Joshua Keith Craft

0:52 Hey, we should do that, right? And I'm like, I know, right? Yeah. Totally should. Yeah. And that it's interesting to hear you say that because I thought I thought a lot about this. So when I went to Bible college, um you know, it was it was the church network that I was a part of that in the UK was very much very influential, man. Like the whole the whole they had churches in the whole of the country. And so like I went from growing up in this church that was relatively small in San Diego, but like somehow gotworked in with these guys to like I go over to Bible college in the UK. Obviously, I meet my wife there, but that's not why I was there. And so, suddenly, I'm in this place where they're like, "Yeah, we have people coming in this weekend. We have all the leaders from all the churches coming in." And I'm in this room with like 150 people and they're all like about it. And I'm like this Bible college student. I'm there to learn. And I'm like, "This is amazing." Like, I can still remember all these people and and for each one cuz they would these were the same people that would come in and teach us at our Bible college. We didn't like learn we learned a lot of theological things, but we learned a lot of practical. It was more of a leadership study than anything. And so we would have these people coming in from churches all over the country telling us about here's what we're dealing with.

1:55 Here's how we overcame it. Here's what we did. And so these leaders come together and they go, "Hey, this happened in this church." So like for example, I watched this happen in one of the churches I went to. People started manifesting demons and like they were casting these demons out because they sought this out, but because this just started to happen. And so like much like you read about in the New Testament, they like we need to kind of understand what's happening here. And so they get all the church leaders together and it's not like they're talking about like, hey, we're going to have a great Easter production this year and we really want you guys to, you know, push this. It's, hey, we we started seeing some demons manifest. We talked about some demons. Let's talk let's like let's talk about this from a scriptural perspective and understand. And it was very um, you know, they were they were very much believe in apostolic uh, blessings and like and the five-fold. And so they very much were big on structure, but it was really the first time I'd ever seen something like that where you have all these different expressions of church.

2:48 Like the one that I was involved in in Coventry was all house churches. It was all house churches. Then they had the one up the road that was very much more like your traditional church where everybody got together, but they also had a ton of relationships built into it. And so this was this whole new experience for me. And it it it I really started thinking because I had never grown up in that. And I started thinking, how do I bring some of this relational uh belief back to America? Because I had observed so many times you could go to church, you know, say hi and bye to the people, blessings, brother, and off you go. And like, you know, my observance of most Christians with they would get pumped up on Sunday, get deflated for the next six days, and then come back for a refill. And I just hated that. That just didn't seem right to me. Like from a very young age, it always seemed wrong. So I go over to Bible college, I experienced this. And so to this day I still sit there and go like what should a church be like? What should church be like? Because when I look at the whole of history and we covered it on the Christmas episode when you talked a little bit about Constantine as the first he was the first emperor that accepted Christianity in in the Roman Empire and that changed everything and I don't think we realize the wake of uh the forefathers in the church history and how it affects us today because you the the council of Nicaea is what we still are built on to this day and that happened in what like the 38 like 325 right? Yeah. Cuz Constantine was 312. I always remember that for whatever reason that he was 8312 was whenever he came in and and and we don't we don't realize how much it influenced us but as I remember from church history people started going to Constantine being like hey where's your where's your temple where's your priests where's this because that's how other religions did and that was like the early formation of what became the Catholic Church is that is that am I correct in my remembrance?

4:28 Well the Catholic Church like as we know it didn't show up until 300 years later. So, so the first pope, so people, you know, Catholics call Peter the first pope. No one was called pope until I think it was Pope Gregory was the first pope in like 600 something. Okay. So what you know it's really interesting at least to me what you see in the history of the church is this and we we talked about this on a previous episode but the church is a god idea that human beings are always trying to kind of articulate and structure and put together. Mhm. And so what's interesting is we didn't get a lot of information from God on there's not like a playbook. Here's how to run a church. I know, right? There's kind of philosophical standards, there's character standards, there's, you know, what a lot of people think, for instance, is that churches, churches have to be run by boards, right?

5:26 Okay. Um, in the New Testament, you have three different kinds of churches that you see, three different kinds of governance models, you know, and they all come with different drawbacks, honestly, and different positives. One is a congregational model where the church votes on everything. You see that in the New Testament. So that's a biblical way of leading a church. That's not the only way, right? Then you have um the the elder model, which is an elder church, which is a board-led church. You know, running a church, more like you run a company with like a board. But then you have uh what's what I think is called the Episcopal model. And the Episcopal model is what the Catholic Church uses. So the Catholic Church doesn't have boards. They don't have, you know, over individual Catholic churches. They don't have a board of elders that run the church. The church is run by the priest. The church, those churches are run by a bishop. All the way up to the bishop of Rome, that's the pope, right? Um, where does this idea of the pope come from? It's it comes from uh Roman pagan religion.

6:26 So, they had a they had a in in ancient Rome, there were three different aspects to their their religion. There were uh augurs which were people that would uh kind of foretell omens. They would be able to see the birds in the air and say we should go to battle or we should not go to battle because of the omens. Right? So that was one aspect of their state religion. The other the other aspect of their religion were what's called the the vestal virgins and these were like priestesses in the temples. And then the third aspect were the guys that did all the ceremonies, all the religious ceremonies where they sacrificed animals and did all that stuff to the pagan gods. The the supreme priest of of the Roman state religion was called the pontifex maximus which is what we call the pope. Right?

7:17 So the idea of a pope was not cre is not somewhere in scripture. It's a a uh and you see this in a lot of traditions of the Catholic Church. It's a pagan approach to something that the church adopted to make people feel comfortable switching over into Christianity. That's so interesting. Right. So, where did incense burning come from in the church? Uh where did a lot of these ceremonies and traditions come from in the Catholic Church when the when the Catholic Church would go to different parts of the world throughout the Roman Empire and they would try to they're trying to get people to convert to Christianity, right? They would adopt pagan traditions and pagan things that the pagans did into their church services so that people could feel comfortable coming to a Catholic church. Now what's interesting is at some point that stopped right at some point they went okay now we've arrived on God's tradition and now God has so so in Catholicism one of the primary you know differences between Catholic and Protestant belief is Protestants believe uh in what's called uh the five solas which is what Martin Luther and the reformers kind of put in place and one of those is sola scriptura like that all we need is really uh you know one of those is sola script scripture. All we need is the Bible. We don't need a bunch of other things. That's not what Catholics believe. Another one of the the five solas is um uh grace and that's that we're saved by grace alone through faith alone. Catholics don't believe that.

8:48 Catholics believe you're saved by the you're saved by God's grace and following the traditions of the church. So this is in in a language sense. One of the difference differences between um uh Catholic and Protestant language is they use the word sacraments and we use the term ordinances, right? Supposedly I mean a lot of a lot of Protestant churches use sacraments and that's not the language is not the most important thing. But the reason why the Catholic Church has sacraments which are like these things you have to do is because they are proof of your salvation. And so infant baptism, your first communion, things like that, those are sacraments that are this part of your salvation experience throughout the course of your life because you have to follow the traditions of the Catholic Church to be saved. Right. Right. That's that's what they believe. So is that anywhere in scripture like no, right? So the the the challenge and the tension for all of us is to transform traditions and things that make us feel safe into things that are required for us to walk with God.

10:01 Yeah. So there's there's two there's two I think there's two sides of the equation. And there's like a duality here in that even the Catholic Church itself to become relevant to culture adopted pagan pagan uh symbology, pagan religious um worship actions, but they pointed them to Jesus like like the like the the the story of Beowulf, right? um was supposedly one of the reasons why Beowulf was written was to try to get people to buy into a Jesus Christ type figure, right? In uh in the Saxon, Anglo-Saxon world of all their pagan myths and all the things that they kind of believed and worshiped, they wrote the story of Beowulf as a like a pre-Crist of oh well, you know, Beowulf and he fought Grendel and Grendel was a demon. And so, you know, Jesus did the same thing. So, it's like this same stuff we do today.

10:59 Like warming people up to it. Yeah. Same same stuff we do today, which a lot of people have problems with, you know, like people go like we're we're recording this during a Christmas season and what's kind of become a normal thing, at least in yours in my corner of Instagram is uh we do a Christmas production. There's a there's a church that's locally here called Prestonwood that we're great friends with and we love and they do like a $70 million Christmas section and they charge for it and then people go, "Well, the church shouldn't do that. The church should spend money this way. The church should spend money that way." Um there's there's two problems I have with that. Number one, you know, who cares what you think when you're counting other people's money? Yeah. So like there's always this deal of people want to count other people's money and tell people what they should do with the money that they have, right? Which is a whole other thing. But the second thing is since the foundation of the church, the church has done everything it can to to it could to be relevant to culture and to get people to come to church that would otherwise not come to church.

12:01 A person may disagree with that methodology. I'm sure if we could go back in history and look at how the Catholic Church incorporated pagan traditions and pagan myths into their church that uh that people were going this is this is sacrilegious. This is not sacred. This is against God. And it you know there's 1.2 billion Catholics in the world today. So they they did a pretty good job of becoming culturally relevant. Even the idea of saints, which is a whole, you know, I'm not just here to talk about Catholic history, and I'm not an expert on Catholic history, but even the idea of saints is attached to what people were already doing. So, there's a there's a saint in um in Catholicism named St. Bridget, and she's from Ireland. And before she was a saint, she was a goddess that the Irish worshiped that they incorporated her as a saint to help bring Catholic church in in the Catholic church to bring the Irish into Catholicism. I I want to pause there for a second because you you said this when we first launched out and you gave a lot of really useful information there. U which I love the I love how you do that, man. How you bring No, I'm serious. you bring the wake of history to help us understand things today because I think a lot of people will see things on social media or whatever. And once again, I say that a person's opinion is only as valuable as the price paid to form it. And very few people pay much price to form their opinions. They make snap judgments, which is why I don't really care about most people's opinions.

13:26 And so how it goes is this. That's why nobody should really, right? Well, well, yeah, nobody should, but they don't. But but what happens is this. you see something like somebody some Christian you know famous Christians there's people who are very influential in Christian that will talk about like how you should not celebrate Halloween because of the roots of it and then you have other people saying like well actually you know Christmas this isn't actually when Jesus was born we know it was actually probably more like a springtime based on what was said in the in scripture you or was it summer that they're out there with their sheep and they're they're in the fields and like you know they would have been put away if it was cold and winter and blah you know so you have all these people and they're like so this isn't really that and what actually happened is you have these pagan festivals that we've taken on. And so as a even as a good well-meaning person that doesn't necessarily know the history, you're going, "Well, gez, what do I do?" Cuz from a place of conscience, you don't want to be taking part in something you shouldn't. Now, what you said when we launched off that I think is so important and and is what we're literally wrestling with on this episode and what we all have to wrestle with in life as followers of Christ or is there's so much of the Bible that is that we have that of what's said. What's also important is what's not said. And you said that. You said you can see roughly three models in the New Testament and you listed them off. But what what none of what we have nowhere in the New Testament is this is exactly how you should do. We have bishops, we have overseers, we have five-fold ministry and we have Jesus going like, "Hey, go teach everyone else to do exactly what I what I did." Now, what's wild about that, the same Bible, it's not like God did that and he was like, "Ah, they'll like, whoops, I forgot. I should have said some said said some more whenever I was on earth." Go back to the Old Testament.

14:57 Here's exactly who the Levites are. These are the priests. This is their exact jobs. This is where they come from. This is their roles and duties. This is how they're supposed to serve. This is what they're supposed to wear. This is how big everything is. I mean, it could not have been more prescriptive. Still got screwed up, but it could not have been more prescriptive. So, God, this is on purpose. Like, we're here at this place thousands of years on after Jesus. And God, you know, it wasn't like Jesus or was surprised like, oh no, you know, they they did something I didn't see coming. And so we have to we have to wrestle with these things I think from a place of humility because what I what I rail against so you know complete side note I got on the we put there was a real for the produ Christmas production I got caught up in the comments I don't get caught up when people say stupid stuff that like to me is like a puppet at individuals what I get what what I start to I go no I need I I'm going to say something is when people who are uh Christians think that they're going to they're going to like slam they're slamming somebody else because to me it's not even about whether I want to defend that person or not. It's more about like hang on man we are missing the mission for why we're here. So there was a comment and it was from somebody who's a Christian and they started quoting all this scripture about like you know these mega churches and blah blah blah blah blah and they're you know misusing money and Jesus this and that and like you know false teachers and all this sort of stuff. And my immediate comeback to that is I just go, "Hey, we're the church, aka both of us. We are not called to spend our time judging how somebody else is running their race. You have no relationship with these people.

16:33 We we pull these scriptures out and we don't realize when Paul's talking about these false teachers, these weren't like people that just, you know, sent uh sent sent a TV program asking for money because it didn't exist. These were people in the congregations like he he knew these people. He had a personal and I think Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's uh it has a tremendous implication for the industry of people who see it as their job to point out false prophets. 100%. At this point, it's a to me it's a total industry that's been developed where there's YouTube channels, there's all these different things that people watch. And um you know historically when you look at the historical precedents of scripture, the reason the the background for calling out a false prophet was if that person was in your specific church and in your specific location and if you had a relationship with them. Now we live in a world where that's not that way, right? And so now now uh it's easier than ever to moralize and to be like well you know what like that I'm because what what what we're all when we do that I mean I think it's true for me it's true for you it's true for everybody whenever I'm doing that I'm inherently saying I'm better than you I'm better than this person I'm better than that person I know more truth than this person or like I don't uh you know some people they they have the wool pull over their eyes and I'm just not going to be a sheep however however a person wants to say or they say, "Well, if I was, you know, if I was the pastor or if I was in that deal." I mean, people have inherent problems with, you know, as far as I know, and again, I've I've been on both sides of the story, so people can choose to believe me or not. I've I've been on the megachurch side. I've been on the non- megachurch side. As far as I know, no one that I personally know has ever set out and said, "I'm going to build a megachurch."

18:18 Right. Right. So people are anti- megachurch, which you know, there's drawbacks, there's good parts to it, there's not great parts to having a large church. But no one I know set out to say, "Look, we're going to we're going to get thousands of people to come and we're going to just delude them." And I think for a person who's a Christian, especially to have that perspective shows how cynical and really like unchristian they are. If a person starts to look at churches that and judge their motive as wrong, I think I think that's a misunderstanding of being graceful. I think it's a misunderstanding of being loving towards people because all of us are human. So it's it's it's real quick. Sorry, Josh. It's also a mis it's a misunderstanding of spiritual authority and it's absolute arrogance. Who are you as the lump of clay to say to the potter like not only why did you make me like this, but what are you doing with that lump?

19:15 Yeah. Cuz I think the thing is and and you know there's a lot of depth to spiritual authority that I think a lot of Christians in we live in a culture that doesn't uh we live in a culture that I think more than ever um is about rebelling against authority. Yeah. and all authority is wrong, all authority is evil, and everything's just this populist rant against established o. So even even the even, you know, as much as people love Donald Trump, as much as people love what's, you know, people on the right love what's happening in our government, what what got Donald Trump elected was this rejection of oh 100% all systems of governmental authority that existed before. It's called populism. And so with when you when you have populism, authority is not just questioned. Authority is completely rejected. And uh the Bible talks about that is that when you reject authority, the people run wild. Yeah.

20:08 Right. So if you have a biblical belief system, what you have to believe is that all authority is God ordained. Y So there's a whole bunch of implications with that. But as a parent in a family, if you're a parent and you're listening to this, you are your children's authority. God put you in place. It's not up to them to decide whether or not you're their parent. It's not up to them to, you know, if you practice biblical parenting, which like a lot of people maybe don't, but you're the authority, not the ch, not the child. That extends all through society. So, the Bible talks really clearly about always having a respect and an honor for people in authority because God ordains authority. He even and again, like I said, there's implications to that because he even ordains evil authority. M he puts evil authority in place and we don't know the story God's telling. And it's not that we don't have a part to play in um the the rise or fall of authority that's evil.

21:04 That that statement that you said real quick, sorry, I just want to pause before we keep going. That'll challenge a lot of people because it's like, what do you mean God puts evil people in authority? Like that's a real tough one. Here's how for for anyone that's struggling with that because you know the nature of God. Anytime you're wrestling with something like that, you have to have a humility of understanding. There is no way for you to understand just how all powerful God is. Like imagine if you cuz people will struggle with like, well, was I chosen or do I have free will? What we can't fathom a God that's so powerful that he goes, tell you what, you do whatever you want. I'm still going to win. And that's that's essentially what we're playing. So when when pastor when Josh says something like that and you say, "Hey, you know, he's put evil authority in place." You're like, "Well, no, God wouldn't do that." Hang on. Do you know what he did? He allowed everybody to have free will. I mean, he's done it before. We we we talked in the last episode about Christmas and Santa Claus and all that. And he God put uh emperors in place that killed Christians, right?

22:01 And that might be like a little bit, you know, a little bit challenging for like our faith and our belief that God only does good, but then it comes back to what our definition of good is. I don't think God shares our definition of good. He definitely doesn't. And when you see things in a long-term perspective, things that are short-term painful uh can be long-term good. But the only problem is that a thousand years is short-term to God, right? Well, and and we have no view. We literally have no view of eternity. We have no idea what happens cuz like the one that always blows me away and I reference it all the time cuz what you just said sounds really upsetting unless you have an eternal view. And guess what? None of us have an eternal view because what would be upsetting is if we're like, he put those people in place and they did all these bad things and that was the end of their life, but they entered eternity. Well, what happens there? We don't know. Like, we don't know. We don't But what I do know is that God's just. Yeah. And he's just and but the same could be said of someone who's born and has um has some kind of has some kind of chronic illness where they have to live with that. Like there's a syndrome, you know, there's a movie called The Elephant Man and there's a syndrome called Proteus syndrome where you like all your bones and everything just grow.

23:09 It's like a really painful existence. Well, uh, that person was is God's child who has that kind of thing. How's that how's that fair? How's that just? How's that whatever? That's not really our question to answer. But that's what people ask all the time. How could a just God How could a good God allow this to happen? And so, you know, to go back to what I was saying, so we have this thing in us that we believe in a God, but then we don't let God be the arbiter. We think we're the arbiter of truth. Like, I think that my definition of morality is also God's definition of morality. I think that my definition of good is also God's definition of good. And if my definition of good or truth or morality or whatever is not satisfied, then I have the right to criticize, yep, reject, uh, be dishonoring towards that. You know, there's this and so people, so here's what people say in America on on the subject of authority and being a Christian. And then I want to get I want to get back to like this whole talk on the future of the church.

24:14 But what people say is um you know what like you don't have and this this happened a lot during co you don't have to submit to the United States government because the United States government is us. We the people. Yeah. The people we elect the we elect people and we're the leaders of the government. Um okay. I I understand I understand the thought process in in the Bible. So, think about that thought process. I'm going to read you a couple verses in the Bible you can look up for yourself. First Peter 2 11-15. Peter says this, "Beloved, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh which war against your soul. Conduct yourselves with such honor among the Gentiles." So Gentiles and non-believer, conduct yourselves with such honor among non-believers that though they slander you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. Submit yourselves like listen to this verse. Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution.

25:19 So that's got to be a translation issue, right? Every human institution. Yeah. And you can execute that but it means every human institution whether to the king as to the supreme as as the supreme authority or to governors as those sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorance of foolish men. This is in a time when those same good people are are killing Christians. None of those Peter's talking in the context of uh evil kings. Yeah, these guys were were torturing and evil governors. And so he's saying and again implications massive here. Yeah. What does it mean for me to submit to human institutions, right? This is what this is what Peter's saying. And so I think in general people don't have an understanding of spiritual authority. They don't have an understanding of a lot of things. And then the question is why is that? Right?

26:20 So if you look at and we're it seems like we're talking about a lot of things but we're all talking about the same thing. There's this concept called dogma. Okay. So dogma the definition of is um from the Oxford dictionary means a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority is incontrovertibly true. Okay. So dogma is a is a Greek word. It comes from the world of philosophy where it the the Greek word dogma means that which seems good or an opinion. Okay. So every faith, every philosophical tradition, every belief system has dogma attached to it. Um what that means is every belief system, every church, every school, whatever has things that have been laid down by authority as incontrovertibly true. So one of those things for instance is the fact that elders should run a church. So for some people this is incontrovertibly true.

27:22 It's just the best way to run a church, run a business, run anything is with a board, right? That is an idea that a person has. That's not God's idea. So, you know, like I said, scripture gives us three examples that are biblical. Yeah. So, a person might not like that a pastor, you know, well, before I say that, in the Western world, especially in America, you're not allowed to, you know, people go, well, these these pastors, they're just they have no accountability. They just do whatever they want. And in in the Western world to have a nonprofit to have a bank account as a nonprofit organization, you're required by the bank to have a board, right? Okay. So, no church is just led by the senior pastor. Well, then you get into the debate of, well, who's on the board? People he put on there, how much do they just let him do whatever he wants? It's like, man, just chill out, right? Like, just just Hey, my my thing with people that go down that road is just go find somewhere that fits with whatever your narrative is, man. Like don't don't sit around. It's a waste of everybody's time. Right? This is why I don't do debates. I don't like debates. I don't like sitting in debating because debating is I have this belief that I'm locked in on. You have this belief you're locked in on. We're not willing to change. We're just going to see who's right.

28:38 So you can make the other one look between us. It's like we don't know who's right ultimately at the end of the day. So I don't believe and this is why this is called The Dialog, not the debate. Because I don't believe that I'm all the way right. I don't believe that you're all the way right either. And maybe in the middle we can align with something that is a right way to do things. You're wrong. I am right. So how do things become dogma? Well, in the in the in the philosophical world, okay, things start as what's called doxa. So doxa means something that appears right or something that a person thinks is right. So in the ancient Greek world, this could mean a teaching, a law, or a policy of the government. So doxa was something that appeared to be true or at least was the best knowledge that people had at the time. Yeah. Okay. Which is fine. The challenge arises whenever doxa becomes dogma.

29:33 So and that's how that's how dogma comes to exist is a person says well I think this is a good idea or I think this is something that we should do and then everybody after that person goes no this is the way it has to be done. This is the way it always has to be done. this is the way that we must do it. Right? So the dogma of Christianity starts with the Nicene Creed, but then it spreads out and we've always been trying to figure that out from Yeah. from from now to to then the the the problem of dogma, right? All of us have dogma. All of us have things like principles that have been handed down to us that we believe are incontrovertibly true. These things have always been true, will always be true. And like I always quote Mark Twain. He said, "It's not what you know for sure that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't ain't." So dogma is not from God's word. Dogma is from man's opinion.

30:26 Right? Dogma is from a person's thought process. There's nothing wrong with us adopting a person's thought process or a person's approach. There is something wrong with saying that that's incontrovertibly true. Okay. So this is why people um and everybody has a part to play in this dynamic as it relates to being a Christian or the church or any other authority structure that's being rebelled against. So you have authority figures who have an opinion and they've now transformed their opinion into something that can never be challenged. Right? You have people that are connected to or sitting underneath these authority figures that believe that those questions, those those opinions should be challenged and they challenge those opinions and that's not welcome in a lot of cultures. And so then they go out and take their opinions and they turn their opinions into dogma. So you see this in uh in the Christian world. This is what's called the deconstructionist like movement, right? This it's it's been around for a long time. A lot of people talk about like it's brand new and everyone's deconstructing their faith for the first time. Now, the problem with problem to me with deconstruction is um you're just you're just replacing dogma, right?

31:39 So, you're going, "Well, what that guy said isn't true and this is true, right? And this must be true." And then you're cuz humans are just we're wired to want to have dogmatic thinking. Like we're wired to want to have things that it's certainty what you want what Yeah. What you want you want to know cuz how good does it feel if you just go I just do 1 2 and three and then four comes that is that's a great place. You know what you don't need for that? God. Yeah. And that's really that's really the rebellious flesh nature. And and so I want to be in in a you know for whatever reason man like God's put me in a place personally where I'm I play a role in church leadership, right? I could completely reject that and like I honestly want to a lot. I think you've tried to, but at 38, I've just I'm not going to like I I believe that God's put me on the earth for this. And I I have done I'm a person that has done everything he can to not be in authority.

32:36 Like I I've I've talked about it. I've talked about myself negatively. I've tried my best to not be in the position that I'm in. And it just keeps coming back around in my life. Like I it's I can't even explain that phenomenon. It's not I don't want it. I don't want the, you know, people like we post videos of our reels and stuff, right, from this podcast and I just want to get the word out there. I don't really want it to be me. People are like, "Oh, you're a wannabe influencer." I don't want to be an influencer. Please, please agree with me. Like, just take me off the air. We can start doing puppet faces over top of your voice. Yeah, that'd be great. You know, gets just write things for someone else to say. So, then you'd be like, "You'd say it right." But I've done everything I can to not be that. God, hey, here's what here's what needs to happen. Um, so I'm on the other side of it where I'm like, "Hey guys, I don't want to, you know, more of my experience as being like a ministry leader has been, "Hey guys, I don't really want to be your leader. I'm going to try my best." And so if you rebel against me, I completely understand cuz I'm an idiot. I don't even want to be here right now.

33:37 How to instill confidence in the people that follow you. So, um I So, the reason why I'm saying all of that is because I think you you have to you have to get to a place where you go really like nothing is nothing is certain. We have our best we we have this is today what we're doing right now is our best guess. So, people look at like a Christmas production like we're talking about and they're like, "How dare you? How dare you? You could." And they say the exact same thing that Judas said. And they know they're all saying what Judas said, but they think it's coming from a different place than where it was coming from for Judas, right? And they go, "This money could have been used to feed the poor. This money could have been used for ministry." That's literally exactly what Judas said. It's identical. And it's for the same reason as Judas said it, which is like a person thinking in their mind that they um are doing better than they're actually doing. Because my question to and I've had, you know, individual conversations with people about this. It's not just me sitting on a stage saying this stuff or talking on a podcast. It's like, "Hey, cool, man.

34:42 Tell me what you're doing for homeless people, right?" Yeah. If we gave, let's say we gave you the same amount of money you think this costs, what would you do with it? No. Hey, I'll give you a million dollars today. Yeah. What are you going to do with it? I'm going to pay off this for myself and then I'm going to go on vacation. They would say, right? They would say, "Here's all the things that I would go if I was that guy. If I was sitting in that seat." And when you're when you're concerned, and I'll just say this from my perspective, when you're concerned with like eternal souls, we're going to do everything we can to reach people that are far from God. 100%. If it costs what it if it costs whatever it costs, if we got to do whatever we got to do, we're not here to you know, the the thing that the thing that I heard Andy Stanley say this one time and I just so love this thought process that we're not doing this for you. If you're already saved, this isn't for you. And so it's what's our mission to go and make disciples. Our our mission is lost people. So if you got all these opinions on Christianity and you got all these things that you think it needs to be, go find somewhere that's like that, this isn't for you.

35:39 This is for people that are far from God, that need hope, that are looking for that, that normally wouldn't uh darken the doors of a church. And so what what people do though is we just get so into dogmatic thinking because we need certainty. And what we have to learn how to do is to embrace the uncertainty that comes with just living life. It's not even the uncertainty that comes with walking with God. That creates its whole other level of uncertainty. But the uncertainty that comes with living life where people go, "How do you know this is going to work?" I don't know. And I think God did that on purpose with the New Testament church. Like you're saying that with the Old Testament where God said, "Here's exactly how this is going to work." You know, here's exactly what the temple's going to look like. Here's the exact structure. Here's the outer sacrifice. Yeah. The outer court, the inner court, the holy of holies. Here's what the priests do. Here's what the Levites do. Here's exactly how this works. And then we get into the New Testament church and God doesn't God doesn't do any of that.

36:36 Yeah. Right. Well, and and what's so interesting I when I think about I kind of this kind of dawned on me as we're talking about this. So, cuz you were talking about so much of the Catholic Church and you said it's not in scripture. Now, what you're not what you're not doing is saying they're wrong. I like you're not criticizing them. And here's the thing that's so interesting about that. When Jesus came, what he absolutely corrected was the spirit compared to the letter. And what I mean by that is the the the rabbinical traditions of the time had built a bunch of like protection around what was actually written. So they had added to God's traditions. And if you when you read the gospels, you hear Jesus tell them like, "Hey, you'll you know, you guys do all these things, but you forget to do this to do what really matters." And that cuz like for you when Jesus spit in the in the in the mud and spit in the ground and healed that guy uh and and put the mud on his eyes, that's a really weird way to heal somebody. Well, he did it on the Sabbath. And the reason he did that was very much because he was letting people know uh that they were that what they had made to be God's ways was not actually his ways. Because the rule at the time was you weren't allowed to work on the Sabbath because that's what it said. You shall keep the Sabbath holy. Well, what had happened is a bunch of rabbinical traditions over thousands of years had decided, well, you know what? What is work? Right? Because now we got to define terms. Well, there's a lot of people who are making bricks and actually you make bricks by mixing mud and water together. So if you even spit on the ground, that that's actually now violating the Sabbath. So Jesus comes along and what he healed on the Sabbath.

37:58 It's like he waited for the Sabbath to come to show them over and over again how much they had missed the heart of what God was doing. And even to spit on the mud, make it and put it on people's eyes was him going, "Hey guys, you're you've missed it." So when he leaves and goes, "Go teach everybody to do exactly I've done." That's very much in the spirit of like, yeah, hey, like y'all need to keep the heart of the matter. So, so I guess the question I'm kind of asking is like what is the heart of church? So that's the so the the that's the then that's the danger of like dogma. Oh yeah. Is um it's dogma is not dogma is how we think. It's not a problematic thing like everyone has dogma. So like if you have this saying in your family that family comes first no matter what. That's dogma, right? that's a person's thought process that's come developed into principle that that's just true or um if you say that uh you know in the educational world it's good grades equal intelligence right so good grades can be a measure of intelligence but are they the only measure of intelligence that's where dogma becomes an issue right so dogma is not a problem unless we're not really super aware of it and where it came from so this is what like to your point this is what Jesus was talking about and I've quoted it a few times on the podcast but I Mark 7, it's really interesting passage of scripture. Mark 7, uh, verse, it starts in verse 6 if you want to go read it.

39:13 But it's where Jesus says to the Pharisees, you sidestep God's law to hand down your tradition, right? So, you've elevated your traditions above the the commands of God, which is what dogma becomes if we're not paying attention. And there's nothing wrong with traditions, but here's the so before I get into like even what you're saying with your question, the the challenge and the problem is um when you don't when you start to go from trying to align with truth to trying to align with tradition, you're just a few degrees off course. Yeah. And the problem with being a few degrees off course is however long the journey is, uh you're going to be pretty significantly maybe off course. So if like if we took a road trip from Dallas to LA, that's 1,200 miles, right? So let's say that that's a straight line. It's not a straight drive, but let's say it's a straight line. If we start the journey and we're one degree off course on a 1,200 mile journey, that's 21 mi off target. That's not that big of a deal. 21 miles, you're still you're still kind of technically in LA cuz LA is massive.

40:19 Insanely huge. The metropolitan area of LA is massive. um one degree doesn't seem like a lot. After one mile, it's only 92 feet. So that's noticeable, but you can fix it really easily. But if we were going to take a plane f plane flight from New York to Tokyo, that's one of the longest plane flights that is exists in the world today. So if we were one degree off course, after a mile, we'd be 92 feet off course. After 1,200 miles, we'd be 21 mi off course. But at the conclusion of a 6,700 mile journey, you're 118 miles off course. Well, shoot. Right. Yeah. Um and depending on which direction you are, you're you might end up in the ocean instead of Japan, right? So, in um in 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So, that's like the farthest journey that we know so far humans have ever gone. Um from the Earth to the moon.

41:12 We believe in that on this podcast, by the way. I was literally thinking I was like, "Man, I wonder how many people are like, but did we really?" We I last episode I'm a believer and I believe we landed on the moon and do all the other things as JFK said. So, we landed on the moon. The journey between the Earth and the Moon is 238,900 miles. Dang. So, if the if the astronauts were one degree off course, they would have missed the moon by 4,000 mi. That is wild. And the moon itself is only 2,000 mi in diameter. So the space between the astronauts and the moon would have been almost twice the size of the moon itself. If Apollo 11 was just.1° off course, they still would have missed the moon by over 400 miles. Man, so if you're 0.1° off from your road trip to LA, you'd be around 2 miles off course.

42:04 Not a big deal, right? So that's theoretical, but this actually happened in 1979. So they used to do these plane flights from uh from New Zealand to Antarctica. They would they would fly you from New Zealand to Antarctica and they would have u adventurers like Sir Edmund Hillary narrate the journey to show people these vast reaches of Antarctica, right? And it was this unique sight sightseeing experiences. So the there's this particular flight in 1979. It's called the Mount Erebus disaster. And guess it didn't end well. Yeah, it did not end well. So before the flight, the crew corrected what they thought was an error in the flight coordinates and they changed the flight's course by two degrees. Okay. Um which shouldn't be that big of a deal. 2° is not that much. Um we just talked about what it was. As they approached Antarctica, the pilots descended to an altitude of 2,000 ft and switched to autopilot, but because of their two-degree change, the plane was 28 mi to the east of where the pilots thought they were.

43:05 Shoot. Okay. Um, this difference, the unfortunate thing about this 28 mi was this difference put them directly in the path of a mountain called Mount Erebus that was an active volcano that rises 12,000 ft above Antarctica. So outside of the windows, they they descended to be able to see Antarctica as a part of this journey, this experience. And outside the windows, it just looked like a white out, right? There's just snow. Antarctica's snow. It snows all the time. They thought the crew the crew thought that the volcano so they they they see all this white that there's this ice shelf called the Ross ice shelf that's just this massive expansive floating ice. So they thought that that was they thought that the mountain was the Ross ice shelf but they were 28 mi off. Of course they were directly in uh in the mountains way. So the terrain of the volcano was so sle so steep that by the time the autopilot started sounding the warning that there was a terrain warning, it was only a few seconds before the plane crashed in the side of the mountain and blew up and everybody died.

44:06 Right? So the reason I tell that story is because that's the danger of being one or two degrees off of truth. And tradition is always one or two degrees off truth. There's there's nothing wrong with traditions. There's nothing wrong with dogma. There's nothing wrong with saying, "Well, I believe these things to be true and I'm going to live according to them." There is, however, if we don't assess every belief that we have in our life, and I think there's probably a better, you know, and more positive way to say it. If we don't embrace the daily uncertainty of making sure that we're on course, even if we're just a little bit off course, we we talked about this on a previous episode, but the the implications are massive for being a little bit off course. We talked about that when we talked about pain management like when your core values are a little bit off when you're uh you know I'm following and this is the danger of the Catholic Church like I want to follow God I want to follow ultimate truth personally I want to be aligned with that I don't think that people think that well so if I align my life with the traditions of men that people have built I'm I might not be totally off course like I'm not totally headed in the wrong direction But I'm headed in the wrong direction enough that it's over the long journey of my life, it's going to be significant enough that I crash the plane. And this is where I always quote Talladega Nights, legend of Ricky Bobby.

45:30 If you ain't first, you're last. And his dad said, I don't know. I must have been drunk when I said that. I can't believe you'd live your whole life based on that. And this is what so many people do. And so, how does that translate to today? Like when you're talking about how do we make sure? Number one, this is something I'm going to say a million times if in my life if I don't say it a million times on this podcast, and that's be a Berean. Be a person who everything that someone tells you about God, everything that someone tells you about the church, everything that someone tells you about how to live, you have to have a true north on the compass that you weigh that against. I don't care how much you love the person, how much you trust the person, how much you believe in the tradition or the thought process. The only thing that matters to me is whether or not it aligns with the word of God. So I I value the traditions. I value the dogmas of things I'm associated with. But at the same time, those are not my truth.

46:22 Right. Right. And I understand there's security and safety in that. It's why we as humans create traditions is for for security and safety. But I have to be willing to live in the uncertainty of I don't really know if this is fully the way to do this best, right? I don't know if I'm raising I'm trying my best to raise my kids in accordance with principles, in accordance with truth. I can't sit here and tell you I 100% have ascertained how to do that. I I'm always trying to be better, right? And if if but if we get the problem with becoming dogmatic is when you become dogmatic, you go this is the only way. So you start to think the only way that God reaches people is through this. The only way that the only way that the church should so we'll we'll go with the only way that the church can reach people is if the church funds all this homeless ministry and uh we never do anything and we don't build nice buildings and we don't do nice stuff because that's a person's dogmas. They think this is what a church should be and this is what a church should do. There's nothing wrong with thinking that. There is something wrong with converting that thought process into the into truth because that's not in the Bible anywhere. That's just a person's ideas.

47:29 On the other hand, this is this is where I personally have like a significant challenge. On the other hand, uh we have now there was a time in church history in the '9s where um in the late 90s, early 2000s, which was around the time we started our church, churches start to look like nightclubs, right? So they start painting the auditoriums dark. They start doing all these lights. They start they worship starts to feel like a little bit more like a concert. And that's like the tradition. That's now be for 20 20 something years that's the tradition. Now that's dogmatic. So now what people do is they go this is how we have to experience God. We can't be unplugged. We can't be lowkey. The megachurch model is the only model of the church now and everyone should be trying to do that. Right. That's just as dogmatic. I don't know that people they won't think of that though. No, they won't because what the it's like so it's like that's something Well, people that like it like it people Yeah. But but you're right. But but for a for people that that are new, it's just kind of like, oh, this is worship.

48:28 Yeah. Like this is and and they say it's worship, not knowing the actual biblical definition of worship. Worship is when you play a song. No. No, that's not worship. Or or worship is when I feel, you know, a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the truth of modern worship is it is uh and I'm not saying this in a negative sense. It's just reality. It's music that's geared to creating a response. So corporate worship, there's nothing wrong with these things. There's nothing wrong with having an emotional response to music, but you're getting the you you'll get the same. I mean, I I I've gone to concerts where people cry during the concert. Yeah. And it's not a worship, right? You know, there's there's something powerful about music and a spiritual component to music and all of that. So, I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying music in itself is powerful to our souls. Yeah. So the problem becomes though when we turn these things into things that are incontro incontrovertibly true which is another place we find ourselves in church history where I feel like lights screens big time show like all this different stuff has now become the new dogma and the new tradition not that we have to break it and that's why you see so many people deconstructing the faith because they go well this has now become dogmatic and we need to find a new dogma but what they've done is instead of um trying to help the church be navigated through that they've just thrown out the whole proposition.

49:53 Yeah. And you know there's a great quote by GK Chesterton that uh he talked about reformers and one of the things he said about reformers is a reformer a bad reformer will look at a fence wonder will look at a fence not know why it's there and remove it and then wonder where the sheep go. Right? A good reformer will look at the fence and they won't move the fence until they understand why the fence is there. Right. Very good. So when we look at traditions and dogmas of the church and the way churches operate, we shouldn't try to blow that up until we understand why those things got put in place in the first place. And the reason why is because if we want it to actually be better, we can't repeat the same mistakes. Right. So let me let me ask you, man, because I we we do need to wrap up here. Yes. We've been we've been been chopping it up for a while. Chopping it up, which is what what dialogue is. What? So, what do you think are like the essentials? Because what we're saying is like we're not saying this is the methodology like if you don't do this, you're wrong. Yeah. So, but what are the essentials uh for for church?

50:54 Well, I would say that there's uh there's just one, right? There's the great commission. So, we have to ask ourselves this question. Not not as a church leader. I'm not sitting here saying this as a pastor. I'm saying this we have to ask ourselves this question as Christians, right? Is are we discipling people? Right? and our people being taught to obey all that God has commanded us to do. And when we look at culture, I'm not personally satisfied with that outcome. Okay. So I think that the question has to become how can we build a church that fulfills the great commission which leads to all sorts of other implications like we have built there's beautiful things about being large churches and uh one of and I'll just talk about one of the dynamics and then this will be a conversation we're always having. So um we're not going to leave people hanging. We're just always talking about this kind of stuff because we believe the church is the hope of the world. One of the things that's happened to me in the context of the megachurch tradition now that's been built is um Jesus said the great commission go into all the world and he said this to everybody not just the pastors teach people to observe all that I have commanded you. This doesn't happen very well. It doesn't happen very well for a lot of reasons.

52:07 Let me just give you like one of them in my opinion. One of them is the average um churches like ours that are megachurches. We have things like small groups that we put in place and those are kind of these structures that are built for the purpose of discipling somebody. Well, the only problem with that is that most of the people in every church in America, you know, let's say not every church, but um a lot of churches, majority of churches, the people that they put in leadership over small groups are not any more spiritually mature than the people in those small groups. So you should have people that are being discipled. But the problem is you have put someone in place who usually a person who's in a small who's in a small group leadership position is being put there because they're loyal to the church or they can gather a group of people or some other criteria or they they've been a member for a long time, whatever that is. We're not really accurately we're not really actually that great at assessing a person's spiritual maturity because you have to see a person's spiritual maturity over a long period of time. You have to see how they treat their wife. You have to see how they are with their kids. And the growth the growth trajectory and the growth model of churches where people go, we should just grow the church doesn't allow for that because we need to get as many groups as possible in place as as possible. And I'm just describing a phenomenon that exists. And so we end up missing on the discipleship outcome because well people do get discipled.

53:33 They just get discipled really poorly and they get discipled wrong and they get taught a lot of wrong stuff and they're one or two degrees off. but over the long period of their journey that one to two to do to to two degrees leads people into crashing into a mountain. And so what what the church has to be able to do is uh reconcile the dogma and the traditions that have now been created of having a super large church that honestly large churches are not very great at being relational and onetoone. And so what a lot of people do is they go we should just go back to small churches. What if, and I was kind of getting on this point earlier, what if a small church all of a sudden you have thousands of people that show up? What are you going to do? Just turn everybody away, right? Sorry, we have to stay. Sorry, we we got to just meet in this house. We I know we have 500 people coming, but we we can't we have to just meet in the house. You guys have to find somewhere else to go. No one would do that. They're trying to care for the people. So, you have to figure out how to create something that is sustainable, which um again, you look back at history. And I'll just give this I'll just give this thought and then we can wrap up. But um in the early church with which is the church that Paul and the and the church fathers led, you would have to come to the church for two years before you were allowed to be baptized. And the way that it would work was they would have home gatherings.

54:48 They would do a lot of stuff in homes together, but they would also gather uh in a in a large amount. So, you would have multiple home churches that were all would all meet in homes every week, and then they would do a gathering at some point for all the home churches like in a city or in an environment. During that gathering, there would be two parts to the church service. One part would be uh for everybody, everybody that came, anybody could come to the small groups, anybody could be a part of the discipleship thing. That would be the first part. The second part would be only for people that had been baptized into the life of the church. Oh, right. And to be baptized into the life of the church, you would have had to been there for to been there for two years. Yeah. And why two years? It's not in the Bible anywhere. It's just what the kind of early church fathers identified as once we've been around you for 2 years, we can get to know you. Like me and you've been friends for I don't know. Wow. Longer than that. But um like I've seen how you are with Rian. I've seen how you are with your kids. I would have I have no problem going, "Oh, Nick's a great leader and Nick's a great man and Nick can mentor men and Nick can speak because I've seen your life." So, this is kind of like this model that they put in place and it would be what's called a slow growth model.

55:53 Uh because you're making sure that before you allow a person to step into leadership, they actually have maturity. um we would have to figure out and that's I think the a huge question for us in the future is in terms of the future of the church is how do we make sure that we have spiritually mature people in place that are helping people to become spiritually mature and helping people to become great disciples while we also look at like the we're always going to be building traditions and kind of reworking them but the thing we can't do is get so hung up on our traditions and the way that we do it. Yeah. That we forsake truth. And that's why I think it's really important for us to intentionally live with a degree of uncertainty to say, okay, we don't ever feel like we fully ascertain the right way to do this. And we're always open to making it better. And that's what I think gives you the highest chance to overall in life build something that aligns with truth.

56:56 Thank you for listening to The Dialog. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe. And also, if you think someone else would enjoy this, please send it to them. If you want to get in touch or learn more about me, what I think, speak, and write, you can go to joshuacraft.com. Or you can also follow Nick and I on Instagram. Our handles are in the show notes. We'll see you next time.