 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 98, Tim Andrews, Rich Baker, and House Churches. I'm the layman, Trace Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing this week? Very good. I've been looking forward to this episode for a while now. Yeah, we're good. Won't you tell us what's going on? Yeah, well, we've invited a couple of guests. Rich Baker, who is local here where I live, in Bellingham, Washington. And I'll ask Rich in a moment to introduce himself. But the main focus is going to be Tim Andrews in Atlanta, who is the guy who organized the Unseen Realm event back last November in Atlanta. And Tim has had a long history in what, again, a layperson would refer to as House Churches, this idea. So we want to sort of pick his brain on this interview because for those who've listened for any amount of time or who have paid attention on the blog to the recent beginnings of McClott, the non-profit, again, that has been started really to ostensibly to promote my content, but also, again, less visibly to network people who are like-minded, who appreciate the content, again, who feel that they're not being taught in church and they want more content. They want to find other people like them and they want to get active in doing ministry and doing what the church is supposed to be doing. And oftentimes the sort of the traditional outlet for that is an impediment, or it just isn't something that works real well, like with the case of Fern and Audrey. So we wanted to have Tim on just to, again, pick his brain about how he does what he does and then the people he works with, how they do what they do, and start to contribute something to the listeners thinking that if you are in this situation, either in terms of lacking a church home or wanting to network with like-minded people just to get good ideas, to hear maybe about bad ideas that were tried, I hope this episode that we'll do today will be a thing that people can return to, again, kind of a touch point that if you're in this situation where you're trying to figure out, how do I supplement what I'm getting in church or how do I network with other believers to have fellowship, again, find like-minded people, that this will be an episode people can look back on and re-listen to just to stimulate that thinking, get some good ideas there. So Rich, we're going to start with him, again, I'm going to ask him to briefly introduce himself, because Rich and I are actually going to try some things, at least that's the goal. We have a group of college students here in town and we're sort of going to use them as guinea pigs to try to experiment with how to do church things differently that really isn't a church, but, again, that is beneficial to them and actually try to weave some of my content into this. So we're going to go on what is essentially, I guess, a nine-month experiment starting in the fall, but as preparation for that, I thought, man, it would be a good idea to just talk to Tim, help us to think well about this. So Rich, why don't you just briefly tell everybody who you are, why you're in Bellingham, and that sort of thing. All right, name is Rich Baker, married to a beautiful wife, Michelle, have an awesome son, three and a half years old named Jedediah, that pretty much God gave to save my life and I love them. My interest in this is when I started walking with the Lord about when I was 23, I'm 38 now, I read in the New Testament and I appreciate what he said about New Testament fellowship as opposed to maybe house churches. What I began to read was that really Jesus never told his disciples to do anything he didn't model and that we had the right to be able to seek God all we wanted. And so we just started trying that. So we'd have prayer groups and prayer meetings every night at our house because we could when we were young and have people that you live with. And we experienced such rich fellowship and we've had homeless people and went to other people's Bible studies and learned so much that eventually you want to actually see that so much more in our lives now as you get away from it. So I'm interested in that. What I'm doing in Bellingham as far as I can tell is one, I'm trying to recover from about five years of being severely ill. And this is a beautiful place to do it. I was living in California where it does not rain and I need some rain. So I came here. I did not know that necessarily Mike Hyzer lived up here or went to the church. But I actually can see that God brought me up here so that I can spend time with Mike as we've been spending hanging out for over two years now and he's one of my closest friends and really appreciate not only the work that he does, the love that he has for the Lord and being able to bring that love for the Lord and for people and the content that he produces into these groups of people that really desire to seek God more deeply in fellowship to bring that to them and him to them as well. Well, great. Hey, Tim, why don't you, I think a good place to start is who are you? And how did you get to this point? I mean, just tell us who you are. Describe, you know, we'll just start real briefly, kind of describe what it is you do that most people would look at and say, oh, that's house church stuff. So who are you? How did you get into this? How did this all start? What's the story? My name is Tim Andrews. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I have a beautiful wife, Donna, we have a son who is at Emory Law School right now, finishing up, started out, I guess, like any other church, a tender sitting in a pew, growing more and more uncomfortable with the process that I saw more than just sitting in a pew. I served in the church doing high school and college ministry sat in on writing the pastor sermon. And this was a an exploding mega church. It just became more and more frustrated, felt like maybe I'll go seek out seminary, see if that works, walked into a seminary twice, walked back out after about 30 minutes, sat in on a class and a half, made it through one, not to go after seminary, it just wasn't for me. Owned a business that marketed gigantic youth events around the country, saw the inside of what you would refer to as a local church, saw the inside of the big production end of what you might call ministry, came out of it, unsettled. A friend of mine's father passed her to church in a particular area of Atlanta called Little Five Points. It is a very alternative area. Went up, started taking my college students up on Sunday afternoon, skipping our evening service to clean up the grounds there and to work with the people that lived on the streets. And that led to one thing, which led to another. I ended up working for a local Baptist Association here, serving there, ran into a little bit of problems about two years in with certain stances that were being taken on, we'll call it socio-political positions. Felt like I couldn't do it anymore, went to my direct report, told him that I couldn't do it anymore. He asked me more where my heart was. I told him, I feel like there's a there's a model that can be done that actually we were already doing it. We just didn't know what you called it. And he gave me his blessing to go do it. Subsequent to that, did a big project for what's called the frontier side of the North America Mission Board and ran into a person here in Atlanta. Very similar story. You're going to hear close to someone here in Atlanta who had been doing it, who had written some material on it. He kind of took me under his wing. And that has been 20 years ago. Began to think through it a little bit more aggressively, left that association. Some folks who we're fellowshiping with felt like we should pursue this, formed a not-for-profit, and we really haven't looked back. That is kind of where we are or where we came from as far as the beginning of it. We were doing it, didn't know what it was. I find that most Christians have done that. You just are going to have to rethink some terms that you use like church. What is that? Most people, in their way of thinking, it's somewhere you go. And so you have to kind of redefine that for them. And moving through this, it's an interesting dynamic because you're going to find that you're deconstructing and reconstructing at the same time in people's lives. And that can be very messy. So you've been doing what we call alternative church. Let's just use that. You've been doing alternative church for 20 years. Yeah, we thought through it a long time ago. We were actually working with some of the thinkers through the emergent church movement. That was a joke I told you, Mike, about we wanted to be part of the submerging church. We didn't want to be seen when we were interviewed about that. So yeah, we've been doing this a very, very long time. So it's one of those things where as I've gotten older and lost more hair, I've lost my patience with theorists on this. I tend to look for practitioners who are doing it. And most of us have kind of come to the position of, I can't tell you how to do this and be guaranteed what someone might call success, but man, I can hook you up with ways to mess it up. So that's kind of where we are. So you're, I mean, you're very open. I mean, this is the impression I got when I met you in Atlanta. And I had no idea who you were, you know, when I showed up in Atlanta, because I was there for the academic meetings and you were going to have the unseen realm thing and wound up in a remodeled funeral home talking about the Divine Council. Indeed. But it was just so interesting because it had come on the heels of discussions I had had with Rich. Rich was the guy who first distilled this in my head, at least this is a thing to think about with the statement, what if church wasn't a time or a place? And I heard, you know, that same sort of thing, you know, coming out of you. And I was intrigued because of something you, you know, you said it even here, you know, we were doing this stuff, but we didn't really know what to call it. And there's this inclination to call it something. And the first thing you sort of gravitate to is you include the word church in there because you're doing churchy stuff. And so, boy, that becomes a comfortable label. But you're right, it's not adequate. It's not really even descriptive. And I think you'd even say it's not even necessary, you know, in terms of giving it a label. I mean, for listeners and those who have read The Poor Tent, of course, this will be familiar. And again, we're calling our nonprofit McClot for a reason. But the group in The Poor Tent are just a group of committed believers. They're committed to just doing things that they know the Lord wants done. They're not asking permission. They're not taking it through committees. They're just doing it. If it needs to be done, just do it. And they're mutually committed. They're just absolutely loyal to each other in this cause. And so that has become sort of what plays in my head, you know, when I think of this is what church ought to be, but I'm still, you know, I'm like anybody else, I'm still stuck with this vocabulary. You know, I'm willing to call it a disadvantage, but I don't even know what to say about it anymore. I just love to meet people who, whether they again, quote unquote, go to church or not, they're doing ministry. I mean, some of the most dedicated people I know are not doing anything you could look at and equate it to a traditional church. And that's why I found you so interesting and have been looking forward to the conversation just so that people can get to hear you. I also think you're very realistic about it. This is not a silver bullet, you know, as you said over and over in Atlanta, you're going to have every problem with this or any other model that you do with the traditional model. So yeah, that's right. You still have to do with people. Yes, you do. And you're going to, you have to make a distinction. We've learned to make a distinction early on. If someone contacts us and I'll back up and say, I think right before that event might was the first time I got business cards printed up in 20 years, I took our website down. If you find out about us, you know someone who knows us. And we did that on purpose because of the people we work with and for. It is, it is, you know, a complex set of issues people coming out of a church where you walk in and there are rows or pews or chairs. There's a pulpit up front, you know, a riser for the choir. What if you walked into one of our houses on a Sunday morning, it looks much more like Thanksgiving at Grandma's house than it would what people are acclimated to of a 1045 or 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning in most places across America. So it takes some adjustment. You have to know that if someone contacts us and it's they're just absolutely upset with their current sort of environment, finding things wrong with it, picking it apart, we encourage them to stay there until they get it worked out one way or the other. If someone contacts us and after a while you can discern these things and the Holy Spirit, if he's leading them somewhere else, we're all in. We'll jump in immediately. We'll go anywhere around the country or even locally, whatever the need might be to help people begin at least to think through these things. Because it, you know, it is a it is a pretty high hill to get over sometimes. So what, I mean, now that that's come up, so what kind of people are part of your group? I mean, is there a certain percentage that, well, there's 10% of the people who are here who are disgruntled with their with their other church? Or what are the reasons? How does this break down? Is there a profile or you can't profile this at all? Not really. You, we would on a site, if you were to walk in by the time it, everyone kind of shows up and you're going to be looking on a normal Sunday somewhere between and these numbers shock people sometimes of this many people in a home anywhere from say 40 to maxed out would be 70 people that would show up in a home. And we've yet to find an environment that that can't accommodate to some degree. We have four different five families who each take turns hosting for about a month at a time. And so the people who show up, we have three families that there are three generations of that particular family that would be there. We have folks whose parents were full time staff at mega churches. So it's it's across the spectrum background wise Baptists completely unchurched. We have some people who have never been to an institutional type, you know, setting of a church, which you would think of when you walk in to a local community or first fill in the blank church of whatever city they've never been there. They don't even know what sometimes when people are talking about things, they have they have no point of reference because they've come to the Lord in this sort of environment. So yet to get a read on types and backgrounds, it's really, really tough. It's really hard thing to get up. Right. So you couldn't say, Hey, you know, 90% of the people who are here are here because they're just they want content. They've they they feel let down by their old church and they've they've somehow through a set of circumstances found us that it's not that simple of an equation. They wind up as part of your network for all sorts of reasons. That's right. And the bulk of them, I would say if I'm going to have the bigger category, the biggest slice of the pie, are people who there's something within there, someone else say within within them, driving them toward ultimately a deeper fellowship, primarily with our Lord, secondarily with the people they identify with is these are the people our fellowship with. We we start to sort of push that the minute that we make contact with them. We talk about issues like common sality, issues like that of eating together, sharing together. What we do is very, very meal focused about what I would guess a third of our gathered time is around a full meal. And in the midst of that meal are the components of the Lord's supper. That's a central issue. So again, it's shocking to people who walk in have never seen this sort of thing before, when they contact us and want to show up and we tell them, don't worry about the first couple of times, we'll cover you on food, just come and be our guest. And it takes about a month of adjustment or so for people to wrap their minds around what's going on here. Well, to me, it sounds suspiciously biblical. Well, it comes out of probably a Greco-Roman influence of that symposia ran a sort of meal thing where you had this cultural field already ripe. And that new testament model sweeps right in there of sharing a meal together. It torpedo certain cultural systems. You don't know how the food was prepared. You hope that the spoon wasn't licked as the food is being prepared. I mean, it's a lot going on that creates an environment for a lot of passive instruction to people. So I think the closest thing I've seen to that, and this is going to be a really simple, simplistic illustration. But when I was in graduate school, I was attending a particular reform church. And one of the neatest things they did, I thought, and again, this is still a very traditional setting. And it's a very denominational sort of thing. We wound up going to this place because we wanted some sense of liturgy. And what I mean by that is we wanted what happened on a Sunday morning to make some kind of sense as opposed to just being activity. And one of the things they did was with the Lord's Supper, they had just a loaf of bread, and everybody went up to it and tore a piece off. Now, that's a very simple act. But you meet people at the table. Yeah, that's right. Because you get a big congregation. You literally meet people at the table. And there's no single profile. It's rich, poor. It's professor and student. And to me, it had a leveling effect, just this one simple act. And so when I hear you talk about the meal, that's the first thing that pops into my head, this kind of leveling effect. Tim, can you walk us through a typical worship? I mean, what kind of the structure of it? How do you define worship, too? Yeah, even that word makes me chuckle. I was with a fresh product of the seminary system two weeks ago, and he kept using that word, and I kept having him redefine or define it for me, because I'm going to use it differently where, you know, the average person who attends a church in America, the worship is compartmentalized in some degree to either, you know, you may see a sign outside that says 1030 Worship Service, but especially in the less tightly orchestrated denominational sort of systems, the worship is when the band is up there playing. Worship for us, and what we try to, and doctor, that's the wrong word, try to move people toward us. Maybe it's the right word. That it is, you don't take a vacation from that once, from 12 o'clock on a Sunday until the next Sunday at 11 o'clock, it's all of it. So if someone shows up on a Sunday, some of our gatherings are, it can get a little bit tight parking wise. That's the only issue that we really face, and it kind of depends on how rural the home is. If you were to walk in, you would see people kind of in little groups, you'll have a couple of people maybe playing the piano and the guitar, a couple of people praying together, kids playing around inside and outside, the food being put where it's pretty visible and easily accessible to the people who'll show up. We kind of pull everyone in, and we'll have about somewhere around 30 maybe to 40 minutes of pretty, I hope it's solid teaching. I feel like it is. We just work through the particular groups that were visible during the second temple period. So that's not something you would normally, I don't think, get most Sunday school classes and try to, so that when they read their New Testament, they have some familiarity with these groups they see mentioned and sort of set the ground for what's going to happen with Jesus showing up on the scene. Then we will pray, the food is prayed over, people will begin to eat, and it's a beautiful thing, and to what you just said a minute ago, Mike, I watched four or five weeks ago, the granddaughter of a family go up, tear off the little pieces of bread, and take a cup to her grandmother and grandfather. And I just, I don't know what you say to that sort of thing. When you see it, there's something within you that affirms, yes, that's what you're after right there. This beautiful portrait of this little girl, I guess she's probably five or six, considering the weight of what she's doing when we're together. And that's one of the things I mean, but it creates an opportunity for teaching. After we finish up eating, one or two of the musicians will start playing, and people just want to pick a song or how many anywhere from four to five, I guess, on average. And again, these things vary wildly. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's none. And then you'll have two to three folks teach maybe five to 10 minute words of encouragement, and that's about it. You leave. I say you leave. Let's say we conclude that part and people hang around for an hour or two afterwards. Yeah, I would imagine. There's a lot of hangers on just to talk, like you would do if you went over to somebody's house. That's exactly right. So it ends up looking less like a Sunday morning at a church where you would drive to a building, you're driving to a house, and people will people become acclimated to conducting themselves as if they were in a house. It doesn't mean you're more relaxed or dismissive. It's a serious time. And we'll let people know that this is a serious time. And the reason for that, Mike, I think you had asked about some of the content of your teaching. How does that play into this? And you get over to Ephesians three and Paul makes this staggering statement sort of about the purpose of the church, what it's all about. And it's in our sort of modern mindset. The church sort of influences a horizontal plane. And Paul's saying, no, this is a different plane that the church is demonstrating what God has done through Christ. And we take that very seriously to the unseen in heavenly places. So we take that very seriously and we push that out there. This is why we gather together. We're making a statement. And it isn't necessarily in the way that you think of it, if you think church exists only for evangelism, which is traditionally the answer you get when you ask someone why the church exists. Do you think because of what you do, in other words, because it's so different, that you actually end up having to be more intentional in what you're teaching and why you're teaching it to sort of, I don't know a better way to put this, but to sort of remind people of what you're actually doing, like why we're actually here at this point. I don't know if that makes sense. But in other words, I'm just wondering if you have to be intentional so that people don't forget why we're doing this, because it looks like just a normal meal, like something you would do at any time during the week, that sort of thing. So do you have to be more intentional about that, do you think? Well, yes. You want to remind people, and that's not an idea of foreign to the New Testament. We have that, hey, you want to know this by now, but I need to remind you again, fill in the blank, whatever the issue is. And you do find yourself having to do that. But I think that's just part of human nature. I don't know that any more intentional. We probably approach it from a little bit different viewpoint, especially now, so the last five or six years, I guess, and taking people through some of the worldview that comes out of divine counsel thinking. But it's not difficult to find areas that touch. In fact, you start to see things more clearly, I think, when you think about the story that way, and moving people, again, out of that hour and a half, maybe two hours on a Sunday, to know this is your life. So that where and when becomes a who, as you move them over to seeing their relationship, not to some set of ideas, but to this Jesus. And in that, it would still be the bulk of the teaching would be Christocentric. It would just go out maybe in a different direction than you would get on a Sunday in a Baptist church. I'll pick on the Baptist and some here in the south. So it is interesting to, again, it's a lot of stuff going on in people's lives. It is easier for someone who's never been to a church to begin to talk to them about these things and fellowship them. Do you think the setting, again, because it's a home, just something as simple as that because it is a home? And if you're used to going to this home and you get to know these people over the course of time, do you think that actually encourages people to kind of be more transparent to share things that they wouldn't normally share in quote unquote church? Because one of the frustrations I think, and again, I'm not saying this to pick on traditional church, I just think that it's an inherent obstacle. But if church is a timer and a place, and it's a set time, and it doesn't occur, I can't think of any other way to say it, it doesn't have a family atmosphere, even though pastors try to cultivate a family atmosphere. But they're just inherent obstacles to that. But because it's in a home, you see the same smaller group of people with regularity, that it just encourages you to be more open, to build relationships. Do you think that's true? Yeah, I know it to be true. And the reason I can say that is you're not left with a whole lot of room because if you're hosting, people are going to be in your house and they're kind of up in your business. So it's pretty obvious what's going on. You can self control is one of those, I think, manifestations of the spirit's work in our life that we can only fake for a little while. People are going to see through that, it's going to come out. And so yes, you're forced into a level of intimacy, then the responsibility shifts over to the group, never to violate that. So again, it's one of those dynamics where you have a lot of this stuff going on at the same time. And it does take a while to work people through these sort of dynamics as they enter into it, especially an idea like intimacy, where I let my Sunday morning guard down. Because it is such a different environment when you have, you don't have any suits, you don't have ties in the south here, nine months out of the year, we were shorts to church, or what you would call church. And sometimes people don't know what to do with that. But it's not that it's it's not that it's being somehow less respectful. It may in some ways be more respectful, in that I am not going to put on a pretense in here. When I go inside these walls, and hopefully even when I'm outside these walls, but specifically inside them, you're just not going to be able to get away with it for long. So do you find that the who do you work with? Number one, like you yourself, how many people do you work with? Like leadership, I guess, of the what you're doing? We, there's myself, and it'll be three to four, we meet on Wednesday mornings, and have a time of discussion if an issue has come up or something that we need to sort of address. And when I say that, I don't, it's very rarely some corrective behavioral thing, although it does come up from time to time, most of the time, it's, it's some sort of service, what who is in need. You know, it's, it's the basic how can how can I know about it. If you know about it, and you don't tell me. So that's lived out there. They would be viewed as this group as the, as their elders. It's that is a very passive thing you would never know. Unless you were there for a while, we know what's going on here, but you would see these people doing real service outside of that. We felt like, you know, how do we impact the community outside of this. So here in Georgia, family and children services is called defect Department of Family and Children Services. We went to them and said, look, we have the resources to provide medical care, transportation, housing, all sorts of stuff. And it took me about two months to convince them that we weren't crazy people. Because, you know, we want to do this, and there's no strings attached. And, you know, I've lost count of the, of the young girls whose, whose parents brought them here to Atlanta to have an abortion and the girl backed out and the parents abandoned her at a gas station that, you know, we were able to get her placed outside of that environment. Surgeries we've paid for. You lose track of it after a while. I don't even try to remember them. So, you know, we're not just inwardly focused when it comes to that. We are outwardly focused in an aggressive posture. So that, that really appeals to me. Again, when I, again, my metaphor for this is McClott, you know, in the novel, because when I hear that, I think, yeah, that's exactly what that group would do. And again, I just, I didn't know, I didn't have any real life analogy for it. But when, you know, when I met you in Atlanta and of course hearing, you know, different, different things that you've shared, that's what continually pops into my head. This is exactly what that group would do. Which is why I just, I have this, there's a strong appeal to me that, why don't churches do this? Well, it's not churches, it's people. It's people that don't do it because they're afraid. They don't think they're qualified because of the system we have. That's true. But if you think about the traditional church model, where does the money go? Infrastructure. It's infrastructure. You know, and we're not saying that, you know, the only, you know, the New Testament pastor shouldn't get paid anything. They should be poverty strict. You know, that isn't the point. But there's so much, there's so much expense, you know, people give a lot of money, you know, to have a fairly large church operate. I mean, it's a significant amount of money, but it goes to overhead, to buildings, to electricity, to toiletry, or we had to hire a plumber. We had to, you know, all this kind of stuff. And if you were just basically just saving that stuff, you would have resources to do this kind of thing. And it just, to me, it just sort of rings true. I don't, again, I don't have a fancy academic, you know, label to put that. It just sounds right. Yeah, I think it's called the church. I think that's, it's being the church. It's people who are called out, you know, in order to do something, they're not, we're not called out to sit around. We're called out to be active, to be salt and light, and you just can't do that inwardly. That's going to die. So you push going outward. The kingdom's it's an arrow going somewhere. And that's not necessarily, I don't think inwardly. So when you're talking, go ahead, go ahead, Rich. I just say, when you're talking to people about the institution itself of, you know, the congregations, how long, how hard are those conversations for you to have with people to get them to, you know, who are only understanding that that is what church quote unquote is, how is it, you know, how hard is it? It's brutal, but you can get them to a place where I'll generally ask them, what's your favorite memory of your Christian experience as far as fellowship? And it's been one or two times this hasn't been the case where that person will say to me, well, one time during the summer, I had this Bible study group or one time during college, like Mike was saying, I had this experience. And okay, now just take that one step further and going forward with thinking about that. If that was that appealing to you and that comforting, then why don't you do that? And don't worry about what someone might call it. We have to be willing to sort of take those sort of punches from at least what's the visible church to the culture that we live in. And I guess I've gotten to the point I'm willing to take that. It's fine. But it is a difficult thing. The more trained they are, the more difficult. I try to have lunch with pastors of traditional church models once or twice a week and talk to them. I don't try to convince them they're wrong or anything like that. I just want to talk to them about, where they see their particular fellowship going, the problems they face. Generally, they're the same. If it's someone who has only been an attender of church and gone there for how many every year, sometimes that can be easier. If they've never been, it's really easy. It's, hey, why don't you come over and have dinner? And that's usually, I need to say this, too. That's the entry point. That's the methodology I use. If you contact me, we're going to go to dinner first. And I'm going to paint as bad a picture as I can of what it looks like because I don't want some unrealistic expectations because people think, oh, it's some sort of utopia. It's not. You get the, I call them the ecclesiastical preppers, the ones who feel like, we got to prepare for the end times. Let's stock up food and meet in our house. We're not that either, trust me. It's just not into it. I know those folks are out there and God bless them. I hope to find some of those when I need it. Maybe. I don't know. I think the Bible tells us he feeds us. I worry about it more. So it's all good. So yeah, again, this is a lot of stuff. You have to go slow. This is a marathon, man. This is not a sprint. So those people's experiences, you know, when you ask them, what one time do you remember? I mean, how much does that has to do with the presence of the Lord? Like the Lord being a part of that that sometimes is really missing from our Sunday congregations. I mean, the presence of God that he promises us. That, yeah, I don't know that he's necessarily, I don't know. I don't know that I would say that he's missing. I believe that our brothers and sisters, mine go to, you know, traditional, what someone would think of as church. I think that God works through that. I think it's, I don't think it's that it's different in a house. I don't think that it's this particular model is somehow sanctioned or approved. I think it is a matter of that interdependence that's kind of woven once that guard comes down, that social guard, that that's when I see him really go to work in people's lives in opening their eyes to things. We have one individual that fellowships with us and this gentleman's in his 60s. He's been in church, you know, for 40 or 50 years and he is going through this illumination right now where he staggered at the present, or the view of the Bible that he was given in his experience up against what he has, his experience has been over the last seven or eight years now. So I think that God is present wherever we're told that. I think it is a matter of cultivating that level of intimacy that sort of traditional structure blocks in a real way. I don't know that it's possible and that's why people like their Sunday school classes. That's why they like their small groups. What we're doing is taking that another three or four steps further and saying, no, why don't you view this as your, this is your church family. And it's, listen, I'll be asked by academics sometimes, well, how long have people been doing house church? And I just chuckle. They've been doing it for a couple thousand years now. It's nothing new or that radical. It's just a matter of looking back at something. And we have tons of witnesses internally and externally to it. So it's, I mean, it just feels, I think maybe people can understand this. There's often a concern in a traditional church setting of we're getting too big. And people are bothered by that because when you hear that, what they're really saying is, I liked it when we were smaller because it felt more like a family because you knew everybody, just something like that. And to me, that, that's really what's going on here. You know, it's not the fact that it, you know, I do think there is something to be said for the fact that what you do occurs in a house and that just creates sort of a different setting that can lend itself to certain barriers being dispensed with or maybe drop more readily or more quickly. But there is also this thing about the size. If you do go to a place where you do know everybody, it does feel more like a family. And if you do things deliberately to cultivate a sense of family, you know, to treat people as though they are blood, as though they are family. And it's, it's, it's this smaller group. I don't see how that can be disadvantageous to the traditional church model, because that's just so hard to replicate beyond a certain number. It is, but it's, it's threatening to the, to the model. And I want to back up and say, or let me make this point, we have done this in homes and offices and call, we had a coffee shop in that area of Atlanta, little five points. It would be very similar, but on a, on a little smaller scale. Funeral parlors. Don't forget the funeral parlors. Yeah. College dorms, we were contacted by some students at a university over in Alabama. We'd go over twice a month and meet them in their cafeteria. And here you have as from six to 10 students in their cafeteria at lunchtime who would pray, sing. We'd have Bible study and time of encouragement and fellowship. And we've done it in multiple settings. I'm very hesitant to tell someone, look, this has to be in a house. The coffee shop that we had a little five points on Sunday mornings, people would come from all over the city of Atlanta and we would bring, we would bring food and we would have brunch together. And the beautiful part of it, even beyond what you might notice was that we had a really in-depth ministry to the people who lived on the street in that area. And these folks would get up out of the bushes and go down to the little corner market and come in with those little aluminum trays of those iced over cinnamon buns. They would go buy them and bring them in and put them on the table to share with the people who did not just get up out of the bushes on Sunday morning. I just, I just don't know what you say to that stuff other than touche. That's probably what it looks like right there. Cutting socioeconomic divisions off, cutting cultural division off, cutting racial off, cutting economic off, that it is the great equalizer that table is. There's a scholar at Notre Dame and he makes his comment that what the cross is to Jesus, the meal is to the early church. It became its primary symbol. And I think there's some, something to think about within that statement. We don't think about that in that way, but I think there's, I think there's some truth there that is just something that's- It's a familiar, it's a familiar thing that people can contribute to. And by definition, they become a part of as opposed to just walking into a building and taking a seat. That's right. That's that idea of common sality and in its ecological use. It's an organism that lives on with or in another without doing harm. We take that one step further and say, no, you're not only are you not doing harm, you're contributing to the other's benefit. And I think there's a whole other angle here for other countries like China, these home churches and secret churches that are oppressed. And so you've got this whole other side of the purpose of a home church, a house church or whatever. Can you speak about that, Tim? I have a friend in China and that is what he does. I'm not going to say his name or what his fake job is over there, but he does it. And it's so interesting to me when he writes back emails how it's in such coded language that you really have to learn to read what he's saying that Jesus has referred to as the boss, not Bruce Springsteen boss, but boss. And that is you have to use words like that. And he's been escorted out a couple of times. It is obviously the fastest growing, just in sheer numbers, form of church worldwide. It's pretty obvious. It would have to be because of the pressure that certain countries, governments are applying to the visible church that may or may not be coming here. I suspect it probably is to some degree, at least in the way that you think of it. Church will, the Christian community will come under more and more persecution. But I think that's sort of the guarantee, isn't it, that we ought to expect not to be shot. Right. We're at least going to be monitored. Oh yeah. Yeah. And again, that's one of the reasons why I want at least my audience to start thinking about this. Is there a replicatable model for doing what we need to be doing in terms of community? And again, this collection of resources, whether it be skills or time or money to be doing ministry that doesn't involve a time or a place, a building, or any of these trappings we take for granted. And you can say more about your friend in China, but to me, that's a good example that this is replicatable. And this isn't something you guys invented. I mean, this is just the way it's been done for millennia. Well, you've already done it, but I think two of you have already said you did it, you just didn't know what it was. Or what you would call it. It's easily, I don't really like the word reproducible, but I'll use it, it's easily modeled. Let's put it that way. You can do it anywhere. It takes a fairly high level of commitment. It may take a little bit of, you want to back load in that deconstructing is the most difficult part. That's why the guys that tear the hole in the roof, we call them the unnamed deconstructionists because there was no hope and mark for them to get any glory for putting their friend down in front of Jesus. So there are heroes in the Bibles, they're deconstructing this guy's roof to get their friend in front of Jesus. And that is sort of what we set out to do to help people get some of this stuff out of the way in order to build back up to, this just isn't that difficult. It just, it only takes a little bit of, it does take a little bit of courage to step out there. But if you just take a few minutes, I encourage people, I pushed them over to Lightfoot's translation of the dedicate, go read it. Here's a great glimpse into what's going on here. So yeah, there's tons of resources out there. We don't need somebody, I don't think necessarily to write another book about it, have plenty of friends who do and have. But it's about getting the people to participate in these rites and helping them understand that's who they are as a people with God. Getting them to pray, getting them to be familiar with those things when they hang out with their friends rather than what we do call fellowship, like when we go golfing. I like golfing, but I know that that's not true New Testament fellowship. Whereas when we gather together as the people, we actually pray and they're comfortable doing those things that we ought to be anyway. Well, yeah, it is. And I think that's one of those things where we're really big on the ascension. And the reason is this, that I don't think that that's, that's, that's an occasion within church history that's not marketable. You're not going to sell t-shirts at Walmart about the fact that you have a king. And so it is, you can't, you're not going to do candy. You're not going to do any of those things, especially in America. A couple of European countries still close on ascension day, but we push that that, look, we have a king who is seated in the heavenlies. Our identity is there with him. His identity here, you're looking at it. It's us. We are the mobile temples again. So we even present the story of the Bible sometimes is this progressive story of temples where you, Genesis and Revelation are these bookends where you have these temples and you have these two mobile ones right next to them with the Tabernacle on Genesis Hills and us preceding the one that we see in Revelation. So, you know, it's, there's a, there's a lot of ability to teach a lot of opportunity to teach and get people thinking along these lines rather than, you know, the temple being over there somewhere in the sense that people think about it. What, I imagine, you know, you've talked about making the Lord's Supper again part of the meal, which, you know, obviously is, I think, fairly evident in Corinthians. What about things like baptism? What about church discipline? What about conflict resolution? Is that you, and again, you had three or four people you meet with on the Wednesday morning, is that the time when you decide on, when you discuss either, hey, you know, we need to baptize somebody or, hey, there's, you know, you go about doing it? Is that how you more or less move those things along? It sort of depends on the situation. We've baptized in bath tubs, hot tubs, swimming pools, you name it. We've done it. I actually broke into a church. This sounds bad, but I don't think the guys tear the river. I broke into a church. A guy was going to go to prison and he wanted to get baptized before he went in, so I had a keys. I had worked there, so we weren't supposed to be in there, but went in, borrowed the pastor's waders and baptized the guy behind the big singing Christmas tree thing they have at Christmas. So we do it upon request of the believer. We'll talk to them, see where they are, what they're saying, make it clear to them that this is not a course here in the South. Baptism gets you on a church role, local affiliation. We explain to them that's not what's going on here. This is cosmic in nature. So we baptize in that way. Generally, you're not going to be able to get away from this. This is another dynamic. A lot of people that are involved in this, at least visible people that are involved in this, are very anti sort of pastor authority and hierarchy. And, you know, I warn people right away, listen, those words are in your New Testament and they're in there for a reason. I have watched fellowships try to do it without that structure and I can tell you what's going to happen. So the visible leaders rarely do the baptizing. It's the brother or whoever that this person approached about it. We will push them that way that, you know, you should have the privilege of doing this. You certainly have the right to do it. Church discipline, we try to follow the New Testament model for it. I mean, it's sort of how those things work out. We have had some people who chosen alternative lifestyles that were in fellowship with us and it got to the point where, you know, we cannot say okay to this lifestyle. You're making a decision to do something that we cannot say okay to. Those things come up given the numbers of people that we have dealt with. So, you know, those things are handled. Some of them, sometimes you'll have confession of sin and it makes people very uncomfortable because, you know, you're sitting around a din or a living room and most people aren't acclimated to that and the body's able to restore that person. The point of that is restoration. It isn't punishment, which I think sometimes the church gets caught up in. So you exercise the body in that way and after a while it just becomes second nature. Quite honestly, I don't even think about it anymore hardly. It just happens because we are acclimated to that and understand others coming along are not going to be yet. So you want to kind of hold their hand through it, which, you know, we do a good bit of that as well. What is your group or individuals within your group is probably a better way to frame this. What are some of the things that they are engaged in in terms of ministry? You mentioned working with the homeless rich has a lot of experience doing that. I know when I talked to you before, at the actual meeting there were the two guys who had gotten involved in the, you know, what happens with refugees as their process there in Atlanta. Just give the listeners some ideas of how your people, you and your people who are with you in this, how you approach quote unquote ministry. Okay. Internally, we have, I'm not going to say their names here, I'm not going to violate their privacy here. We have a couple of guys that are hyper computer literate, software engineers, that sort of thing. They make it very known to folks, hey look, if you have computer issues bring it to me, I'll fix them. We have a guy who is really, really good at financial planning. He helps people with their budgets teaching them basically how to run their household because I think that's a, I think people think that's a skill they're born with. And so they don't understand it's a method you need to learn and there's no shame in that. We have people that are in the construction business that help people, their homes with that sort of thing. Externally, the people that we fellowship with will bring to the tension of the group. This family over here, over there is suffering, they're facing surgeries or they don't have, they need dental care or they need a car, whatever the case may be. And we pray about it. And then the most famous story of the entire experience has been we had a friend that was a missionary to a really rough area of Phoenix and they needed a car. And so we prayed over it. We wrote a check and sent the check to him and the car that he had picked out that he was going to get that check was within like 20 something cents, I think, if I remember correctly, of the value of the price of the car that he needed to buy. So you see things like that happen. It's easy to dismiss them. I don't dismiss them anymore. That, you know, this is the superintending work of the Holy Spirit over this body and he's teaching them through this action within the body and then outwardly. We still do a lot of work with people that are sexual deviants with you. You name it, man. It's sometimes it's not very pretty. That's one of the reasons I'm shy away from very much publicity. I think the first five or six times I emailed you might because I didn't know what your deal was either. I used fake email addresses and all kinds of stuff. And I think the first couple of times it was a little more public. I asked you not to publish it because I just didn't want to get into ecclesiastical arguments with people about how church should be. I got other things I need to worry about. So yeah, we try to remain in a forward-leaning posture toward culture and not pull back from it. We'll engage it at every turn. Well, some of this, again, just to go back to the analogy, the construction people, the computer people, do you need a car? Do you need this? Do you need that? That's exactly what you would do if it was your brother or sister. That's right. That's absolutely right. So you're just extending this family thinking to people who aren't blood. But when you do that thing with a frequency, I don't want to use the word impression because it's not a false thing. But it creates the atmosphere, the trappings of family. It becomes this thing you want it to be in this modeled effort, again, this blood relationship kind of thing. To me, I think that has great consequence in the way people think about the people in their group. I think it does. It's walking people through a kinship, a fictive kinship. What do these things mean? How do we relate to one another? So we spend time on that as well. How does this work out? And the word that I was used for what it creates is just normalcy. This is how you live. This is how these things work out. So it doesn't become some special event that you make sure everybody knows this wonderful thing you did. We don't tell anybody what we did. We report back to a couple of people within the leadership of, hey, this expenditure happened over here. This is when it went down. Again, it's shocking. I think I told you when you were here, Mike, I walked into a surgeon's office to pay for a procedure someone had to do. And because of HIPAA regulations and all these things that are going on, it was unbelievable. They don't even know what you're talking about when you say, I want to write a check for what these persons have done. They look at you like you're an alien or something. And that's cool. No problem. It just creates normalcy for the people that you fellowship with it. Oh, wow, this is how. And then for families that may come from a less functional setting, it creates an environment for them as well. Oh, wow, I see. This is how these people live. They live like this. There is a lot of that that people don't know how normal it is to be a part of a family or what that's like or how to have a father or having a father or anything like that. And it's important to have those environments for people to be able to learn in. Yeah, that's right. They do. Mike, can you and Tim talk about your experiments that y'all are going to be doing with some college students specifically? Well, Rich, why don't you? Well, we have an opportunity possibly on a Wednesday night to have it in a coffee shop in downtown Bellingham or get together about eight o'clock at night. And it seems that anywhere between 20 and 40 college age youth will be there. And usually at that age, I remember when I was at that age, how hungry and desiring I was to know the Lord and seek the Lord and need content and to meet people and to have conversations. So I thought it would be interesting to be able to put Mike in that setting for these youth to be able to not only ask him questions, but to get to know him a little bit and to be able to fellowship and learn. Because I think that they're going to respond really well to Mike. I don't know that for sure, but that's what I believe in my heart that these youth will, without question, you know, want to fellowship and attract. And the other part that we're going to do is just have, like at my house, I have a very nice setting outside where I can have a bonfire and have people over for prayer. Because me, I want people to be with God in the presence of God through prayer and fasting and things like that if people are willing. But inviting them from that kind of evening into fellowships with us outside of that. So, you know, they can come on Wednesday night here, Mike, have Q and A and then be able to join us on a Tuesday night at a Bible study that we have or a Friday night or a Sunday to be able to come over to a house and do that and really get them the opportunity to spend more time with people who have understanding who have sought the Lord or like Mike, who is a scholar himself, you know, be able to spend time with him, not just listening to him through a podcast or reading a book, but actually being able to spend a couple hours hearing him talk, which I believe will really impact a lot of people in the things that we do. I think it'll have a huge, you know, effect on the people that are going to attend these. So we'll do things like that, a few different kind of like, you know, just where we'll have on a Sunday at Mike's house, we'll, you know, rent some tables and invite 60 people over and we'll have, you know, that kind of fellowship in that way that you're talking and help people to come to understanding of what we do, explain it to them, but really have a hopefully, like why I asked about the number of people that you work with is to have enough mature believers there for when other people are coming in at that point, like why would I come here on a Sunday and not bear to be able to help lead them and explain that to them, but as well be mature enough in their own right to do it on their own and not me necessarily or anyone having to be able to push them towards that. And yeah, but really, it's just a one, I want to worship the Lord personally. And I mean, like words have been like go and hang out, do the things that we do to honor Jesus Christ because he is our king. And like Mike said, I was right when he said, they may not be our blood, but they are certainly covered in the blood. Maybe we've covered in the blood and for that we should fellowship and love them. And yeah, we want to get people out and hear Mike and also have the opportunity to be able to be with other believers who do things, you know, to, that are just natural. Like for me, it's natural to want to pray with people and spend time in the Lord and discuss these beautiful ideas and to discuss different and difficult ideas, you know, like whether it be technology or things like that, that they don't have the opportunity on a Sunday. And I think one of the things that we would also like to do is to not necessarily do a dictatorial where, you know, someone just speaks for 40 minutes and no one can ask a question, but do a lot of Q and A with Mike because he's a big boy and can handle questions. You know, when people are doing it, unlike a lot of times when you go on a Sunday, you never get the opportunity to be able to ask the pastor that you might disagree or have a question about what he said. Most people won't actually walk up and ask the person that question because they'd be very intimidated. So if I can just get for a few months, people used to Mike, then maybe they'll, you know, ask him or things that they want to ask that they've never been able to ask about the Bible or God. Yeah, I don't know if I rent tables. Don't don't rent tables. Use what you have that you're going to send a message. Of course, I'm calling on Mike and his dear wife here, but use what you have. You're sending a message that way. And don't there if there is a problem with this model, it is the lack of teachers. There's no question about it. We get contacts constantly from fellowships that are just dying because they don't have a teacher at all, much less two or three. That is the rarefied position, unfortunately. So it may take some time. Do you have in your group, do you have, you know, three or four, you know, people you would, you feel comfortable, you know, with teaching and do they ever travel to some of these other groups to kind of help them out? You know, this kind of itinerant feel you get from the New Testament. Do you ever do any of that? I have done that. I'm trying to think. No, I mean, I have other people we work with. The gentleman that hosted your event does it all the time around the world. I've just never, I can say I've never felt the Lord tell me to go do that for whatever reason, but we have capable teachers. I don't think twice about not being there for a meeting or two or three. I'm there and that group is in really capable hands. And I'll say it takes a while to build that because you're building the confidence in that individual and you're building the trust of that group into those individuals. And that takes, that takes a while. That's one of those, again, the transitional things. Yeah, going back to what Rich was saying about some of the things we want to experiment with here. I mean, I go to church, I'm an elder at the church in town and I view this kind of in the same way you do. If people are happy and feel they're being fed in whatever church context that they're in and assuming it of course is a church that doesn't teach nonsense or some sort of anti-gospel kind of message and messing that up, if they're comfortable with that, then I think it came clear in what Rich was saying that some of this other stuff can be a supplement. You get to ask questions, you get to spend time, you get to do, I'll use your term, you get to do normal things with Christians and you start to develop closer relationships because the group is smaller and that sort of thing. So in our context, Rich and I are viewing this as something we want to experiment with because we know down the road, there may be some situation that arise. We have one person in our midst that really has a desire to plant a church. That really isn't either of us and that person has a strong house church background as well. We want to bring him into the equation too and kind of collectively see how this would work, what works, what doesn't, what's a good idea, what's a bad idea. In my situation, I could be living somewhere else a year or two or five years from now and my situation might be completely different where this is something that from the get-go we want to try to create. If that ever happens, we're going to be bringing you in. Because Rich and I have talked about that, what if we move to a different state and we sort of get to start over and we can create something now that is filling these gaps, is doing what the New Testament wants us to do, but now we have a chance where we don't have any of these trappings. Do we really want to plunge into this? We're looking at this experimental thing as something that can help us think about that question, the bigger question. Is this something we would really see workable in some different context at some other place, some other time? We're hoping to learn a lot in it. Again, I view my role as basically, tell me where to show up and what I'm supposed to do. I'll be there and do it. I view myself as a resource, not as a planner or a planter. I've always enjoyed being a good Indian rather than chief. Even though you get thrust into those chief roles, that's okay. But I've never been one that consciously seeks those things. I don't think it's going to shock people to hear that. I'm just not interested in kingdom building. It just bores me. I don't know any other way to put it. I'd rather be a useful person in doing this thing I think is worthwhile. To me, that just feels a lot more significant than having to, again, be a kingdom builder. I guess it's why I just have such a visceral dislike for celebrity Christianity. I tend to behave badly in those situations. It's just very contrary to my personality. I'm not saying that's a point of sanctification. It probably isn't. But I just don't think about things that way. I want to be a resource. In this area, I meet people all the time who just feel stuck. Either I don't have a church or my current church setting. I don't have these things that you guys have been talking about, either in terms of content or relationships. They just feel stuck. I'm hoping that one of the things the non-profit can do is free not only me, but free other people who can become participants with me in doing this kind of thing, just doing something to be a resource point. Even if it's as simple as, hey, I know this guy in Atlanta. You should go talk to him. Well, I'd like to have 50 Tims. You scattered all over the United States. That's a scary thought. But I know, we know, McClott knows where these people are and that they can be trusted. I'm getting this email now from this person, oh, I wish I could connect with believers who were serious about ministry. I have this need. There's this void or this physical need or whatever it is. It's like, look, we've got a list of 50 people around the country that we know who they are. We know they can be trusted and we will put you in touch with them. That's what I think about when I talk about McClott being a resource for networking. It's not like an official, you become part of this organization kind of thing. It's an awareness thing. We know who these people are. We can connect you with someone who can give you direction or give you some specific help. Like I said, I'd like to have 50 or 100 Tims. I know they're there so that when I get the emails, when somebody who's part of our little organization, when they run into this online or in Facebook or whatever, it's like, okay, we know who to direct you to. You need to have a conversation with this person and they will get you some help. They'll do what they can to fill this void. That's what I'm really looking to gain long-term out of what we're creating. I mean, on the surface, it's Mike and his content, but I just don't think of it in those terms. Visibly, that's why people might get interested. But as those people surface who really want something genuine, either in terms of content or how do I live out, how do I experience my Christianity and get away from this, what they perceive to be right or wrong, in authentic context? How do I graduate to something better, more meaningful? We can actually help. That's what we're shooting for here. It's probably still kind of a nebulous thing, even struggling to try to even articulate it, but that's what goes through my head when I think about what you do. You're a resource person and how do we take your model and help people discover it so that they can do it? And if they have trouble, they can talk to you, talk to somebody else, and just help them to work the model to do this. Because you would certainly find it rewarding, correct? I mean, you wouldn't have it any other way. So why should we not want other Christians to not feel the same way about what they're doing on a given Sunday, or not just Sunday, but in their Christian experience? I would want every Christian to feel that way. You would hope so. I would encourage if you're going to do this with college students, that it seems to be the richest soil to do this with. And the Christian celebrity thing, when we had our coffee shop, we had the visible Christian celebrities come and essentially assign their college-age students to us to try to walk them through late adolescence and early adulthood. And that's a tough world, too. And that's one of the reasons I kind of tried to stay as invisible as possible. And as far as multiple people outdoing, I told you, Mike, I enjoy a wonderful life. And I've had just privilege where I spent two years every morning going to four different McDonald's for the breakfast time and building conversations with people, relationships with people. And one of the great things that shocked me were the number of people that show up in McDonald's reading a Bible. Then I would spend the lunchtime at a mall very close to where I live. And you would be shocked. I did that to observe how people eat together and the dynamics of seating because meals tell us a lot about the people that are enjoying them or maybe not enjoying them. But to have people in places like that to strike up conversations, to do real ministry that can only be done once you've established a relationship and get out of this sort of glancing blow, sort of come to the rescue thing, it is a wonderful, wonderful approach to serving this world in the name of the kingdom. So, Tim, do you have a handful of tips of somebody out there maybe listening that might be interested in starting something like this? Do you have, can you just give them some advice on what to do next? I would. Play hard. You got 30 seconds, Tim. Play for like-minded people. They're there. They're around. It's just a matter of, I'm reading Pete N's book right now about the sin of certainty and he's talking about how he got to this point where he realized he had to be brave enough to say these things. And I think what you're saying, Mike, about the people you interact with who are in church that feel this, I don't know if frustration is the right word. I hope it's not. I hope it's the Holy Spirit working in their lives through sanctification, moving them away from one environment to another. So, I would encourage people, pray through this, go back and historically look at the materials that we have. Again, I push people to the dedicated, University of Nottingham over in Great Britain has a why study series. It takes about, I think the videos are 10 minutes and one of their Old Testament scholars, a man named Tom O'Loughlin, wrote a book on the dedicated. It's about a 10-minute video and it gives you incredible insight into the early church and how meal-centric this thing was. So, most of the people that produce material out that's available out are people I know. So, I'm very careful to speak either way to them. There is a resource online, a friend of mine, the organization is NTRF, the New Testament Reformation Foundation, and there's a book there that you can get that I think is valuable in thinking through these things. Some of the problems you will probably face, some of the solutions to the problems. I would also say, Mike, in the content of your teaching, that's another thing that's going to get folded into this with some of the objections to how church should function, what we should do, and I'm kind of settled now on, we're very careful to do these things primarily because of the angels, which may sound odd to people, but that's why you do it. That's why we act like this, that's why we conduct ourselves like this. So, it's not just the model or the form or the template, it's going to be the content that's a different thing too. Can you discuss that just a little bit? Because when I was reading through your email, it seemed like the content was a big part of it. I mean, I guess you did mention that you didn't have a lot of necessarily teachers that can go around. I mean, can you just discuss a little bit about the content? Well, as far as Mike's influence, I was challenged by the gentleman that's my mentor, why does the church exist? And I told Mike this story, I got up at I get up at four o'clock on Saturdays, four o'clock in the morning, not in the afternoon. I got up at four, I got up four o'clock and I don't even remember what I typed into my trusty old Dell in Spiron. And that passage out of Ephesians and up popped a resource to some guy named Mike Heiser. And I think I told Mike, an Old Testament scholar, Margaret Barker. And I began to read what Mike had published at that time. And it was one of the super early manuscripts of, I think it was still called The Myth That Is True back then. And you took it down just a week or two later once I started telling people, hey, you need to read this stuff. And so I'll never forget this. I went in on it when we did a gigantic midweek Bible study at that time. And I went in and I started to present it and I was terrified. And my first question was, how many gods do you have? And from that point on, our fellowship took a dramatically different sort of trajectory in viewing scripture, viewing your relation to scripture, and maybe in a real way de-idolizing, I'll use that word carefully, the Bible, and looking at, we've been told these things that may or may not be, I'm not going to say they're not true, they may not be accurate, might be a better word to use. And thinking through that, that content has now impacted and affected every part of everything that we do, where if somebody in our fellowship starts talking about wisdom, they're going to stress that this is an uppercase W wisdom, or someone's talking about the word, this is the uppercase W. Don't think for a second that your Bible showed up and took Abram outside. And that is a dramatic shift for people. It's more than you think it is. And I think Mike and I were staring at some gigantic quail or something at the Georgia Aquarium, and I told Mike, look, I ask every pastor and every Bible teacher I meet, if they recognize Jesus as the Old Testament figure of Yahweh, if they put those two together, and every trained person tells me, well yes, everyone knows that, then I asked to have access to either their class or their Bible study or whatever. I've only ever had one person raise their hand and say, yes, I think that way. I think that's a problem. I think that's a foundational problem. If we don't recognize who he is, he doesn't say, what do you say that I am? He says, who do you say that I am? And if indeed every knee is going to bow and every tongue is going to confess that, what's the content? I'll use that word of their confession. Is it Jesus's, I'll use that word, my friend in China, he's boss or master or is he Yahweh? And if you said that to a first century Jew or any century Jew, you'd have a problem on your hands. It's an explosive statement that somehow there's this assumption that all Christians think that way. Then I asked them, do you associate Jesus with Genesis 1-1? And I've had two people say yes to that. That's scary. And I'm talking about across the spectrum of Christianity, from charismatic background, Methodist, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, you name it. It is shocking. And then you try to introduce them to this thinking. And again, I was, I'm not going to use the word stealing, I was borrowing Mike's thoughts from the old myth book and working people through this. And I can, I will say this, it has had such a profound effect on my life of moving away from seeing my relationship to a thing or a set of ideas to a person. It has been revolutionary. That work has that effect. Yes. And it is that particular content and that way of thinking that I have watched, I have watched it have a profound effect on the people that I love and care about. And I don't know what else, what other higher compliment you can pay to something other than this has moved people. It has freed them from a real bondage. Praise the Lord. Yeah. It's absolutely shocking that something that we assume or take for granted might be the better way to look at it. So I was telling Mike that I just went to California to visit my mom and my brother and on the way back on the plane, I sat next to a gentleman and we began discussing, I have the name Jesus tattooed on my wrist. So I get a lot of people asking me questions about it. And he said, Hey, are you a follower? So I began to dialogue with him for a little bit. And he said, you know what I've been really thinking about the past year and especially the past three months is the Council of God. What is the Council of God? He said, I've been studying the Bible for 37 years, four hours a day. And he said, I'm really into this and I just laughed. I was like, here's a book. Call me when you're done. Here's a Bob. See you later. I said, here you go. I said, this is going to be awesome. Well, and beyond that, even, even beyond that, I think Mike's, you know, I told him this, I think his, his approach to Romans five, that has been the thing that has been the most just, I don't, I don't even have a, I don't have an adjective to describe it. What it has done to people to begin to see this death sin thing where I think, I think in traditional Christendom, we in some way value this sin mentality, the sin first mentality, where the New Testament declares a death first reality that that is such a different approach to life. That, that dominates most conversations I have with the people I fellowship with. That idea, it's as simple, I don't know, I only have words to describe it. We are infected with death. And that is what, that is what he frees us from. Yeah. I mean, for, for my part, I mean, I, as I've said many times, I just had this sense that it, again, it just didn't feel right that the way, you know, I'll use the term academics, since that was my context, I was, I was not a pastor and never have been. But why, why should academics be, you know, believing academics, not just, you know, critics and stuff like that, but why should the scholars within our believing ranks, why should they be talking about scripture in such a different way than the average person in church? You know, why is this disconnect tolerated? You know, and so that, that became kind of the, the driving ambition to, to take all this stuff, you know, in the academic world that had real payoff for understanding scripture and just, just again, thinking more like the writer and being able to translate that for the average person, because I think that they are quite capable of digesting the material. I think most, most people are, and that they're probably going to enjoy that. You know, it's probably going to, you know, reignite a sense of discovery, because it, you know, well, we all know sort of what happens in the, in the average church, you know, it, it, there's just a real dearth of content. So not only do you have the disconnect to begin with, but, but there's, there seems to be just a very little attempt to sort of cross the divide or fill the void or, you know, whatever metaphor you want to use there for it. And it just bothered me. It really bothered me that people should be missing out on content and not being able to think what I think are kind of exciting thoughts, you know, about scripture, about a given passage and just sort of seeing it for what it is and, and, and how it fits into the bigger picture. And I mean, I love that stuff. And so it just didn't feel right, you know, that it was restricted to this little ivory tower kind of community and not filtering down to church. So, well, doesn't that sound like, doesn't that sound like the atmosphere and the environment that you had at the Reformation? And if, if you argue that the press or technology is what accelerated that work, we're, we're in the same, we're in a very similar dynamic today where technology can move ideas forward now, you know, at a much higher, more rapid rate than was possible in those days. And I really do believe that's, that's sort of the dynamic we're finding ourselves in where there's not just one monolithic voice anymore, at least not in the Protestant world. So I would say this to Mike, one of, one of the guys at our fellowship, he put it this way, he said, what I've experienced my entire life was teaching, teachings on stuff about the Bible. And what Mike is doing is he's talking about what the Bible is about. And that's a different thing. Yeah. So that's actually a, that's actually a pretty, that's pretty profound. I mean, just it's a pithy, but very pointed way of putting it. Yeah. Well, Tim, you know, thanks for, for spending this time with us. I think, again, the goal here has been to stimulate thinking among the listeners about, if you're in this situation, you feel stuck, you know, in your church context. And even if you enjoy your church context, to be able, again, to think more widely than that and get some, you know, just get some insight on building a family atmosphere. Again, even if you like your church, you're going to have a small group, you're going to have other smaller units of contact that can play a role in your life that maybe the bigger church can't. But if you're, if you're really, you know, again, right or wrong, whether you're processing your situation correctly or not, you feel you're stuck. You know, we're going to try to do something intentionally here. And hopefully, you know, Tim won't be our only touch point here, even though he's a good touch point, we don't want to wear him out. You know, we don't want to pepper you with emails. No, I'm glad to do it. Send them on. You know, just, just to start people thinking about how to do these things and how to live out what the church is supposed to be doing. You know, between ourselves, we have this little thing like, we're not going to, we're not going to start a church because you are the church, we are the church. I mean, you know, we don't even want to talk about starting churches, you know, because that's supposed to be us because when you use that language, you're using time and place kind of thinking. But you just have to be mentally retrained to start thinking of yourself and your fellow, you know, believers in your, in your family, your church family circle, your fellowship family circle in a different way. So hopefully, this will be part of that for other people. Amen. All right, Rich, any parting words from you? Nope, I would just love to hear Tim's actual traditional testimony, but we don't get time for that. He said a couple things in there that I'd like to hear, but. God called me and I set up and laughed in the bed like Sarah did. So, and I promptly ran for 18 years. So, amen. That's my testimony. There we go. Well, Tim and Rich, thanks for being part of this episode. I think it'll be something that when people listen to it, they'll get a lot out of it and again, use it as a continuing ongoing resource just to, again, to be stimulated, think about these things because they're important. So it's just thanks for your time. All right, Mike. Well, that was a good interview again, like always. And Mike, our 100th episode is fast approaching. We're on 98, only two more to go. So I thought a fun idea would be to celebrate it with our listeners. And so I was thinking about having our listeners record a pithy, short, one to two minute recording of whatever they want to talk about, maybe how they're using the content, what it's done for them, any feedback or just something nice to say, whatever they want to talk about. They could email me at TraceDrickland.gmail.com. If you don't know how to do that, you can use your phone to make a recording. You can use Audacity, which is a free program on your computer. But if you want to send just a quick, short message to us and the Neck and Bible Podcast listeners, please email those recordings. And the deadline is going to be May 12th. So you've got two weeks. And Mike, you're going to blog about it. We're going to remind everybody on the Neck Podcast too, but you've got two weeks to get those recordings in. And that would be a fun way to celebrate with everybody. Yeah, I like the idea. I'd kind of like to hear, again, how people found the podcast. Again, are you using it as a personal thing? Maybe you're using it in small groups, just whatever. But this is your chance to be sort of part of the Naked Bible Podcast history. But we thought it would be fun. I mean, to me, it sounds like it would make an interesting episode all of its own. And why not? In the 100th episode, let's do something different. Yeah, I thought about trying to do it live, but the logistics is just a nightmare. So it'd be much easier just for everybody to record it on your own and just email it to me. Again, at Tracerick.gmail.com. And that'd be fun to hear from our actual listeners. And when you do send it in, please include your first name and where you're from. I really enjoy getting the emails from all over the world. And Mike, are we going to do a giveaway to somebody who sends in one of those recordings? Yeah, we'll have a random giveaway. Probably a book, but we're still thinking about it. But it'll be something that maybe Amazon or some other site will use some kind of random generator to throw everything in the mix. We'll get the recordings and we'll just number them. So if we get 50 of them, we'll throw all that into a bucket and get something that picks a number randomly. And that'll be our winner for the prize. But again, it'll probably be a book, something again that will be in the sweet spot of the kind of stuff we talk about. But it might be something different. Yeah. Well, if it's mine, it would be autographed. But if it's somebody else's book, obviously we can't arrange for that. We'd have to get that sent. Unless I can get it to me ahead of time, we can think about that because if we just make a decision here, the next few days, or the next week, I could order it and get it to me and stick a little note inside. Yeah. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Regardless, it's going to be fun to have a giveaway. And so another incentive to please send me your recordings. Again, you can get that email on nakedbiblepodcast.com website and send me those. You got two weeks and you'll get on the podcast and you'll have a chance to win something for Mike. So that'll be fun. All right, Mike. Well, next week we're blessed with another interview. Yeah, a friend of mine here at Faithlife, again, we're the makers of Logos Bible Software. Rick Brannon is going to be on the show with us. And Rick is the guy inside the building who does our New Testament Greek databases and other Greek databases, things like pseudopigraphy and whatnot. And I've got a number of emails that ask me questions about, hey, can you do something on the history of how we got the New Testament? Can you do something on people that insist on this or that translation, especially the King James only kind of thing? It might have conspiratorial views about this. Well, Rick is one of these guys. He doesn't have a PhD, but he's the guy who creates the databases that the PhDs use. He is uniquely qualified by experience and knows a lot of the people, a lot of the textual critics in the field and the scholarly agencies that collect and collate manuscripts. We do business with them on a regular basis and the pin or the linchpin person in our building for that is Rick. And so I think it'll be a really interesting episode to talk about New Testament history, manuscripts, textual criticism, all these kinds of questions. So he'll be on with us next week. All right, sounds like a good one. We're all right, Mike. We just want to thank Tim and Rich for joining us this week, and I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless.