Pastor Joel Webben and The Kings Hall address internal fractures within the Reformed community, advocating for a "No More Brother Wars" initiative to unite diverse theological camps against external threats. They critique immature leadership while defending their moral framework that equates figures like Putin and Trump with historical evils, distinguishing their movement from Nazism accusations. The discussion highlights the necessity of direct reconciliation over gossip, noting how delayed conflict resolution hardens bitterness irreversibly, urging Christians to prioritize unity across denominations like Ogden Institute and Moscow for a robust Christendom. [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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Algorithmic Ministry Growth00:15:14
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And so our entire moral framework is based around 1930 and 1940.
And every bad thing is Hitler.
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And Saddam Hussein, Hitler.
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Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome to another episode.
Of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webben with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, if there was any title for it, we'd probably call it something like this No More Brother Wars.
It is an episode that actually was recorded by the Kings Hall, which you should have heard by this point.
This episode that we're doing now comes out a few days later.
If you haven't had a chance, go over to the Kings Hall and check out the episode that they put out.
And this is kind of a repeat, maybe getting into the weeds on some certain specific topics that they didn't address.
But I have, as special guest for this episode, the co host of the Kings Hall.
Guys, thanks for coming on.
Joel, thanks for having us.
It's great to be here with you.
Absolutely.
All right.
So we've got Eric Kahn.
Brian Sauvay and Dan Burkholder.
So, you guys kind of, you know, have been trying, you know, at your best.
And I know that I've been doing this too.
I had a call with James White a few weeks ago.
And, Eric, you just had an 80 minute call, which is great.
We saw that on Twitter.
We're trying to repair any of the fractures that we can.
And remember the big picture that we have communists on the front porch that need to be warmly disinvited from our country.
That's the big idea.
We want to fight the real enemy and not fight each other.
What did you, Eric, you and James talk about?
What was the consensus that, you know, coming away from that?
Are we good?
Are we still in trouble?
What's going on?
Yeah, hopefully, I do think we're good.
I think the bulk of the conversation really was just, you know, we want to be for Apologia.
We want Apologia to be for Ogden.
Same thing could be said about Moscow and, you know, you guys down in Texas.
But really, when you look at it, if you looked at each camp like overlapping circles, we have so much in common.
There's so much theology that unites us.
You could even say it's probably 98%.
And so we really just talked about how do we maintain differences?
We have distinctives and we can still have debates and friendly conversation.
But how do we do that without trying to destroy one another?
And, you know, Joel, I will say by the end of it, I was researching where to buy my next kooji.
So James was very helpful on that front.
And, you know, don't go to their website, by the way.
It's $600.
Eric and James have been like texting about.
The RV, Dr. White's cats, like aircatchers.
And Dr. White are basically like good friends.
He doesn't even talk to us anymore.
He just hangs out.
He just hangs out with his new friend, James White.
So I do think that is one of those things where what we wanted to encourage was guys just picking up the phone, talking to each other.
Let's see if we can't sort through some of these differences.
It's a little bit of the netter or neater principle, right?
Where we want to have friendships with people who are so close to us and recognize, like, what is the friend enemy distinction?
You know, James White can differ on sacralism and some of the views that, you know, he's espousing in opposition to Stephen Wolfe.
That's fine.
But how do we do that in a peaceful way to maintain unity as a Christian body?
Because at the end of the day, you have these conversations with a lot of these guys.
And I really did.
That was the first time I talked to James White.
And I walked away and I said, I actually really like James.
I think that, you know, he had even brought up, he said, you know, you guys called me a pietist.
And he was talking about all the things that they've done to fight in the political realm and fight for, you know, the pro life.
Stuff and abolition, all that.
And it gave me a level of respect where it's like, okay, I get it.
We differ on some of these things.
But at the end of the day, we have a real enemy, and it may not be our brother.
I don't think it is our brother in that case.
Right.
Yeah.
One of the points, like overall, is I think we'd agree on this that if we're actually the Christendom wing of the coalition, like we're the people who are saying, we love Christendom.
Let's learn from the Crusades.
Let's go learn from Christendom 1.0 and critically assess it and say, Here's what we don't like about it.
Here's what we do like about it.
Here's what lessons we think we could learn.
Here's where we've fallen, and our forefathers were greater than us.
One of the things that that actually means in a funny way, if we're the Christendom faction, is that we actually have to figure out how to work in coalition across lines, including with people who don't like Christendom.
Or, like, I'm not into Christendom.
So the point was as much as we, you know, we beef with G3, even like take someone even further from us in terms of practice and culture and some of their aims, the reality is if we're aiming for the new Christendom, I am for G3.
I want G3 to win.
I want Apologia to win.
I want the Lutherans to win.
I want the Credo Baptists to win.
The Presbyterians, the like, Christendom implies a coalition that is both ecclesiastical, but beyond that, it's political, it's cultural, it's international, it's national.
It's got all these other elements there.
So that's a main thoroughfare of the point we're trying to make is just no more brother wars doesn't mean like the uniformity and homogeneity of sameness.
It means that we're going to maintain our particularity.
We want you to have your convictional particularity, but we want to get along and be able to work together instead of doing the post war consensus thing that said, hey, let's fight against the dangers of national particularity with gay, globo, homo sameness.
Like nobody's allowed to have Germany and Italy and France and England and America, they can't have their own national identity that people very much love and are zealous for.
Let's flatten it all out.
And we're saying, no.
Like, you, these different.
Different tribes and peoples and places, they can have their own emphasis, convictions, distinctives.
Let's figure out a way to be for one another and maintain those convictional distinctions.
I really think that's at the heart of what we're trying to say, if you guys would agree.
Yeah.
And along those lines, I mean, one could possibly object and say, oh, so James White reached out to you because you were found out, your arguments couldn't stand.
And so now you're calling for peace, right?
Essentially, it's you're being a sore loser.
So now you want peace.
And reality would just show that's not true.
We reached out, Eric reached out to Dr. James White.
And this has been, like Brian said, our vision since the beginning.
We called this project New Christendom Press.
And our vision is building the new Christendom, which necessitates, like Brian said, coalition across people that might even disagree with you on many things.
And so this has been our work from the beginning.
This is actually baked into the DNA of who we are.
In our church, even by being dual practice with baptism, we actually practice this locally.
This isn't just an ideal, you know, for that's in the ether somewhere.
Yeah, we didn't get beat and then say, Oh, wait, uh, I'm sorry, guys, um, no more fighting.
Yeah, we we got punched in the face, and now no, it's not like in our church, we're like, Oh, we're convinced of pedo baptism, and we don't really have a good defense for the credo baptist, so we'll just accept both and like conceit.
Concede defeat.
You know, that's not what happened.
We're actually, this is our DNA.
This is our value.
Yeah, I think the other part too, Joel, in this is like as you're doing the historical research on the first Christendom, you find that time and time again, Christians have been destroyed primarily because there were betrayals from within coalitions that fell apart, whether it's, you know, Skanderbeg and John Hunyadi.
And then you'll get somebody in the middle who has betrayed them, refuses to come to the aid of the Christians.
Vlad, of course, is sold out by another Christian prince.
And for the Turks.
And so as we looked at that, we said, wait, this is a huge issue.
And one of the temptations that we have to fight, I think, particularly as Protestants, is to continually ghettoize and then fight each other rather than, again, realizing, hey, what would happen if we actually work together?
The other thing I would say about it is if you actually have relationships with people, kind of slowing your roll and saying, okay, I didn't like that tweet.
I don't, maybe I don't get it.
We've done a lot in the last couple of weeks of just firing off text messages and saying, I'll screenshot or I'll send the link to the text or the tweet in a text and I'll say, what did you mean by this?
And I like, This concept is foreign to a lot of people, but you don't actually have to grab every passing dog by the tail.
Right.
Yeah.
And not everything has to be in your immediate response to something you disagree with.
It doesn't, there's no law of the universe that says you must tweet publicly about it before you actually try to talk to the person.
And we're not saying that public teaching isn't open to public scrutiny.
Of course, if I tweet something, if Eric or Dan or any of us, we say something on the record in a public forum like Twitter.
It is perfectly fine if someone else in a different tribe or camp argues with it and says, We're not, wait, I don't agree.
Can you clarify here?
What I don't want, though, is the behind the scenes political silencing, whisper campaigning, gossip campaigning, but where you haven't actually ever talked to a person that you very much could.
And you're about four degrees of separation removed from.
And instead of talking to them and trying to work out differences, you're privately, secretly warning other people about them and you're sending emails and you're doing all that.
That to me is kind of not that helpful.
I'd like to hear you guys' thoughts on why there have been these fractures in the first place.
I have my opinions, but why is it that all of a sudden there's.
Because when I think of a certain wing of the Reformed world, like the CREC, they've always had a reputation of being some of the most ecumenical guys.
On the block.
You know, like if Rod Rear is, you know, calling Doug Wilson, you know, a tyrant and a dictator, that his boot is going to be stamping on a face, you know, that's smooshed into the curb, you know, in perpetuity, he gets an invite and not for a private discussion, but to publicly speak to the NSA students, right?
You know, or if you're Paul Miller, you know, or whatever, and you're quite literally a Fed, you know, like invitation.
Like, you know, so like lots of invitations.
But in some ways, it feels like the closest guys are the ones who are treated as though they're the biggest threat.
Do you guys have any thoughts on that?
Well, I do.
I think that there is, and I want to steel man this.
I want to try to say this in a way that I think someone who has had concerns, maybe about Ogden or about you, would go, Yeah, that's the thing.
That's the thing I'm actually trying to get at.
Because otherwise, it's like you can go back and forth in podcasts forever and never really deal with the issues.
So the way that I've thought this through in my mind and tried to understand it is that.
When you're really close and overlapped, like you've described, you've got multiple ministries, multiple, as we call them, Christian boroughs that are making influential content, writing books, podcasts, things like that.
And because of your overlap, your people are being influenced by these other people.
Understanding Substantive Disagreements00:03:26
So now it's a concern for you because you're actually concerned for your people.
And so let's say then that one of those Christian boroughs that's close enough that you share quite a bit of an audience with them.
They're not James McDonald, or well, he's probably not around anymore.
They're not some crazy charismatic group out there that has nothing to do with your people.
Like you're in the reformed world, close overlap.
Now, let's say that there's stuff going on in that world that you're genuinely concerned about.
You don't like it.
You think, It's wrong.
You think it's leading people astray.
And whether that's Theonomy, classical Two Kingdoms stuff, whether it's like you look at some things on the internet, you say, look, wow, are these guys promoting like Nazism?
Are they pro?
Is like National Socialism the thing they're trying to bring back?
Are they trying to make Nazism great again or something like that?
Then all of a sudden, if you don't actually clarify, take the time to clarify what they believe, and you conclude that they believe something that you consider highly dangerous, whether you're right or wrong about that, you are going to be.
You're going to have an instinct to say, Hey, my people, be careful about this thing.
Be careful about these people.
And so that can go on.
And there's a legitimacy to that as a pastoral concern and as a concern for your people.
Now, where it goes off the rails, though, is when you're not careful to actually make sure that you're understanding substantively what the other people are teaching and believe.
If you don't do that, and then you politically whisper campaign and campaign against them, On the basis of a false belief about what they're promoting, then you have done something sinful.
You've done something unhelpful, right?
Yeah.
So that's at the most basic level, me putting on my most charitable hat that I can, saying, I can understand that.
I think that's a thought process that's involved.
I think there's other things too, but that's certainly one of them.
So I think that's perfectly understandable.
The problem is, for me, the problem is the timeline.
So, like, that would make total sense.
If there were, you know, discrepancies and frustrations and divisions and these kinds of things forming over, let's say, like the last two or three months.
And that was the first that any of these things had ever occurred, you know, that there's starting to be a withdrawal or even a warning at a local level, you know, as a pastor, you know, talking to some of his church members.
If those things, If those things had never occurred until the last two or three months, then I still would say that they're unfounded.
Pick up the phone, give us a call.
You'll quickly find out that none of us are fans of socialism, that these concerns are ill founded.
But in my experience, it's not.
I'll say it like this In my experience, taking Nazis as an example, the white boy summer video that you, Brian, and Eric, and I shared.
And then, you know, there's like 650 quick images.
And then we were alerted that, hey, well, you know, there might be some Nazi imagery.
And so then we come back, you know, we're like, hey, just for the record, you know, we don't like Bolsheviks and we also don't like Nazis.
Addressing Complaints Head On00:03:27
Glad we could clear that up.
Okay, what's next?
You know, and then move on.
But my point is I had the impression, and I want to see if you guys had it too.
I had the impression that this is not where concerns began.
But that this was actually almost like a warmly welcomed confirmation for the concerns that have been going on for a year and a half.
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Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I would be personally, I would want to be really careful about.
Attributing motive where I don't actually know.
And part of it too, I think that's been helpful in this process for me is yeah, some people have made there's whisper campaigns.
We know that that's happening.
Basically, when I found out about them, when I've heard about it, I've contacted the people associated with whatever I've heard is.
And one of the things I do think is helpful is it has been an opportunity for people to get their complaints on the table, say, hey, we disagree with you on this.
We've offered pushback.
They've offered pushback.
Avoiding Flame Wars Online00:15:06
And Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, we don't agree with each other, but at least we can get to the point where maybe we're being a little more fair.
Right.
And maybe it's not such a character assassination attempt, if you will.
So I think that is helpful.
And I think, look, sometimes there's going to be situations where maybe there's reviling, maybe there's slander.
We really have the opportunity, though, to not go full gospel centered on you, Joel, but really to model Christ.
Like when reviled, he did not revile in return, continuing to pursue what I think is an upright way, which is.
Yeah, well, the thing that I can do is not necessarily control all the conversation that's happening in back rooms, but reach out to people where possible.
The other thing I'd love to see more of, quite frankly, is just honest conversation, honest debate, even if it's public.
For example, one of the things we talked about in our episode with Christian nationalism is it's a really good example of people talking past each other continually.
And so all this animus builds up.
But if you actually have a conversation with them, you're like, I don't even believe the things that you're so upset that you think I believe.
Right.
The Nazi issue is kind of an interesting case and study because there probably is like a 0.025% of people who may be feds who are pushing that narrative.
But like, if you talk to most people in the CN camp, we're like, it's something along the lines of, I think like a Christian nation ruled by Christian men would be better.
And then, so when you get called a Nazi, you're like, is that really a fair assessment?
I don't think it is.
I also think just some of the conversations we had the opportunity at the conference was really productive to talk to Joe Rigney.
And Joe's great about this.
He's a very reasonable guy.
And he said, Hey, I have some questions about white boy summer.
Like, tell me what you think.
And so we had a fairly lengthy conversation with him about that.
And at the end of it, he was like, Okay, yeah, I actually don't have a problem.
If that's what you're talking about, I think we're good.
Where the danger is, I think, particularly in these cases, you have to ask which gaze, whose gaze over your shoulder are you really concerned about?
And I think if you're in the camp where you're like, I am so terrified of being called a Nazi.
Yeah, to who though?
And the answer is to people to the left of you.
And I just think if you're in that position, my caution would be they already hate you.
Like people way off to your left, like you're not going to win like David French.
So why are you acting in a manner that would be like appeasing him by proving that you're not actually a Nazi, which, you know, in our camp, like none of us are though.
Right.
So that's where I've been, like, I'm going to have conversations.
I really don't want to get into the game of, I think as you and Brian both found out, you start denouncing, like, Not even a denouncement, but it's just saying, like, we don't believe this.
And it's not enough for people.
No.
Those same people are like, well, you need to denounce it harder.
And it's just saying, like, no, I'm not going to do that.
Joel, you said this actually, and it captured exactly my intentions with conversation following up with all the, like, oh, you're a Nazi thing.
Is that I won't pay the dame geld to anybody.
I won't take back anything I believe, anything that just because it's unpopular, because the left doesn't like it.
It's almost like the meme where someone gets character assassinated and you look over at them and say, first time?
Because, like, we've all been through this 50 different times.
Right.
But I will clarify, I will, especially when friends who are like that 94% overlap and they say, wait a second, do you actually think this?
If it's sufficiently unclear, I'll absolutely say, hey, just so everybody knows, this is what I believe, uncontroversially.
But the second you do that, people think that you're getting in, that you're the monkey dancing to their organ grinding, and you're actually not.
Because that's why I just chuckled at the, the, the, the, what's the word?
The interlocutors who are not good faith after that point, who were like, Oh, yeah, well, what about this?
What about that?
Do you not denounce this person, this person, that person, this handle on Twitter?
And I'm like, No, I'm not doing that.
I'm sorry.
Right.
No, not going to do that.
Not going to play the game.
The other thing I think that's helpful in this conversation to point out is so we went through these issues.
You know, we've talked to Dr. White, and that was helpful.
There were definitely people, let's say you mentioned the CREC, there were definitely people who had some concerns about our teaching and, you know, whatever.
Real quick, just for the record, it's not all.
And this is always the case with any kind of group or any, you know, speaking in any generalities, it's never everyone.
So it's not all the CREC.
And to be frank, it's not even close to all the CREC.
Yeah.
So to your point, that's kind of, you know, what I was saying is that as we had the conversations with the CREC, one of the things that I found was actually really helpful that, you know, the majority of people are like, hey, no, you know, we support you guys, love you.
Yeah, there's some stuff to work out, but it was mostly a favorable experience.
And I think sometimes you have to keep that in perspective.
Because if you have people offering critiques, that is going to be the loudest thing.
That's going to be the thing that everybody remembers and heard about.
But again, so many people from within the denomination were helpful.
We could say the same thing about the PCA, the OPC.
There's definitely guys in each camp where, you know, they're not super big fans of us.
One of the things that we found, this is probably true of Brian as well, but generally it's like people get a perception of you from social media and we get perceptions of other people.
But just realizing that's a part of it, where, you know, I'll say, particularly, you know, there's been critical memes of, say, like the boomers.
Well, you got to give them some grace too.
A lot of these guys did not grow up with social media.
And so the interaction that they're still trying to interact, like it was a blog or a debate or a format that existed 20 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever it is.
You know, even with my high school son, I'm like, he's like using words that are like very like Gen Z.
And I'm like, I feel old and the flashlight's on on my phone and I don't know what to do about this.
So I think it's also just being gracious with one another and slow to jump to some of those conclusions.
A point as well.
So this is an interesting.
Case study actually of a lot of what we're talking about.
You actually brought it up earlier.
There was that the sermon.
Some of you will know the one I'm talking about.
There was a CRAC pastor that preached a sermon, and he was in a passage talking about false teachers and warning against this kind of stuff.
And about 40%, no, I think about 70% of the sermon was just applying that sermon without naming us, but very clearly, I mean, very obviously, it was about Joel, me, and Eric.
He went to our I mean, he had to have gone to our YouTube channel and was literally just reading off verbatim titles of videos and not one or two, but I think five to ten.
Five to ten titles.
He quoted Eric like an actual tweet, but didn't name him.
So, and then it was like, you know, the very strong implication that was left was that, you know, I'm not saying these guys are false teachers, but like Hymenaeus, Alexandra, the Chorus Rebellion, the God opened the earth and swallowed everyone else.
But, you know, and then like all these other things about these guys, but also, you know, so like just be careful out there.
And, Immediately, people started sending us, you, us, the sermon, because there are people that we actually know and are friends with in the congregation.
Right.
In his church.
Yeah.
Supporters of our stuff.
And they're like, What did our pastor just do?
Wait a second.
What happened?
So instead of making a public statement, this is an example of what we're talking about.
Instead of like getting on Twitter and starting to freak out and quoting the sermon and flame warring, which I think we could have done pretty effectively, like we know how to flame war, right?
We're pretty good at that.
We just said, Hey, let's contact the minister.
Let's contact the presbytery.
Let's contact the presiding minister.
Let's.
Let's talk to these guys and let's just work this out if at all possible first, because this is the pulpit.
This is a big deal.
I think he's calling us false teachers.
I think he's saying we're damnable heretics who should go to hell.
So let's figure it out.
So, in the course of this, meetings and setting this up, one of the things that we actually found was that many CREC ministers and congregants had also reached out.
And some of them even.
And you know, one of the ones that actually went to bat for us?
Hmm.
Was Pastor Wilson.
Yeah, amen.
And some other ministers I know in Moscow.
And so they said, I don't think that was fair.
So we talked.
The pastor said, Believe it or not, I actually wasn't trying to say you guys were false teachers.
We don't agree on all this stuff.
And we were like, I mean, I don't know how you could not.
Take that away.
The text is about false teachers.
So then he made a public statement and said, I did not intend, while differences remain, I believe these are Christian ministers and brothers.
I am praying for their success.
And we said the same.
So it was actually a really good example of that could have been an inflection point in our relationship, say with even the CREC, where all of a sudden that could have been it.
Like we could have said, it's time.
We've got the Minutemen three, you know, pointed over at the denominational headquarters.
I don't even know where that is.
Probably in Florida now with Yuri somewhere.
I don't know.
Anyway, and we could have hit the launch button, but instead we said, let's try to figure this out first through the private means.
And then we will make a pub.
We will talk about it at some point.
Here we're talking about it now and still disagree with the content and a lot of that stuff.
But because we picked up the phone, not only were we able to work it out in a way that actually demonstrated that most of the CREC didn't agree with it, it wasn't the CREC talking to us.
It also demonstrated that a lot of those ministers that we've even had like disagreements with in the past and talked through issues who we don't see eye to eye on every single thing, a lot of those people were like, swing and a miss, my guy.
Swing and a miss on this.
So.
I think we have to recognize that some of these things are relationally complex.
We're dealing with humans and people.
And so there's always going to be a great big soup of sins, righteousness, good motives, bad motives, genuine mistakes, and also malicious sinful actions.
And the only way you start to unwind those things is actually by trying to unwind those things, not by starting a nuclear war, a brother war.
To the thesis, no more brother wars.
So let's work together as best we can.
Again, Paul says, insofar as it's up to you, be at peace with all men.
He recognizes that that's a limited scope.
Well, I was going to say, too, one of the helpful things that a CRAC minister did say to me in this process was you know, if Ogden and Moscow or Ogden and the CRAC, Ogden and Georgetown, you know, whatever it is, if we can't get along, there is no point in ever talking about Christendom again.
Like, if those groups that are so close can't get along, then, you know, you might as well call it now.
And on the flip side, I think that we can start to work towards some of that coalition building.
It's going to be hard.
You see this obviously in books like Lord of the Rings.
We would pretty much be remiss, Brian, if we didn't bring up Lord of the Rings at least once.
At least one.
One time.
So, yeah, it really is.
I think a lot of it's like it's a Gondor Rohan thing for a lot of these camps where it's like, hey, we have differences and they're real.
And we're not trying to say that we don't have them, but we are saying that there's orcs and we're going to fight them, not each other.
We forget how small everything is.
Everything is so small.
So, you know, if you pan out and you say, okay, these United States of America, right?
And then you say Christians, right?
So, you're already down to a subset, you know, within America, you know, as a whole and its total population.
And then within Christians, you know, getting down to Protestants, you know, so Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic are, you know, places the size of Protestants.
And then within Protestants, you know, the Reformed.
And then within Reformed, it's even a further subset of what I would consider to be.
You know, it goes by many names, but as a descriptive, muscular, the muscular reformed or the masculine reformed, or, you know, or like Doug's blog, you know, it's a blog in May about theology that bites back.
So now you've gone from America, Christians, Protestants, reformed, and the whole reformed world, just to put it in perspective, is like we're talking like 150 to 200,000 people, like total, out of, you know, starting with like 300 and, 40, 50 million, you know, and so now you're down to 150 to 200.
And then the reform, muscular reform, reformed that's active in the political and cultural war and those kinds of things is not even close to half of the reform.
Because when we say reform, we're talking about G3, we're talking about R. Scott Clark and Westminster Escondido.
You're talking about all the way from Tim Keller to John Piper to John MacArthur in the Master Seminary.
It's a pretty, to Ligonier and Sproul and all that.
So you get all the way down.
To the muscular subset of the reformed, and you're no longer looking at 150 to 200,000.
You're looking at, like, well, I think it's grown, you know, but four or five years ago, you're looking at, I mean, it may only be 10, 20, 30,000, you know, like, and, you know, for the longest time, Canon, as a publishing company, their bestseller wasn't any of their reformed books.
Their bestseller was like their school curriculum.
It was like a science book or a math book or things like that.
And so, which is great.
Kids need to learn.
And so, but my point is, I think if I'm to steal, man, and to be as charitable as possible, I think the CREC was probably pretty got pretty used to being the only muscular reform guys around for decades.
Yeah, who else was there?
Nobody.
There is basically nobody else.
In fact, a lot of the reformed Christians basically hated Doug Wilson's guts and wanted him to die in a fiery car crash.
Exactly.
And that's hopefully before No Quarter November came out.
That's right.
So that's my point in trying to be as charitable as possible here's a crew.
Of guys, of men who have been faithful in a particular task, not just for four or five years, but for a couple decades, for quite a while, and have received as the fruit, you know, or the reward for their labor, nothing but scorn, absolute pure vitriol and hatred.
100 proof scorn.
100 proof scorn.
Constantly for decades and decades and decades.
And so then all of a sudden, you know, in God's providence, 2020 just.
You know, red pilled a lot of people.
And all of a sudden, Doug Wilson didn't sound so crazy anymore.
Praise God.
And he never was, you know, but like, so all of a sudden, he seems pretty reasonable.
Raising Up New Leaders00:06:08
And a bunch of new guys are kind of jumping to the team.
And to be fair, I was reading Doug Wilson before 2020 and having some of my own conversions with these kinds of convictions before 2020.
But that 2020, I mean, I have to admit, it certainly was a catalyst in the equation that, you know, that if I was, If I was radicalized at like a 6.5, 2020 put me at like a 12, you know?
And so, like, so I was like, let's go.
And I was not the only one.
It's a lot of guys.
And so, all of a sudden, you've, on the negative side of the equation, you've received nothing but scorn forever.
On the positive side, though, you've never had any competition because nobody's ever wanted to compete for who can be hated the most because that's what you win.
If you, if, you know, before 2020, if you compete with Moscow, you were competing for scorn.
That's literally what you're competing for.
Like you're competing for hatred and not hatred from the world.
There's plenty of that that has gone Doug Wilson's ways as well.
But sadly, you're competing just as much for hatred from Christians, from brothers.
And so nobody's going to compete for that.
So my point is, they had a monopoly.
You know, the CREC had a monopoly.
Gondor is the only city of men that's left in existence.
There is no Rohan, there is no other, you know.
And that's probably.
You know, I think that's just kind of a bittersweet.
It's like, hey, we're being vindicated, and a lot of people are appreciating us now, and the movement is growing.
Also, that's good.
But also, there's a lot of young men that we don't like.
I found it back to that sermon and praise God for the reconciliation that's happened.
But I do, I found it interesting, more than interesting.
I found it clarifying that, you know, that it was said that this is not a CREC church.
These are not CREC churches, but CREC adjacent.
And I think that's the point.
That's what I'm getting at is I think that the Lord in his providence is raising up other men that aren't of your exact tribe.
They're still your people.
They're still your brothers.
They're still, you know, your countrymen, you know, like, but they're not your, you know, they're not cut from the exact same corner of the same cloth.
It's adjacent.
It's not us, it's somebody else.
And they're, and, you know, and I think that there can be, if we're not careful, and we can all do this, I can do this, but if we're not careful, there can be frustration.
There can be frustration, one, because someone who is adjacent is not as controllable.
You don't, like, you don't have as much.
In the formal ecclesiastical sense, you can influence.
And here's the deal we're young men, we welcome influence.
If you want to be an older man who's not going to disparage us and publicly seek to humiliate us, but you actually are concerned and you want to pick up the phone and call, 80 minute calls from James White, I'll take them.
He'll probably need to send me, just to keep it interesting, I'll need him to send me a few text screenshots of his cats throughout the 80 minutes, just so that we both are having a great time.
But I love James White.
I'm down for that call.
I love James White.
I love Doug Wilson.
I love these guys.
And so, but my point is influence, yes.
But I think that there's a temptation to say these guys, they, they, they, I think there's a temptation to say they, they stole our goods, but didn't join our crew, you know?
And if you're not careful, and again, trying not to speculate, but I try to put myself just, you know, sometimes I try to, you know, to steal, man, and to be charitable to the person that you're having a disagreement with, it's helpful to put yourself in their shoes and just imagine it for a moment.
I was thinking, if I spent 40 years building something and everyone hated me, For 40 years.
I'm not even 40 years old.
So, my entire lifetime, I'm 38 years old.
If my entire lifetime plus a couple of years, I have been faithfully building something, I'm the only one, and I've gotten nothing but scorn.
And then all of a sudden, other guys overnight took me 40 years.
And then these other guys in four years are putting up massive numbers with their podcasts and these kinds of things.
And I'm listening to them.
And they're just repeating like 90% of the things that I wrote in my books.
And I know that they got it.
I know they read my books.
I know where they got it from.
I know where that theology comes from.
But they didn't join us and they're kind of doing their own thing.
It would be tempting to disparage.
But that's back to the whole point of this show no more brother wars.
And if we want to win, Christendom, the only way Christendom wins, the whole idea of Christendom is it's this all encompassing entity that's massive and that you can't even.
At a certain point, you don't even know where it began, where does it start, and where does it end, and does this blur into that, and does that blur into this?
And it's just this massive, like, it's an ocean.
Christendom is like an ocean.
You're just swimming in it, and you don't know the particular current, but it's just all water.
It's all encompassing.
And if you want to win, you need Christendom.
And if you want Christendom, Christendom can't be perfectly organized.
It can't.
Christendom, I remember Doug Wilson saying this to Michael O'Fallon on Twitter, it was hilarious.
But Michael O'Fallon was like, if we have Christendom, you know, like in a Christian prince, who's that guy going to be?
You know, who's the guy who's going to be in charge of all this?
And Doug Wilson said, the same guy who's in charge of the free market, you know.
And me and another guy commented, they're like, it's like a majestic great white shark, you know, it breaches for a moment.
He doesn't often tweet, but when he does, you know, it's just, it's a sight to behold.
It's glorious, you know.
And, but my point is that, like, that is, that's the difficulty of Christendom, is no one person.
Person, no one church, no one ministry, and no one denomination like this year gets to control it.
Private Family Banking Partners00:03:10
Ogged in and right response, you can sit there and say, You're not doing it exactly our way, or you could sit there and rightfully say, This is the fruit of what we worked on for 40 years.
And you know what?
You'll get no disagreement from me.
We'll sit there and say, Yep, yes, sir.
The Bible tells me to honor, show honor where honor is due.
And you're right.
I would not have the convictions I have today and be doing what I'm doing if it wasn't for.
Your faithful service when it was small for decades and you received nothing but scorn.
So you can look at your sons and say, What the heck are they doing?
Or you can look at your sons and think, I think it's appropriate to think, What the heck are you doing?
I'm a father, I've got a kid, I've got a little son.
And I'm often thinking that, but there's a difference in saying it publicly to other adults, mocking your son as he's doing something foolish, versus thinking it in your head.
But publicly, the only thing that's going to come out of my mouth is, This is my son.
Proud of that guy.
Look at that chat over there.
Look at that.
Love it.
And then you pull him aside and you say, My dear son.
My son.
Who has bewitched you?
You fool, fool of a took.
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Aligning With Doug Wilson00:06:18
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We try to do this with our fathers too, with our spiritual fathers.
A point we made in the episode, it's worth repeating, is that believe it or not, we haven't had the exact same mind as Canon Press on everything they've ever done or Christ Church or CRC.
There have even been some things where, like, I don't know if I would have done that.
I don't know if I would have done it that way.
But if you go with any of these things and you search through our Twitter feeds or something like that, you will actually not find.
Dan, Eric, Brian, Ogden, counter signaling those guys.
Because those are our friends and fathers.
We don't do that because those are our people.
Those are our guys.
And we don't need, like, there's enough people disagreeing with that.
They'll handle that.
There's enough people out there that are going to disagree.
I actually want their tribe to increase.
I don't want them to lose.
So, sure, if they ask me someday, you know, sitting down at whatever, Wooster's, if we grab a pizza at Wooster's or tapped, then maybe we'll.
And they say, What did you think about Johnny Cash's finger bone, a favorite finger?
Maybe I'll give him my opinion on that.
But until then, like, not really my business.
If anything, what I've seen that I think just makes me a little sad sometimes is I'll see the opposite.
I'll see a lot of guys who are frustrated and have felt betrayed.
And I'm sure some of these guys have been stupid.
And some of their feelings of betrayal are ill founded.
It's not legitimate.
It's like, No, you weren't betrayed.
You were just, you were stupid.
But a lot of the guys weren't.
They weren't stupid.
And they're not all just, you know, we say young men, they're not all 19 year old boys, you know.
A lot of these guys are like 35, 40 years old.
They've started their own business, they've got a wife and six kids that they're catechizing.
And some of those guys feel betrayed.
And I think when that happens, you at least have to listen and lean in and ask some questions to find if there's something legitimate going on.
But my point is like, I've seen those guys and, And still, no matter how much betrayal they feel, still, if Moscow steps in it, a lot of those guys will not counter.
And if Moscow gets the scorn, these guys who feel betrayed will be the first ones to rush in.
So, like with the middle finger thing, I didn't pile on.
I'm like, I think that I want to do it.
I have my reasons for why I want to do it.
My point is, so I'm not piling on.
But what I noticed was a ton of our guys, Ogden and right response Georgetown guys, who have felt a little bit hurt by Moscow, they were the first ones in to defend.
Every single time that Moscow starts getting pushback from people to their left, it's these guys who come in to their defense.
It's almost like sons with their dad that are like, ah, yeah, I wish dad didn't do that.
But that's the sons.
Anybody outside of the family, they start saying something about dad, and the sons are like, Let's find him in a back alley and it's time to put him down.
Nobody else gets the right to talk about a father that way.
People still don't join our church because of Doug Wilson.
Right.
I've lost probably just as many church members over Doug Wilson as Doug Wilson has over the years.
Right.
So, you know, the bona fides are there.
Right.
I remember when I was in California in 2019, we lost, it was the end of 2018 and then 2019, we lost a third of the church.
No hyperbole.
It was, I think, like 46 adult members that left the church.
And the number one reason that they all cited was because.
I was aligning more with Doug Wilson.
Didn't even know the man.
Hadn't never spoken to him at that time, but I was just saying, Hey, I think he's right about this.
And I think he's right about that.
And so I've, I've, you know, lost a third of a church over Moscow.
And what year was it, Dan, that we've, how long have we been losing people over Doug Wilson?
2018, 2017?
Yeah, it started in 2017.
And I think 2018, we really started to hit our stride.
We peaked probably like 2019, 2020.
It was, yeah, and into that 2021 tail.
Yeah, that was when we really got on the fat tail.
Yeah, yep.
And now we don't lose people over Doug Wilson.
Now no one leaves over, like, pretty much they don't leave over Doug Wilson.
They're pretty much in with us on that.
But yeah, we've been, for the better part of a decade now, it's been like one of my best hobbies has been losing people over Doug Wilson.
Yep.
All right.
Well, any other thoughts from you guys?
I feel like this has been helpful.
I agree.
I think pick up the phone, make a call.
Send an email.
But with that, it's been my experience because I have some of this going on right now with another pastor.
He's not in the CREC, but another guy who's in our larger Christendom tribe, but is frustrated.
Well, I'm actually about to record an episode on it, but basically, he's frustrated because I won't excommunicate a member of my church.
So, And that's about all I'll share on it in this setting.
Reconciling For Deep Trust00:03:21
But my point is, I tried, we've both have tried, he's tried to talk privately.
And the difficulty is sometimes you do that and you still, you just can't get consensus.
Because sometimes if you let it go too long, and I think this is my concern if you let it go too long, the biases are already, like the cement hardens.
The way that, like, the way that, Bitterness and gossip and these kinds of things work.
We think, like, we'll have a sneaking suspicion that maybe we're out of line, maybe we're being too presumptuous and those kinds of things.
But we'll keep in the back of our mind, we'll console ourselves by saying, Well, I'll make it right eventually.
Eventually, I'll get around to having that conversation.
Eventually, I'll get around to that reconciliation that I know the Lord would require.
But what I have found in multiple examples is that.
Reconciliation doesn't work that way.
The longer it goes, the harder the cement becomes.
And you actually sometimes can't go back.
Like you can get a ceasefire, you can get a no more brotherly wars kind of thing, but you can't ever get like there's a window.
And when it closes, it closes.
There's a window of the degree of reconciliation required for true, deep trust and friendship.
Because then eventually it's like, okay, I'm reaching out to you, but I've already It's been months.
I've sat on it.
I've already really made up my mind.
And so now you're telling me these things.
I'm asking you questions.
I'm finally giving you the opportunity to defend yourself.
And you actually are defending yourself and you're answering the questions and you're answering them well.
But I don't believe you.
I don't believe you.
I don't, I just, I don't trust you.
So even, even if we do sit down and you do give me the right answers, the ship has sailed.
It's just, it's too late.
It's too late.
And I think this is like why the scriptures don't let the sun go down on your anger.
Like their anger and bitterness, the Bible gives those things a timeline and it's a quick turnaround, a really quick turnaround.
And if you let it go, then it's just, it eventually, yeah, again, you can get to the point where it's like, I'm not going to, You know, like Jacob and Esau, right?
So it's years after the fact, and you get to the point where it's like, I'm no longer going to try to kill you.
But I don't know if Jacob and Esau were like, and also, you know, for the rest of our lives, we're going to be best friends and let's live, you know, let's buy a plot of land together and, you know, you build a parcel and I'll build a parcel and we'll celebrate each other's birthdays and I'm going to be the godfather of all your kids.
Like, no, that ship is gone.
It just, that's gone.
Yes, there is some measure of reconciliation, but the degree of reconciliation at That point when you do it years after the fact is basically a ceasefire.
That's about as good as it gets, as deep as it gets.
But there's never the deep, the deep founded trust.
So be reconciled sooner is my point.
It's a good word.
Good word.
Agree.
All right.
Well, thanks for coming on the show.
I appreciate your time and everything that you guys are doing.