Mega Church Madness: From Whitefield to Warren—A Historical Disaster

The megachurch didn’t just appear out of nowhere—it has a long and tangled history that stretches all the way back to the First Great Awakening. In this episode, we're joined by Steve Kozar of The Messed Up Church as we trace the roots of this modern-day monster, exposing how emotionalism, revivalism, and entertainment have slowly replaced biblical preaching and faithful pastoral care. If you've ever wondered where the madness of the megachurch came from, you won’t want to miss this.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Talk about something special in your Easter basket. It was
quite a celebration of the Bay Area of Fellowship Church
in Corpus Christi, Texas this Easter. That's because Pastor Bill
Cornelius gave a way up to fifteen cars, flat screen television's,
guitars and furniture.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Show us what it's all about. Give him a welcome.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Guys, think you can jump that cheer for him and
see if you can do it.

Speaker 4 (00:24):
I think it's a copat to say, well, I'm a Christian,
but I don't ever do anything to help.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
If you're Jewish or Muslim and you don't accept Christ
at all.

Speaker 5 (00:31):
You know, I just I'm very careful about saying who
would and wouldn't go to heaven?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
God has done something new.

Speaker 6 (00:37):
Besides, He would say to them, and he would say
to you, vou shout out of made the ten commandments
because those aren't your commandments.

Speaker 5 (00:43):
Hey, how us rupper out of held you show us
you on the cem aka a big drain because I'll
be getting a schmuggy.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Shut me out.

Speaker 5 (00:59):
I think.

Speaker 7 (01:03):
Couse, God broke belong for long. I said to every sinner,
God broke belong for long.

Speaker 8 (01:14):
So listen, who grew up in a family where mom
had the rule, no jumping on the bed, no jumping
on the furniture. Who had that kind of rule? Come on,
we had that role, We had that rule going up right,
no jumping on the furniture. But guess what my mom
was in the last service. She's not here at this service.
Ooh yeah, welcome to the comfy couch.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Now serious at Church by the Glade. Gotta be fun today.

Speaker 9 (01:55):
Welcome to the Long for Truth podcast. I'm Robin Long.
Join my husband Dan and I as we explore the
roots of the early Pentecostal and Charismatic movements and we
shine a light on false doctrines and false teachers in
the modern church. Let's get started.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Hello everyone, welcome along for Truth. My name is Daniel Long.
Today we're going to be discussing a topic that affects
millions of Christians worldwide, and that is the rise and
influence of the megachurch. And to help me unpack this,
I've invited my good friend Steve coozar on for a Well,

(02:33):
if you know anything about our videos, it's a wide
ranging conversation because not only do we take a look
at the history of the megachurch movement and its common
practices and it's theological trends, but we talk about things
surrounding the megachurch as well. So I hope this video

(02:53):
will be helpful to you. I hope it will be edifying,
and most importantly, I hope that if you find it
helpful or that you think it's going to help others,
that you will just pass it along. All right, let's
get into our conversation. Okay, doctor Coozar, thank you so
much for joining me today. We're going to be talking
about something that I don't think you and I have

(03:15):
talked about in a video ever. We're going to be
talking about megachurches. We're going to be talking about the
history of megachurches, the theology of megachurches. How did these big,
gigantic megachurches come about? Because, Man, a lot of the
stuff that we've seen over the past year or two,
with all of these scandals and stuff, have been from

(03:35):
big megachurch pastors.

Speaker 10 (03:38):
Yeah, there's so many layers to the issue. It's not
like the fact that they're really big is the problem,
or the fact that the pastors are celebrities is the problem.
Those are components, Man, there's a lot of stuff involved
in tracing the history of them, how they came about,
What ideas led to the next idea, which led to

(03:59):
the next idea, and pretty soon you got a whole
bunch of ideas, maybe with some good intentions, but the
end result is bad. And that's where we find ourselves.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah. Yeah, And it's a good point that you made
there that it's not it's not about the size of
the church in and of itself. I mean you can
go back and you can find huge churches in history.
I think about the Metropolitan Tabernacle of Charles Spurgeon. What
he had like six thousand people, you know, but he
was he was not like what you see today. I

(04:33):
mean he was preaching from scripture, you know, he was
preaching exegetically, and he had big church. I think of
other churches where pastors are preaching exegetically that are bigger churches,
and we can't say that they are, you know, part
of the whole stuff that's going on. I think one

(04:53):
of the big issues though, is is just why these
churches exist. You know, it's to reach the unchurched. I
mean that's how it all started. I think with the
whole church growth movement, am I right.

Speaker 10 (05:06):
Yeah, yeah. Before we even go any further, I want
to recommend everybody check out that video Church of Tears
or Church of the Tears. I've forgot exactly how Church
of Tears. I have a Cornucopia article. It's not new
or anything, but it still has really good like an
outline of information the seecret friendly, purpose driven Cornucopia false doctrine,

(05:31):
and I have a number of resources and kind of
briefly traced through the history of things. And I have
that video right there on the page.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Good Good, and I'll put a link to that in
the description Good.

Speaker 10 (05:43):
It's a long video. It's really long. In fact, I've
toyed with the idea of dropping it into my editor
and speeding it up and taking out some of the pauses,
just to make it go a little quicker, because the
content is great, even though it's over I think it's
over ten years old now.

Speaker 7 (06:00):
But that.

Speaker 10 (06:02):
The issue that you just brought up, though, is it's
supposed to bring in the unchurched, and so church now
becomes a place that's focused on meeting the needs of
the people who aren't going to church, right right, And
and so you're and we will kind of chomping at
the bit. Now, go ahead, let go go.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
I'm gonna let you. I'm gonna let you talk.

Speaker 10 (06:24):
Go ahead, because I don't think I really heard it
as clearly explained as I did when I first heard
that video from Elliott Nash, and he basically made it
really clear from the Bible, not from his own explanations,
but just from scripture that the church is a place
for Christians. The church is a place for Christians, and

(06:48):
if you want to go there as a non Christian,
that's great. We really really want that, and no one's
against that. I mean, maybe there's some weirdo somewhere who
says we don't want any you know, new people coming here,
but in general Christian I've always wanted the thing to grow.
But what they haven't done is said, we wanted to
grow so much that we want to focus all of

(07:09):
our attention on the needs and the wants and the
desires of non Christians. And we want to say to
the Christians who are here in their Christian church, Hey,
this place isn't for you. It's just it's crazy. It's
like it's like, I don't know, I have an organization
of model railroaders, and we've been doing this for a

(07:30):
long time and all of us are really into it.
We know a lot about model railroads. We enjoy exchanging
information about it. But we don't have any new people.
So in order to get the new people who are
interested in basketball and they're not interested in model railroading,
we're gonna start talking more and more about basketball so
we can get new people to show up. And all

(07:51):
the model railroaders are saying, excuse me, but I thought
this was a model railroading organization. I go, yeah, I know,
but you got to just hang in there because we
need to bring in new people. So that's why we're
talking about basketball so much. I just made that up
off the top of my head. But I think that's
kind of a really simplified version of what's happened.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, it's it's trying to make it's trying to make
Jesus in the Gospel more palatable to pagans. I mean,
the fact is that these that that the people that
these uh secret sensitive churches and pastors are trying to
reach are It would be great. I mean, if if

(08:33):
if it wasn't a watered down version of the Gospel
or if they weren't trying to make the gospel look
more appeale, you know, appealing to the masses. But that's
the problem. You know, the cross is foolishness to those
who are perishing, that's the thing. And so to the
out the person that is not a Christian, the the

(08:53):
and let's just call it, what is it. People who
are not Christians are pagans. I mean, that's just what
it is. But they are. To them, the Cross of
Christ is foolishness. But then when you add you try
to make Jesus look cool, or you try to, you know,
make Jesus look appealing to lost people or people who

(09:15):
are not Christians. Really you end up with nothing but cringe.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Well, we're back be off church super Bowl weekend too,
yea too man. I'm excited to be here with these
beautiful people and you, oh thank you?

Speaker 11 (09:35):
Yeah, well you're saying I'm not beautiful.

Speaker 12 (09:38):
Everybody else is.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
No, you're beautiful looking.

Speaker 12 (09:42):
Great way to start there.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Are you excited to be here?

Speaker 11 (09:45):
I'm very excited to be Hey, if you're a first
time guests here, hey, we're so glad to hear it.
Can everybody else welcome our first time guests talk about that, Matt,
Why is it so important that we recognize first time guests. Yeah,
because you know, we at Behup Church, we want to
make sure that we are someone's arch, not just someone's second.
And so that means everything that we do is catered
to be able to say hey, you can come to church,

(10:07):
to making sure that we can invite someone in and so, yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
We did this all for you today.

Speaker 11 (10:11):
That's why, yes, we did.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
We did it all for you.

Speaker 10 (10:14):
That's what I've documented in a bunch of my videos.
You know, how embarrassing the seeker friendly. You know, let's
make church really attractive to the largest number of people.
What they really are doing is they're making it attractive
not to the largest number of people, but to the
lowest common denominator. In many cases, a place like Church
by the Glades. You know, they're saying, maybe, sincerely, we

(10:39):
can't judge the hearts of the people in charge. I
think I have a pretty good idea of what's really
going on, especially since they don't disclose how much income
the pastor is getting in most of these places. But still,
even with the best of intentions to say, if we
just talk about biblical things and we talk about the
need for us because of our sinfulness, and how you know,

(11:03):
the wrath of God is real, that God is angry
at mankind sin. If you don't have that component, Jesus
coming and dying on the cross really doesn't make a
lot of sense, you know. So, so if you're going
to make it really really attractive to non Christians and
you're saying to the non Christian, hey, what is what
is it that's keeping you from going to church? And

(11:24):
this is what has caused the patterns of the structure
of the modern megachurch, according to Bill Hybels, According to
Robert Schuler, according to Rick Warren, they all went to
their town, they knocked on doors, and they said, why
don't you go to If you go to church, great,
have a nice day. Oh you don't go to church.

(11:46):
That's interesting? Why not? What would make you want to
go to church? What kind of things would you like
to see church doing? Oh you want to see this? Okay?
What else? Oh you want to see that? Okay. They
compile all that stuff and they said, non Christians want X,
Y and z, so let's do X, Y and Z.
And then people started going to church more because it
wasn't really a Christian church anymore. It was suiting the needs.

(12:08):
Now you got to be really careful, and there is
nuance to this issue. Like, for instance, the German Lutherans
who came here in eighteen hundreds. We've talked about this
years ago. They didn't want to have English spoken in
their churches, and that was not a wise idea in
terms of getting other people to go to church because

(12:29):
they didn't speak German, So why would they ever go
to your church? While they were doing it to try
to protect their little world from infiltration, which I can
kind of see, but that's going too far. You're really
preventing people from hearing the gospel. So there is some
nuance to the idea of making church a place where
outsiders feel welcome. Should really want that, and I know

(12:53):
there are churches that don't make outsiders feel welcome and
that is a genuine problem. So that's I think we
should make it clear. We're not saying that we should,
you know, have a guy at the door saying are
you a Christian or not? You're not well, don't come
in here, you know, right right, Just need to be
super clear, like our little Lutheran church a mile down

(13:16):
the road. Honestly, we we we've talked about not being
too friendly to newcomers because it's almost, uh, kind of
overpowering them and they're like, I don't know if I
want to go to a lot of time to small church.
If you go there, there's two problems. One is it's
a click and you don't feel welcome because you don't

(13:37):
fit in and no one knows you and they're all
just talking to each other because that's what they always do.
And a new guy comes in, they kind of ignore
the new guy and they feel like, wow, I thought
people would talk to me more. The other side of
the coin is there's a new guy, get him, let's
go make him feel welcome. Let's let's make you know.
So there's there's a there's a balance there so that
that is a genuine problem in churches. But we're now

(13:59):
we're going to the other extreme where the whole church
is like it's like a corporation. It's like a shopping
mall or a movie theater or some kind of a
venue that's got this franchised system in place to make
sure that everybody gets what they want. When they got
the coffee, they got the welcoming team. They got the
people parking the cars. They make sure that there's no

(14:21):
inconvenience whatsoever. They take your kids off. It's a place
where they can do whatever. And then you can just
sit there in this theater, this darkened theater, and watch
this incredibly professional production. Yeah, the idea that you can
you can basically manipulate people. Yeah, he wouldn't use that word,
but you can manipulate people to make decisions to become Christians.

(14:43):
It's it's not overly spiritual here. I've got it figured out.
And of course he was a lawyer who had probably
exceptionally good skills at convincing people of whatever he wanted
to convince them of.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yeah, yep, And I'm going to read his his I
don't guess it's a conversion experience when we get to it,
but it is supposedly when he was baptized with the
Holy Spirit. And these are just his words, and I
think you read those. I read that text yesterday that

(15:16):
I sent you. I want to read that for people.
I'm sure there are those who may never have known this,
but but anyway, let's let's go ahead and talk about
the roots of the megachurch movement, because this monster did
not start in a vacuum. I mean, you go back
and you can go down and trace, you know, even

(15:38):
back to the First Grade Awakening in the seventeen thirties
and forties, you can trace. Really it's kind of its
roots and where it all started, especially these massive gatherings
that took place. You know, I guess, Steven, correct me
if I'm wrong, before the First Grade Awakening, before you
had and really George Whitfield kind of the catalyst of

(16:01):
all this. Before you had George Whitfield, you didn't have
these really mass gatherings as far as I know, you know,
it was Whitfield that kind of popularized this thing. Am
I correct?

Speaker 10 (16:15):
As far as I know? There may be a movement
that's just so disconnected from Western culture, you know, European
culture that we're not aware of. That's possible. But in general,
everything that we know as evangelicals in America today, and
I'm saying evangelical, we eve I mean the evangelical world,
because we're Lutherans, and we're not exactly in a category

(16:38):
of evangelicals. In the broadest possible sense. We are, but
in another sense, we're really not the thing you just
said about Whitfield. I think it's important to make a
distinction between Whitfield and somebody like Jonathan Edwards, even though
they get lumped together. Edwards was actually a much more
traditional preacher who wrote his sermons and specifically did not

(17:02):
use emotion in his preaching because he was concerned that
the use of emotion would be manipulative. Whitfield was the opposite.
He had a background in theater, and he used all
the tricks of the trade of theater, and he went
out into the public square and he actually was railing
against the actors in the theaters because that was the

(17:23):
really Unchristian thing to do. He'd be but he'd be
out there using his theatrical techniques to win over the
crowd and tell them why the theater is a place
of pagans.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Let me tell you.

Speaker 10 (17:39):
And he was using all of this drama. He was
acting out things, he was crying, he was laughing, was
he was literally doing the things that actors did to
draw a very large crowd. And it worked, it worked really,
really well. And he attributed all of that to the
work of God and to the Holy Spirit. And I
tell you, I think it wasn't always the Holy Spirit.

(18:02):
I think it was just Wow, who's this guy out
giving these dramatic speeches. Wow, he's he's enthralling. He really
captures my attention. Even his close friend Benjamin Franklin said,
I don't have you. I don't have any interest in
this whole Christian thing. I've never been a Christian, don't
want to be a Christian. But boy, he's good. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
Franklin had a very popular printing press and or paper
was it a paper? Yeah it was.

Speaker 10 (18:28):
It was like a kind of but he was also
publishing books as well, if I remember, I read about
it a few years ago.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
So, so he had this large printing business and he
really capitalized on this because he took he put made
Whitfield really was one of the ones who made Whitfield
extremely popular by putting, you know, the times when he
was going to be in areas he would he would
print his sermons in his publication. I mean, and he

(19:00):
just he just and and he was very good friends
with with George Whitfield. And and fortunately Whitfield had the
opportunity on several occasions to present the Gospel to him
and when he was uh, when he was sitting in
Whitfield's meetings, he heard the gospel, so you know been
of course, Franklin wasn't a Christian. He was a Deist
and didn't care, like you said, didn't care for Witch

(19:22):
Whitfield's message, but uh, you know, he he did get
to preach the gospel to him, and Franklin did make
Whitfield pretty popular, uh in in the colonies.

Speaker 10 (19:34):
You know, they were both the kind of a prototype
of the self made promotional machine celebrity, and they both were.
It wasn't that that Whitfield was this humble guy who
just happened to become famous. No, he worked at it.
He wrote in his journals. He made sure that those

(19:55):
journals were published. When he talked about all the great
things that I did, would go back and forth between
America and England because he was British. He would talk
about all the amazing things that happened in just such
a way that when he came back into town next
time and the posters went all up all over the
place saying George Woodfield's coming back, people were like, that's

(20:16):
the guy I read about six months ago. I got
to go see him. So he was an expert publicist
and he became a phenomenon across all of colonial America
in a way that was very similar to Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin was also an excellent publicist. I think we've
talked about this before that the picture of him with
his coonskin cap was a total fake. He was not

(20:39):
a pioneer, you know. Franklin was like a He was
a guy sipping tea with the ladies and reading books,
and he was an intellectual. He was a high society guy.
And he put on that hat. He had an etching made.
He had it plastered all over Europe, so that when
he gave speaking engagements in Europe, everybody went to see
Benjamin Franklin in the frontier pioneer guy because they saw

(21:04):
his picture with the coonskin cap. It's it's actually amazing
how much these guys were if they had if they
had Twitter accounts, they would have had the most followers
probably of anybody, or they could have been on you know,
uh TikTok or something, because that's they were. They were
that they were doing their own version of it at

(21:25):
the time, for good or for bad. That's that's just
the reality of They became celebrities based on the fact
that they worked hard to make it happen.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Yeah, let's talk about the crowd size sizes. How how
many how many at a time would Whitfield draw to
his his outside or even inside meetings it was.

Speaker 10 (21:49):
They guessed, based on pretty i think careful calculations, eight
to ten thousand people would be able to hear him.
And he apparently had a voice that could project like crazy.
And he also made sure that he went to a
location where the sound would bounce around. I'm not sure
how that works. An open setting, the sound just goes

(22:11):
and kind of dissipates, but if you're in a place
where there's maybe he did it in a public square
where there's buildings on either sides, so the sound would
echo a bit more. I'm not sure how that works,
but they guessed close to ten thousand people would go
to hear him. And I think it's really important to
also make the point that he was an Anglican priest

(22:32):
who very quickly became entrepreneurial, first in London and then
in the United States, which was still you know, colonial Britain,
and he realized that if he was a populist. This
is another really interesting category of discussion. Populism is roughly

(22:52):
the idea that I'm going to attract the largest number
of people by being on their side. I'm going to
take their side of an issue versus being part of
the aristocracy or part of the elites. And so Andrew
Jackson was the first American president who would be categorized
as a populis president. He was like the rough and
tumble guy. I'm gonna tell it like it is. I'm

(23:13):
not part of those hoity toity people. I'm with you.
And that is another element that's carried over with most,
if not all, of the megachurch pastors today. They're saying,
you know what, I'm not going to go into all
that theology stuff. I'm not going to go into all
that deep study. That's for those intellectuals. It's all about

(23:35):
the heart. It's all about, you know, getting out there
and making stuff happen for Jesus. So that's a component
that Whitfield was. He wasn't in that category completely, I
don't think, but he was in that category to an
extent as opposed to somebody like a Jonathan Edwards, who
was a genuine intellectual. He was a brilliant mind. He

(23:56):
was probably if he took an IQ test in his day,
he would probably be, you know, like mensa quality intellect,
whereas Whitfield was much more of a populist, and Trump
is a populist in the most blatant example of populism.
You just just think of whether you like Trump or

(24:17):
you dislike Trump. He's really good at getting people on
his side by claiming to be the guy who's not
part of the elites. He's not part of the powerful
at the very top. He's down there with the common people.
Whether he really is or not is not what we're
talking about here. But if you do that, and I remember,
there are pastors whose names I can't even remember that

(24:39):
Chris Roseborough was talking about just ten or twelve years ago,
who were exactly like this. They were terrible preachers, they
had terrible theology, and they had gigantic churches. Many of
them were that I can remember, like Perry Noble, Remember him.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
I do remember Perry Noble and uh New Spring Church.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
She said, Perry, what about the jackass in the church.
The jackass in the church is the person that always screams,
I want to go deeper. You know what I tell
people that say that around here. You're only as deep
as the last person you served. You want to talk deep,
Let's go check your tithing record and see how.

Speaker 7 (25:20):
Deep you are.

Speaker 8 (25:24):
Deep deep.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
Most Christians are. John Maxwell said it, most Christians are
educated way beyond their level of obedience. Anyway, what you're
really saying is you want me to stand on the
stage and confuse the heck out of you so you
don't have to apply what I teach on Sundays. I
could do that, So I'm praying. One morning, I'm like, God,
how are we gonna start this thing out. I'm in
my basement, I got my iPod, I'm lifting weights. The
song by ac DC Highway to Hell comes on.

Speaker 7 (25:51):
I said, that'll do it.

Speaker 10 (25:54):
He was like, I'm just one of you guys. I'm
you know, I'm just a regular guy. And what you
can do, if you're good at that, is you manipulate
a large audience to feel like we're all in this together.
My pastor is just like me.

Speaker 12 (26:07):
You know what.

Speaker 10 (26:08):
Let's be honest. You don't really talk to your pastor.
You don't really see what he does. You don't know
how much money he's making, you don't know what he's
doing behind the scenes, but he conveys that image when
he's up on stage. The guy with the mic always
controls everything in the megachurch. And this, if I can
go on just a tiny bit of a tangent here
in the beginning, you said there are big churches that

(26:29):
have good theology, and the pushback I would give is
that there are people who say the church should never
get over whatever. The number is somewhere around two hundred
and three hundred people, and the reason why is because
the pastor cannot possibly know everybody in a church once
it gets bigger than that. And the job of a

(26:50):
pastor is to literally talk to and interface with everybody
in his church in a fairly regular basis. He should
know their names, he should be able to visit them
if he has to. He should be able to catechize
each of their children. And if you can't do that,
then your church is too big or you need to
get more pastors, you know. So if you had a
church with more than two three hundred people, you need

(27:12):
to now get another pastor to fill that role so
that there is always a pastor who knows everybody's name.
And a mega church can't do that.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
Right well, you know, that's kind of how one of
the bigger Lutheran churches in our area has a couple
of paths. They have two pastors and staff because the
church is big, you know. And i've I think I
was it was what you had gran Olson on a
couple of weeks ago, and he talked about John MacArthur.

(27:43):
I didn't know this, but having thirty elders or so
and his church, and he's got a very very large church,
and so I guess you can. You know, I don't
know how Spurgeon took care of all of the people
in his church. I have no idea how he did that,
but I've been that he had deacons and elders that

(28:03):
you know.

Speaker 10 (28:04):
Yeah, that's a good point. That's probably where they would say, no,
it's a plurality of elders. To pastor himself is assigned
more to the preaching task, but we have elders who
are actually doing those other pastoral things. So that's a
good point. That's the way you could maybe make the
case for a very very large church. And the thing
that I don't think everybody's aware of is that a

(28:25):
lot of times there's a new, upstart church, you know,
think of one of those kind of cool names mosaic,
you know, there's always they're trying to make it sound unchurchy.
Many of the people who are going to these new
churches are already Christians. They're just dissatisfied with the previous
one because they were told that church should do certain things,

(28:47):
and they're like, it's not really doing those things. So
I keep trying to look for one. A better one's
that's doing those things that I've been told that they
should be doing. And the megachurch, based on its size,
has resources that a small church just can't match. So
a lot of times smaller churches are getting eaten up
by the megachurches. When I lived in Lake Cirk, Illinois,

(29:11):
that's where Paul Ittt and I both grew up. The
next town over was Bearington, Illinois, and that's where Willow
Creek started. And Willow Creek was originally a youth group.

Speaker 7 (29:19):
It was.

Speaker 10 (29:21):
They just rented a theater called Willow Creek Theater. It's
still there, so they named it after this theater that
they rented on a weekly basis. And Bill Hybels, was
a student of McDonald's, was one of the sources of
how to do this thing. He was a big fan

(29:42):
of Ray Kroc. He actually had a Ray Croc sign
saying on the wall of his office. I forgot what
the exact saying was, but it wasn't a Christian saying.
It was from Ray Kroc. Ray Crock was a jerk.
He was a manipulative businessman, but he built McDonald's to
be huge after he stole a from the McDonald's brothers.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
Basically, I was gonna say that reminds me you had
mentioned Church of the Tears, and I meant to say
this right after you had mentioned that. But it reminds
me of Peter Drucker and how Peter Drucker was so
influential on so influential on Rick Warren and others. But
Chris Rosebro has a really it's just detailed video of

(30:28):
how the church growth movement, secret sensitive movement is very
much well, very much like the business model. And so
it's called, oh it's slipped my mind.

Speaker 10 (30:42):
Can you talk about a podcast?

Speaker 3 (30:44):
It's it's actually on YouTube. It's actually on YouTube. They
took it and they put it on YouTube. But it's
just it is the podcast episode. It is feudal. You
will be assimilated into the community. That's the name of it.
I'm going to put that LinkedIn on there because he
really gives some really incredible background. He's got some slides

(31:07):
to go with it, too, so I'll link the slides.
You can kind of follow along as he's talking. It's
really really fascinating anyway, would I digress?

Speaker 10 (31:14):
No, that's a good point. It would be amazing if
we could be a large segment of the Christian population
educate themselves about the secret Sensitive movement so that they
really understand this is not what the church has been historically,
and the people at the very top who have been
at the very foundation of building it are not people

(31:38):
that are trustworthy. I actually I am looking at my
corner copy article here. One of the earliest guys that
could be considered an early founder would be Henry Emerson Fosdick,
and he was the guy in the twenties who was saying,
you know, people don't really care about Heaven and Hell.
They don't really believe in that stuff anymore. And the

(31:59):
church is going to die if we keep focusing on
these theological issues that people just don't care about. So
what can we do to make church something that relates
to people? And he's one of the first guys that said,
what if we just focus on good works and making
the world a better place? What if we just make
the church a place where you can have a better

(32:20):
outlook and more positive and stuff like that. And the
guy that Robert, yes he was before Robert Schuler, but
he was one of the people laying the groundwork. And
Machen was the guy who wrote against him one hundred
years ago. This stuff was going on one hundred years ago.
Then you've got Norman Vincent Peel who his ideas were

(32:43):
taken up by Robert Schuler, who just put a very
slight Christian veneer on them. But it really isn't Christian
teaching anymore. They're just a Christian veneer.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
And Robin and I have done an entire video on
Norman Vincent Peelee and I'll put a link to that
down in the YouTube description as well. And yes, do
mention Robert Schuler's fascination with him and how he was
he was really, you know, just influenced greatly by that guy.
But let's let's let's stay let's go back. Now we've
kind of went down this, Let's go back to the second.

(33:15):
Let's talk about what you know, we we've got Whitfield.
We're talking about him, the massive crowds and Whitfield. One
of the things I did want to mention is how
Whitfield and his style really kind of influenced guys like
Gilbert Tennant, and then Tenant was influencing others. And so
you were having all of these guys out, you know,

(33:36):
leaving their churches, and they were going out in the
fields and they were you know, or they were coming
into churches and dragging people out of their churches, and
they would have outdoor meetings and they were just getting
these massive audiences and that kind of you know, that
kind of thing is what, uh, what Whitfield's sparked. I

(34:00):
think you know, am I right on that?

Speaker 10 (34:02):
No, I think you're right. I think that things that
are really bad often start out at a much lower
level with some good intentions that people can't foresee. If
we keep going in this direction, X, Y, and Z
might happen. There's or if somebody did say that and
they said, no, I don't think that's going to happen.

(34:23):
I think it's going to be better if we do
it this new way. And so whatever the intentions of
the original people. Along with Whitfield, there is also the
really interesting side issue, but very fundamental issue of the
new lights versus the old lights. It was happening primarily

(34:43):
in the Presbyterian Church in America, which was very, very prominent,
and that goes back to the issue of is the
church a place where we have to have highly trained,
theologically sound pastors who are called to start churches or
is that too low of a process. And because America's
growing so fast that we should just let anybody preach

(35:04):
any kind of a gospel. It doesn't have to be
perfect as long as it's good enough. And of course
the Methodist movement was what really changed everything in America
starting in the early eighteen hundreds by saying we don't
want to have theologically trained people at all. In fact,
there's actual stories of theologically trained Methodist ministers hiding their

(35:27):
credentials so that they wouldn't be ostracized by their fellow
Methodist pastors because they believe so strongly that you had
to be this very rough, crude, primitive version of a
Christian to really have any kind of an effect, and
you had to just get out there and preach this
really primitive version of Christian They actually there is still
a denomination to this day called the Primitive Methodist movement

(35:49):
or the Primitive Methodist Church. And they didn't necessarily mean
primitive in the sense of it being primitive like cavemen,
but it was we're going to go back to the
early Church where there was no, you know, theological discussion
as much there wasn't any kind of systematic theology. It
was very simple and kind of rough and rugged. And

(36:10):
that's what we need for this new frontier of America.
And that idea is also combined with this populism. You know,
I'm the regular guy. I'm not going to use those
big words. The thing that's interesting is that those early
guys they were preaching hell. They were preaching about the
dangers of hell. So that's not the problem that they
weren't talking about sin. They were so, but the use

(36:34):
of populism, the use of I'm against the intellectual types,
that idea is what transferred to where we are today.
And it transferred and then what was added to that
was the idea that well, now that people aren't interested
in hell as much as they used to be, they
don't want to hear about their sin. They just want

(36:55):
to know, how can I be successful in life? How
can I raise kids that are going to turn out good.
That's when I think the worst aspects of people like
Schuler and then Bill Hybels and Rick Warren had their
had their effect because they were taking those populism ideas
and they were adding to it the idea that well,

(37:15):
people aren't really interested in hell anymore, so what can
we give them, Well, let's give them life skills.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
You had some similar things going on in the early
to mid eighteen hundreds when you had the Cambridge Revival
in Kentucky which took you know, Barton Stone and then
later on Alexander and Thomas Campbell. That came about and
they they ended up, you know, being anti denominationalists.

Speaker 10 (37:44):
And they started their own denomination that yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
Church of Churches of Christ, Church of Christ and Disciples
of Christ. But they had this idea that we need
to get back to the Church of Acts, you know,
the Church and the Book of Acts. We need unity,
we don't need to divide over doctrine. They were anti

(38:07):
creedle they didn't want anything to do with creeds. They
they would they would heartily agree with Rick Warren's creeds
not deeds kind of or what is it deeds not
I'm sorry, deeds not creeds. But they were anti creedle
they they they all they wanted they wanted unity, and

(38:29):
they didn't want to have any kind of sermon. They
just wanted to preach right out of the Bible. It's
just me and my Bible. And uh so they all
get together. And of course, like you said, uh they
were anti denominational, but the Church of Christ, the Disciples
of Christ, and the International Church of Christ all came

(38:51):
from that movement.

Speaker 10 (38:52):
We don't want any division. That's why we're splitting off
from everybody else. And it's happening to this day.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Oh big time, big time.

Speaker 12 (39:01):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
But yeah, so you had you had that taking place,
and they were like thinking of the Cambridge Revival. You
had what did they had? They had stages where they
were they were building up and they were having different
peak pastors from Methodists, Baptist, Presbyterians, all different denominations were
just up there kind of doing their own thing. They

(39:23):
even had people in the crowds that were standing on
stumps and preaching. So, I mean, so you're seeing all
of this stuff take place. You have the first grade
Awakening with all these massive crowds, and then that usher's
in the second grade awakening in the what the eighteen
kind of the eighteen.

Speaker 10 (39:40):
Us to Yeah, you said it, ushers in the second
grade Awakening. I think that's the narrative that people use
in a broad brush sense, but I think it's more like,
I'm not sure. I think that a lot of what
happened with the second grade Awakening was what always happens,

(40:04):
and that is, we got all this established religion, whatever
it is. If it's been established for five years, it's
established religion, and we react against the established thing.

Speaker 7 (40:20):
And so.

Speaker 10 (40:22):
I'm not sure, because really, the real historians, the academic
people that I read their books and take most seriously
because they do the most rigorous study, they don't really
say that there was a first grade Awakening. It was
a series of events that got lumped together later and
it was called that after it all had already taken place.
But it wasn't one sweeping movement. And in the same way,

(40:46):
the second grade Awakening was not one giant, sweeping movement either.
It was a series of small events that later got
lumped together by certain people who called it the second
grade Awakening, but even the Cambridge Revival happened what like
twenty years before Finnie.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yeah, eighteen oh one was the time when the when
the Cambridge Revival took place, and then Finnie came around.
I think what was it the eighteen thirties, forties, I
can't remember the actual date that Finny came on the scene.
But you had a bunch of little sex rise up
from this time period. You had the Miller Rights, you

(41:22):
had like we taught, you know, the Stone Campbell Movement.
You know, you had you know, Finny, Charles, Finnie and
just the Mormons came from this time period. And because
of all of these little sweeping revivals going around during
this time, you had the was it, yeah, the Mill Rights.

(41:44):
So you had the the Seventh Day Advent is coming
up out of this good Night Man. There were a
lot of denominations that popped up from this time period
that we call the second grade Awakening.

Speaker 10 (41:57):
There's there's a book that was really helpful to me.
It's not the only book that and it's probably not perfect,
just like every book on this sort of a thing,
but it's called the Democratization of American Christianity. Forgot the
author's named Nathan something, but he makes the case that
after the American Revolutionary War, there was this rejection of

(42:21):
everything British. Kind of makes sense because that's what we
just had a war against. And the Church of England
was the church that no one wanted to be a
part of as much because then, you know, again, those
are the people we just had a war with. We
split off from those people. Why would we want to
have anything to do with that, you know, establishment sort
of religion. So there was this very, very rapid spread

(42:44):
of everybody and their brother saying I got me and
my Bible and I'm going to make up my own
new version of things. And that's when all of the
cults began, and just a couple of generations, early eighteen hundreds,
it was an absolute, big time, big what's the word
I'm looking for, not train wreck.

Speaker 7 (43:02):
It was like a.

Speaker 10 (43:04):
Every man for himself version of Christianity was spreading across America,
because that's what America was. It was a frontier and
everybody was just trying whatever they thought worked. And I
think we need to get to the issue of Charles Finnie,
because he's probably the most important guy that came out
of that whole mess. And he's probably more fundamentally foundationally

(43:31):
influential in shaping evangelicalism in America than anybody. And I
actually have another cornucopia all about Charles Finnie, the Charles
Finny cornucopia false doctrine.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah, so, Steve, I'll put all of this stuff. Man,
we'll have a We'll have links to all of this
stuff in the YouTube description. Everybody can go and check
those out. But yeah, let's let's get on Charles. Let's
talk about Charles Finnie for a few minutes.

Speaker 10 (43:59):
This is this is this is going to kill you
if you haven't ever heard this before, everybody watching. A
revival is not a miracle. According to another definition of
the term miracle, something above the powers of nature. There
is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature.
It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers
of nature. It is just that and nothing else. When

(44:22):
mankind becomes become religious, they are not enabled to put
forth exertions which were which they were unable before to
put forth. They only exert powers which they had before
in a different way, and use them for the glory
of God. A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent
on a miracle in any sense. It is a purely

(44:42):
philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means,
as much so as any other effect produced by the
application of means.

Speaker 3 (44:55):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that we need of we need.

Speaker 10 (44:59):
Of voiceover artists to do like a mid eighteen hundred's
a revival is not a miracle. According to another definition
of the term miracle, something above the powers of nature.
I can just imagine him. This was in his lectures
on revival lecture number one, book eleven or something. I

(45:20):
forgot where I got that quote, but he did a
whole series of He was the guy that said, hey,
all of you theologians, I know more than you because
I'm getting results. I'm out there making stuff happen, so don't.
The Presbyterians were actually saying, we'll pay for you to
go to Princeton, please just go get theological training because

(45:41):
we're glad you're bringing new people to church. That's great,
but you got to teach him correctly. You can't just
teach him anything. And he said, I don't need to
go to Princeton, no, thank you. In fact, I'm going
to write my own theological works. And I'm going to
create my own systematic theology because I'm out there and
i'm doing it. I'm getting the results. So everybody you
want to know how to do it, just listen to me.

(46:02):
That was Finny, And really, isn't that kind of like
the megachurch world today. It's saying, we're getting people in
the door. Don't tell us what to do, don't tell
us our theology is bad.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
Exactly. I want to read something from Finny too. This
comes from Let's see I've got I've got uh, let's
see which one is this one? This is also from
his works, his memoirs. Let me uh, let me just
read this. This is kind of a long quote, but
this is tell me what this sounds like. This sounds
like something that you would hear. Well, let me read

(46:37):
it and you'll you'll know. Okay. Just before evening, the
thought took possession of my mind that as soon as
I was left alone in the new office, I would
try to pray again that I was not that I
was not going to abandon the subject of religion and
give it up at any rate. And therefore, although I
no longer had any concern about my soul, still I

(46:59):
would continue to pray. By evening, we got the books
and furniture adjusted, and I made up. And I made
up in an open fireplace, a good fire, hoping to
spend the evening alone, just at just at dark, squire W.
He just lines out the guy's last name. He does,
He just gives W and then a line after it.

(47:19):
Seeing that everything was adjusted, bade me good night and
went to his home. I had accompanied him to the door,
And as I closed the door and turned around, my
heart seemed to be liquid within me. All my feelings
seemed to rise and flow out, and the utterance of
my heart was I want to pour my soul out

(47:39):
to God. The rising of my soul was so great
that I rushed into the room back at room back
of the front office to pray. There was no fire
and no light in the room. Nevertheless, it appeared to
me as if it were perfectly light. As I went
in and shut the door after me, it seemed as
if I met the Lord Jesus Christ faced. It did

(48:01):
not occur to me then, or did it for some
time afterward, that it was wholly a mental state. On
the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him
as I would see any other man. He said nothing,
but looked at me in such a manner as to
break me right down at his feet. I have always
since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind,

(48:21):
for it seemed to me a reality that he stood
before me, and I fell down at his feet and
poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like
a child, and made such confessions as I could with
my choked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed
his feet in my tears, and yet had no distinct
impression that I touched him that I recollect. I must

(48:42):
have continued in this state for a good while, but
my mind was too much absorbed with the interview to
recollect anything that I said. But I know as soon
as my mind became calm enough to break off from
the interview, I returned to the front office and found
that the fire that I had made of large wood
when nearly burned out. But as I turned and I
was about to take a seat by the fire, I

(49:04):
received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost, without any
expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my
mind that there was any such thing for me, without
any recollection that I had ever that I had ever
heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world.
The Holy Spirit descended upon me and a manner that
seemed to go through me body and soul. I could

(49:27):
feel the impression like a wave of electricity going through me,
going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come
in waves and waves of liquid love, for I could
not express it in any other way. It seemed like
the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that
it seemed to fan me with intense wing wings. No

(49:50):
words can express the wonderful love that was shut abroad
in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love,
and I do not know, but I should say literally
bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These waves
came over me and over me, and over me, one
after the other, until I recollect. I cried out, I

(50:13):
shall die of these waves. If these waves continued to
pass over me, I said, Lord, I cannot bear anymore.
Yet I had no fear of death. Does that not
sound like Bill Johnson's experience? That's what I think of
when I think of this. It sounds exactly to me
like White Well Todd White. But if you I thought,
if I remember correctly, when Bill Johnson was telling of

(50:35):
his electric shock in his bed, how he was saying, Lord,
I can't take anymore, you know that kind of thing.
Maybe he read that in Finny. I don't know, but yeah,
that's Finny's experience, and it really sounds like something that
you hear from some of these pastors like Bill Johnson.

Speaker 10 (50:52):
The worst part about Finny was his view of the Atonement.
By far, he was a heretic. He was technically what
Christians have always called heresy. He was a hair tick.
Not only did Finny believe that the moral influence theory
of the atonement was the chief way of understanding the Cross,
he explicitly denied the substitutionary atonement, which he said, quote

(51:15):
assumes that the atonement was a literal payment of a debt,
which we have seen does not consist with the nature
of the atonement. It is true that the atonement of
itself does not secure the salvation of anyone. Wow. He
was a plagionist. He believed that if you told people
that their sins were forgiven by what Christ has already

(51:37):
done on the Cross, that they would go back to
their sinful ways. So he had to constantly make people
feel guilty and feel like they had to keep working
and working and working to earn their salvation, which is
the whole problem with Pallagianism. It says that you got
to at best, you have to cooperate with God in
your salvation, and at worst it says you actually have
to cause your salvation by your good works.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
Got some on his sermons on the Gospel themes. He's
got a sermon called on the Atonement, and I highlighted
a couple of things in here. Uh, this is what
he says, is no public justice that an innocent being
should suffer penalty or punishment in the proper sense of
these terms. Punishment implies crime of which Christ had none.

(52:23):
Christ then was not punished. So that's that's his sermon.

Speaker 10 (52:29):
That's that's him using this little logical formula as opposed
to the Bible itself. He's just using this little formula.
And he was a lawyer. Again, he was a very
persuasive man. So yeah, it's just so dangerous when people
really get already, and he started a whole movement. He
was in charge, He's the what was the College Oberlin College.

(52:54):
He was a president. And this is the guy who
the the Sean Foyt. There's a picture of him with
his child and they're touching the tombstone of Finny. It's
actually not too far from where Brandon lives in the Cleveland,
Ohio area. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
I think Billy Graham was a big Finny proponent as well. Yeah,
and in this whole idea of decisionism comes from Charles Finny.
And then let's talk a minute about his new measures,
because these new measures have carried over into what we
see in these mega churches, and really not just mega churches,
but you know, in a lot of evangelical churches. One

(53:31):
of the new measures was the anxious bench where people
would come forward and you know, if you wanted to
be converted, you would sit on this bench and you
would you know, you know, wrestle with God over your conversion.
And it just of course that's where the altar call
comes out of comes right out of the anxious bench.

Speaker 7 (53:54):
You know.

Speaker 10 (53:55):
Yeah. The idea of the connecting element, I think to
that new way of people being converted to the modern
megachurch is the whole issue of pragmatism. If it works,
if we're getting results, then that's what we should keep doing.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
So, yeah, that's exactly what Finny said. Finny said, if
these new measures work, then you should adapt whatever measures
are going to work to bring people to conversion, to
give them a conversion experience. I mean, that's exactly what
he said.

Speaker 10 (54:33):
So it's not like they're saying, we see what we're
doing as being biblical, and on top of that, when
we practice these biblical things, we see good results. He's
just saying, no, it doesn't matter if it's biblical or not.
We're getting results, So shut up and do what we're
doing because you know we're leading the way, we're setting
an example. Don't tell us what the Bible says about this.

(54:57):
We're getting the results people, And so it's this pre
pragmatism which is at the heart of many of the
bad ideas. A guy like Craig Grochelle today is a
total pragmatist. By the way, Craig Grochelle has filled the
shoes of Bill Heibels after Bill Heibel's sexual, sexually abusive,

(55:18):
sexually promiscuous behavior caused him to step down from being
the most if not the most one of the top
three most prominent preachers in America and just the last
I don't know what is it, like six eight years ago,
they just quietly swept him under the rug and said, oh, well,
too bad. No biggie, there's a new guy who he

(55:38):
stuck in his place. His name is Craig Grochell. Pragmatically,
you go, hey, you know, it's not that bad. Look
at the results. Look how big this church is.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
So let's move forward to after World War Two, right
around the time of what the nineteen fifties, and let's
talk about Robert Schuler because he's going to be another
huge reason why we have these models of churches that
we have today.

Speaker 10 (56:07):
So let me get on my Robert Schuler high horse,
because this is really interesting. Robert Schuller was considered by
most evangelicals to be outside the realm of sound biblical orthodoxy.
He was considered to be somebody you really don't want
to reference, you don't want to be mean to him

(56:28):
per se, because he's got a large audience. He's very popular.
In the seventies, he was huge, His books were very popular.
His Crystal Cathedral into the eighties became extremely popular, had
a very popular television show, and evangelicalism as a whole
was very uncomfortable with him. However, Rick Warren and Bill
Hybels both took his ideas and ran with them and

(56:52):
gave it a slightly more orthodox looking veneer, but it
was still just a veneer. And the thing that I
find is super for interesting is that Rick Warren literally
went to learn from Robert Schuler and then pretended he didn't.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Yes, literally, I.

Speaker 10 (57:12):
Think I met him one time.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
Hi, but you know I'm not really And then his wife, Yes,
I gave him away in an interview or something, right, Yes,
I have that.

Speaker 10 (57:22):
In my article. She says, oh, yeah, he loved Robert Schuler.
We learned a lot from Robert Schuler. We went and
studied with Robert Schuler. Robert Schuler had such a huge
impact on my husband Warren, Rick Warren saying, oh yeah,
I barely know the guy. So the bottom line is
Robert Schuler laid the foundation more than Rick Warren, more

(57:45):
than Bill Hybels, and he wasn't biblically orthodox at all.
He admitted that he said, I don't care about hell.
No one else cares about hell. We don't care about
the blood and the cross and the atonement. We want
people to have a more positive life. We want him
to be happy. And if Christianity's going to survive, if
we need to get rid of all that icky stuff
and we need to make it happy and fun. So

(58:06):
the guys that supposedly were orthodox and supposedly were evangelical,
Bill Ibels and Rick Warren just copied him verbatim, gave
it a slightly better, slightly more orthodox sounding veneer. But
really they whitewashed what was happening, and the weak gospel
that they had was really no gospel at all. It

(58:27):
was the gospel of you know what, why don't you
just go ahead and ask Jesus into your heart, Why
don't you make him your lord so that you can
have a better life, so that you can have a
sense of purpose, so that you can have answers to
the problems in your life.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Let me ask you this. We mentioned Peter Drucker earlier,
and he's actually way before Robert Schuler. Did Peter Drucker
have a influence I can't see how he couldn't have.
Did he have an influence on Robert Schuler? Or do
you know anything about that that I don't know? I
know we had a big influence on brick Warren. He

(59:02):
had a Yestriten influence.

Speaker 10 (59:03):
And Bill hybelt Warren, both of them and Billy, both
of those guys considered him a mentor. They they they
gushed over him more so than almost anybody. And it's
in that it's in that three hour documentary they actually
have quotes from both of those men talking about Drucker,
and Druncker wasn't even a Christian as far as we know.
He never really espoused being a Christian. He was just

(59:25):
interested in, uh, the non profit charity world and how
you could use his theories that previously had been used
in the business world. His management theories were very persuasive
in the corporate world. And he said, you know, I'm
interested in like hospitals and these mega churches, and he
saw them as a place for his sociological theories to

(59:47):
be played out in the real world. Yeah so, and
the it's all about go ahead, no go ahead? Would
he was all about I was going to say, he was.

Speaker 3 (59:57):
All about you know this, this whole idea of community.
He was about building community. And he called he called
the the megachurch or churches themselves as they need to
be the community centers and they need to find out
what people's felt needs are and uh, you know kind

(01:00:20):
of and Rick warm kind of took took, uh, you know,
that business model from Drucker and others. But yeah, he was, uh,
he was huge.

Speaker 10 (01:00:30):
Let me let me tag off of that, because the
idea of the people need some sort of community, they
need to have a I think the community is the
best word, but there's another word that I think they
would use anyway, it doesn't matter. What's really interesting is
that the emergent church and the and the kind of

(01:00:51):
the height of Rick Warren and Bill Heibel's popularity all
happened at the same time, roughly like from two thousand
to twenty ten, and that decade roughly, especially in the
mid two thousands, there there was this idea, especially with
guys like Rob Bell, that this new emergent church was

(01:01:12):
a way to take postmodernism and slap a veneer of
Christianity on it so that we can get young people
to stay in church. And one of the key aspects
of postmodernism was that truth is relative. There is no
universal truth, but within the context of a community there
can be a sort of version of truth. So your truth,

(01:01:33):
and your community is giving you what you want in life,
which is either a sense of purpose or a sense
of community, a sense of belonging. And so the emergent
church movement was really deviating, much more so than the
megachurch movement. But for a while there they were both
sharing a lot of the same people, a lot of
the same books. If you went to Willow Creek Church

(01:01:55):
around two thousand and five two thousand and six, you
would have seen all of the Emergent Church books in
their bookstore. They were promoting Rob Bell, they were promoting
who's the guy that wrote a new kind of Christianity,
Brian McLaren and and those guys killed the faith of untold.
Probably millions of young people, my own kids were listening

(01:02:18):
to Rob Bell videos at the stupid youth group events.
And Rob Bell became an absolute heretic within just a
few years of this happening. And it was because they
were following people like like Drucker, who was just basically
spouting off ideas he had about kind of like I
want to experiment with large groups of people and see
if my ideas might work. These people had said for

(01:02:41):
a long time, they were saying, you know, the Bible
doesn't seem to be that helpful. What else? What else
can we use?

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
It's crazy, It's just absolutely crazy, man. I mean, how
do you how do you build a church off off,
you know, apart from scripture? How do how does the
church even have a foundation apart from scripture? They and
I know they would use scripture and they would, but
they but but what they man, they take it out

(01:03:09):
of context. It it just the whole thing is just crazy.
So let's let's talk about their philosophy for a minute.
Let's talk about you know, the secret sensitive philosophy and
and talk about you know, the the the entertainment aspect
and uh, the focus on the user experience and all that,
and because that that's what it's all about. It's it's

(01:03:30):
let's take let's make like we talked about in the beginning,
Let's make Christ a lot easier for people to digest.
Let's make the cross. Let's take the cross out, because
you know that who wants a bloody cross? Or if
we do, we just kind of mentioned the cross as
kind of a flyover kind of thing. Let's, you know,
let's make Jesus and the gospel as easy to swallow

(01:03:53):
as we can possibly do, and let's do that by
entertaining uh, the people that come in and and kind
of you know, I don't know, created a marketing, kind
of brand or whatever, you know what I mean.

Speaker 10 (01:04:11):
Yes, if you have this pragmatic belief that the most
important thing for our church is to get new people
in the door, then you will say, what can we do?
How about guys riding motorcycles across the stage? How about
a how about a but if we have somebody actually
doing tattoo art on a person while the sermon is

(01:04:32):
being preached. How about if we have the preacher right
right in a roller coaster on stage. All of these
things are real, and I've seen them. I've got videos
of them. It's all about getting people in the door
so that they go, hey, what's going on in there?
I want to see what's happening. And then you give
them a message that basically says something about how to

(01:04:53):
have better life skills, how to have a better communication skills,
how to have better relationships, how to raise children better,
anything that's kind of practical. And then at the end
of it you say, if you really want to love
your kids the right way, or if you really want
to have a better marriage, or if you really want
to have a more successful career, you need Jesus because

(01:05:16):
Jesus can help you with all those things. Jesus can
give you the strength and the Holy Spirit's power so
that you can do X, Y and Z. So go ahead,
let's just say a prayer right now, Jesus. I want
to ask you into my heart. And then they might
at this point say please forgive me of my sin.
You know that thing I never mentioned one time for
the last hour and a half, They mentioned it in

(01:05:38):
the prayer, and then they say that was a Christian prayer.
That was that wasn't bad. We've told them about sin.
So if you don't understand that you're a sinner, then
you don't see the need for a savior. And if
you've been sold at Jesus, who's a problem solver, He's
like a life coach, and then they teach you a

(01:06:00):
bunch of life skills, then the whole Jesus aspect is
just window dressing. You can actually learn about how to
have a better marriage without Jesus. You can learn how
to raise kids that are more responsible and respectful without Jesus.
Let's be honest, if you want to have a if
you want to have a really good career, a happy
career where you feel fulfilled, and you want to ignore

(01:06:21):
your sinful nature and the fact that you might actually
be at war with God. If you want to ignore
all that, you can find some really good teachers who
will help you do that very thing. And when you die,
if what Christianity teaches is true, you will go to
hell because you're a sinner who needs to be saved
by God. And that's what Christ did. That's the central

(01:06:42):
message of Christianity. And because it's the central message, it
has to be the central message of every church service
as well. There. I'm sorry I gave a little soliloquy there, but.

Speaker 3 (01:06:51):
No, I'm glad you did that. That was perfect. So
to the megachurch pastor to many of them, Jesus is
about the gospels, about fixing your life, Yes, doing something
for you. I I Jesus had the same thing happen.
When you go to John chapter six and you look
at the when Jesus fed the multitude, and then you

(01:07:15):
know he sends them away. He goes over uh to
the next town or whatever, and these same people they
find out he's gone they follow him, and he tells him,
you know, you're coming after me, but you're not coming
after me because of because you saw the miracle. You're
coming after me, and because I'm the Messiah. You're coming
after me because I fed you, you know, the loaves
and the fish. And so it's that that that kind

(01:07:35):
of coming to Jesus is not really coming to Jesus.
Jesus is not a a a fixer, you know. I
mean it's great, hey, listen if if you know, you
come to Christ and your place for faith in Christ,
and then things do start to work a little better

(01:07:56):
for you. It's not going to stay that way because
there in life is a life of suffering and that's
not you know, that is not a very attractive message.

Speaker 12 (01:08:08):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
Jesus said, take up your cross and follow me. Anybody
who's not willing to, uh, you know, to die for
his faith or to take up his cross because and
what did he mean by that anyway? Take up your cross?
I mean you could die for being a Christian. Now
we've got it fortunate here in this country. We're not dying.

(01:08:29):
But my goodness, man, go over to Pakistan and and
do your your your megachurches over there and your seeker
sensitive stuff over there. How well that's gonna fly because
or or Indonesia or wherever people are, you know, Christians
are actually dying for the faith to be is a
dangerous thing in other countries, but here, Yeah, Jesus is

(01:08:52):
all about fixing you up.

Speaker 10 (01:08:54):
Yeah, And it can only work in America or a
country like America where you are relatively comfortable and you
have a relatively good chance of you know, getting a
good job, going to school, doing all the things that
we're so blessed by. But it's actually, really it's really ironic.
A lot of the reasons why we do have the
freedoms that we have in America is because of some

(01:09:16):
of the really good Christian foundations that were about, you know,
following God's law was instilled in the earliest Americans. It
was part of culture. The Ten Commandments was just accepted
as the rule of law. And we don't have that anymore.
And we're rapidly approaching a time when America won't be
welcoming to Christians. And I really I could be wrong,

(01:09:38):
who knows, but I'm guessing that the megachurch model won't
continue that much longer because they won't have the freedom
to do what they're doing. And in America that's increasingly
so anti Christian. And I also think that because of
the Internet. I really I've heard some statistics from some

(01:10:00):
insiders that Church of the Highlands College, one of the
biggest megachurches in America is Church of the Highlands, and
they started their own college. As Chris Hodges, who's a terrible,
terrible pastor, terrible preacher, terrible theologian. It's actually seen a
large decline in the last few years. Interesting, and it's

(01:10:22):
because of people like us just basically telling people these
megachurches are tricking you. They honestly are just tricking you.
And it's because the guy with the mic has control.
He can say whatever he wants, he can create the
narrative that he wants. But because of the Internet, people
like us and people who have actually been to these
churches can tell the truth and they can say it's

(01:10:43):
actually not that great. In fact, behind the scenes, they're
actually coaching people to be cheerleaders in the front road
to make it sound like people are all excited. That's
what's happening at Elevation Church. They literally have people who
are cheering and going yes, who amen.

Speaker 3 (01:11:01):
But but that's it's not just there, it's other churches
as well. I mean you've got they they have they've
copied the whole elevation, uh front row model, people in
there doing the same thing. It's it's awful, man. It's
like having what is it, It's like buying subscribers. Man,

(01:11:22):
it's crazy. All right. So I'm gonna name right now,
really quickly, some of the biggest I've got a website
up here, Robinson me this link of the biggest church
is what right now? Don't even look, just just take
a guess. Who do you think? What church do you
think right now? Is the biggest church in America? The
largest church in America.

Speaker 10 (01:11:39):
It might be Andy Stanley's church because it depends on
how or it might be Craig Groell's church because.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
That's the one Life church. Life Church has an attendance
of an attendance now and I'm not I don't know
if this means, you know, on his other campuses or
his main campus, but it's okay, Well it's seventy six thousand,
so I would think that uh yeah, at seventy six

(01:12:06):
thousand people in attendance. Second biggest church.

Speaker 10 (01:12:12):
Well, that's where I'm guessing now, might be North Point
in Atlanta, but it also might be Church of the Highlands,
but it might.

Speaker 3 (01:12:20):
Be in the Church of the Highlands. Church of the
Highlands with an attendance of sixty thousand. Then you have
CCV Christ Church of the Valley at forty eight thousand
and some change. Lakewood would be after that at forty five,
north Point after that, and then number six is Christ
Fellowship Church in Palm Beach with thirty two to five.

(01:12:43):
And we could go down like I think the smallest
church is uh, and that's still nineteen thousand. That's not
that's not small lake Point Church, Rockwell, Texas with a
nineteen attendants. So yeah, I mean, and i'll i'll uh.

Speaker 12 (01:13:04):
I was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
I was listening to to some of these numbers that
Robin was because she was reading these off to me,
and I'm like, because she asked me to saying what
do you think it is?

Speaker 12 (01:13:13):
I was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:13):
I actually said it was Lakewood. I thought Lakewood was
the was the largest church. But Lakewood is number four,
believe it or not. Incredible, and they're huge.

Speaker 10 (01:13:23):
Yeah, it's because there's different ways of measuring it. Because
most of these places have multiple campuses, and how do
you measure the actual number of people? This is a
real problem. If you can't even measure the actual number
of people at a church, there's there's a problem right there.
You know, like if if you if you go to
my church, we have a guy in the back counting

(01:13:46):
who's there every Sunday or the number of people there
every Sunday, so we have an attendance record because it's
just one room with one group of people. And if
people don't come to church, the elders actually call on
them and say, hey, yea, how come you haven't been
to church? What's going on? Yeah, that's the way the
church used to be.

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
Yeah, yeah, all right, let's talk about celebrity pastors, because
what happens, uh with these megachurches, these big, popular, secret
sensitive churches, is that the pastor becomes a gigantic celebrity.
And you could even see this a word of faith
churches like with well with Joseph Prince would be a

(01:14:25):
good example of that, you know in Singapore, his church
in Singapore, and just these these men become world famous. Uh,
you know, Robert Morris is another good example for here, who,
of course, you know, is no longer a pastor, but
when he will, he was. He was worldwide, you know, no, worldwide.

Speaker 10 (01:14:50):
I couldn't stand listening to that man. Most of these men,
I can't stand listening to them. I don't understand it.
I can't stand listening to Andy Stanley. When people say, oh,
he's such a good speaker, I'm like, no, he's not.
He's very patronizing. He treats He's like a kindergartener, a
kindergarten teacher to his people. Listen up, listen up, pay attention,
pay attention. He actually does that to his crowd.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
Listen to me.

Speaker 6 (01:15:13):
If you will do important things, you will meet important
people who are doing important things.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
Now listen to me. No, no, no, no, no no,
Now look up here, listen. Listen to me. But listen
to me. God thinks you deserve it. I don't miss this.
The only way we do that is through influence. So
listen to me. Nobody chooses this on purpose. Listen to me. No, no, no, no, envy, envy.
Listen to me. Now, if you're a Christian, are you listening?

(01:15:41):
You gotta listen to me, okay.

Speaker 10 (01:15:43):
And it's because he knows the level of the intelligence
of the typical people going to these churches is like, Wow,
they got good music. Well, they put on a skit.
I want to go to that church. If you if
you're attracting people who are are going to church because
of its attractiveness, don't be surprised when they're not paying

(01:16:05):
attention to a serious sermon if you ever even give one,
so you get what you expect. Church by the Glades
is one of the worst examples. The way that they
explain it is, well, we got to get people in
the door. So that's why we do secular songs. That's
why we have these giant productions with all the dancing

(01:16:28):
and the music and the theater, and that's why we
have to have the celebrity guy to kind of draw
people in with his speeches. He has to be a
good speaker. He doesn't have to be a good theologian.
In fact, it's probably helpful that he isn't a good theologian.
It's more helpful that he's a good speaker and a
good entertainer. And none of these men would it would
probably admit to being entertainers. But ultimately that's what they

(01:16:52):
wind up having to do. They have to constantly hey, hey,
check out this. And that's why they have to say
things like repeat after me, because they know the crowd
is about two seconds away from losing their attention at
any given moment, so they're constantly having They got to
talk fast, they got to have skits, they got to
use props, they got to have video presentations. They're really

(01:17:15):
they're kind of getting the lowest common denominator of the
population in many cases, and then they're having to spin
all these plates to keep people's attention and keep them involved.
Another thing that I find really interesting is if you
watch the entire services, which in many cases they don't
show because they only have the sermon, but a lot
of times they will have a little video presentation of

(01:17:37):
a couple from that church telling their testimony about how
great their churches. And this is a tactic for anybody
who's going to that church for a while, and they're
starting to think to themselves, I don't really like this
place anymore. They told me it was going to be
so great, but I don't know, I don't really feel
like anything's different in my life like they said it
would be. And then they put up a video where

(01:17:59):
this couple with the really good production values with a
soft focused lens and the really emotionally manipulative music. And
they talk about what happened since they started going to
this church. And I was going to leave my wife,
and I was going to start beating my children, and

(01:18:20):
I was doing drugs. But now that I'm going to
Pastor so and So's church, my life's turned around. Our
life is so much better because of what Pastor so
and so did. And to think that this whole thing's
just started in his living room just twelve years ago.
And now look at the thousands of people. So you

(01:18:44):
do that, and everybody who has doubts is going, oh, man,
I got to stay here. God really is doing something here.
Why do I believe that? Because they just played that
really really emotionally manipulative video on this giant screen and
everyone else's crying and everyone else is so moved. I
guess there is something happening here. Yeah, I mean so

(01:19:06):
large manipulation.

Speaker 3 (01:19:08):
Big time. And it's so this goes back to this
idea of the shallow you know, these shallow messages but
reaching out to people or trying to pull people in
just to meet their felt needs.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
God decided male and female No, No, no, I'm not.
This is not a bad I need y'all to hear
my heart on this.

Speaker 5 (01:19:35):
This is not a bashing, This is not a he
If I was there, maybe I would have told them,
is there something in the middle you could do like
kind of a like a little maybe if somebody, well,
I was born like this.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
I don't know how I feel that.

Speaker 5 (01:19:50):
I feel you and I wish that there was an
option of other in the kingdom. In you can make
up whatever you want to. In culture, you can build
whatever you want to. But the truth of the matter
is that if we are going to submit under what

(01:20:11):
the king says, I'm going to have to wrestle with.

Speaker 2 (01:20:17):
What I don't even fully understand.

Speaker 5 (01:20:21):
Oh God, if the pastors don't say this because they
want to be absolute, well why did they?

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
I don't freaking know.

Speaker 5 (01:20:28):
No, Honestly, I wish God would have made it so
much simpler and it was like a B, C or
D like frick.

Speaker 3 (01:20:35):
So you have you have all of this stuff going
on where you're trying to meet every you're trying to
please everybody out there in the audience, and you end up,
like you said, spin it a bunch of plates and
really just you know, not preaching the Gospel. You're not
you know, you're not teaching any Bible doctrine. You're actually

(01:20:59):
being blacks. When you do those kinds of things, you know,
it's actual blasphemy.

Speaker 10 (01:21:05):
One of the things that's hard for a lot of
Christians is that you live in a world of normal people.
You and I live in a world of normal people.
We don't live in a world filled with narcissists, power hungry,
pleasure seeking narcissists. Yeah, and those people are a very

(01:21:26):
very small portion of the population, and there are certain
fields that they tend to veer towards, like being politicians,
like being doctors and lawyers, and like being pastors of megachurches.
And so it's really hard when a normal Christian tries

(01:21:47):
to judge another situation, and they tend to look at
the pastor and say, well, he's a normal Christian. He
just happens to be a mega pastor. He can't be
that bad. He's probably just a little misunderstood, or is
it just a little off track, But let's give him grace,
which is normally the way we should treat everybody. So
they're on track with the way we should normally treat

(01:22:07):
other fellow Christians. But what they have a really hard
time accepting is the possibility that he's not a normal Christian.
He's a narcissist, he's abusive, he's a seeker of pleasure.
He's the leader of this giant organization because he wants
to have a giant organization because it gives him what
he wants. He wants power, he wants pleasure for himself.

(01:22:29):
And that's why we see sexual predators becoming famous as
megachurch pastors. And I remember this is about ten years ago.
One of my best friends as a counselor in Nashville,
and there was a big megachurch pastor who announced kind
of out of nowhere that he was stepping down because

(01:22:49):
he was just worn out, I need to take a break. Well,
my friend knew that the real story was that he
was actually having sex with lots of women, and they
didn't make that public, and they gave this facade of
a story that he was just worn out from all
the ministry and he needed to step down and recharge

(01:23:10):
his batteries or whatever they said. And I said to him, well,
if you're a megachurch pastor, you're quite possibly some somewhere
on the narcissist level, which also means you're probably interested
in having sex with people who aren't your spouse, because
that's one of the things that narcissists tend to do.
They want pleasure for themselves. So Bill Hybels another narcissist

(01:23:33):
would be James McDonald's walk.

Speaker 7 (01:23:35):
Around with the capital a heavy duty.

Speaker 12 (01:23:37):
I'm here to hold you accountable, account would like you accountable.

Speaker 11 (01:23:40):
All right.

Speaker 12 (01:23:41):
That's a control move. All right, that's a control move,
and it's rooted in pride. Okay, and it's not the
senior pastor's job. I'm sorry that you're not happy with
your career, but it's not my job to make you
feel significant by folding my full ministry under your ten
hour a week volunteer opportunity.

Speaker 10 (01:24:04):
An unbelievable narcissist, big time. So I think if this
helps people when you're trying to kind of go through
a church that you're evaluating and you see these patterns that, gosh,
seems like the pastor is a narcissist. But I don't
really want to come right out and say that, because
that's not a nice thing to say about a fellow Christian.

(01:24:25):
You're right, it's not a nice thing to say about
a normal fellow Christian. So those intentions are good and honorable,
and that's what you should normally think about most people.
But it's also I think a really safe bet that
most people who are in charge of a large megachurch
like that got there by being Mark Driscoll. He's the prototype.

(01:24:46):
He's an absolute bully. He was offending people all day long,
and he was proud of the fact that he was
offending people all day long. His famous statement about hey man,
we're going forward. We're going to be asking people to
get on the bus with us, and if they don't
want to get on the bus, we're going to run
them over. And we hope to run over a whole
bunch of people on our way to the top.

Speaker 3 (01:25:08):
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of bodies piled
up behind the mars Hills bus, I remember. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:25:13):
So those are the kind of people that tend to
fit these the role of a megachurch pastor who's going
to go on stage and create his own narrative of
how humble and godly he is when he's really not.
There's exceptions to that, obviously, there's some that aren't like that.
But I think, why do people get into places of
tremendous power, because those are the people that want to

(01:25:36):
have tremendous power.

Speaker 3 (01:25:38):
Yeah, exactly. And there are people Steve in these churches
that they let's just face it. You know, the Bible's
very clear in the latter times, people will gather for
themselves teachers to satisfy their itching years. You know, they
have itching years, and they want to hear this, and
this is going to happen, and we can see that happening,

(01:26:00):
you know, right before our very eyes. But there are
also sincere Christians in there who really do want to
learn and grow in their faith, and they actually want
to hear about Christ and hear about the Gospel. And

(01:26:22):
so in that sense, they I'm sure they feel kind
of trapped. They're in these churches. They they've they've been
there for years. Perhaps they've their eyes have begun to
open up, and now it's time to to move on.
What what how do we help those kind of people?

(01:26:43):
I know, doing videos is one thing. You and I
both do that, and we we've both had people reach
out to us. Chris and and and Justin and all
the all the uh, you know, the other guys in
our and our genre that that do this kind of thing,
and so we do the and we hope that people
will see them and that they will come out of

(01:27:05):
these dangerous churches. But what are some practical things that
people can do, you know, to to to kind of
you know, get out from under this this this kind
of atmosphere, this this kind of you know, mess that

(01:27:26):
they're in with these churches.

Speaker 10 (01:27:27):
Right, I would say number one, if you're going to
a megachurch or have been going to a megachurch, you
have this really noble feeling of I don't want to
let my pastor down. I don't want to let the
people down at my church because I care, and it's
so important that we have that attitude at a real church.
But if you're going to an actual megachurch with thousands

(01:27:48):
and thousands of people and you leave, your pastor doesn't care,
because it happens every day. It's a revolving door at
a megachurch. People come in, people go out. They don't care.
They won't even know that you left. They probably don't
know your name. So your job is not to meet
the needs of your pastor. Your job is not to

(01:28:10):
be the little worker bee that he's been teaching you
that you should be if you've been taught that your
job is to be a worker bee and to constantly
set aside your feelings and the lack of teaching that
you're like, I want to be taught something. I want
to learn more about the Bible. How come I'm not
learning these things and you're being scolded for that? You

(01:28:31):
need to leave. I just want to really help people
to feel comfortable knowing that you're not crazy. You might
be in the minority, but you're not crazy. Those are
really noble things. You should want to go to a
church where you're being taught the Bible from somebody who
actually knows how to teach. It isn't just you know,
doing a sermon for the purpose of bringing in new
people by giving these life lesson skills and stuff. And

(01:28:53):
another thing that I say that I don't think I
hear enough is that you might need a step back
and reconsist all of your assumptions about what it is
to even be a Christian. You might need to step
back and say, what did the historic Christian church previously do?
Because all I know is what I've seen in my
own lifetime which maybe thirty forty fifty years or whatever,

(01:29:15):
and all you know is the modern evangelical world, which
has changed a bit. But I really found comfort in
going back to the original Lutheran teaching of what church
should be because that was much closer to the historic
Christian Church. It didn't change everything like the modern church.
It actually took the best elements from the historic church

(01:29:36):
that actually go back to even before the Christian Church.
It took those elements of liturgy from the Jewish temple
practices and brought those into the church. So I love
going to a liturgical church. But that may be something
you've never really considered before because you think that liturgical
churches are dead and you think that liturgy is something
that liberals do, because unfortunately the Episcopal Church, many of

(01:29:59):
the as Lutheran churches, and the many of the largest
Presbyterian churches, they still maintain the liturgy, but they rejected
all of the theology that was actually the most important
part of their history. So I really encourage people to
watch channels where like there's a guy that has the
channel Matt Whitman ten minute Bible hour, he actually goes

(01:30:21):
and learns from all the other various denominations. Redeemed Zoomer
does some really good videos about explaining the differences between
all the denominations. Ready for Harvest is another great channel
to learn about the different denominational practices. Gospel Simplicity is
another channel that I highly recommend. He actually dialogues with

(01:30:44):
Catholics and Eastern orthodox which Evangelicals are very uncomfortable with.
But in reality, a lot of Evangelicals are going over
to Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, and so it's good
to actually understand what those traditions believe in practice so
that you can and actually have a more sound faith
and remain a Protestant. And of course as a Protestant,

(01:31:05):
I would recommend people become Lutheran, a confessional, historical biblical Lutheran,
not the crazy liberal one which isn't even Lutheran anymore.
But that's a side issue. The issue is that you
probably don't know a lot about theology. I didn't about
only a dozen years ago. I realized I had been
skimming across the surface of theology my whole adulthood, and

(01:31:27):
I didn't even know I was because that was what
everybody else was doing. The churches that I went to
weren't digging deeply into theology and even digging deeply into
the Bible itself. So that's going to take time. So
I want to encourage people to take your time and
to realize there's a lot of stuff you weren't taught.
It's not your fault. No one else was being taught
that stuff either. That's just become the norm, unfortunately. But

(01:31:50):
there are some good churches that are teaching stuff that
I think you'll find really helpful. But it's going to
take time to even understand what those churches are and
why they're different, and why those different are actually beneficial.

Speaker 3 (01:32:01):
Yeah, and I would say, you know, don't don't don't
let it cause you to just want to totally give
up church altogether. I mean, it really does take a
long time to come out of false teaching. It just
it you have to undo and untangle so many things

(01:32:22):
that have been you know, all tangled up inside of
your head. And it just like you said, Steve, I
just want to re emphasize that don't beat yourself up,
just get you know, take take time and just you know,
get into some well, first of all, more than anything,
read your Bible, that's the very in context, read your

(01:32:43):
Bible first step.

Speaker 10 (01:32:45):
A big category distinction is that in modern evangelicalism, which
has its roots in Pietism and revivalism, those are the
two big things that led to modern evangelicalism at a
theological level, and the empty Christianity is about what I do.
And one of the biggest things I need to do

(01:33:06):
is I need to keep sharing my faith so that
I can grow my church. I'm kind of a worker
bee that in that scenario, and not that those things
are bad. Obviously we want again, we want people to
go to church. We want to we want to share
our faith. But if all we're doing is like this
perpetual hamster wheel of I got to do more, I
got to do more, I got to do more, that's

(01:33:27):
when we in many cases we want to just say
I'm done with being a Christian. If that's what it
means to be a Christian, I don't want to go
to church. I don't even want to do this anymore.
So the category distinction is not that Christianity is about
what I do. Christianity is about what Christ has done.
And when it's all about what Christ has done, that

(01:33:47):
fundamentally changes everything, because now the church service is not
a place for you to go and learn life skills.
It's about you learning and being reminded again of what
Christ has done and being given the Gospel yet again.
The Gospel is not something you should hear one time.
The Gospel is what should be the central focus of

(01:34:08):
every sermon, every service. The liturgy protects the service from
getting outside of the parameters, so that everything, the songs,
the hymns, the readings, and the sermon itself is all
focused on something having to do with the Gospel and
what Christ has done. And when that's the central focus,
you don't go away feeling like I got to do more,

(01:34:29):
I gotta try harder, I haven't done enough. I feel
even worse about myself than I did before I came
to church. The ideal church service, and this is what
I love about my church is going away having heard
yet again the Gospel message and having a sense of
I am free now, I am not under the obligation
of having to do more. I actually might want to

(01:34:50):
do more because I feel so free because I am
I'm reminded yet again of what Christ has done and
how freely he gave of himself for me, even though
I didn't deserve it. He died in the cross for
my sins, and that can't change that. That's that's not
something that's dependent on anything I do. It's a thing
that happened, it's done, and now I can live in
the freedom of knowing that and being assured of that.

Speaker 3 (01:35:12):
Yeah, Steve, thank you so much. I think we've we've
spent a good time amount of time talking about this,
and we've we've you know, we've digressed a little bit.
But that's okay because I think, you know, this is
something that I think, you know, it needs to be
brought up over and over again. Yes, because I mean
that the megachurch really seems to be the kind of

(01:35:33):
the model for the church in the West. You know,
it just it just really really needs to be talked
about more and more.

Speaker 10 (01:35:40):
I did hear a statistic, and I maybe you'd want
to put this in the video if you look it up,
but the number of people who go to megachurches is
not as large as a number of people who go
to smaller churches.

Speaker 3 (01:35:53):
Really, they're just more.

Speaker 10 (01:35:54):
Yeah, they're more visible obviously, you know, like you take
the biggest church has seventy six thousand people. That's ton
obviously compared to a regular church with a few hundred people. Yeah,
But in the overall scope of the United States of America,
what's the entire population three hundred million something, So how
many people actually go to smaller churches is not as

(01:36:16):
meaningless as it may seem, And unfortunately they kind of
get treated like their second class citizens. You know, I
just go to a small church with a few hundred people.
I'm not really doing anything important. Well, you know what,
no one's really doing anything that important in the overall
scope of things. Like I said, we're all going to
die and be buried and be forgotten, So it's okay
to go to a small church. In fact, my pastor

(01:36:40):
has made this point recently more than once. He said,
my job is to make sure you're saved and you
stay that way so that you die, that when you die,
you go to heaven. That's what he sees his job,
as he never says, my job is for you to
be a world changer. My job is for you to
have a great destiny. My job is for you to
fulfill your purpose. All these things that really sound kind

(01:37:03):
of exciting and larger than life, and in reality, it
doesn't pan out that way. Most of our lives are
very ordinary, and that's okay. It's totally okay. You can
enjoy the fact that you're just ordinary. In fact, I
honestly my channel is getting bigger, just like yours is.
I don't necessarily want to be known as anything. I'm

(01:37:23):
not comfortable with it. I actually was already more well
known as an artist in the past, and that's becoming
less and less the more I'm known as this YouTube guy.
But I really have no interest in becoming famous or anything.
I don't like it. I'm actually more of an introvert
than people probably would believe. I like the idea of
leading an ordinary life working with my hands. You know,

(01:37:45):
as it says is that in Ephesians when Paul says
to just be ordinary people, to work with your hands,
and to lead a quiet life.

Speaker 3 (01:37:54):
I think it's first one of the Thessalonians, but twelve episodes.

Speaker 10 (01:37:59):
Yeah, So it's totally okay. And I just want to
encourage people that God really does love you, and he's
okay with you leading an ordinary life, and he died
it across so that you can have assurance, so that
when you die, you have a much better life where
things really get exciting, and you really will see all
the great things that they're promising in this life. They

(01:38:21):
really in many cases, they don't come until the next life,
which is eternity.

Speaker 3 (01:38:26):
Steve Cozar, thank you so much. You and I have
several of these videos together, and I hope we do
many more together.

Speaker 10 (01:38:33):
Thanks for letting me blather on. I don't like making
I don't like doing videos by myself, but I always
tend to get excited when I'm talking to somebody else,
and I tend to talk more than I hoped I would,
because I always want to let the other person talk.
But I appreciate you having me on very much, Steve.

Speaker 3 (01:38:49):
I it's so much enjoy having you on. I really do.
And you and I these are our phone conversations. A
lot of we're just we're just talking, just talking like
we're carrying on a regular phone conversation. But thanks Steve
so much for uh for coming on the program, and
uh lord will and we'll we'll get to it again,

(01:39:11):
do it again soon, all right,