Jon Harris, AD Robles, and Joel Webbon recount their divergent journeys into addressing social justice within evangelicalism, sparked by the 2018 MLK conference, seminary isolation at Southeastern, and the fallout from Eric Mason's "Woke Church." While Harris observed parallels between woke atheism and certain leaders, Robles found his viral video exposed widespread SBC concerns, and Webbon lost a third of his congregation after preaching against critical race theory. Ultimately, they argue that the intense controversy stems not merely from strong rhetoric but from a dangerous disconnect between leadership warnings and congregational perception of an imminent spiritual threat. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Viral Context and Family Meetings00:15:06
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Thanks.
All right, welcome.
This is something that's a little bit out of our normal wheelhouse and context, but today I'm very, very privileged to have John Harris and Ady Robles live in person in our studio.
We're stoked to have you guys.
Thanks for coming.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm glad to be here.
Great.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Very glad to be here.
Cool.
All right.
So, this is what we wanted to do.
We talked about all right, what content should we do?
What would people appreciate?
And we think that it might be helpful for your followers, my followers, your followers.
A lot of people sometimes just want to know what's your personal story?
Why did you turn on a camera and start talking about the Gospel Coalition?
You know, why did you feel it was necessary to address these kinds of topics?
Why is it that you got into this ministry or whatever you want to call it that you find yourself in today?
So, Not origin story, maybe from birth, eight pounds, six ounce, maybe not that far back.
But where is it that kind of began this journey of YouTubing, Gab, Twitter, writing books, podcasts, all that kind of stuff?
So, anybody want to go first?
Yeah, I'll go first.
So, you know, my story, I always answer this question slightly differently because I, depending on where I'm at in life, I emphasize certain parts of it.
But really, what it boiled down to for me is that, I had been aware of social justice and sort of woke stuff in other areas, right?
So, one thing I used to follow a lot of atheists online just because I was always interested in apologetics and stuff like that.
And there was a woke movement in atheism called Atheism Plus.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is so crazy.
And even some atheists would come out against it.
And I really liked that and all of that.
And then, right around Trump's election, which I was not even political in any way during that election.
And what I mean by that is, I didn't vote.
I never even considered voting.
Like, it just wasn't something I thought about doing.
I cared about politics, but I wasn't active, right?
But right around that time, I started seeing a lot of evangelical leaders who I had read their books and been to the conferences and things like that.
And they sounded identical to these Atheism Plus people, except they would replace, you know, Jesus for the principles of atheism that are very rigid, as you know.
So, but they were saying the same thing.
It just was in a different context.
And I remember thinking to myself, like, this is just really weird.
And so, What I would do is, I would put out a video every so often just to, you know, some thoughts about, you know, responding to an article or something like that.
And, you know, basically, like my mom watched it and maybe a few other people would watch it.
And so, but I never considered that this was, you know, going to be something I would do long term until one day I put out a video about the MLK 50 conference, which, you know, featured people like Matt Chandler and Russell Moore and things like that.
And I did some content about that.
And I'll never forget the response to it.
First of all, it went kind of viral for my context.
Viral for me means, you know, at the time it was like 100 people watched it, you know, like that.
But the responses I kept getting were either really positive, like over the top positive, or over the top negative.
And I thought that was so interesting.
In fact, somebody that I knew personally, who I knew knew me personally, said, you know, like something about white privilege, or I forget exactly what it was, but it was just like, Like, dude, you know me.
Like, what's going on here?
So I knew that there was just like a visceral reaction to it.
And that's when I decided to put more content out.
And so it was at that point I knew that I'm onto something here.
Like you don't get like the absolutely hot reactions and then the absolutely cold reactions for the same video unless there's something really deep going on here.
And that's kind of why I started doing it.
When was that?
What year was that?
You remember?
Yeah, I don't remember.
What was MLK 50?
18, I think.
18, I think.
So we're probably talking like four years ago.
And I had been doing it for probably six months leading up to that.
But again, very kind of, you know, just every now and then I'd pull an old Nine Marks article out and talk about it.
And that's how it happened.
It was just sort of by accident, and the reactions kind of spoke for themselves that I was onto something.
That's cool.
What about you?
I remember sitting in seminary at Southeastern being very frustrated that I was hearing all kinds of what today we would describe as woke nonsense.
And a friend of mine sent me a video of this guy named A.D. Robles.
And it was very encouraging because I felt very alone.
And I know the other students who felt similar to myself felt the same thing.
There's no one out there representing what we believe.
And it's like someone had turned a switch on, and all of a sudden, it's either you're pacified or you're on this woke train.
And so, what inspired me to do content was you have a voice like AD out there, but there just weren't a lot of voices.
There was hardly anyone.
And I could see even among the men who taught at Southeastern who were against what was happening at the school, they were very just.
I'm trying to choose my words very carefully here because I don't want to read into their hearts too much, but they didn't want to do much about it really for whatever reason.
Okay.
So some of them have retired since then or tried to transfer out or, you know, these kinds of things.
But there wasn't any pushback on that local level at my school.
And I didn't see much pushback in a wider sense in evangelicalism.
So I did not have the intention of building a platform or anything like that.
I really didn't think a lot of people would see my videos, but I thought, well, at least at Southeastern, if I make a video about.
My experience there and what was happening there, it would let students who feel the same way I do about these issues know what they're getting into, because I thought it's it's happening in evangelicalism, but I didn't know how widespread.
I figured you can just go to another school maybe and avoid this and they're not really telling you on the front end what's going on.
So maybe they'll find my video and see, okay, this is what's happening and and then steer clear of that particular school perhaps, or at least if they come, they know what they're getting into.
So after Some wise counsel and praying about it.
I had already graduated.
I made this like hour and a half long video, which I mean, that's pretty long.
And I didn't think a lot of people would get too invested in that unless they were really thinking about going to the school.
Like I wouldn't watch an hour and a half, right?
Unless I was going to go.
But that's not what happened.
I put it out there and the views just kept going up.
And I think by like the first week, it had hit like a thousand views or something crazy.
And I just thought, what in the world is going on here?
And I thought, well, you know what?
I'll spend a few more weeks just making videos about this topic because I'm getting emails from people all over the country, or Facebook messages, I guess, and some emails from people saying, John, like, I saw your video.
It's happening here.
It's happening in like, it was from everywhere, especially in the Southern Baptist Convention.
And I was just blown away by, I was like, this isn't just at Southeastern.
This is like way worse than I thought it was.
So I said, we'll take a couple weeks.
So I took a couple weeks, talked about social justice.
I figured, you know, that'll be it.
And then, And the views just kept going up.
People kept asking more questions.
And what became a few weeks has turned into now.
I guess that was like January 2019.
It's turned into now a few years.
So we're still talking about it.
It's taken on different forms, but that's probably been the primary driving force in my content has been social justice issues in the church.
And I believe God opens doors.
He put this door there.
He opened it.
And I do believe that this is something that's benefited a lot of people to help them think through some of these issues.
They don't have the time sometimes to put in all the research.
And also just to To be a voice to push back against this a bit and to say, like, there are people, you're not crazy.
Like, there's people just like you who see the same things, know this isn't biblical.
And so it's an encouraging thing for the people that already feel that, you know, the way that I felt about it.
So, yeah, we'll see where it goes.
I don't know for how much longer it'll happen.
But for right now, there is this opening, this platform to talk about these things.
And I'm just grateful that, you know, God would use me in this way, even though I feel weak.
I feel.
You know, sometimes incompetent to do it, but the Lord uses the weak things.
And I've seen his grace throughout this whole journey.
Yeah.
Joel, do you mind if I just jump in and say one quick thing?
Because, you know, me and John were talking at lunch earlier today about, you know, how much longer we're going to do the content and stuff like that.
And something that I picked up on really early on, and I think, John, maybe just based on what you said, you kind of picked up on this as well.
There's a disconnect right now, I think, between the person in the pew, the regular Joe in the pew, And the church leadership, because I think there's this tendency for the leadership to think it's all going to blow over.
You know, it's not that big a deal.
It's not that bad.
In fact, I even spoke to one guy.
I'll never forget this conversation.
This was shortly after John MacArthur kind of started going hard against social justice.
And I think at one point he had said that, in his opinion, this was the greatest threat to the gospel he's seen in his career, which is that's pretty intense language for his lifetime.
Right.
And he's an old man.
240 years.
That's fantastic.
Well, I mean, he's seen a lot and he's been involved in a lot of controversy.
So, you know, he's fought back against all kinds of, you know, insane things.
So for him to say that was a big deal.
And I'll never forget talking to an elder who I knew knew me and I knew, like, cared about me, but he was very against my tone and my, you know, naming names and stuff like that.
And I said to him, I said, look, just go with me for a second.
Let's just say you agreed with MacArthur that this was the most dangerous threat to the gospel in the last 100 years, like you said, right?
Yeah.
Let's just say you agreed with that.
Wouldn't you think it'd be appropriate to name names and to maybe, if necessary, use tone that maybe during peace times you wouldn't use, but during wartimes you would?
And I'll never forget, he looked me square in the eye and he said, No.
And to me, like it just didn't, there's such a disconnect between that.
This is the greatest threat to the gospel.
We read Paul talking about the threats of his day and he gets aggressive, he names names, he does all these things.
And you're telling me that even if you grant that, it's still not appropriate to get.
A little upset about it, a little bit animated.
The person in the pew is not like that.
They understand the threat.
They're worried.
They have anxiety.
And maybe some of that is something that's sinful and we should consider.
But as long as that disconnect between the person in the pew and the evangelical leaders that are out there exists, there's going to be people on YouTube and on the podcast universe that are going to step into that gap.
You know, if pastors were taking this seriously, as they should, in my opinion, I'd gladly stop talking.
Because that should be their realm, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Well, that kind of leads into my story.
But in terms of the people in the pew and the disconnect between the clergy and the congregation, in my experience, it's like, okay, I think it's like half and half.
So, yeah, half of the people in the pew, I would say maybe half of the people in the pew are like, the walls are coming down, the enemy's at the gate.
What are we doing?
The city's on fire.
It's time to go to war, it's time to actually defend ourselves.
But then at the same time, my story is, for me, it all started as church planting as a pastor.
And we started as a vineyard church, and I came a long way since then.
But I started as a vineyard church, and then we were Acts 29.
I was into Acts 29 as an Acts 29 pastor for about four or five years.
Left after Eric Mason wrote Woke Church, and so that was like end of 2018, left Acts 29.
But that decision to leave Acts 29, and then what I began to start railing against from the pulpit in 2019, cost me about a third of my church.
Our church didn't grow, we shrunk, we lost.
And it was 100% of the people in the pew saying the same thing that for you, the pastor was saying.
But for me, it was the congregants saying it to the pastor.
Your tone, your tone, your tone, your tone, and your tone.
Gentleness, charity, gentleness, charity.
And I remember one of the things that I would tell them as I'm taking meeting after meeting after family after family is leaving our church.
And all these meetings, 90% of them, without exaggeration, primarily being led by the wife and not the husband.
So he's pretty quiet, and the wife's the one who actually has the problem.
And they're talking about tone and talking about charity and these kinds of things and naming names.
Is that really appropriate?
And, you know, I picked for 2019, coming off of 2018, leaving Acts 29, seeing, you know, what was brewing, the storm that was coming.
I picked 1 Timothy to preach through.
You know, Hymenaeus and Alexander.
I've had it, you know, or in the very beginning, it's like, Timothy, I charge you, or I'm encouraging you to charge certain elders, certain men, certain leaders in the church not to teach any different.
Doctrine.
And so, you know, that was like the second sermon in the series, and boom, people left.
And then, 2000 or when we got to 1 Timothy 2, verses 9 through 15, I slowed down instead of speeding through it.
I did four weeks on that text.
I only planned to do one week, but I ended up doing four weeks and talking about the callings of men and women and the distinction between the genders.
One of my big lines was it's not male and female roles he assigned them, but male and female natures he designed them.
Like the difference goes all the way down to the way that we're made.
And I started talking about how, and that extends, I believe that extends beyond the home and the church.
If husbands are the head of their homes, and then men as elders, and I would argue for a male diaconate, are the head of churches, but then when we step outside of homes, which is the building block of any society, is the family.
So we're saying that an entire society is made up of, even in a non religious culture, an entire society is made up of the building blocks of families, and men are explicitly called in scripture to lead those.
But then women, when we step out of the home, women start leading their husbands.
War, Tone, and Biblical Leadership00:02:28
You know, like it just doesn't make any sense.
So I was like, all right, the civil magistrate bears the sword.
The sword is the phallus, it belongs to men.
Like, and I started just, you know, and I mean, I know those are strong statements, but I started thinking beyond the home and the church and say, let's start there.
But I think the implications, I think we do need to be more careful the further we get away from what scripture explicitly says home and church.
But to act as though this is exclusive to those realms is foolish.
And so I started preaching on that and started preaching on false teaching, started preaching on critical race theory.
Started calling out Matt Chandler, you know, all those kind of things, and lost a ton of the church.
And it was all tone, tone, tone.
And one of the things that I said was I remember telling people, I said, a man will always be labeled as harsh if he has the gall to fire off around at someone who's charging if his comrades in that moment are sitting on a blanket in the middle of a meadow thinking that they're having a picnic.
Right.
Right.
So, like, the first guy to fire off around with a platoon when everybody else still thinks that this is just a drill.
Right, that we're not actually at war, there's not actually a threat, the enemy's not at the gates.
And this guy has the audacity to fire off around, and then everybody, you know, looks up from their sandwich and their pudding, you know, from the little picnic that they're having, and they see somebody bleeding, you know, laying dead.
They're like, What did you do?
What's wrong with you?
It's like, Well, I like we're at war, right?
And they're like, No, we're not.
And so, I don't really think it's like here's explicit biblical principles of why you cannot, you it is inherently sinful to speak like this or to use this phrase.
Or to call out in it, it is all 100% what you said.
It's that that pastor lied to you.
He lied to you because he knew where he was smart enough to know where you were going with the question.
Of course, he did.
Yes.
Exactly.
So he saw your sneak attack coming.
So he just blatantly lied to you.
But the real answer is of course, it's okay to name names and to use strong language because the Bible says it's okay.
And the only reason everybody has a problem with it is because at the end of the day, we're not arguing about what's permissible in terms of rhetoric.
We are arguing about whether or not we're actually at war.
Thanks so much for listening.
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