories.
And all of a sudden, then he was met with the full force of two nearly unstoppable forces, the criminal justice system and the activist media.
He was called a white supremacist with no evidence by our now president.
He was smeared nonstop on cable news as being a militia member.
He doesn't know what a militia is.
He doesn't.
I asked him.
I said, what's a militia?
He says, I don't know what a militia is, I've never, 18-year-old kid.
And he had a decision to make.
Either he was going to fight for what was right, fight for himself against lies.
It says in Romans, hate what is evil, love what is good, or he's just going to kind of roll over.
He made a decision to fight.
And we all saw that trial.
I think a lot of people in this room might have been a little skeptical at first.
Like, what is this?
I was told he's a terrible person.
And all of a sudden, we saw what very well could have been some people in this room could have been you, your son, your daughter, your kid or grandkid.
Someone wrongly accused that got in a tough situation that decided to defend himself.
And despite all of that, you heard the arguments, like, well, it's not self-defense if you bring the gun to the situation, all these ridiculous things.
And in a rare moment, all of a sudden we saw, wow, we saw justice actually be served.
In a very rare moment, we said, you know what?
And here's the lesson.
And I'll close with this.
The lesson is why did they come to that decision?
That decision was made because it involved normal people.
I want you to think about this.
This is a takeaway that so many people I think on television have been missing.
You had people with no agenda that looked at things as they were, that had no motive other than to do what was right.
Justice Served in Rare Moments00:12:05
And that gave me hope in some sense.
I said, man, as broken as you might think this country is, as backwards you think it is, you get a fair and prudent and sober hearing of facts.
All of a sudden, it doesn't matter what MSNBC says.
It doesn't matter they're trying to threaten the jury.
It doesn't matter about that.
You slow it down.
And all of a sudden, I think that the American people, the normal people, I'm talking outside of the activist press and the people that run the CIA and Facebook and all that.
No, just the normal person says, you know what?
I don't think it's right to all of a sudden destroy someone's life for self-defense.
And isn't that a common theme?
The common theme of what's actually moving America back to a place of righteousness.
It's the moms and dads showing up with school boards that are doing it right now in Scottsdale that did it in Loudoun County.
It's the regular people that spoke out at the jury and said, you know what?
No, I'm not going to put up with this.
You know, I don't think that we should lock someone up in jail just because they defended themselves.
The point is this: the hope is in the people.
It's the hope, the hope is, of course, in the Lord, obviously, but the hope, as far as what we're talking about, of how we are going to get our country back on track, it involves every single one of you.
And there's no better example than that of another story that I want to mention.
And I think a lot of you enjoyed going to bed at 2:30 in the morning with a smile on your face, where all of a sudden you were like, man, it feels good to be in America.
And we say, in, let's just say, a very left-wing state, otherwise known as Virginia, all of a sudden, you stayed up late and you saw out of nowhere a total reversal of what was supposed to happen in Virginia.
Now, let me tell you about that.
The untold story of Virginia is our guest tonight.
It is the church in the county that actually flipped Virginia.
Now, I don't even mean flipped politically because tonight's not even, I don't even talk about politics.
I'm talking about spiritually.
I'm talking about culturally.
I'm talking about morally, a church that stood for righteousness that had dozens of people run for school board in the critical Loudoun County, Virginia.
I'm talking about the man who gave the opening prayer at the celebration victory for the now next governor of Virginia, Mr. Youngkin.
And so it is with great pleasure and an honor to have my friend here tonight, the man who runs, in my opinion, the most influential church in Virginia, who I think could tell us a lot here in Arizona.
Like, what you do in Virginia, maybe we can implement it here in Arizona.
He's a wonderful person and has a lot of courage when he received a lot of different backlash for standing for what was right.
But please join me in welcoming Pastor Gary Hamrick.
Thank you.
That was, thank you.
Who said that?
That was a little over the top.
You know, I'm reminded of Winston Churchill when he was given a great introduction.
And they asked him, weren't you flattered by that?
And he said, not really, because I know if I were being hanged, there would be twice as many people here.
That's funny.
Not really.
The guy was a little bit more.
Yeah, I'm telling you.
I processed that.
But I don't know how many people would show up.
Actually, probably more people would show up to my hanging.
I'm not uplifting note, Gary.
Thank you for being here.
And welcome to Arizona.
Thank you.
It's a joy.
And I have been a longtime admirer of Pastor Tommy Barnett, his son Luke.
Love your church.
Love you, Pastor Barnett.
Thank you.
And so you guys have had a pretty exciting month in Virginia.
A little bit.
Not much is going on in Virginia.
So just walk us through it.
Let's start this last spring.
Talk about at your church locally.
Started hearing rumblings about local school boards.
Just talk about how all of a sudden that started to develop, started to unfold, and where your church started to get involved in that.
Yeah, do we remember the days when you didn't really care who was running for the school board?
And now you want to know every local election, national election.
I mean, our people are much more engaged today.
And we've had to become that way because of the nonsense that is happening.
And it's gotten to the place where people are just basically saying, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.
And the way that it first started for us is I'm watching our local news, which ended up going national, when this PE teacher in Loudoun County Public Schools, Tanner Cross, stood up at a public school board meeting, which was called for the purpose of giving public input on what was the proposed transgender policy.
The transgender policy would allow children to decide, of course, whatever gender they wanted to be.
And then the teachers were forced to honor the language that that student wanted.
And the classmates had to honor it too.
So Tanner Cross, PE teacher, gets up at a public school board meeting that was inviting public comment and says, Hey, as a Christian, this is against my faith.
I can't deny God's beautiful design of a child's biological gender by deferring to whatever they want.
I can't do it.
It's against my faith.
It's against God.
And it's doing a disservice to children.
I'm kind of paraphrasing what he said.
And for that, he was put on administrative leave.
And then in that week, I found that he went to my church.
I didn't even know that he and his wife Angela went to our church.
And so I met with them.
And my wife Terry and I, who's here, by the way, too, my wife Terry on the front row.
So Terry and I met with Tanner and Angela and we prayed for them and walked them through all that.
But yeah, he was put on administrative leave.
Alliance Defending Freedom came to his defense.
Yeah, praise God for them.
So Mike Ferris, who's the president and CEO of ADF, goes to my church.
He's one of my elders, actually.
So they took up the case.
They won in circuit court.
And so Tanner had to be reinstated.
But what happened was at the same time, people who were not even a part of our church, who just were part of the community and were sick and tired of, you know, what I found, Charlie, was that people who didn't even say they were Christians were realizing that the traditional American family values were eroding.
And so they started, you know, being upset by all this.
So I got contacted at the same time that Tanner Cross was going through all this.
I got contacted by some people in our community saying, we want to recall school board members.
Will you allow signatures to be gathered in your church?
And at first, I was a little reluctant because I thought, you know, as pastors, we have to pick and choose our battles, which ones are important enough for us to engage in and not.
And so when this happened with Tanner, I stood up in front of our congregation.
We invited Tanner and Angela up on the stage to pray for them.
And then I said, Guess what my decision is about recalling school board members?
We're going to be taking signatures in the back of the sanctuary today.
And so, yeah, that's how we got engaged.
That's how it all started.
So then all of a sudden, there was more and more activity.
Talk about how on a certain May school board meeting, a father shows up and gets arrested at that meeting.
That made national news.
And what was he complaining about?
And what was the kind of underlying story behind that?
So what happened was at another school board hearing to allow public input, the school board was very controlling about public input.
They wouldn't even allow people to applaud.
You had to do these jazz hands.
It was just like, it's ridiculous.
Yeah, I'm not kidding.
You could only go to the school board meeting if you like something and do jazz hands.
What is that?
It's interesting.
I got in trouble once at a college campus for clapping.
I could do not.
It's offensive to the hearing disabled.
Is that right?
So you have to do this.
I guess that would be offensive to the blind.
Yeah, I don't know.
I could.
I identify as a clapper, so I want to be able to clap.
But anyway, so, but what happened?
Well, you do too.
But what happened.
So what happened is they decided after these parents were justifiably outraged about stuff that was happening, transgender policies, CRT, all the stuff, different stuff that was being introduced into the school system.
And by the way, also sexually explicit material, pornographic stuff that was approved a part of reading.
And so these parents were outraged and they were, you know, they were justifiably upset.
Well, so the school board cut down public and cut off public input, no more, because the parents were so outraged.
Well, one of the dads, who then didn't get to give public input, was outraged because, come to find out later, it hit national news, his daughter had been sexually assaulted in a restroom by a young man wearing a skirt who took advantage of transgender identity to be able to go into the girl's bathroom, identifying as a female, sexually assaulted her.
We've come to find out since because of FOIA with emails that the school board knew that that happened and they covered it up because they sent the student to another school where he repeated a sexual assault on another female student.
So these parents are coming unglued and for good reason.
Yeah, and so it started to kind of become ground zero for all the school board drama.
Yeah, that's right.
And then you add into the mix a seemingly unwise arrogance from Virginia political leaders that were like, oh, by the way, parents, you think you're in charge?
You're not.
Talk a little bit about that.
Because that wasn't really smart on their behalf.
No.
And you know what they even did?
Because I prayed for Tanner and Angela.
And I, just as a pastor, said, listen, Genesis 1.27 says God created male and female in his image.
There aren't 70 genders.
There are two.
Okay?
And so now, but at the same time, look, you know, as a pastor, I have compassion for people who struggle with gender identity.
And so there's counseling, but you do a disservice to people by pretending that it's not an issue that needs to be treated and then just embrace it and celebrate their confusion.
That's doing a horrible disservice to people.
So when I prayed for Tanner and Angela, and I don't know if I can, it's kind of unpolitically correct, I suppose, but the Loudoun Democratic Party put out a press release against me asking me to recall, to recant my statements, my statements that God created male and female.
That's what they wanted me to recant.
So I said, I can't recant this.
But in the meantime, then, of course, the Justice Department starts to get in, and they're labeling parents as domestic terrorists.
And the AG just, you know, had to kind of backtrack some of that.
But yeah, so these parents have been labeled as domestic terrorists.
They're just fighting for their children.
They're fighting for their children.
What better cause than to fight for young children?
And it's such an important point because they kept repeating Terry McAuliffe when he was then running.
He said, look, I don't know who gets this idea of the parents being in charge of the, I'm paraphrasing, but it was as if, like, who do you think you are?
Yeah.
Type thing.
No, he actually said, I don't think, because Glenn Yunken loved the soundbite and made it all part of his ad campaigns.
You know, but because Terry McAuliffe actually said parents should not have a say in what their teachers are teaching, and that went viral.
And so it, it, you know, so again, that became a huge issue.
That was a turning, no pun intended, that was a turning point.
Perfect, Derek.
That was a turning point in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
That was my next question.
What was the turning point?
You on that turning point.
That's right.
So then let's connect a couple dots then.
Turning the Tide on School Boards00:15:25
Yeah.
Because all this school board energy is happening.
Your church kind of becomes this incubator.
Is that fair to say?
Kind of a place where a lot of this activity, from a righteousness perspective, was allowed a platform.
Is that right?
Yeah, sure.
Because there's a few different issues happening.
So you have the school board, all of this stuff happening.
You have there's a gubernatorial election, and you have, see, I'm over 50 now.
So now what was the other thing that you have going on?
Oh, you have new election laws in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which check this out.
You know, remember the day it used to be?
You had to show up on election day, show an ID, and vote in a precinct at your local precinct.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia, I don't know what it is here in Arizona, but in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
It's a mess.
Yeah, okay.
It became a 45-day voting spree.
It's not that bad here.
Okay, 45 days.
And here's the deal.
But we capitalized on it because churches could serve to collect ballots.
So an individual could ask for an absentee ballot, even if you weren't absent.
It used to be you could only get an absentee ballot if you're like overseas or something.
No, no, no.
If you just don't want to go to the polls, I can be an absentee voter.
So you get an absentee ballot to your home, and then they could bring it to the church.
We could witness it, receive their ballot, and deliver it to the county election office.
So I stood up in front of our congregation.
I said, guess what?
We're handing out ballots, and you go home and you vote and come back.
We'll witness it.
And we're going to collect massive ballots.
Oh, you talk about people were so outraged.
You're like, this is illegal.
We're like, no.
We went to the state board of elections and we said, here are a bunch of ballots from our church.
They're like, you can't do this.
This is not legal.
They had to call Richmond.
And Richmond said, no, it's legal.
You can take them.
And so we were engaging our people in voting and recalling school board members.
Love it.
And so, yeah, it was a great scene.
And so your church, talk a little bit about your church.
When was it founded?
You're right in Loudoun County.
Yeah.
You're right there.
We're 30 miles west of Washington, D.C.
So we're the land of politics.
That's two Greek words, poly meaning many, and tics meaning bloodsuckers.
But anyway, so that's we're in the shadow of the nation's capital.
We're a suburb community, you know, bedroom community, a lot of commuters into D.C.
And our church, we started it 30 years ago, my wife and I, with 18 people, and it has like six, 7,000 now.
If you're ever in D.C., it's the most incredible church.
Wonderful people.
We had a great event.
Yeah, we did.
We were similar to this.
And it was a lot of fun.
Now I get to ask you questions.
And so, but also over the summer, there was not a lot of chatter about who was going to be the next governor.
It was kind of assumed.
Yeah, it was.
Isn't that fair to say?
Terry McAuliffe's going to win.
This is a left-wing state.
Okay, that's very cute, moms and dads in Loudoun County, enough.
Talk about how all of a sudden this turned into an annoyance to the ruling class to all of a sudden to a legitimate political channel.
Yeah.
Well, not to be partisan, but just as a factual statement, there had been no Republican elected to statewide office in Virginia the last 12 years.
And so, and Terry McAuliffe and the Clinton machine, you know, they were running a lot of stuff.
And in fact, on election night, we kept wondering, some ballots are going to show up in a trunk somewhere at 3 a.m.
You know.
Well, I was so upset at Gary and that whole team.
I wanted to go, I was up to like 3:45.
I was like, okay, it's 1 a.m., call it.
And the paranoia was impressive, I have to say.
It's like, we've been through this before.
They're about, nope, we're not doing 2020 again.
I get it.
But I mean, you guys waited for like every single day.
We did.
We waited for a long time.
But Terry McAuliffe had been governor before, and you can't have successive terms.
So you have to at least take a term off.
And so he was running again.
So people already knew what they were going to get with him.
But there was just this rising discontent.
And it's very similar across the nation.
A rising discontent for a lack of righteousness.
And even if somebody's not a Christian to know what that term means, a lack now of good American family values.
And that rising to the surface, people were tired of it.
And so they came out and drove.
And I really believe that the evangelical church turned the tide.
And you gave me a little too much credit, but I really, it's not our church.
Really, the evangelical church in the Commonwealth of Virginia turned the tide and went with a man who professed Christ.
Glenn Yunkin makes a very direct public profession of faith.
And I knew him personally because we both served on the board of the Museum of the Bible.
And so, in fact, when he told me, hey, Gary, I'm going to run for governor.
Inside, I was just like, okay, I'm going to run for president, whatever.
Are you, Gary?
No, I'm not.
No, But, you know, the Lord just had his hand in it.
And I think really the evangelical community came out and turned the tide for that election.
Well, I'll give you the credit because I know you won't receive it publicly.
What I saw at Gary's church was a motivated, engaged church so similar to this.
And it was in, talk a little bit about, and again, we want to be careful not to make this, you know, explicitly political for many different reasons.
But talk about how in Virginia there was a feeling you were outnumbered.
Talk about that, where some people, I'm sure you heard some form of the incantation, Gary, it's over.
Yeah.
Virginia's the new California.
Stop it.
Yeah.
Did you hear that a little bit?
Like, it's over.
What's the point?
Well, when you look on a map of Virginia, the suburbs around Washington, D.C. are extremely progressive.
I never know what that term means.
Like, what are you progressing to?
But anyway, you know, yeah, yeah, that's true.
And did they hear that on your mic?
I don't know.
You said hell.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, but progressive ideology, I mean, listen, what I've tried to say to our people when they think you're getting too political, you're getting too political.
This is what I say.
I have just stayed true to where I've been for decades.
When people start to veer in this progressive direction, then they look at me and they're like, why are you being so political?
I'm not being political.
I'm staying true to God's word right where I've been for decades.
The only difference is that now I have to be more vocal about these issues because everybody in our congregation is dealing with these kind of issues.
And if we stay silent, where are they going to hear truth?
And so as I start saying, hey, listen, this is what God's word says.
You know, we love everybody, but we need to understand what is right and what is wrong.
Listen, Isaiah chapter 5 talks about what are those who call good evil and evil good, and who substitute light for darkness and darkness for light, and sweet for bitter and bitter for sweet.
We're living in the days of Isaiah 5 because we're now living an upside-down world where things that used to be called wrong a few decades ago are now called right and celebrated and vice versa.
And it also reminds me of the period of the judges where it says it was the time when there was no king and everybody did what was right in his own eyes.
And we have a very relative world right now where people think they can determine what truth is.
Listen, God determines what truth is.
And so when people say, when people say, well, you're just getting too political, no, I'm just getting very biblical.
I'm just talking about right and wrong issues as God lays it out.
And when the culture starts veering in a different direction, then it looks like we're becoming so super political.
No, we're just being very biblical.
And I'm so glad you mentioned that.
So let's talk about a component of that where some people say, well, I'm a pastor.
If I speak out on this, it's going to destroy my church.
Since you've spoken out on these issues, or you've always, has your church grown?
Very much.
Now, what I say to people is for every family that leaves, probably three families come.
Because when somebody gets offended, you know, there's always somebody else who's looking for just somebody tell me the truth.
You know, I will have people come to our church.
They may not necessarily agree with me at first, but they're hungry for somebody just tell me the truth.
I just want to hear a straight talker, just somebody who's not going to be playing games with words.
Just give me the truth.
Let me tell you where it really started for me, Charlie.
In 2008, because I bought into, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid about pastors shouldn't be political, you know, separation of church and state, all that nonsense, where people think that that's actually in the Constitution or the Declaration.
It's nowhere in our founding documents at all.
A letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802, that's another story.
But here's the deal.
I just thought that that's the way the churches should be, non-political.
Okay, 2008, I had David Barton come to my church.
It was an awesome guy, president and founder of Wall Builders.
It was an election year in 2008.
He and his wife Cheryl took me and my wife Terry out for dinner.
We're at Outback Steakhouse.
And he says to me, do you ever preach election sermons?
I said, I don't even know what an election sermon is.
He says, yeah, do you know that for the first like couple hundred years of American history?
And in fact, he turned me on to a two-volume set called American Political Sermons of the Founding Era from like 1730 until like the mid-1800s.
And I had the volumes in my library at home where pastors would get up and preach election sermons and call out the candidates and even say things like, this candidate is standing for truth.
This one isn't.
Now you know who to vote for.
Don't vote for this guy.
Vote for this guy.
I'm being very direct.
Well, what has happened since is, see, 1954, you have the Johnson Amendment, when at the time, you know, Senator then, LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, convinced the Senate and the whole Congress, and it was signed into law, that a 501c3 organization cannot officially endorse a candidate.
So that's one thing that stands, you know, pastors then are intimidated by that.
And then you have the separation of church and state clause.
And so again, pastors become intimidated, like, I can't wade into this fray.
But the reality is, and the reason why Jefferson wrote that letter in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Convention was because the Baptists were asking a question about their freedom as their religious freedom.
And he wrote in his letter, and he used that phrase that there's a wall of separation between church and state.
But in the context, he was reassuring the Baptist at the convention that the First Amendment was to protect the church against government intrusion.
It was to keep government out of the church, not the church out of government.
And look what we're living through today.
Yeah.
That the government is coming into churches and shutting them down.
That's right.
It's the same fear.
It's the same fear.
And so when I say to pastors, because I was in the boat of what I would say was ignorance, it's either negligence of your pastoral duty to engage people in the political process because it's part of being salt and light.
I truly believe that.
Every aspect of life, we are to have an impact and influence.
That's salt and light.
That's what we're called to.
Why all of a sudden do people say, well, just don't take it into the political arena?
No, that's part of it.
So it's either negligence that we're not pastorally doing what we're supposed to do, or it's ignorance.
We don't know that we have the freedom to do this.
And so, yeah, so I was up in the camp of ignorance.
And then in 2008, David Barton challenged me.
And so in 2008, 12, 16, and 20, I've preached election sermons.
And I've gotten a little more direct with each passing election cycle.
And in 2012, I had our U.S. Congressman Frank Wolfe.
He served one of the longest serving Congressmen in congressional history, like 36 years.
And he called me up in my office.
He was still in office.
He called me up at the church.
And he introduced himself, Congressman Frank Wolf, and which I knew.
He was my congressman.
But I didn't know him personally.
And he said, somebody gave me a copy of your election sermon.
And I want to know how you got away with it.
And I thought I was in trouble.
I thought, like, he's he's, he's, but he's a good guy.
He loves the Lord.
I mean, I knew that much about him.
I'm like, why is he challenging me like this?
And I'm like, well, and I kind of explained, you know, just some of the things that I've already shared.
And then he pauses and he goes, well, I just think it's great.
Keep it up.
So, I mean, he just emboldened me.
And ever since, I've just continued to just try to help people understand here are the policies.
Listen, you can even strip the word politics out of it for the purpose of and equipping the body of Christ.
Just talk about the policies.
What do the different parties stand for in terms of policies?
Because politics shapes policies.
Policies shape a nation.
And there goes your family with it.
So it's important that we are educated, equipped, informed, engaged, because the voice of the evangelical church should be loud and strong in the United States of America.
And so as a pastor, talk about how, as you stand for righteousness and stand for these issues, you say there's only two genders, for example, which is considered to be a thought crime in America today.
It actually helps you win people for Christ, though, that it's the Galatians 3 model, that the law is a school teacher to Christ.
Is that your experience at your church that it actually fastens and strengthens your congregation?
Because they come to you then and the scriptures for guidance, not TikTok or whatever.
Yeah, right.
I'll answer that question with an email that I got.
I got an email from a guy who's president of a pharmaceutical company in Roslyn, and he emailed me and he said that he and his wife and their four daughters have been coming to Cornerstone for a few years.
And he said it this way.
He said, Gary, we love coming to Cornerstone because it helps me and my wife know we're not going crazy.
That's what he said.
And I read that email and I thought, you know what?
If for no other reason that people who are now so confused, listen, don't allow the culture to steal the narrative.
Like we know what is right and what is wrong.
We know what's up and down.
We know what's true and false.
We can't allow the culture to shape the narrative.
We have that narrative.
We own that because it's based on God's word.
So God defines all that.
And so what I was encouraged by the email about was just the idea of just being truthful.
It helps people know, hey, I'm not going crazy.
You know, when you hear all these nonsensical ideas that are floating around out there, and then I come to church and I can get centered.
I can get centered vertically, right?
And I can get centered horizontally with one another.
And so I can leave knowing I'm not going crazy.
And so it has emboldened our congregation in a way that is, you know, and I and I try to tell people, look, you know, let this passion bring you to a place where you are going to be more useful to the Lord for the sake of the kingdom.
Don't let it make you so angry that all you want to do is go turn over tables, you know?
And so if you just become a table-turning Christian, you're probably not going to be very influential in the world.
But if you retain the zeal And you filter that in a godly way, then we can have a great impact to change the culture rather than the culture changing the church.
Finding Center Through Gospel Passion00:09:51
I think that's, I mean, it's well said.
So let's, there are some, there's some people in this room that are new believers or people that aren't believers.
You've been a pastor for a while now.
Talk about how you got into this.
Talk about also the need for everybody to give their life to Christ and to live for Christ.
And what does that mean in today's America with all this nonsense happening around us?
So a few months ago, as I was just praying through how to navigate some of the craziness, there were two words that came to my heart.
One is proclamation, and one is refutation.
That as a pastor, I have to still be focused on the proclamation of the gospel because it is the word of God and a relationship with Jesus that will change people's lives.
But I also have to recognize that there are some things worth refuting in our culture so that people know that some things are not right.
Now, if I become only proclamation, this is how you get saved, and it's about a relationship with Jesus.
And that is my passion to see people come to faith.
But if that's all that I talk about, then somebody might get saved, but not know really how to apply it.
In day-to-day life, I'm talking about how do you live out your faith?
How are you, salt, and light in a relationship with Jesus to influence your world?
If I only talk about refutation, you know, just we're going to refute this, we're going to, we're mad about this, we're angry about this, I'll create a congregation of, remember those two old guys who would sit up in the balcony on the Muppets and all they'd ever do is complain and they're griping and they're angry.
I don't want a church like that either, right?
So I don't want to be known for just this angry church.
You're refuting everything.
You're against everything.
So we have to be for, we have to be for Jesus, right?
We have to be proclaiming the gospel.
We have to also balance that with refuting the nonsense and the lies that are out there and helping people to apply the gospel in their daily walk with Christ to real life.
And so, yeah, I mean, I would encourage you, if you don't know Christ as your Savior, I mean, you heard Pastor Tommy before we came up here just encouraging you to, you know, take that, take that leap of faith and trust him as your savior.
I'll say this just to add to it.
When we started taking signatures, when I said, okay, we're going to allow recall petitions to be signed for the school board members, which, by the way, we recalled one.
We had enough votes and she decided to quit.
Tragically, another member that we were recalling died in the middle of that.
I don't celebrate that at all.
I'm just saying, you know, so we've removed two and we're still, you know, trying to remove others.
But here's what happened: we had non-Christian, non-church-going people who, again, just love America and love their kids come to the church because we were having the petition signed in the atrium, and they would stay.
They'd come into the church service.
And those people have been getting saved and they have come into a relationship with Jesus.
So wonderful things that God is doing.
And that's the most important thing: coming to faith in Jesus Christ.
So I have a question for you.
I should ask this of every speaker.
What's your favorite book of the Bible?
My favorite book personally is the book of Psalms.
So it's the longest book?
Not for that reason, but because it is the longest book of the Bible.
But I find it in a chaotic world where I can easily go to bad places being frenzied and hurried and worried and all caught up in the craziness.
I find Psalms just soothes my soul.
Talk about the context of how Psalms was written.
What was David doing?
Was he living the high life?
Yeah, right.
So, David, I mean, David wrote like three-fourths of the Psalms, but he was a man after God's heart.
He had great victories, and he had very low points, too.
You know, he's the shepherd boy who kills Goliath, but he's the man who falls into adultery.
And by the way, he was not a young man when he fell into adultery.
When you look at the chronology of his life, he was about 50 years old when he fell into adultery with Bathsheba.
But he was a man who was a warrior.
What I love about David was he was a man's man because he was a warrior, but he wasn't afraid to cry and to show emotion.
So you see through the Psalms the strength of a warrior who at sometimes he's saying, Lord, kill my enemies.
And at other times, he's saying, Lord, you see me when I lie in my bed and weep at night.
And so I just love just the raw, genuine, you know, just the tough and the tender guy of David and how the Psalms, I think, appeal to all aspects of our lives.
For new believers, what one or two books do you really recommend the most?
Not Leviticus.
No, not, although, although I'm going to tell a Leviticus story, but I'm going to answer your question first.
I have a Leviticus story, too.
Okay.
The answer to the question is: typically we say the Gospel of John, it's a great book to start to read first if you're a new believer.
But so one of our sons played t-ball with a buddy, and his parents said to me, one time, so Terry and I were sitting in the stands or watching Austin playing ball, and this wonderful family, not churchgoers, not believers, came and said, Hey, we heard you, Pastor Cornerstone, we need to start coming to your church.
And I'm like, okay, great.
Now, if you are familiar with Calvary Chapel, we are affiliated with Calvary Chapel.
So Chuck Smith was my pastor until he passed away several years ago.
And one of the things that Calvary Chapel churches do, well, Jack Hibbs, he's another good friend of mine.
And Mart Ramikoy, yeah, we teach straight through the Bible.
We go Genesis to Revelation, then we start over.
Yeah.
And so when the Flinton family said, we're going to come to your church, I was in the book of Leviticus.
And I'm like, no, right?
I'm like, you're going to come and you're going to hear about mold and mildew and diseases and pus.
And oh, this is not, you've been wanting to come to church and now you're going to come to Leviticus.
And I was like whining.
And then, and then my Lord like convicted me and like, my word will not return void.
I'm like, oh, great.
You know, and so God nailed me on that.
So the first Sunday that they came, I'm talking about like Levitical rites and the feast.
Disposing of bodies.
I mean, it was almost that bad, right?
They got saved that first Sunday in the book of Leviticus.
So God's word will not return void.
I love it.
Love your Leviticus story.
Well, my Leviticus story is how I knew the founding fathers were awesome because they put Leviticus on the liberty belt.
I mean, that means they really knew their Bible.
That is true.
I mean, they could have put like Genesis or God.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
They put Leviticus, Leviticus 25, proclaim liberty of which the lamb are in.
I also just love learning about the founding fathers.
I mean, John Adams spoke fluent Hebrew.
Every founding father knew their Bible.
They knew the implications of it.
But yeah, I always joke around with Dennis Krager.
I say, when's your Bible commentary on Leviticus going to come out?
Yeah.
It's a tough one.
I mean, he jokes around.
25,000 words he's dedicated just on the verse on homosexuality, just on that verse.
Wow.
So it's a heady one.
Okay.
One or two more questions, and we'll open it up for the audience.
Yeah, that's okay.
Just talk more broadly about someone out here that might be struggling, a believer that gave their life to the Lord, and they're going through a tough time right now.
You know, I'm getting a lot of emails like this.
I have a pretty good sense of where people are politically, but not just politically, though, just kind of where people are.
People are run down right now.
There's this thing called the great resignation.
Like people are just kind of looking for purpose, young people in particular.
What's your word of encouragement if there's someone who's a believer?
Like, okay, Pastor Gary, I did the altar call thing.
What now?
Yeah.
You know, what I try to tell people is the Christian life is not a sprint.
It's a marathon.
And that it doesn't matter what kind of a start you got.
What matters is how well you finish.
And that there's going to be times in the course of running a marathon where it's going to be painful and you're going to feel like giving up.
But one of the things that God rewards is perseverance.
And sometimes when we become Christians, we want everything to just be wonderful.
And what I try to remind people is this is not heaven.
This is earth.
Our citizenship is in heaven.
We're looking forward to a day when we're going to be there.
This is why Paul said, I consider my present sufferings not worth comparing to the glory that awaits me in Christ Jesus.
Because we can't lose sight of the fact that there will be valleys and there will be mountains in this life.
There's going to be ups, there's going to be downs.
There's going to be times where we feel discouraged.
But that doesn't mean that God has left you or forsaken you because I will never leave you nor forsake you, is what he says.
But we have to run the race with perseverance so that we can receive the crown which he has provided for us.
And that perseverance is sometimes hard.
It is hard.
But everything that is worth the victory is worth the endurance to get there.
And, you know, ask any athlete, anybody who's gone into training, it hurts, it's painful, it's difficult, but the reward is worth it in the end.
And so that's what we have to keep our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross and suffered for our sakes so that we might enjoy that eternal life with him.
We've got to keep that eternal perspective.
You could be a pastor.
I try to be.
I try to be on self-did you ever get that before?
Once in a while.
Just like Jerry Jones over there.
Yeah, Jerry Jones.
Season tickets, by the way.
It's so funny.
We were catching up backstage and he showed me his card because the dream conference at the bottom, it said Jerry Jones.
And I looked at him.
I was like, are you actually Jerry Jones?
I was like, looks so much like Jerry Jones.
Keeping Friends Across Political Lines00:10:04
So let's get ready for some questions here.
And if we can, the best way to do this.
Students get priority.
Let's please just keep it to questions, not public proclamations or public announcements or gatherings you're having.
I really want to get to as many as we possibly can.
But as we're kind of getting into line here, anything else on your heart, Gary, you want to share with this audience before we open it up to?
I just appreciate how engaged I can tell you already are.
That's why you're here.
So thank you for being here.
I'll try not to be as corny as Eric Metaxas, though.
I saw when you were.
Because we're friends too.
Eric was a real problem.
He's a real problem.
I've had him speak at my church twice, and every time I'm scared, what is going to come out of his mouth?
And the way he dresses is just ridiculous.
Yeah.
He's going to the beach or something.
Okay.
You, my young friend, you are up.
Hi, my name is Micah Stevens, and I wanted to ask your opinion on how the Biden fraud and how there was this secret thing where they counted the balance over again, and they were actually Trump, and he won by a landslide.
You don't watch CNN, do you?
So smart.
Are you Chris Pomo?
Yeah, exactly.
No, he's been suspended indefinitely.
Yeah, that's right.
Look, so to answer your question, there was so much shenanigans back in 2020.
We need to make, in my own personal opinion, it needs to be a priority to find out what happened and fix 2020.
It needs to be priority number one.
I can go into great detail about it.
We have the footage from what happened in Atlanta of the ballots magically being discovered under the table.
But the most thorough reference that is irrefutable and is very well researched of a woman that I really respect, Molly Hemingway.
Her latest book called Rigged is incredible.
I encourage everyone to check it out.
If you have family, friends that are skeptical, like, oh, why are you still talking about 2020?
Go read that book.
It will go through all of this.
It'll go through the late-night ballot dumps.
It'll go through the signature verification issues.
It'll go through Zuckerberg putting in $420 million for the Center for Technology and Civic Life.
And she's done a terrific job.
And she's a legitimate journalist.
She's very fair.
I'm sure you've seen her on television a lot.
She's not a sensationalist.
She's not going above and beyond.
But I do hope that there's going to be some continued investigations into this, especially here in Arizona, because there's a lot of open questions still here in Arizona.
Gary, you want to comment on that at all?
No?
Plead the fifth?
Okay.
God bless you.
Thank you for being here tonight.
Okay.
My name is Jamie McPeak.
I'm 10.
And my question is: so my friend is not Republican.
He's Democrat.
And so he's been in his house for a while for a long time.
He's been online for my school.
And he finally comes back and doesn't play with me.
And I just wanted to know: do you have any tips on it?
Yeah.
First of all, you guys are 10, so tell them to cut it out.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Seriously.
And the parents should get involved and be like, we can hate each other.
Our kids are 10.
Okay.
But what you're highlighting is not surprising.
It's tragic.
When I was 10, I didn't know what a Republican or a Democrat was, okay?
Let alone what my friends.
And this is a real thing.
And Gary, I want your thoughts on this.
That if you think the nastiness that you see is only going to be between 50 and 60 year olds, no, no, that river goes all the way down to 10 year olds.
It is destroying the lives of every single American citizen.
And you said something very interesting.
You would like to play with him, wouldn't you?
Yeah, but he doesn't want to play with you.
It's interesting how that works, right?
It's that unfortunately, 99% of the time on the left, and maybe 1% on the right, I'm sure all of you have this, friends that stop talking to you, family members that stop talking to you.
It seems as if it's in the operating system and the programming on the left that if there's an idea or there's a worldview that they disagree with, immediate dismissal.
That is where cancel culture came from, by the way.
And I want to broaden this to the whole audience.
If friends leave you, you know, blessed subtraction, right?
But you shouldn't leave friends over politics.
You shouldn't.
You should not leave friends and don't do this.
If they leave you, whatever.
Like, don't fight for that.
You know, like, whatever.
Have a nice day, okay?
I've done that plenty.
But you shouldn't allow something as a difference of, you know, worldview of how you think things should operate as be like, I'm never going to talk to you because of this.
Instead, especially as Christians, we're not called to do that.
Gary, do you have any thoughts on that?
Well, one of the things that struck me was that you said your friend is Democrat and stays in his house all the time.
Is your friend Joe Biden?
That's the first thing that I thought.
The second.
You wouldn't be 10, Gary.
That's debatable.
But anyway, I'm going to get over.
See, I get to leave.
I get to clean up your mess.
I did this at your church.
No, no.
I'm not going to have you back because you'll repeat.
But seriously, though, what I find so tragic is that the people who talk about tolerance the most are the least tolerant.
And why is that?
It's so sad.
It really is.
But I would just encourage you, you know, you do your part to love your friend and be a good friend and, you know, pray for your friend, but we can't control our friends.
And so all you can do is try to be a good friend yourself.
Yeah.
And the last piece of advice I'll give you is try to mend it.
Try to keep friends regardless of political differences.
Don't fall into that habit at a young age.
It's not a good way to live.
It isn't.
You end up siloing yourself off.
There will be people that leave your life, but especially for 10-year-olds, I don't want to live in that type of country.
God bless you.
Thank you for being here tonight.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Sandra Christensen, and we're going through some school board shenanigans.
Paradise Valley Unified School District, pornography of the schools and things of that nature.
There's a governing board meeting on Thursday.
So my question is, as a person who's going to be running for governing board next year, how can I keep my Christian values and fight the good fight without having to tear people down?
Because they're trying to tear us down.
Yeah, that's a great question.
You know, Jesus said, blessed are you when people persecute you and say all manner of evil against you.
They did the same thing to the prophets, right?
But great is your reward.
And I would just say, as long as you are truthful and season it with grace.
Amen.
And a lot of times, especially married men have heard this before.
You're newly married.
Have you ever heard this, Charlie?
It's not what you say.
It's how you say it.
Have you ever heard that?
Once or twice.
Once or twice?
Okay.
I've heard it once or twice myself, too.
And so I would encourage you, it's not always what you say.
You might be factual, but it's how you say it.
And just, you know, let the love of the Lord Jesus come through, but don't compromise the truth.
And God will honor you for that.
And this is something that's important.
Now, if you get into the business of principalities and you get into the business of politics, you are now making a spiritual decision to play offense in a domain that, according to Paul and according to Jesus, is dominated by the enemy.
This is a theological position that Christians don't like talking about openly, but it's what the scriptures say, right, Gary?
It's that you're now playing, you're not, you're now going to play offense in Satan's sandbox, right?
So that means you have to understand and be equipped with the spiritual tools and weaponry to know what you're getting into.
What does that mean?
Praying, fasting, going to church, being around fellow Christians, right?
Asking God for wisdom and he'll give it to you abundantly, James 1, 5, always self-assessing, like, was I Christ-like in that situation?
At the same time, did I tolerate evil in that situation?
Right?
That's a balance, isn't it?
As you say, proclamation, refutation.
And look, it's important to remember that, and C.S. Lewis said it best where he said, we need to launch a sabotage campaign in enemy-occupied territory because we're living in enemy-occupied territory.
And so when you're getting into that fight, some Christians don't realize that different than almost anything else, if you're going to run for office, you're going to come under arrows and attacks and backlash.
And so you have to then come into that posture.
It's like, okay, especially if you're going to proclaim righteousness and be disagreeable with the ways of the world, as it says in Romans 12, 2, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind so that you might be able to see God's perfect and goodwill.
The second part of the verse, I'm paraphrasing.
That's the essence of it.
And the point is that the do not conform comes with a promise, but that's hard.
And that comes the total transformation of it.
So, I just want to encourage you and commend you and keep on showing up to Freedom Square if you can, because you have a whole room of people here that are going to want to support you.
But also understand, it comes with a price, but a price worth paying.
So, God bless you.
Thank you for being here.
The Cost of Showing Up Freely00:04:29
Hi, Charlie.
My name is Maverick.
It's a great name.
Thank you.
I have someone that I deeply care about who.
thinks that Kyle Rittenhouse should still be charged with something.
They haven't told me what, but with the killing of those people.
And I've seen the trial, at least a good portion of it, sorry, where I didn't see anything wrong.
And I was wondering if you have anything to say about it.
Yeah, I mean, boy, did they try to lock him up for something?
Weapons charge got thrown out.
Let me try to tie this in biblically.
You know, someone said, Charlie is a Christian.
It says, thou shalt not kill.
Now, interesting, if you go into the Hebrew, it says, thou shalt not murder.
It's a very big difference.
And Kyle did not have the intent to take life that night.
But self-defense is time and time again articulated and defended in the Bible.
And Gary, do you want to talk about that?
That's exactly right.
That there's a distinction in the Ten Commandments between murder and killing.
Because some people have asked me, law enforcement, military, hey, I've had to kill people.
In the line of duty, you're an arm of the government.
You are doing something that is not murder.
Sometimes there's killing, but that's different from murder.
So, yeah.
And especially, so you take the military example, our rules of engagement are supposed to be almost all a self-defense posture.
But let's just talk about Kyle Rittenhouse, right?
What on earth in the criminal code can they throw at him?
And then let's just say the politically incorrect part out loud: that for whatever reason, there was that picture of Kyle Rittenhouse with his mouth open and his hat backwards, wearing a green camo color and the AR-15 strapped.
And he all of a sudden fit into a stereotype of a young white man that is inspired by Donald Trump and wants to commit violence.
And for whatever reason, they need to keep that narrative going.
They don't care whose lives they destroy.
They don't care if they have to lock up entire families.
And that's wrong.
That's tribal politics at its worst.
Because you notice every time they try to attack Kyle Rittenhouse, they insert race where no one's actually thinking about it, right?
They all of a sudden are like, oh, he's a white supremacist.
How on earth do you say something like that?
You know, his best friend in the world and the father figure to him is a black man.
Does anyone actually even know that?
Of course not.
The media won't tell you that.
No, instead, they basically say that.
And because, and I did this on our radio show on our podcast today, and this is an analogy that might make sense to it, might not.
So I just apologize in forgiveness, for forgiveness ahead of time, which is that the media is in the mosaic creating business, okay?
So if you look at a mosaic, it's thousands of independent little tiles that go create a bigger picture, right?
So if you zoom in on just one part of a mosaic, it just looks like a tile.
You zoom out, it's a bigger picture.
But the media refuses to put a tile or a collection of tiles in their mosaic picture if it doesn't fit the type of thing they want you to see.
Does that make sense?
And so Kyle Rittenhouse was a big part of their picture.
It was like the middle part of America's a terrible place and white people are hunting down people in the streets.
And all of a sudden you have to remove that.
That's a mea culpa.
That's a, oh, it's actually not as bad as you might think.
Like, oh, actually, all that outrage was unwarranted.
And they don't want to have to do that.
So look, you asked a very specific question.
I'll give you a specific answer.
I would ask your friend, what on earth in the U.S. Criminal Code could he be charged with?
Because they tried to do everything, you know, he and he was found not guilty by a jury of his peers under a very intense prosecution, by the way.
Some of the most unfair and I would say belligerent prosecution that I have seen in recent memory that really wanted him locked up.
Thank you so much for being here tonight.
Yeah, can I just give a flip side to the tragic labeling of the white supremacist thing?
And she's kind of gone under the radar, but she's getting more notoriety now.
But people talk about how Young became governor, but the lieutenant governor elect Winsom Sears.
So, first black female ever elected to statewide office in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
She's a conservative Christian assault weapon-carrying Marine.
And that on her campaign literature, she has an assault rifle on her campaign literature.
Rethinking the Civil Rights Narrative00:03:04
She stopped by our church two weeks ago.
I brought her up and prayed for her.
People gave her a standing ovation.
So there's a good, again, we can talk about how the narrative is just like so, you know, racially divisive, but there's some good things happening too.
And she's a great example of some good things happening.
It's so funny.
She went on Twitter and she said, all my followers think I'm base.
Okay, I am base now.
It's like, it's so funny.
You guys, it's a political nomenclature thing.
So she's terrific, and we're going to try to have her at AmericaFest.
So, yes.
Hey, welcome to Phoenix.
Charlie, I consider myself, like a lot of people here, pretty well-read.
We listen to podcasts.
There's a lot of information.
And while the left has been lifting up the word racist and the accusation of racist, there's one thing I haven't heard.
And can you explain why I don't, at least I have not heard any reminder and restoration or restatement of all the advances that we made during the civil rights movement.
No references to Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Medgar Evers.
That was a church history moment and it was an American moment.
And I've not heard any rhetoric to remind us of the bridge that we built.
Did I not hear it?
No, I think that's smart.
I will say, though, that when we say that, we're told that America is just as racist as it was back then and there was no progress made.
That is the belief of the media orthodoxy and the academic orthodoxy.
I'll prove it to you.
Derek Bell, who is the leading critical race theorist, or at least previously, in 1991, wrote an essay where he said the black man is just as unfree as he was in 1865.
He wrote that in 1991.
That started this argument that any progress was actually not real progress.
This is preposterous, obviously, for anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear, whether it be Major League Baseball, sporting schools, anything, to imagine that there's no progress at all whatsoever.
I think that's a smart point, though, because the civil rights movement is actually not taught the way you would think it would be taught in most public schools.
Most public schools have a de-emphasis on Martin Luther King's vision of a colorblind society, and they have an overemphasis on Malcolm X's society of a hyper race, Malcolm X's vision of a hyper-racialized society.
So let's take out Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. for a second.
There are two other black intellectuals that are really important.
That's Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Okay.
So Booker T. Washington, he believed that we want to try to have a colorblind society, that the spirit and the soul of a man is the most important.
Booker T. Washington was articulating what Martin Luther King Jr. said beforehand.
W.E.B. Du Bois said, race is the most important thing in the world, that race is what moves history.
Engaged Church and End Times00:12:12
And so, just so you understand that if I say that, they'll just dismiss it.
But I think that's smart.
We do need to do a better job of talking about the civil rights movement and really what came out of it.
I think that's highly, I think it's highly beneficial.
Gary, do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, just highlighting the positive, I think, will go a long way to speaking against all of the divisiveness.
So that's one reason why, like when Winsome Sears said, Can I come to your church?
Absolutely, but I'm wanting to pray for you up on the stage because the more we highlight the good things that God is doing in terms of racial reconciliation, then that'll push out the darkness.
But we do have to do more of it.
Yeah.
Sometimes I find that we're so spending so much time trying to fight against the false narrative and the lies and the divisiveness that we're not highlighting what the truth is.
So sometimes we get caught up in that game.
It's true.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Smart point.
Yes.
Good to see you again.
Great to see you again as well.
First of all, I want to say I love the progress that you guys are doing in our culture, but my question comes to the role of the church.
Since right now, we're doing so much politically and the idea of activism.
You were talking about earlier, Gary, how you had even congressmen asking, How did you get away with it?
So if the left uses more than what I call their collective brain cell, they'll find out that we're doing things like the petitions and things like that.
So how far can we bend the rules and for how long can we get away with it until the left really starts to attack us?
And then what should we do in response to that?
Yeah, well, the left has already attacked us.
And I guess implied in your question is that there is a limit.
And I'm not sure that there is, only in this sense, only in this sense, because I don't want a church to become hyper-politicized.
Like I said, proclamation and refutation has to be a balance.
But I also believe that the church has been silent way too long.
Way too long.
And a friend of mine, Dr. Erwin Lutser, used to pastor Moody Church in Chicago.
He wrote a book years ago called When a Nation Forgets God, Seven Lessons to Learn from Nazi Germany.
And the church remained silent during the days of Nazi Germany.
But, you know, there were the few exceptions, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke up.
But then what happened?
He was executed at the age of 39 in 1945.
But Bonhoeffer said, A silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
And God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.
And we have to be the church engaged today.
So I'm not sure.
I understand your question, but I think the bigger battle is that churches are too passive and silent.
Not, are we going too far?
We need to get the church engaged in the conversation and make the difference in the culture.
I agree.
Nice question.
Hi, my name is Chuck.
I'd like to thank both of you guys.
Charlie, I came a couple months ago when Jack Kebbs was here.
Nice shirt, too.
That's a turning point shirt.
Appreciate it.
He was talking about the pastors in black cloaks.
And after that, I started attending church for the last month and a half.
And thanks to great pastors like yourself, Pastor Gary, defending his church and our nation.
I kind of have a question that kind of piggybacks off of Mavericks, not too much off of Kyle Rittenhouse, but what you had said, defending yourself and how it's moral.
But you said in the beginning it's a moral duty.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a moral duty to defend yourself against imminent death.
I think that would be the same as if you were bleeding out and you had a tourniquet next to you.
Would you use it or not, right?
And that it goes to kind of this question of if you have a chance to save your life, would you do that?
Um, and the answer is absolutely yes.
Um, and that's the situation I would say with Kyle Rittenhouse.
Um, the same it would be with medicine or in self-defense or any of those things.
Um, and there's a multitude of biblical examples.
As a side note, I got into this really bizarre conversation the other day.
Um, there's these people that think they're really smart and um they pick fights with me, and it's kind of interesting.
I wish this one was filmed.
And he said, Charlie, um, Jesus, what he actually did an act of suicide by going to the cross.
This is a new thing, and again, this would take someone who's never read their Bible before because Jesus did not go willingly, he went obediently to the cross, right?
Jesus went because he knew what was going to come after them, right?
Um, and so to your question about the moral good, right, and to tie it all together from the Christian ethic, God gave us life.
Life, now, this is another thought crime, it's not a gift, it's an investment, okay?
It's a difference.
A gift means you can do whatever you want with it.
Like, if I said, Hey, what'd you get for Christmas five years ago?
I don't know.
You forget gifts really easily, right?
You don't forget investments, though.
Anyone ever here start a business, you get an investment to do it?
You remember the day that check arrived, you remember the expectation, and you remember what you have to do in return for it.
Big difference: gift versus an investment.
God invested in you.
Now, you could say life is special.
That's what people are really saying when they say life is a gift, right?
They're saying life is special, it's unique, it's ordained, you know, it's to be taken seriously.
I think that's the essence of it.
But it's also say, Hey, I have a responsibility.
So, here's the question: Is it the moral right if all of a sudden, like Mr. Rosenbaum coming up to try to kill Kyle Rittenhouse?
Do you, as a Christian, have a responsibility to defend your life?
The answer is absolutely yes.
The answer is that at that moment where your life is put in jeopardy, the life that God made an investment in you, you have a moral obligation to try to protect them.
Thank you.
Okay, so I've noticed the spirit of the Antichrist recently with all these BLM riots and last summer and the recent Christmas parade incident.
Every single time we push back, they create a new mandate or a new, yeah.
So, is there really any way we can reverse this, or is this like the beginning of the end?
Maybe that's a good question.
That's a Calvary Chapel question.
That's a great question.
You know, look, John in 1 John, he talks about the Antichrist, but he talks about Antichrist small A. In Revelation, you know, you hear about the beast and the Antichrist, capital A. There will be an actual Antichrist who rises on the world, seeing this geopolitical figure, very charismatic, who will try to unite the world into one world government.
Okay, but John in 1 John talks about the Antichrist small A because that spirit is now present at work.
And that spirit of Antichrist, small A, is always trying to war against the things of God.
And so, we have to expect that in our culture, there will be constant things warring against God, God's people, Israel.
I mean, all of it, you know, all of it is rooted in the enemy and that spirit of the Antichrist.
So, we have to recognize that that's there, but we can't become passive and check out and say, Well, John says the spirit of the Antichrist is going to be here, so we might as well check out.
Have to always fulfill our responsibility, as I said earlier, being salt and like make a difference in the world, be the representatives of Christ, be his ambassadors in the world, because just because the spirit of the Antichrist is here doesn't mean we become passive and check out.
We have to stay engaged.
I want to encourage all of you that might be interested about this topic.
Our friend Steve Smotherman gave one of the best sermons on the Antichrist.
You could type in Steve Smotherman, Antichrist, that has millions of views on YouTube.
He did a terrific job.
It's one of the best, so biblical.
But, Pastor Gary, I want to ask you a piggyback off of that.
Do you find that some people that might focus on the end times, do you think that the danger of that is an apathetic posture?
Do you see that ever?
Yeah, I mean, and this is why Jesus teaches this parable and he says, occupy till I come, because he wants us to still be engaged in our world.
Because people can just become passive and check out.
I mean, Paul even had to address this in his letter to the Thessalonians because people were deciding, well, Jesus is going to come again, so I don't need to work.
If you don't work, you shall not eat.
He's continually challenging us in scripture that even though Jesus is coming again, you still have to do your part to be his representatives in the world.
Stay engaged.
Yeah, and it's a balance, right?
We want to look at the signs of the times, what the scriptures say, and be aware and alert.
Also, admitting the day and the hour is unknown, right?
No one has it circled.
Some people are very, they're like, oh, Jesus is coming next Thursday.
I don't have to worry about anything.
Not so fast.
Some people say, the house is on fire.
All we got to do is get the kids out.
And it's like, well, maybe put the fire out.
That would be more logical, right?
But it's not to say we shouldn't care about eschatology, right?
Or care about what the end times have to say.
So I hope that's helpful.
Thank you.
Do you have a question?
Do we have a question here?
Okay.
So this will be our final question.
And then we'll call it a night.
So yeah.
How are you guys doing?
My name is Mark.
There's a five to six minute presentation called The Greatest War and the Covenant.
And it takes global warming off the table and the race card off the table.
Why isn't anybody speaking about that?
Why isn't anybody talking about it?
And I'll give you just a short expert from it.
God chooses the color of our skin and God chooses if we're a man or a woman.
And I don't judge God's choices.
And that's just part of it.
And why isn't anybody speaking about that?
It goes?
Well, I'm not familiar with the video, but it's got God all over it.
Okay, well, then we'll check it out.
So thank you.
All right.
We'll look at it.
The covenant.
Thank you.
Appreciate that.
So let me just kind of complete all this together.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Anyone go to every Freedom Square?
Did anyone go to every single one?
You guys are awesome.
Seriously.
And look, we are going to stay on top of this.
January, we're going to come right out of the gate.
January 4th, 4th.
Is that right?
4th?
Okay.
Yeah, we'll do it.
And I think a lot of people are in town.
I'm in town the whole month of January, so it's going to be a lot of fun.
But let's pack it up.
We're going to have some amazing speakers, amazing things.
I just want to say a couple things in closing.
Thank you again to the entire Dream City team and the Barnetts.
As you guys consider year-end giving or tithing, please consider Dream City Church.
They're doing such an amazing job on so many different fronts.
That's number one.
Number two, for those of you guys that want to come to America Fest, again, we have Tucker Carlson coming, Candace Owens coming.
We have Pete Hegsef coming, Jesse Waters, Greg Gutfeld, you name it.
They're going to be in Phoenix December 18, 19, 2021.
Just go to our website, tpusa.com, and get your tickets.
And then in closing, everybody, you guys are making a phenomenal difference.
And I don't know about you, but I was extremely inspired and convicted by what Pastor Gary shared tonight.
It was one of our best we've had.
So give it up for Gary.
And we'll see you guys next year.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
If you want to come to AmericaFest, it's tpusa.com/slash A-M-F-E-S-T.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.