 Thank you, Brother Kurt. It's great to be with you here this evening. Obviously I wish I could be with everyone in person like I normally is, but we're making the best here and I hope to share my heart on this very important topic. So I'm going to be speaking, as Brother Kurt mentioned, on this topic of racism and civil unrest and thinking about how we as two Kingdom Christians ought to be responding. As all of us know, there are scenes like this occurring often in the news for those who only have audio access. This is a photograph of a store burning in Minneapolis. Here's another photograph of some individuals celebrating as a police building behind them is burning. Here we have a photograph from, I believe this is Seattle, where some young people are standing over this banner that reads, abolish the police and as I think most of us knew they set up an autonomous zone there that was ostensibly its own government. Scenes like this all over the country of various statues that have been decapitated and caked with graffiti. Here in this photograph we have a statue of a Catholic missionary. This is in California and you can see this young lady is spray painting his hands and his head with red spray paint. Here we have another common scene of a line of police officers and then some young people standing opposite of them using a signal of the race fist which is a symbol of defiance. These are our common pictures that we're seeing all over and what I'm going to do this evening is share with you three topics. The first topic is to actually start with a very foundational perspective on what race is from the perspective of genetics. So some of you may know that I'm a physician and by training and I spent a number of years as a postdoctoral research fellow doing genetics. I'm going to give some introductory material on that. Then we're going to look at two perspectives on the issue of racism. Finally we're going to look at what it is to be a peacemaker during civil unrest and then finally we'll summarize with some applications. So we'll move through each of these topics now beginning with the first. So as I mentioned I spent a number of years as a scientist, a full-time scientist doing research in genetics and I love genetics. It's a very powerful tool to help us understand questions like how much do our genes contribute to attributes like height or intelligence or lifespan and a lot of you have heard the debate of nature versus nurture, genetics versus environment. How much do our genes contribute to a disease risk? This happens to be an area that I spent quite a bit of time on and published in. And then can we reconstruct the history of populations and their migrations using genetics and in fact you can. There's very powerful tools you can use for this. As was mentioned I spent four years after my PhD working as a research scientist at a place called the Broad Institute which is a joint research institute between Harvard and MIT doing medical and population genetics. And if anyone's interested you can look at some of those publications here. So I'm going to share a summary of how I came to view the topic of race through the lens of being a scientist. And in order to do that I need to illustrate the principle here with an ethnic group that gets a lot of attention. It's a group called Ashkenazi Jews. So some of you know the Ashkenazi Jewish population. They're well known and the the lore is that they have very high intelligence this particular group. They're only about 2% of the US population and 0.1% of the world's population. But as you can see with these statistics they have outsized results. 27% of the Nobel Prize winners in the US are Ashkenazi. 25% of the Fields Medal winners are Ashkenazi. The Fields Medal is the highest award given in mathematics. 50% of the world's chess champions are Ashkenazi and all of you know Albert Einstein. He was an Ashkenazi Jew. There's a long famous list of some of the most bright individuals that you would know who come from this heritage. And so people have wondered and asked questions about what is their genetic contribution here. Is it genetic? Is it nurture? What is it? And again to further illustrate I'm gonna show you this this is I think a very interesting game where an individual who is very skilled at chess plays a simultaneous exhibit where they're playing against multiple players at the same time. So the person in the middle his name is Magnus Carlson. He's the number one chess player in the world. And what he's doing here is he's playing about 20 individuals and you can see they've arranged the tables in a square format. And what he does is he simple simply cycles through the the table and the only rule is that you have to move by the time the center player comes to your board. So he's playing all of these individuals in very quick format and they're very very incredible to watch. When I was doing my graduate work when I was a PhD student I was teaching organic chemistry. I was a teaching fellow at Harvard doing organic chemistry and I heard that one of the students in my course was going to be doing one of these against again about 20 people. And there were some very, very good chess players in this particular competition and I raised my hand and I said I want to try. I'm not a good chess player. I'm very mediocre. And this student his name was Sherwin. He played all 20 of us and he beat all 20 of us and he didn't just beat all 20 of us. He thrashed all 20 of us. It was an absolute devastating loss. One of the most sound losses that I've ever experienced there. And I'll show you his picture here. This is the individual who beat all 20 of us. His name is Sherwin McClellan. And you might be thinking, wait a minute. I thought you were talking about Ashkenazis here. This is an African American. You're right. He is African American. And I was talking about Ashkenazis. The Ashkenazis were actually on the outside of the table. They were sitting next to me and they were defeated by Sherwin. He went on to be a very successful chess player and went on to actually become a doctor. Did that surprise you at all? Did it surprise you that the individual in the middle who beat everybody, who beat these Ashkenazis, who beat me, who beat everybody in the room, was a young African American individual? The reason that I share this story from my experience back in the 90s is that it illustrates a very, very powerful and important principle in genetics, which is the following. That within group differences are several fold greater than between group differences. Now I know that's a mouthful and you might not have grasped that at first glance, so we're going to unpack this. I'll repeat it again for those who are just listening. If you're on the screen, you can read it. If you have Zoom access, visual, you can read this. So I said within group differences are several fold greater than between group differences. So I'll illustrate this by an example because I think it's easiest to see by example. So let's imagine that you have some ethnicity, we'll call it ethnicity X, and they measure the heights of all the men in this particular ethnicity and they find that the men in that ethnicity are on average a half an inch taller than the men in another ethnicity Y. What the principle basically says is that if you pick two men at random from ethnicity X, which as I said on average for half an inch taller than those in ethnicity Y, so these two men, let's call them X1 and X2, they are likely to be much more different to each other than just half an inch. So in other words, X1 might be 5'8, X2 might be 6'2". That's a 6 inch difference. And basically what this principle is saying that when you have a group, the differences of just different individuals within the group are much greater than the differences when you look at group averages. Okay, so like I said here in this stylized example that the group average is only half an inch difference, but within that, you have to realize that the variance is much greater within the group. Hopefully that's clear. Different geneticists have estimated this number, the famous geneticist named Lewontin feels like an estimated that it's about six fold greater, the variance within a group compared to between groups. So for this reason, group averages are usually not very helpful when you're considering an individual because the variance, the variation within the group is so much broader and is so much more, introduces so much more diversity than simply considering the group that they're a part of. In addition, the black population, which is of course under much discussion right now today, has by far the highest within group variation of any population in the world. Back when I was a research scientist, I was studying principally three populations, a Nigerian population, a European population, and a Japanese population. And I remember, I'll never forget this day, I was measuring the variation in their DNA sequences within the group. So taking two Nigerians, two Europeans, they happen to be from France, two Japanese, and as it turns out, for reasons we won't talk about now, but the variation within the African population is much, much higher than it is in any population of the world, and that's a universally agreed upon finding there. So this is the first principle from genetics, this notion that within group differences are several fold greater than between group differences. And I'll illustrate it yet again using another way because this is such an important principle. So after I finished my time as a scientist there, I had a job offer to become director of research for a company called 23andMe. It was a startup, this was back in 2008, where what you basically do is you spit into a tube and you mail this tube into a laboratory, and they measure your DNA out of the spit, and then you, you, they will email you your results of your ancestry and then your risk of different diseases. So I thought, hey, I have this job offer to be director of research there, one and I take this test and see what the results are. I didn't end up going to the company, but I did get my results, and so my results were, and I'll share them with you here, so my top result was 94.6% South Indian. Okay, so I saw this and thinking, wow, consistent, right? 95% South Indian, my parents are from a state called Kerala in South India, not a surprise there. What about the other five and change percent? And a part of me was hoping, maybe I've got something exotic there, maybe some, I don't know, something from some interesting country that would be a nice story to tell people. Well, I'm going to take a guess what the other percentage is, take a guess. The answer is, I was 5.2%, North Indian. So pretty boring there, and then I thought about it afterwards and I'm thinking, oh, of course, I get it. The population that my parents are from has been basically in the same geography for thousands of years, and not very much migration has happened there. Unlike, for example, the European population, so if you take this test and you're Caucasian, you will find almost certainly that you're a much more mixed group of different geographies there. But I'm about as boring or as homogeneous as you can probably come up with, even though I'm actually born in California, but my parents both came from that part of India. So the reason I say this is, so now as I realize this and I go to different family events and I look around the room, and we're all basically cousins and all from the same little area of India there, I look around and I realize, wow, some of us are slim, some of us are overweight, some are tall, some are short, some of us are educated, some don't like school, some are introverts, some are extroverts, we're all over the map. And here we are from a very, very homogeneous group ethnically there, and it's all over the place. I'm a younger brother, he's very different from me. A lot of people are surprised when they see him and they say, you don't really look like your brother. In addition to that, I have identical twins, identical twin boys, I have seven children, and I'm always amazed. Here is the geneticist dream, right? We have two boys with identical DNA in the same home, same roof, same environment. Very different personalities, they like different foods, they speak differently. One is right-handed, one is left-handed. There's a lot of differences there with the identical genetics. So again, the take home here is that even from populations of very similar ancestry and genetics there, you can have tremendous variation and to use and rely so much on just superficial thoughts on where you're from is very misleading. So then, what then is race and how do we conceptualize what race is? Well, there's some people who've gone, as far as saying, an anthropologist is saying, there are no races. There are only clients. So a client is related to the word incline, so think of a slope or a gradient. And this individual who's studied the field very carefully, he points out that really, there's, you should think of humanity as being on these up and down landscapes of hills and valleys and to put everyone into discrete categories is a very difficult enterprise. And for that reason, many people have made statements like this. Now, long before I was even in college, I had some studies myself of the Bible and I personally don't like the terminology of races. I believe there's only one race, the human race. I never use the term, what race are you? You'll never hear that come out of my mouth because I genuinely do believe that there's only one race. There may be other ethnicities, but there's only basically one human race. Across all humans on the planet, this is not controversial. Human DNA is 99.9 percent identical. And so we are far more identical than we are different and yet we often will try to make a lot of the 0.1 percent that differentiates us. It is true, there are differences in ethnicity across traits different. On average, some populations can digest lactose differently. Some have different likelihoods of having diseases like sickle cell anemia or muscular dystrophy. Those differences are overwhelmed by individual variation. That's what we talked about before, the weight of the group variance. In addition, this is a secular geneticist. He's actually Jewish, David Reich, who's a professor at Harvard. He says this, a great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution, studying DNA, is that in the relatively recent past human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today. So he's involved in sampling skeletons and getting DNA from skeletons and studying their DNA and basically we talked about this this landscape there. The landscape has changed and what we think about today as someone from Yugoslavia is totally different than the group of people that would have been living in that same region, say a couple thousand years ago. These concepts are not fixed in over time. The landscape is indeed changed quite a bit. So for this reason, the population genetic community has generally moved away from the word race to the term ancestry and I much prefer ancestry or ethnicity because I think that's a more precise term that communicates better these truths that I've just laid out for you here. So this is a very quick primer on race. What I'm going to do now is just give you a little bit of caution here to beware of arguments that smack of inferiority. So we all have heard of Charles Darwin who of course introduced the theory of evolution in the 1800s and if I were to ask you what his most famous book is you would probably say it's the book on the origin of species. Well in fact that's an abbreviated title. The full title is this on the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. And Darwin introduced many pernicious ideas. Some of you who have heard me speak on this know how much I speak against Darwinism mostly on scientific grounds but here in the context of this discussion it's very interesting to see what he wrote in his books. Here's an example from a book The Descent of Man where he says the Western nations of Europe now so immeasurably surpassed their former savage progenitors. They stand at the summit of civilization. Here he says the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout through the world and many people seized on these ideas and made them the basis of their justification of slavery and colonization. So we have to be very very careful about who we hitch our wagon to and I trust that that you all are not drawn to Darwinism but even if you're not we have to be careful about attendant ideas that ride along with it. Okay the next topic is to talk about now that we've laid a basic idea of race and as I said there's one race the human race. We have different ancestry, we have different ethnicities but really the within group variation overwhelms differences compared that one population would have relative to another. So now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about these two issues of racism and two different perspectives on it. So there's two sides of this debate. Some of you have heard me speak on this before so I'm only going to summarize it today. The one camp are the structuralists and they see the main cause of ethnic disparities as being systems and institutions and historic forces. They they're very interested in how these larger movements of geopolitics and laws and all of the different forces that come to bear in history how those have shaped us and then there are the individualists who see the main cause of ethnic disparities as being individual choice. Some individualists will point to genetics not all and I'm not going to go much into this. I would really encourage you to look at a talk I have online that goes more into detail about this which is called A Biblical Perspective on Racism. It's on YouTube and there I provide references and authors that go deeper into these physicians. As I said I'm not going to go into it. I'm only going to spend just a couple of minutes on the structuralist position before moving on. One of the main arguments for structuralism is looking at how Jesus looked at people and if you remember in Matthew 9 a very famous passage or when Jesus looks at the people he has compassion on them and why does he have compassion on them? Well the text is very clear it's he has compassion on them because they are like sheep without a shepherd and he attributes the blame. He's burdened. He's he's groaning in his purity as compassion because they don't have proper leadership. He sees people as sheep. All of us are sheep and Jesus here grieves that there is not the the level of leadership that they need to have in order to flourish. This is a very common theme in the Bible where in the old and New Testament God puts a heavy charge, a heavy obligation and judgment often on the leaders for misleading or neglecting the sheep that are under them. So these are arguments that feed into the structuralist argument that says hey look look at how Jesus look at how God speaks of people as being moved by their leadership and the structures above them. The structuralist would say that telling people to make better choices is just laughably simple. It's oversimplified and they would say you are far more shaped by your parents, by your heritage, by your schools, by your culture than you even know and right now as we're having all of these discussions about the the way that the black community has been treated they would say you can't just tell people that are marginalized and that have had historic oppression to despicks themselves because there's much deeper forces at play. They would say if you don't believe this look at these kinds of arguments here. We know education begins education if your parents went to college you probably went to college. If your parents didn't you probably did. If your parents were wealthy you're probably wealthy. If they were poor you're probably poor. If you come from a fatherless background tends to create and forget more fatherlessness. Crime begets crime. Again these are facts that we all know. We all know this. We all see this and we all appreciate this and the structuralist would say this is a very important way that we ought to look at the world. On the other side are the individualists. I should say that the structuralists tend to be although not always they tend to have sympathies with more liberal policies when I say liberal politically liberal but not always I'm generalizing here. Individualists often tend to have more sympathetic with more sympathy with politically conservative positions like the Republican Party. The individualists often begins with Ezekiel 18. Ezekiel 18 is a famous passage where where God says I'm only going to judge the children on their own terms and not because of the sins of the father and God rebukes those who speak a proverb that the fathers have eaten the sour grapes and the children's teeth is set on edge and instead he says every individual is going to be judged on his or her own merits and how they have responded to me in faith and for the works that they have done on on this life in this life and so this is often a key passage that individualists make. Judgment of course happens at the individual level. We stand before God one day not as a church, not as a family. We stand before God alone and the individuals point out that humans can transcend difficult circumstances that many people in the Bible overcame the pull of the group. Abraham overcame the pull of the polytheistic environment that he was in so we should be encouraging and positive and many individualists fear that the structuralist position can propagate a victimhood sense. Now the thesis that I have laid out is that these are actually complementary perspectives that you can't say that one is wrong and the other was right that both have strong elements of truth but you have to be able to to use them and see them as complementary and the the other element in this is that very few people have carefully studied the subject and fewer still have studied the other position. When I say carefully study the subject, I mean having read a couple, two or three good quality books on the subject, instead what happens is both sides tend to listen to their own camp alone which reinforces their position as they live in this echo chamber. It's often very difficult for an individualist to understand a structuralist and vice versa. If you come from and many people on this call come from a very godly heritage, you've had excellent training as youth, you've been raised in a god-fearing setting, you've been given a good work ethic, good education. When you look at someone who comes at the world from a more structuralist perspective, it's often very difficult for you to process that and that's okay and I think we just really need to recognize that and then vice versa. It's very difficult for the structuralist to understand the individualist. Then you have polarizing rhetoric that is deep in the divide and right now we are at a fever pitch of polarizing rhetoric as both camps are yelling at each other and seemingly unable to to dialogue. Making it worse, social media and the news often promote very superficial thinking. Sound bites here, sound bites there, a lot of jabs, a lot of vitriol making fun of one another. It does nothing to help the situation and it only makes it worse. I often say that a well-written book is far better. You can't compare the value of a well-written book on these subjects and again to see some of those resources. See that other video I mentioned before and then finally there's way too much jargon out there that confuses this issue. I'm going to illustrate this with a case study here. These are two photographs of some recent looting that has occurred. Here we have some young men that have looted a store and you can see they're running down this alley and there's some police in the distance behind them and then down in the lower right we have again some youth that here are looting a target and you can see they've got this shopping cart full of goods that they've stolen. Now when you look at these pictures it's a great test to see are you from a more individualist perspective or from a more structural perspective. Again I'm not saying that either is wrong it's merely something that we need to understand and appreciate and individuals will often look at this and saying why are these people doing such such wrong unlawful acts? These people are taking advantage of these store owners and companies. This is wrong maybe feeling some sense of anger and injustice when you look at this some desire for them potentially to be to be reprimanded or apprehended in some way that's usually how individualists would look at this with some measure of consternation and frustration and grief. A structuralist would look at this picture and say why are these individuals doing this and what about their background has led them to operate this way? Why is it where are their parents? What happened in their upbringing? What happened in their lack or presence of religion and church influence there? What are the set of factors that contributed to their doing these crimes and both sides would say that they're crimes but when you look at it from that perspective the structuralist is more interested in the why and would try to get at these individuals more as the products of systems that have produced this kind of desperate criminality. So where were you when you saw these pictures? Where did your mind naturally go to? Okay we're going to move to the third topic here my third and final one which is now we're going to try to bring these two together and try to synthesize a perspective on how we can be peacemakers during this period of civil unrest and then as I said going to applications in our final section. Okay so this is a very precious verse hopefully to all of us this is of course Jesus speaking these words in the Beatitudes in Matthew chapter five where he says blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. A very important verse. There's an obvious corollary there's an obvious assumption or deduction that we can make from this verse which is that to be a peacemaker you have to be in the midst of conflict right it only makes sense to speak of someone being a peacemaker if there are resolving conflict and for this reason non-resistant people should move toward conflict not run away and I'll illustrate this by way of analogy let's say in this Beatitude that Jesus hypothetically said something like blessed are you physicians for healing sick people something like that and and you then look at this group of people that are proclaimed to be these physicians that heal sick people but they only are hanging around people who are well and they're never visiting sick people and they're not applying their medical skills in any way you would say this is very odd I thought that your master was was blessing you for this function of healing sick people and treating sick people you can't really do that if you're not around sick people you can't do that if you're around if you're merely just with other well people so this is the analogy a very simple concept but we often don't think about this and don't think about this obvious conclusion that you have to be somehow in the context of conflict for this to make any sense and so for this reason and I think the early church nicely demonstrates this that non-resistant people are often found right in the midst of difficult situation bringing in Christian peacemaking in addition a major theme of the New Testament really the whole Bible is ethnic reconciliation I don't have time to unpack this in any detail but I will just briefly say that Jew Gentile friction was a major problem in the ancient world for centuries and the books of Romans and Galatians are motivated by ethnic strikes that Paul seeks to heal and the book of Romans was written not as a book for Paul to write a systematic theology but because he knew that when the Jews had returned to Rome in AD 57 that there was fighting and friction between the Jews and the Gentiles and he seeks to resolve and heal that clash between between different groups within the church it runs through so many books of the New Testament I appreciated what brother Kurt had said there in the book of Acts where when the church is born it's born in a multicultural context and there's something very beautiful about that that the Bible seems to be pointing to where all of the nations are described and both Old Testament and Testament is coming together under God's banner and I hope that that vision excites you you know there is there's this concept of a vision statement and a vision statement is where you're going to be in a few years and God has given us the vision statement already he's painted that picture very clearly in the word and what any good worker does is work towards that vision statement and the vision statement is that all the nations of the of the earth are united under God's banner so how do we get there I'm going to mention this book it's a secular book by an individual Daniel Kahneman he actually won the Nobel Prize in economics and there's some very useful concepts in here that apply for peacemaking the book is called thinking fast and slow and his framework is as follows he says that we have two basic systems in our mind as I said it's a secular book so I'm just taking it here not in a in a Christian context but this is useful just to think about how our brains function system one thinking is fast it's reflexive it's unconscious so an example would be you see a homeless person asking for money and just without even thinking about it you're not even trying to do that you might think or have questions think this person's lazy should I give this person money you just have these very quick thoughts that come to your mind this happens to all of us then there's system two thinking which is slow and it's deliberate and it's intentional and so an example here would be someone writing a computer program you don't do that just as a reflex you have to sit and deliberate and think very clearly about that and so both of these systems are useful in the right context but what can happen is that unfortunately sometimes we can be in system one thinking when we should be in system two thinking and so system one run amok is is all over the place most of the language that we hear around COVID-19 the BLM Black Lives Matter vaccines religion most of it is system one I have many many talks with people about all of these topics and the number of people that have spoken to me about vaccines that have no idea what an adjuvant is the difference in a t-cell and a b-cell but they're very they have very strong feelings but they're obviously reflexive they're obviously intuitive they're not born out of that that careful patient slow study which means that most of what you hear around these topics including the Black Lives Matter discussion and what we're talking about racist it's frankly just shallow and it's not edifying because it's this very again reflexive quick judgment that's not really very helpful and then on top of that when you get into a debate you get into reputation mode and again we've all been there when you feel challenged you're almost always in system one mode you're not really listening but you're thinking about how to answer in a way to justify yourself you're really in a in a hostile mode there to make things work worse you're probably over confident Kahneman talks about this a lot in the book that humans unfortunately do poorly at our level of confidence there's the famous Dunning-Kruger effect where the Dunning-Kruger effect says that the less you know about a subject the more confident you are about it and that has been demonstrated time and time again in many fields that the less you know the more confident you are in the field it makes no sense but this is human nature system two however kicks in when you face a contradiction in your beliefs and you have a safe space a non rushed space where people aren't jumping all over you and then suddenly you can stop and meditate on the reasons why all right here's an example of system one thinking there's an essay from a woman Marilyn Robinson called Puritans and prigs and she demonstrates that people dismiss the Puritans as narrow-minded judgmental and ignorant and the irony that she points out is that they're exhibiting those very traits and denouncing them most people have no idea who the Puritans are they've never read them it's just this byword of of being those terms and ironically as I as she says here they're you they're using the same puritanical attributes that they think the purans have as they discuss them so she says very simply it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved this is a powerful phenomenon and this is in play right now on both sides much of today's civil unrest is system one thinking I like how T.S. Elliott puts it when we do not know or when we do not know enough we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts instead of let me go study that or let me go think about that another individual Jonathan Haidt says intuitions come first strategic reasoning second moral reasons moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning so if you can understand this you will understand a lot of how people work you can also understand why liberalism and socialism have gained so much traction we heard last night from from melvin layman about about socialism in particular well why has it gained so much traction and most people don't appreciate this most people don't appreciate one of the key factors i think it's one of the top three reasons why the world in general all governments slowly move in that direction the reason is that political liberalism emphasizes compassion and looking out for the underprivileged and there is a very powerful social currency that is gained from these virtues now i hope you all know and we would all agree that we are not politically allied with either side we don't ally with political conservatives we're not republicans we're not democrats we're not two-party people we're two kingdom people and i hope you know when i'm saying these things that i'm saying them not from a perspective of allying with either party but i will say that when you look at young people when you look at how these movements gain in stature it's because there's this this this affinity that we have towards compassion and looking out for the underprivileged in contrast the political conservatives are often perceived as being harsh and judgmental so this basic reason is is a fascinating explanatory variable now the question is how is jesus perceived so now we're not speaking about about earthly politics anymore but when jesus was on this earth how was he perceived and i would contend that jesus was known and admired because he was so compassionate and he was known for lifting up the downtrodden and this is something that we need to fight for and to recover among our own people among our own churches system one thinking tends to bind it tends to join persons to a team and it tends to blind it tends to miss alternative perspectives we're gonna go through these quickly before giving some biblical perspectives on this so this is a a group called the westboro baptist church they're in kansas and uh they're a group that are that's quite famous for going to various events funerals and holding up very hostile signs very obnoxious signs here you can see on the upper left this woman holding up signs a sign one sign says thank god for dead soldiers and then down on the right this woman her name is megan phelps roper she's holding up a sign saying god is your enemy well what's very interesting is that this young woman on the lower right she's actually left the church and the reason that she left was she got a a message on twitter from interestingly a jewish man uh whom she looked down upon tremendously for being jewish and the man responded not like most people did with vitriol and more fighting but with curiosity to know why she believed what she did he was very kind he was very gentle they actually ended up meeting at one of these protests and little by little she ended up finding that his position his reasonableness was more compelling than her current way of thinking and she left the group and how did she change this fascinating commentary here written by and author Alan Jacobs who says ah wonderful account of what happens when a person stops believing what she's told and learns to think for herself but here's the really interesting and important thing that's not at all what happened megan phelps roper didn't start thinking for herself she started thinking with different people to think independently of other human beings is impossible and if it were possible it would be undesirable thinking is necessarily thoroughly and wonderfully social everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said he's a he's a christian author who has has noted quite a bit on how humans think and our thought process he's there in addition he goes on and says let's think about this phrase think for yourself this is the point worth dwelling on how often do we really say she really thinks for herself when someone rejects views that we hold no when someone departs from what we believe to be the true path our tendency is to look for bad influences she's fallen into the spell of so-and-so she's been reading too much x are listening to too much y are watching too much z very profound thoughts here very profound ideas that are right at the heart of what is happening in the world today and certainly in america today what about blind i'm going to give you one example here from an individual a blogger named scott alexander he uh uh commented here that he that he was rebuked by his readers when he said that he was relieved years ago when osama bin laden died and people that he admired showed conspicuous disgust that other people could be happy about bin laden's death he says i hastily backtracked and said i wasn't happy per se just surprised and relieved that all this was finally behind us but then margaret thatcher died then on my facebook wall many of the same intelligent reason and thoughtful people who most common response was to quote some portion of the song ding dong which is dead another popular response was to link the videos of british people spontaneously throwing parties in the streets with comments like i wish i was there so i can join in from this exact same group of people not a single expression of disgust or come on guys we're all human beings here so i hope you can see how these these pockets these these groups of people that we get attached to uh and that many people on the on the side of of the civil unrest there's just this binding there's this blinding going on that explains so much of how people do and act as they are so he points this out and by the way the readers couldn't understand what the problem was about celebrating thatcher's death so i'm going to move i've got about five more minutes here and then we'll stop for questions here i was about six months ago i was reading a book i think it was by an author who was coming into a catholic church i don't actually remember now but i was very very intrigued at this description here and i want you to think with me about this think very carefully this is this is one of my most important slides and i'm the whole presentation here so this author who came from a non-christian background said that he thought the sequence in coming into the church was was as follows he thought you had to first behave it'd be a nice person not tell lies don't swear be an upstanding citizen then you believe various truths about in this case Catholicism and then finally you belong to the church that's what he thought and as as i was engaging with this book and and wrestling with these ideas and again i actually don't remember the specifics now it's been several months but the the idea was thrown out that perhaps the sequence is in fact different perhaps the sequence is normally belong then believe and then behave now by belong here i don't mean church membership i mean that you feel an affinity with a group of people you feel that they are loving you that you find a certain affinity with them a certain sense of family with them and in that belonging we we come into this this place of being able to believe as that plausibility structure is filled out and then finally our our conduct becomes like that of the group so again i don't hear me belong as in church membership but in the interest of time we don't have time to get into this theologically and biblically but but i think you would find that there is a there's a lot of merit for the normal phenomenology of how we become part of a group that the sense of belonging believing and and then behaving and the church therefore has an attractive and alternative social structure has great potential so if we for a moment consider this paradigm of belong believe behave and last night we heard from brother brother layman that that to the extent that healthy churches can be i'd like this phrase that he used their close communities with the mission and brother brother melvin said it well there to the extent that we can be that in a multi-ethnic setting and offer this winsome compassion it can draw people in in this belonging sort of way this way that they feel a sense of love a sense of belonging a sense of i figure these people love me and that then draws them into that healthy system to dialogue which we want to get people to where they actually can reason clearly from scripture and have the transformation based on the gospel college scripture and my thesis is that this is the best antidote for the civil unrest that we have today to situate healthy churches in these places of unrest of civil unrest being these close communities with the mission that offer this this beautiful winsome compassion as jesus did a helpful test jesus chose disciples some of his disciples were zealots that means they were anti-roman he wanted to to defeat the roman government other of his disciples like matthew they were pro-roman they were tax collectors they were profiting from the system and i find it fascinating that jesus could bring such different people together under his leadership and what it speaks to is that he transcended the normal axes that existed during the day just as we should transcend the normal axes of democrat versus republican he ain't with sinners and Pharisees he fellowship with prostitutes and he engaged with samaritans knows the diversity and there's a powerful test here how are we doing here you know we all say we want to be like jesus i hope we all say we want to be like jesus but can we really say that if we're not following in his steps of the company that he he kept particularly the diversity the prop a very profitable step to grow in compassion i don't know how many of you recognize this picture here but this is alexander sultan it's in he was held in in soviet prisons in the gulag a very very gifted writer and he endured tremendous abuse and hardship while he was in the gulag prisons and he had this leap forward where he realized one day that the prisoners sorry the the guards that were overseeing him he said you know what do i really know that i would be that different from them if i were raised in their environment if i had their family background if i had their religious background if i had their instruction do i really know that i would be that different and this enabled him to sympathetically identify not to agree with them but just sympathetically identified that he began to love them and bless them and even understand them and certainly to grow in their compassion when you think about those looters there could you do something like that could you sympathetically identify with them this is part of what it is to be a servant of jesus who puts into practice enemy love non-resistant love okay so we're going to end now with just some summary applications that hopefully brings all of this together so as i said at the very beginning population differences are small compared to individual differences and when we when you really if you're wise you'll put much more attention on listening to an individual story because the individual is where the action is at that's where the variance is each person has unique attributes strengths and weaknesses and basically racism is essentially a lazy over generalization be aware of your tendency to either structuralism or individualism i have a tendency you have a tendency we all do read good books from the opposite perspective to compliment your worldview i really feel this is a time that we all need to be doing this i give those some of those references and that other lesson that i mentioned online be diligent to understand the issue the news and social media i have found to be nearly worthless it's just way too shallow i i start with books and have rich discussions from that those of you who know me know that a lot of what i do is i meet with people over books and i say hey let's read a book together and we just go through chapter by chapter usually in a given week i'll be doing that at least once or twice with various individuals it's an excellent platform to have those rich system-to-based discussions peacemakers naturally must be in places of unrest just like doctors have to be around sick people peacemakers are supposed to be around people who are in positions of unrest i think it's a conclusion that we ought to be living and working in places of multiple ethnicities where we do have these frictions the active and evangelism and discipleship in those places the bridge is the place we have in boston here but wherever you live find a place where you can embody this let let our lives not be just mere talk talk is cheap many and perhaps most of our beliefs are shaped by our social structures the church is supposed to be this winsome structure that brings in those from the outside into system-to level gospel transformation and then attractiveness is going to be driven by compassion by thoughtfulness by kindness how well can we do with those finally let the company of people that you keep be a metric for how much you are like jesus i actually had one more to grow and compassion try to sympathetically identify with those who are very different from you those looters i should do that picture of that would you try to sympathetically identify with them would you do what jesus did and have compassion on them as as people who are like sheep without a shepherd remember jesus didn't condemn them he didn't criticize them he had compassion for them and i think often we struggle to do that well and for that reason can lose ground to a culture as i said that lifts up compassion that lifts them up and that's why often we're we're on on a footing that's not the best there so we have some discussion questions i'm not going to read these here they're they're posted in the email that was sent out earlier so with that i'm going to stop sharing here and i'm going to turn this back to brother curt for a time of q&a well thank you brother finney that was a tremendous blessing it sure did make me think a lot reflect engage in self-examination and i'm certain that others many others were doing the same we do have some questions that we'd like to present to you brother philip hess as you can see him there on the screen is going to be asking the questions we'll approach this like somewhat of a dial a conversation or brother philip will ask the question i'll be kind of standing back here in the background and you will be brother finney providing an explanation or an answer and i may be interjecting a few comments as well so brother philip go ahead thank you brother finney i personally found your talk there very fascinating you talked on quite a number of subjects that i'm very interested in talked about population genetics you talked about darwinian influence on racism you talked about how um our thought processes and intuitions are shaped by our environments and the people we listen to and i find all those things very fascinating so i really appreciate that and we've had a lot of engaged listeners also you know i think probably found it equally fascinating they've been asking questions so let's just fire away and see how many of these we can knock out all right okay so we'll start with the first one jesus treatment of the syrophoenician woman could seem racist at first glance please explain yeah that's of course the story of the the woman who comes to jesus and he says he uses that analogy of it's better to keep the bread for the children and not have it go to the dogs and um and yeah at first glance that does seem to be a racist comment that he would make there however we could spend a lot of time talking about this but the the better way to think about it is what jesus is doing there is he is he's sharing uh kind of the the staple way that jews regarded Gentiles at that time so we know that paul for example quoted problems about people in crete and i forget exactly what he says but he says there's something like lying lazy glutton something to that effect and in the same way what jesus seems to be doing is is repeating the standard way that that jews and Gentiles were supposed to be relate relating not necessarily as if that were his advocacy but but because he was wanting to see how she would respond and of course she responds in a very bold way even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table and he rec and she recognizes in some way that i don't think we fully appreciate that there was a plan by which the Gentiles would share and the blessings that god gave the jews and overflowed and this is analogous to even how jesus interacts with the rich young ruler where when the rich young ruler comes to jesus and says you know good teacher jesus says you know why do you call me good only god is good you know he's not denying his deity there he is he's challenging uh the way that the rich young ruler is is speaking to him to basically say do you really understand what you're saying and so jesus often speaks in these enigmatic very beautiful ways that we have to take carefully there and as i said i think there he's he's giving to her the standard line at the time and she shows that she understands the deeper meaning behind the thrust of the old testament which is that the jews would be the channel of blessing to the whole world thank you that's interesting now um we've got some questions about how we should respond to the racist problems and the conflict is happening in the light of what you shared so start with this one if christians should move toward conflict should we then have gone to the cities where rioting was happening and tried to bring peace yeah in fact i i do think that that's okay so of course we're speaking here about whole churches here we as individuals have have a finite ability there but i believe that we as the church should be known for that and i'm not sure if he's on the call but we have a couple of brothers here in boston one whose name is zack johnson who went to minneapolis and we're in the process of doing a church point there in minneapolis and we have some some promising starts there admittedly very early so i think that's exactly right and and just like again to go back to this medical analogy if if you're a doctor and you're a well-trained and you hear about the tsunami in indonesia and you have the skills isn't that the best place to go and use your skills when there's that many people who are so in need and this notion of of being people who who are going strategically to these areas of unrest is exactly what the apostles did in the book of acts and for those who want to go deeper into this there's an excellent book called the rise of christianity by rodney stark where he documents how this is the way that the early church operated they would go into cities where there were a lot of people for example dying of plagues where there was a lot of ethnic strife anteok is a great example of this anteok in syria was of course the base city that paul used for all three of his missionary journeys and and you you may or may not know that that anteok was an area that had tremendous ethnic rioting and in fact they even had to put up walls between different sections of the city there were people from china there were people from persia there were people from all over that living there and in that environment there were often riots so it happened between different groups as they would fight and isn't it interesting that's where the christians were first called christians and where the gospel flourished and took off and it became the launchpad for of course tremendous church planning out of that so yeah i would i would definitely advocate that and i would hope that we as churches can think strategically about how to do that thank you i i certainly think often about the verse where jesus says that to whom much is given of them is much required and i have to admit i think about that verse with trembling because you know we live in in a time of unprecedented wealth ease of travel ease access of information and i just don't know who has who has been given more than i have and and probably most of us on this call can say that yeah i agree we're responsible um here's another one is there any worth in dialoguing with people of opposing views on social media such as youtube comments or is it just in vain since we're all likely in system one thinking you know i i would generally say there's very little value to that there may be exceptions there but but generally where the phrases trolls live you're just going to get baited into discussions that are not particularly profitable there's not much end to that i i find it far better to engage with people one-on-one do a zoom call to a phone call meet in person and to have our our contacts be used more as the the bridge to get to a more calm discussion like that so we're speaking in generalities here so i don't want to say it's it's always unwise what i would say generally it tends to it tends to not be very profitable thank you what are your thoughts about that brother kurt i appreciate that statement that analysis i think that's probably true um i really appointed really appreciated your point that you made and your summary applications about listening to the individual story and i question what you can really get their story if you engage in in uh arenas like like we're talking about here you can do that a lot better when you actually face to face with them and and can ask questions and provide inputs and that sort of thing yeah to add on to that you know these i i'm not active on facebook myself but i i think that there's a function where these platforms can you can do a one-on-one and say hey message me privately and you can engage there in a much more unhurried calm way where you can really listen to the individual and open up heart so yeah you meant to that yes um a lot of christians promote all lives matter why or why not should kingdom christians do this yeah so this is a great example of where you know there's this debate out there black lives matter all signs matter blue lives matter and i find it to be almost intentionally polarizing and not helpful i don't like any of those statements at all and you know the one of the things that the the devil loves to do is to divide people needlessly and when i first and this black lives matter phrase was been around for many years and i first heard it i wasn't it and clear it wasn't clear to me what the the full meaning of that sentence was was it black lives matter along with other lives was it black lives matter more was it black lives matter what does it mean what does it mean exactly other people have pointed out that that when you say things like black lives matter especially those in the womb then that provokes a very negative reaction and then i wouldn't hear that i think hey that sounds good to me so it's intentionally an ambiguous statement that has this provocative feel to it that i i don't find helpful at all and i don't i will say for myself i don't like any of those statements any of those jargons and i would rather again sit down with the person what do you mean by the staple and i think some people do have a good intent in that so that's why i'm not i don't want to say it's it's an evil phrase or something like that but but it's just it's too intentionally ambiguous there's um there is there's a great case to be made that many people mean by that that that all lives matter and because all lives matter black lives matter you know something like that i think is is a more reasonable unpacking but again like what does it mean and i would rather not play these these sloganeering games where we're just caught in these these ambiguous provocative statements that are designed to don't divide because you can't capture the richness of these ideas in three words you just can't and why would we fall prey to these kinds of these gimmicks and so that's exactly what i meant before in the earlier part of my talk where i just don't like these phrases and i would rather sit down and read a book and go through go through something or more carefully that's good what about a follow-up question to that brother finney i've noticed recently that last three or four months that there are signs popping up in various yards that i observe and the the statement is love thy neighbor would you categorize that the same as you would the statements like blue lives matter all lives matter i wouldn't and of course love my neighbor is taken straight from scripture and i'm more comfortable with that type of statement now i've seen that appended to other things that there's um there's a sign that i saw see a few of these where something like love thy neighbor all people are welcomed here and it's written in arabic and in chinese and lots of different languages there it doesn't have the same level to my knowledge of baggage and polarization as some of those other phrases do now i could be corrected in that i'm not always the most astute on the latest thinking there but but there at least we have firm ground and then it's a scriptural command there so i wouldn't at least based on what i know now be comfortable with that great yeah there's problem with slogans is they boil something down too fine then you miss so much i exactly what you're saying there it needs to be a conversation now here's another one maybe you have some experience in this you want to share or just some ideas but on your list of questions you suggested that we think about how to engage in system to dialogue maybe you'd like to give us a little advice on that how can we engage in system to dialogue yeah yeah so a great question and one of the things that i would highly suggest is that is that you you reach out to an individual or maybe a small group and you pick a book and you say okay this this week we're going to reach after one of this book and then we're going to discuss that and you have a moderator who goes through that and you're able to on the on the platform on the substrate of some well-written content there you can discuss that and it doesn't have to you both do you agree in it can be a book that you don't agree with that's okay too but there's something about having that that space where you have something that you've all discussed something that you've all read and then you're going to come together and go go over that very carefully and even what we just talked about there with that expression black lives matters there's some great books that will come out about that what is meant by that and i'm sure we could affirm a lot of great things about that i mean hopefully all of us here would be you know championing and if you listen to the other video that i have online championing the plight of the black community that has been oppressed for centuries and i would i would love for more of us to be doing that reading good books getting educated and building relationships around that i think that's far and away one of the best tools that one can use great brother kerr do you do you have any comments on that well when uh when your comment brother fanny about reading a book and then having discussions about that book was made i happened to think back to a sentiment that i've carried with me for quite a while reading a book like king jesus claims your church would be a good one too also i agree you find the author thank you yeah i agree that would be a helpful one good how much time do we have left brother kerr i think we have maybe five minutes yet okay great um brother fanny can you comment um to what extent did darwinism create racism and to what extent did it simply justify what was there excellent question yeah it certainly did not create it and it was there long before darwin made his his case there in in the books that i mentioned what what it did though and what what darwinism did in so many different ways what is as richard docens himself said richard docens is a very famous atheist he said that darwin made it intellectually satisfying to be an atheist so he he provided a framework around which atheists could now hang their hat because before darwinism what was there really to explain how the diversity of life came into existence and in a very in a very similar way what darwin gave was a scientific justification for the the supremacy of one race versus another and of course the whole premise of darwinism is survival of the fittest you have these random mutations that are occurring in the population and whichever organisms whichever populations are the strongest and the best are going to eat up the other ones and outcompete the other ones for resources and so one of the great conclusions of darwinism is that when you have a group that rises in prominence with respect to military might wealth power what have you that's survival of the fittest and as that process works itself out you should you should want that to happen because that's what darwinism does and it's it's one of the great contradictions of the modern liberal ideology that on the one hand often lifts up darwinism but on the other hand is trying to champion the causes of the poor and the weak it doesn't really make sense so it's it's a very odd juxtaposition there that that we have but nonetheless darwinism no doubt did that and i'll also say this that darwinism later on led to the justification of forced sterilization um so if you know Margaret Sanger and what she did with starting Planned Parenthood that was many many of those ideas again were natural offspring of this whole ideology of the womanism yeah well uh along with that has has darwinism today or liberalism been able to disassociate itself from those ideas not yet there's there's a rare a very very very rare number of people who who have but in general to question darwinism in the in the rubric of what today is the modern secular agenda is virtually impossible i mean you're totally ostracized and dubbed a fool in certainly in the academy and in the media so unfortunately not and maybe that will change one day maybe not i don't know but no there there's unfortunately still bed fellows sure okay uh we have a request uh for a reading list you've mentioned books shape our thinking can you make some recommendations yeah so i i would encourage those who can to look at at the the previous lecture that i gave that i mentioned some of those those works there uh there's there's a these are all secular and so i will say before i mentioned anything here that all of these i what i would want to to disclaim the underlying ideologies and isolate simply what they're speaking about with respect to to race only and nothing about any kind of christian ideology there i'll say that one of the one of the first things to do is understand the history so if we focus here on the black population i think it is just absolutely horrific what has happened to them not just pre-evolution but post-evolution under jim crowe and really understanding the history is extremely helpful for for developing your ideas on why a community has has experienced what they've had and i'll give an example here there's an author whose name is richard rostin who has a book called the color of law and he's documented very carefully how the black community was systematically and methodically marginalized with respect to where they would live in cities why is it today that most cities in america there's the black part and there's the white part and there might be a part where asia and the china town something like that well these are all intentional products of historical forces namely lending companies and i've heard richard rostin lecture and not a christian but when you read about how how this has occurred it's just absolutely heartbreaking just to add on to this of course the quality of the schools there wasn't as good the jobs there weren't as good so you had crime brewing and then you had heavy police brutality that would come into those communities absolutely tragic there's an evangelical author whose name is william stunts who has written about the the american justice system and how that was collaborating with all of this to create very harsh criminal sentencing very well documented as well and those would be a couple of authors on that side there's a another author name who's written a piece in the atlantic called the case for reparations and again i really want to disassociate myself from a lot of his ideas but it's a very good writer there's a structuralist who's pointing out again some of the histories his name is thomas c codes and then on the individual aside there's two african american authors one is named thomas soul uh he's uh he's at stanford at the hoover institute and then shelby steel would be another author also at stanford both very very gifted shelby steel grew up as an african american in the 50s amazing story if you read his book before before what we had with the civil rights movement and he tells the story about he wanted to play baseball of course he couldn't play baseball he wanted to be a bat boy then to at least pee around baseball games and and they would not even allow him to come into various stadiums there and and then he documents how how much things have changed and he he and so i'll believe that a lot of the problems uh today are because of the welfare system that he feels were he feels was well intended but very misguided and that it rewarded uh it incentivized different kinds of behaviors that were not helpful to the health of the black community and speaking listening to both of them who are these agent african americans who have lived through all of this and who are incredibly articulate brilliant people i think you're going to get great perspectives on the individual aside as well so i've read them both i've read both sides and i've tried myself to to really put put my best effort into getting both perspectives and i really appreciate elements on both sides well even though i don't necessarily agree necessarily with the underlying ideologies that's good i appreciate you giving us perspectives from both sides because if someone was to take one of those books and read it and not really have a grounding right or be aware of the other side it could really influence them in direction you're not trying to influence them so exactly yeah we have to be very careful and guarded here and that's why i said we want to isolate this to to specific discussions of how politics how history have influenced the black community and how policies have made an impact there these authors none of these authors are two kingdom christians and for that reason we have to be guarded in our reading sure well i think we're about out of time so before i give a couple comments that came in do you have anything you want to add there kirk no i don't i again i will say that i have appreciated this very very much i have appreciated the responses to the question brother thank you for that yes and i apologize to the people who are sending questions that we did not get around to but i'll just read a couple comments this one says black lives matter mean that we as black people have been ostracized to the place where our lives never mattered as slaves and don't matter today because of mass incarceration and the inequality of cops murdering blacks uh maybe you want to just make a comment on that real quick brother finney yeah and i i would be the first to say and i hope that that individual can listen to the other talk that i gave where i laid out the structuralist case there and i i personally have a heavy burden on my heart for the historic oppression that has occurred both pre uh pre abolition as well as during the jim crow period and i know we don't have a lot of time here so i'll just say please go back and listen to that you'll hear a lot more of my heart on that and i would agree with a lot of that that sentiment there that there has been tremendous injustice that has done there and frankly often with the sanction of i would say the broad american church where the broad american church has not done well in advocating there for the injustices that the african-american community suffered one of the great tragedies and blights the history of america so i hope you can go back and listen to that and i'd be very sympathetic with what that individual was saying sure well i hope that you can share the link with us and that can be sent out in a way that that person can receive it i'd be interested in listening as well and then the last comment i have here is um superb foundational equipping and challenging that are so needed thank you and may the lord bless you finny thanks for the encouragement really appreciate it thank you brother philip for addressing those questions and very adeptly taking care of this for us tonight i want to encourage all of us to think hard and think long about these truths that have been presented to us and let's think humbly about this i appreciated the comment that was made near the end of the session from brother finney this is not an exact quote but it's a it's a paraphrase independent thought is impossible and maybe original thoughts occur but i would suggest that they too are quite rare and when we think about that it should cause us to recognize our own smallness and our own inadequacies and to really begin to listen to other people and it's by listening that we can really enter into fruitful conversations and gain enhanced understandings so just just blast up greatly by what we have heard tonight thank you again brother finney so just a few comments as we as we kind of wrap things up here this evening again there are some questions about if any has some questions and they will again be presented on the screen for those of you who are zoomed in for those of you who are not i'll just read them to you and you can consider them and perhaps engage your small group your local church perhaps your family unit however it is in some discussion on these questions question number one is your natural inclination toward individualism or structuralism and why is your natural inclination toward individualism or structuralism and why question number two have you observed racism if not how would you accurately discern how pervasive racism is outside your experience have you observed racism if not how would you accurately discern how pervasive racism is outside your experience question number three have you observed tendencies in your own heart to look down on others because of their ethnicity how might you guard your heart from a lack of compassion remember that love does not rejoice in iniquity but believes all things hopes all things have you observed tendencies in your own heart to look down on others because of their ethnicity how might you guard your heart from a lack of compassion remember that love does not rejoice in iniquity but believes all things hopes all things question number four pursuant to being a peacemaker are you situated in places of conflict if not how can you practice peacemaking in places of unrest what practical steps can you take to live out the gospel in a multi ethnic setting pursuant to being a peacemaker are you situated in places of conflict if not how can you practice peacemaking in places of unrest what practical steps can you take to live out the gospel in a multi ethnic setting and question number three number five i'm sorry question number five jesus had table fellowship with people from every walk of life nationalistic zealots prostitutes tax collectors etc we often speak of following jesus how does this diversity of fellowship match your current lifestyle or is your experience more homogeneous and comfortable how might you improve on this how can you engage in system two dialogue and when people have diverse backgrounds to the truth jesus had table fellowship with people from every walk of life nationalistic zealots prostitutes tax collectors etc we often speak of following jesus how does this diversity of fellowship match your current lifestyle or is your experience more homogeneous and comfortable how might you improve on this how can you engage in system two dialogue and when people have diverse backgrounds to the truth those questions will be displayed on the screen for those of you that are zoomed in for about five minutes after we conclude with prayer and then the bylar family singing will again take place you'll have a privilege to listen to that a second time a reminder that at 10 p.m eastern time this evening brother bill shyly will be speaking to us again on the problem of pain this will be part two the first part was was shared last evening so thank you each one for tuning in let's close in prayer gracious god heavenly father as we approach you at the conclusion of this session tonight we thank you for your goodness thank you father for the way that we've been challenged the way that our that our lives have been checked we recognize as we engage in some self-examination that we have too often failed to be the kind of kingdom christians that we ought to be father blessed brother finney keep him safe in your care and keep him safe from the attacks of the enemy and bless us each one with security in christ and a desire to live the teachings of jesus to a greater degree in jesus name i pray amen